Vulnerable Children

Lord Suri Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, this debate speaks to a wider issue in our politics. Our politicians often willingly and unthinkingly use nebulous terms. When the time comes for serious legislative lifting, those terms that action has been predicated on are not useful. “Vulnerable” is one of those words—it is used regularly—and another is “support”. “Support” can mean financial payments, a statutory duty or subsidy—indeed any number of things—while “vulnerable” also appears to have no clear definition, or nothing that policymakers here and in another place can drill down into. Without a clear definition, we will find our objectives unending. Once we have attempted to solve one problem, another lobby will say we have not fixed another.

My party’s manifesto at the last election committed to supporting,

“vulnerable children for whom the state acts as a parent”.

That seems to be one clear indicator of what a vulnerable child is, namely that the state is a surrogate. But some children are in gangs, or have severe mental health difficulties. If the state is not involved in their lives, they may well slip through the gaps. I believe an easier solution can be found to maintain the promises made to vulnerable children and families in the manifesto. We ought to scrap the use of the word “vulnerable” and say what we mean when talking about specific groups. After all, every child is vulnerable, which the report correctly alludes to.

Reading the report, I got the impression of the authors trying to grasp a slippery rock. With 32 different categories, no one policy could hope to address all the problems facing the children discussed. This is a direct result of lazy thinking. To make the point, a politician may well promise to help vulnerable children, thinking of mentally unwell youths, but the people to whom they talk may take that to mean absent children or young carers.

Furthermore, the way that the machinery of government works is not compatible with the regular use of the word “vulnerable”. For the Department of Health, it may encompass children who have substance-abusing parents or who suffer from mental illness. For the Department for Work and Pensions, it may cover children aged 16 to 18 who are not in employment, education or training. I propose that we ask every department to come up with the children it has contact with whom it considers vulnerable. That would be a strategy led by policymakers, not one foisted on them by a nebulous term. After they have produced that work, they can develop their own strategies. Perhaps some would wish to attach that duty to one of their Ministers, as someone to take the lead on the strategy. Then we would be able to refer to a strategy to help teenage parents or a strategy to help care leavers or any other group and address the issues of vulnerable children overall.

The report alludes to the aim that,

“we as a society need to know who these children are, how many they are, and what their different outcomes are, if we are to have any hope of beginning to address their needs”.

There is no reason for departments not to come up with definitions and work together to help categories of vulnerable children while staying within that stated aim. Will the Minister consider this course of action?

A Manifesto to Strengthen Families

Lord Suri Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to speak in this important debate. As a Conservative, I have always considered the family to be the building block of society. My deceased friend the former Prime Minister who sat in this place had it right when she said referred to there being no such thing as society, only people and their families. We owe it to subsequent generations to keep the twin pillars of family life secure, so that we may inherit resilient communities.

All too often, in this House and the other place, we can lose sight of what holds this country together. We focus on policies that may make sense individually, but not the holistic sum of what we have passed. I remember some years ago the former right honourable Member for Witney saying that all policies would be vetted before they were announced. This vetting was to include a robust breakdown of the effect on families. Sadly, I never saw much evidence of that protocol being continued or respected, and it appears to have died a death in the Cabinet Office.

That is not to say that the Government are not aware of the problem. I supported the marriage tax allowance when it first came before us, but the depth of the policy has been lacking. Rarely do I cite the serving right honourable Member for Doncaster North, but he was right when he said that departments shape priorities and priorities shape outcomes. I understand the current pressure on government jobs, with all the new departments, and that it is an inopportune time when so many big events are coming down the track. But there is ample precedent for additional responsibilities being attached to Ministers, as this manifesto recommends.

Portsmouth received a Minister responsible for its well-being, following job cuts as navy shipbuilding moved to Scotland. This model worked well because the needs of the city cut across many departments, even if the Minister was not always of Cabinet rank. The Minister for Women and Equalities has always been of Cabinet rank, including when the current Prime Minister held it. Ministers can champion a cause in Cabinet and bring the cross-departmental focus that these policies need. In justifying the creation of a Minister for Women, the then Government argued that the lesser role of women held growth back and that there was a pressing need to address the lack of equality across systems in the public and private sector. All that holds true for the shocking state of family breakdown in our country today.

I feel that more hard facts need to be brought to bear on this debate. The most compelling statistic in all this is that, of all the parents who are still together when their children reach the age of 15, 93% are married. Children from broken homes are 2.5 times more likely to be in long-term poverty, and 44% of children in lone-parent families live in relative poverty—nearly twice the figure for children in two-parent families. If we do not support the family and marriage, we are condemning youngsters to a life more likely to be spent in poverty. The Government’s own statistics show that only 1.6p is spent for every £100 of social harm that is caused by family breakdown. More needs to be done to tackle the associated price tag of £47 billion a year. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Farmer and his assistant for doing the important work of collecting the facts and making the case in his manifesto.