Unregulated Accommodation: 16 to 17-year-olds

Debate between Andrew Selous and Kerry McCarthy

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Why should the duty of care fall only on the police and not on the sending local authority or on the home itself? She makes a pertinent point.

It is also completely unacceptable how little information is shared between sending and receiving local authorities, and between sending and receiving police forces. All local authorities have a statutory duty to check the standard of provision in which they are placing their vulnerable 16 and 17-year-olds.

Thirty-four locations in Bedfordshire are providing unregulated supported living for 16 and 17-year-olds. Central Bedfordshire Council has a quality assurance manager, Sharon Deacon, who will not place the council’s own children in many of those homes, and her role has been commended by the Howard League for Penal Reform.

It is extraordinary that other local authorities continue to use much of this provision when Central Bedfordshire Council will not place its own children in these unregulated homes. Those sending local authorities, in many cases, do not even bother to check whether the provision is suitable, which is vital. Sharon Deacon has conferred with her counterparts at Bedford Borough Council and Luton Borough Council, and sending authorities do not always notify the hosting local authority in Bedfordshire about the children they are sending to the county, as required by the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010, so the current law is not being adhered to and there are no checks or enforcement actions in respect of those breaches.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way, and he raises some important points. For some time I have been pushing for a regulator of supported housing for people with addictions and the homeless. I have a high-profile property in my constituency where, again, the local council does not send people but outside local authorities do.

I have secured a meeting with the Minister soon, and I am working with my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George). I would appreciate it if we all worked together on this issue.

[Andrew Selous]

I look forward to working with Members of good will on both sides of the House to get this right. This is not a party political issue, and we just have to get it right for children, for police forces and, frankly, for the taxpayer.

Sending police forces do not notify Bedfordshire police of the criminal records of the children concerned. One young arsonist was sent to my constituency without any prior notification to Bedfordshire police, which is simply unacceptable. There should be a full exchange of information between both local authorities and police forces on the quality of provision and the children concerned.

The Select Committee on Education published a report on 16-plus care options in July 2014, and it made the following recommendation:

“There are measures to ensure the quality and safety of settings for children and young people right across provisions: childminders, foster carers, residential children’s homes, secure training centres, schools, sixth form colleges and further education colleges are all inspected. Yet accommodation that falls within the category of ‘other arrangements’ is not subject to individual regulatory oversight. What makes this distinction all the more illogical is that the 22% of looked after 16 and 17 year olds who live in such accommodation are among the most vulnerable young people in society. It is unacceptable for these young people, still legally defined as ‘children’ and in the care of their local authority, to be housed in unregulated settings.

We recommend that the DfE consult on a framework of individual regulatory oversight for all accommodation provision that falls within the category ‘other arrangements’ to ensure suitability while allowing for continuing diversity of provision.”

The Government of the time did not accept that recommendation, but I am hopeful that the current Government will because members of the Select Committee who wrote that report include the Foreign Secretary, the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation and the Under-Secretary of State for International Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart).

Five and a half years later, progress on this issue has been too slow. The Department for Education met Ofsted and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers on 13 December 2018, and I met the previous Children’s Minister, accompanied by the assistant chief constable of Bedfordshire police and officers from Central Bedfordshire Council, on 27 February 2019. I had a follow-up meeting with the Minister, accompanied again by the assistant chief constable, on 24 June, and I know that Sir Alan Wood hosted a roundtable to look at this issue on 11 September. It is now time to act, as we have all the evidence we need that local authorities are unwilling or unable to provide the necessary level of scrutiny of these unregulated homes.

Many providers of unregulated accommodation have been allowed to get away with unacceptably low standards, which have horrific consequences for some of the country’s most vulnerable children, because of a lack of scrutiny. Given that the current attempts to ensure standards have failed, it is now time for Ofsted to provide proper regulatory oversight. We also urgently need a fit and proper person test, so that the directors of the businesses that run these homes can be held to account personally. We need a duty on sending local authorities and police forces to notify receiving local authorities and police forces.

