On 24th July 2000 the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and the Arts launched the office of the first London Children’s Rights Commissioner at the Millennium Wheel – better known as the ‘London Eye’. Children from our Advisory Board then took invited guests on a half hour ‘flight’ in the world’s biggest Ferris wheel, and showed them how London looks through children’s eyes. The Eye is located in a place where a lot of homeless people sleep rough, and a lot of others go to the theatre. It is thought that there are about 25,000 homeless children and young people, out of 85,000 in all, in one of the richest cities of the world.
In May 2001 our Office will publish the first of its annual benchmarking reports on the state of London’s children. Their rights have to be seen in a national
context.
As I write, a 15 year old girl, a first offender, has started serving a six months jail sentence (as have two boys she was with, aged 13 and 14), in the ‘youth
wing’ of an adult jail (where ‘interactions’ with the adults are ‘monitored’: so that’s all right then.) Her crime was arson: a group of kids playing with matches
set fire to a charity bin, which spread to the Children’s Society’s premises and did £30,000 worth of damage. The judge, in the (adult’ Crown Court accepted this wasn’t
intended but said he had to ‘send a message’ about such recklessness. An appeal is contemplated. (Contemplated!) Three months ago another judge cried as the 12-year-old boy she had just
sentenced to 2 years detention for trafficking drugs collapsed and called out that he ‘wanted his Mummy.’ On the other hand, the House of Lords recently awarded massive damages for
negligence against an Education Authority that failed to identify a child’s dyslexia, labeling her a failure educationally and crippling her economic future. There are highs and lows in
children’s rights protection, here.
The UK will shortly be shifting up a notch in the rights protection community when the Human Rights Act is fully proclaimed on 2nd October (it’s already in effect in Scotland). The Act doesn’t set up a Human Rights Commission, but leaves it to Britain’s Common Law courts to determine whether public authorities have complied with the standards set by the European Convention on Human Rights.
How well the courts will do this is unpredictable. I have heard the former Lord Chief Justice publicly express concern that the UK is to adopt an ‘alien’ rights-based culture. Yet the UK
government has had to act. It has been embarrassed several times by determinations of the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg critical of its treasured institutions.
The two 11 year olds convicted of murdering the Bulger toddler in Manchester had been denied a fair trial in adult-focused, incomprehensible court proceedings.
Their (judicial) imprisonment term was unjustly extended by the executive decision of the then Home Secretary.
The Common Law defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ did not protect a 14 year old bashed by his stepfather for years, or any child, from cruel, inhuman
or degrading treatment (it exonerated the bully when he was charged).
A social services department had failed to protect abused children from such breach of their rights over a five-year period when it knew of bashings, starvation and
imprisonment (and no doctrine of Crown immunity was relevant).
Children are entitled to the benefit of all of the ECHR rights. One youngster has got in early, challenging a school that excluded her for committing a minor criminal
offence which she denies and of which she has not been convicted. She says that this will deprive her of her right to an education.
And yet, children’s rights are constantly legitimated. At a local government level there is genuine, long-standing interest in children’s rights, perhaps because the boroughs are
responsible for the child protection system (there is no mandatory reporting, here). Several have created ‘children’s rights officers’, funded by charitable bodies, to advocate for
children against them. Several have adopted the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as their values base. Children are required to have appropriate complaints or grievance procedures – though they appear to be underused (perhaps because of the ‘Caesar judging Caesar’ perception). Some central government programs (such as Quality Protects) require boroughs to consult with children on service delivery and report on the consultation as a performance measure. There is willingness in the English professions to talk children’s rights, which is refreshing. The Association of Lawyers for Children has co-opted me on to their committee. Children’s societies talk ‘rights’ where their Australian equivalents cower behind ‘interests’.
A hundred children’s groups and prominent professionals have formed the Children Are Unbeatable alliance to persuade the government to prohibit all corporal punishment of children. The prospects are not entirely favourable. The government’s discussion paper (issued late last year) proposed law changes to prescribe what parts of a child’s body one could smite, and with what implement (obscene).
Yet this government appears genuinely committed to, among other things, eliminating child poverty. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, is personally and sincerely committed to this. In the last session he
announced the establishment of a ‘children’s fund’. A few weeks later, the Prime Minster set up a Children’s Unit, with all the important ministers on the committee,
addressing several government portfolios (but sadly administered on a day to day basis on the Education ministry under the supervision of a non-Cabinet Minister, Paul Boateng). The Unit will focus on
child poverty, but there is clearly potential for it to develop the kind of government policy overview that children’s rights advocates want. But there are
no plans for a Children’s Rights Commissioner. Yet.
