Euan Stainbank
Main Page: Euan Stainbank (Labour - Falkirk)Department Debates - View all Euan Stainbank's debates with the Department for Education
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Euan Stainbank (Falkirk) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq.
With National Care Leavers Month starting next Saturday, it is apt that we are discussing this issue here in Westminster Hall today. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), the Chair of the Education Committee, for the Committee’s excellent report and its urgency in getting this matter before the House. I thank her also for her powerful recounting of the Committee’s inquiry.
On a recent visit to Falkirk & Clackmannanshire Young Carers, which I had more opportunity to do when I was Falkirk council’s young persons’ elected member champion, I was reminded of the social awareness of young people with care experience, but also of the burden on them in advocating for themselves and the distinct challenges they face, which my hon. Friend so powerfully recounted. Falkirk & Clackmannanshire Young Carers is a fantastic organisation in my constituency, which advocates for the interests of care-experienced young people.
I will focus in on recommendation 78, which is that the Department for Education should commission:
“an independent evaluation of the impact of designating care experience a protected characteristic”.
In June 2023, after hearing overwhelmingly powerful testimony from the Falkirk Champs board, which is a group of care-experienced young people who dedicate their time to advocating for young people with similar backgrounds, Falkirk Council, which I was a member of at the time, unanimously agreed to treat care experience as a protected characteristic. We were the first Scottish council to do so. That was achieved through the advocacy and campaigning of the young people in my constituency, and a motion led by my tirelessly hard-working colleague and defender of the interests of young people and women, Councillor Siobhan Paterson.
Recommendation 78 also urges monitoring the impact where action similar to Falkirk council’s has been taken by English local authorities, so let me put the Minister on the spot: will the Department, given its apt proximity to the Minister for Women and Equalities, the right hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), consider legislating if the impact of local councils’ designating care experience as a protected characteristic is found to be beneficial, but could be enhanced by putting that designation on a statutory footing? What are the Department’s thoughts on that issue? For the Minister’s information, if Councillor Paterson makes it to the Scottish Parliament next year as a Scottish Labour MSP for Falkirk East and Linlithgow, the Department would have a very powerful colleague to support and assist such a measure being implemented in Holyrood.
When the Minister responds to the debate, will he also thank all the organisations throughout the country involved in this work, especially Falkirk & Clackmannanshire Carers Centre and Young Carers, all of their staff and all of the young people on the Falkirk Champs board for their continued advocacy?