Of course, we need to work on providing more good- quality provision, especially for those with complex needs. The Local Government Association reports that the number of looked-after children reached a new high of 75,420 in 2017-18. That is an average of 88 children entering local authority care every day. A rising proportion are over 16—the figure was 23% in 2018, which was 17,330 children. The LGA also points out that only 28% of accommodation is local-authority-run, with 5% being run by the voluntary sector and two thirds provided by the private sector. This means that as the scale of need grows, it becomes even more urgent to rapidly improve the quality and quantity of provision.

We should mandate the implementation of the Philomena protocol brought in by Durham police to provide police forces with the very best information to help them quickly locate missing children. I am also grateful to Home for Good for its suggestions as to how we could encourage more fostering for these children, as exemplified by its own work, and to the Shared Lives movement for the example it provides. Of course, as always in these difficult matters of social policy, we need to think about what more we can do to slow down the demand and to provide greater support for families so that they can continue to be able to look after challenging children.

In that regard, I wish to single out the work of Wigan Council, which no longer places any of its children outside its own area. I am very grateful as well to the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults for its report last month on children who go missing from out-of-area placements. The Children’s Society provided very valuable support for that inquiry, and I am grateful to it for its help with my preparation for this debate.

As a nation we need to do far more to support and strengthen families to help them keep children safely at home, and I am pleased that this Government have now appointed the Chief Secretary to the Treasury as the family champion across government. It is now high time to take decisive action to improve the standard of accommodation for 16 and 17-year-olds, as the Select Committee called for more than five years ago.

Junk Food Advertising and Childhood Obesity

Debate between Andrew Selous and Kerry McCarthy

Tuesday 16th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I congratulate colleagues on their excellent speeches so far. As has been said, we have a childhood obesity epidemic in this country. One in three children is overweight or obese by the time they leave primary school. That makes them five times more likely to become obese adults, putting them at risk of the biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking. This debate was triggered by calls from the Obesity Health Alliance in relation to the campaign linking obesity with cancer, but as we know, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and many other conditions are related to being overweight.

Some interesting research was done a while ago—I did not have time to dig it out—on what happened when young offenders in young offenders institutions were switched from junk food and fast food diets to healthy eating. The change that had for their mental health and behavioural conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and aggression certainly needs to be part of the Government’s considerations. A comprehensive 10-year study of children from 100 different countries looked at the links between fast food, asthma and allergies in childhood. I asked the Government whether the public health responsibility deal partners could be part of a discussion on that study, but I was told that the focus at that time was on salt. They were dealing with the low-hanging fruit; it is quite easy to address salty food, but addressing people’s addiction to fast food is far more difficult.

Marketing has a critical influence on children’s behaviour. As Public Health England has said, it constantly influences preference and food choice. Food companies promoting crisps, confectionary and sugary drinks spent £143 million on advertising in 2016. By comparison, the Government spent just over £5 million on their anti-obesity Change4Life social marketing campaign. Those figures show what we are up against and the power of the junk food advertising industry.

It is a decade since Ofcom’s broadcast restrictions on junk food advertising to children came into effect, and they do not go far enough. As has been said, children’s viewing habits have changed dramatically. They do not just watch children’s TV; they also watch family shows, particularly such things as “The Voice” or “Strictly”, or reality shows, where they are regularly exposed to junk food advertising. Research commissioned by the Obesity Health Alliance found that children see as many as 12 adverts for junk food an hour while watching family television shows. I support the calls for a ban on junk food advertising until after the 9 pm watershed. That is supported by 76% of the public and 71% of MPs according to the Obesity Health Alliance. The issue does not need legislation—the Health Secretary could instruct Ofcom to act now, and I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say on that.

As the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) flagged up in his excellent speech, it is not just advertising that creates an obesogenic environment for children. Walking past outlets selling high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar foods every day can set back efforts to encourage healthy eating. There is no point having all these programmes in schools to encourage children to be more active and to teach them what a healthy diet looks like if they are walking past a McDonald’s on their way to and from school and probably during lunchtime as well, if they are able to pop out.

