Covid-19: Children

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I know that we are all grateful to the noble Baroness for this debate and for her outstanding speech. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of our society and of our economy will be defined by the way in which we educate, support and safeguard this generation of children. Nothing matters more, and nothing is more deserving of public investment, if we are to build back better—or indeed build back at all.

The impact of the pandemic on schooling has been huge, especially for children from poorer families. The NAO recently concluded that our response should have been more effective in addressing especially the problems faced by disadvantaged children. We all know now that the Recovery Commissioner has resigned because, in his view, the support made available fell far short of what was needed. The Early Intervention Foundation has detailed the deterioration in children’s well-being and mental health, and the former Children’s Commissioner revealed, as the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, said, that more than 800,000 vulnerable children are in fact invisible to public services.

By any standards, our children, and therefore we, are facing a crisis, which demands not a series of funding initiatives but a concerted national effort to put children first—not just a recovery plan but a concerted national effort. What might that involve? First, we need a strategy. I too am a member of the Lords Public Services Committee and was, frankly, shocked recently to hear a senior civil servant tell us that there is no strategy in government to address the needs of vulnerable children. That says to me that there is no way of setting priorities, co-ordinating action, allocating resources and measuring success. We need a strategy. We also need leadership. The PM’s support for this cause is welcome, but we need to go further. The call by many for a Cabinet Minister with responsibility for children should, on this occasion, be heeded. We need more than a champion, figurehead or tsar; we need someone who can authorise action and be accountable for progress.

There is no disguising the fact that we also need resources far in excess of the current allocations—and not just for education, which has been touched on today. The independent review of social care which, as we have heard, has published its first report, says something with which I agree:

“There is no situation in the current system where we will not need to spend more—the choice is whether this investment is spent on reform … or propping up an increasingly … inadequate … system.”


This is an issue for which resources are important. Although we have made resources available for business and of course for the NHS, allocations to education, social care and mental health have been, frankly, disappointing. We also need to pay more than lip service to the lived experience of parents and children when we come to design our services, so that they are more relevant and more accessible. The policy lab in the Cabinet Office has done some brilliant work around this redesign of services; why cannot we use it as we move forward on the children’s plan?

We could do more to incentivise and deliver collaboration between central government departments, and between the centre and local authorities, the health service, the police and civil society. Because it is nowhere near good enough at the moment and, too often, it leaves children receiving disjointed, fragmented services that cost much more than they should. For example, at the present moment, the directors of children’s services have a statutory responsibility to co-ordinate action, but there is no similar responsibility placed upon health or the police, except in regard to safeguarding. We also need to find ways of sharing data better, so that we can identify quickly where we need to target our support, or just understand the plight of individual children. Many schools at present are not even made aware that a pupil is receiving support from social services, and that quite simply is not good enough.

Finally, as other speakers have said, we need to invest more in early intervention and prevention, because at the moment our actions are often too reactive. Again, the report from the independent review of social care makes the same point today: it says that spending is too often skewed towards acute services and away from effective health. I would say that that is true of every service that impacts on children. For me, putting children first is, as they say in the vernacular, a no-brainer. They just deserve better than we are currently able to give them.