[Andrew Selous]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech with some very good points. She has given credit to McDonald’s for the healthy food it produces. There is no reason why fast food cannot be fast, healthy, delicious and nutritious, is there?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I do not think that I did pay tribute to McDonald’s; I was highlighting McDonald’s as a cause for concern. I am sure that its representatives will be in touch after the debate to tell me that it offers salads, but I am not sure how many secondary school children pop into McDonald’s after school for a salad. I think there was an experiment in Hulme in Manchester where they thought that teaching people about cooking, buying local food and sourcing it in their local community was too large a first step. In a bid to encourage people to eat more healthily, they therefore set up a fast food outlet that was devoted to healthy food. I do not know how that has gone—I think it was a year or two ago—but it shows that it can be done.

Data provided to The Guardian by the Centre for Diet and Activity Research at the University of Cambridge showed that more than 400 schools across England have 20 or more fast food takeaways within a 400-metre radius, while a further 1,400 have between 10 and 19 outlets within the same distance. In my constituency—I apologise; I am going to have a bit of a go at McDonald’s again—we had an application for a new 24-hour drive-through McDonald’s within 800 metres of three schools, and only just over 400 metres from another. As a council, we tried to reject that planning application, partly because of the traffic, litter and noise concerns associated with a 24-hour drive-through. The application also went against advice issued by Public Health England in its March 2014 briefing, titled “Obesity and the environment: regulating the growth of fast food outlets”, which stated that an important function of local authorities is

“to modify the environment so that it does not promote sedentary behaviour or provide easy access to energy-dense food.”

Despite that, the Government’s Planning Inspectorate overruled the council and granted permission for the drive-through to go ahead.

About 20 English councils, including Bristol, have rules banning new fast food outlets from opening within 400 metres or 800 metres of schools—in Bristol it is 400 metres. The Mayor of London recently announced a total ban on new fast food outlets within 400 metres of schools across the capital. However, I agree with the likes of Brighton and Hove City Council that 800 metres, which I think is only a 10-minute walk or so, would be better. It is not in the childhood obesity plan, and the Government need to do more to encourage that.

The sugar tax has been discussed. Children in the UK consume up to three times the maximum amount of sugar that they should, and fizzy drinks are their No. 1 source. We know that there was a real battle to get the levy to where it is now, and it took a long time to get it introduced. It is good that it is forcing manufacturers to reformulate their drinks to come in below the sugar tax threshold, but I am concerned about what will happen to the £10 million that was pledged from the levy to fund school breakfast clubs. It is good that companies are responding, but it is really important that we support our breakfast clubs as well, and I would like to hear from the Minister on that.

I want to say a little about school food standards. For many children from low-income families, school meals provide their main source of nutrition for the day. I would not be surprised if the Labour spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), has something to say about that. She has recently run an excellent campaign about changes to universal credit that would have an impact on the number of children receiving free school meals—their main source of healthy food. Legislation introduced by the last Labour Government required all schools to comply with specific food-based and nutrient-based standards, which resulted in significant improvements in the nutritional quality of school food, as shown by research from the Children’s Food Trust.

The July 2013 school food plan sets out 17 actions to transform what children eat in schools and how they learn about food. That has helped, and the new school food standards were widely welcomed when they came into force in January 2015. I was concerned that those standards do not apply to academies and free schools that opened between September 2010 and June 2014, but I received a response to a written parliamentary question yesterday, which said that more than 1,400 academies founded during that period are voluntarily following the standards. I am not sure how many are therefore not following those standards, which I think should apply across all schools.

I would like to ask the Minister about something that I have been doing on an ongoing basis. The Government have the “eatwell plate”, which is meant to set out guidance for what a healthy diet looks like, with certain proportions according to dietary needs. Rather than just being a paper exercise which can be found on the Government’s website, that ought to be used as the norm for how we publicly provide food, in not just schools, but hospitals, prisons and other facilities. Now is neither the time nor the place to go into other issues about cancer-causing foods, but given the proven link between processed meat and cancers such as bowel cancer, for example, the fact that at the moment schools are told to provide red meat three times a week and processed meat once a week needs to be looked at.

In conclusion, it is all very well talking about trying to change people’s behaviour and responses to the stimuli around them, but the Government could do more to remove temptation from their path. The Government should extend existing regulations to ban junk food advertising until the 9 pm watershed. They should support local authorities, and ideally have a standard approach across the country to tackling the proliferation of fast food outlets near schools—ideally the enforcement of an 800-metre limit. They should also do more to encourage schools to provide healthy food to students.