There is no statutory children’s rights commissioner in the nation. The recent Care Standards Bill, which was enacted in response to the evidence of
systemic abuse of children in Welsh institutions, creates an office called ‘children’s commissioner’ which is limited to ensuring children have effective grievance procedures and
that nobody ‘covers up’ any more. Scotland is ‘considering’ it; there is mixed support and opposition for such a role in England; Ireland has a Human Rights Commission and
does focus on children’s rights.
My role as Director of London’s Children’s Rights Commissioner’s office is to perform that function for the new Greater London Authority, over the next three years. The Authority did
not appoint us. We are funded by the National Lottery Charities Board, two other charities and three of the country’s leading children’s groups, to prove that a children’s rights
commissioner improves the quality of decision-making, and that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a proper standard for judging government, of all levels, performance. We start in London – to make the case that every child should have a children’s rights commissioner
The Greater London Authority’s members and Mayor were elected in May 2000, as a super-Council for the whole of London: above it, the national government and below, the boroughs, whose members
are also elected and carry out essential planning and child protection, housing and other services. The GLA is uniquely placed to oversight the state of London’s children. Every decision it
makes, whether about planning, safety, transport, traffic, the environment or London’s cultural life, affects every London child, now and in the future. It needs a strategy for London children
that cuts through all the boundaries.
London children make up more than 20% of London’s population - 1.74 million of them, from a glorious jumble of cultural, ethnic and community backgrounds. The
majority of children of asylum seekers - about 45,000 children – are thought to attend London schools. It is thought that at least the same numbers of refugee children aren’t attending
school at all. They are not alone.
Thousands of London children don’t go to school, either truanting or ‘excluded’ for misconduct. These exclusions are linked to parental poverty, ethnic minority status and poor
reading skills. The Blair Government has set targets for reducing exclusions, which soared by 400% since 1991, because out-of-school children stop learning and are easily drawn into crime. In London,
it’s thought that 5% of all offences are committed by children during school hours: 40% of robberies, 25% of burglaries, 20% of thefts and 20% of criminal damage in 1997 were committed by 10 to
16 year olds.
London children are more likely to be in need of care and protection than other parts of the country. Inner London children are much more likely to be on child protection registers: 70 per 10,000
children in Inner London are looked after by local authorities, compared to 48 per 10,000 nationally.
Poverty has a grim effect on children’s well being, creating and exacerbating risks (homelessness, domestic violence, property crime), intensifying vulnerability,
and diminishing resilience. Relative child poverty has trebled in the last 30 years. London has one of the biggest populations of deprived children in the developed world.
Child poverty is usually caused by their parents’ unemployment. London has about twice the national proportion of children living in households whose adults are all non-earning. Eligibility for
free school meals is used as a proxy measures for low family income: the following proportion of pupils in local-authority maintained secondary schools were eligible for free school meals in 1996/97:
Inner London 46%
Outer London 22%
Greater London 29%
The average for the whole of England was just 17% (CPAG 1999)
Five of the ten most deprived wards in England are within Greater London, and of the most 20 deprived wards, 70% are in London. Infant
mortality rates in some London boroughs are up to three times higher than more affluent outer boroughs.
Poverty affects the quality of housing for families with children. Far more London children live in overcrowded accommodation than the national average – 10%
nationally, 26% in Inner London and 15% in Outer London. This affects family cohesion. More London children (18%) rang ChildLine over concerns about their family relationships than the national
average (13%), reflecting the high density and stress of urban living. Of ChildLine’s London callers twice the national average needed to talk about running away or having been thrown out of
home by parents: 32% of these callers were between 12 and 13.
Children’s health is always affected by government planning and spending priorities. London has disproportionately high rates of severe mental illness and drug
abuse (28% of the nation’s notified drug addictions among 12% of the population) and young Londoners are disproportionately represented in these figures. One out of 7 London children suffer
from asthma, caused or aggravated by factors within government control – air quality, traffic density, other pollution, inadequate green spaces, play areas and local facilities.
London children with protective parents are also paying the price, lacking regular outdoor exercise and the small freedoms that make a child’s life happier and
healthier because of unsafe streets, dangerous or dirty public spaces and facilities, and traffic hazards. Poor children living in deprived neighbourhoods are particularly disadvantaged in terms of
unsafe open spaces and streets. Most London public transport and facilities and schools are inaccessible to disabled people and children in pushchairs or prams. Better housing, cleaner streets,
better air quality, less traffic, accessible public transport, footpaths and public buildings would, of course, all improve life for London’s children. It is in the GLA’s hands to address
this.
There is much to be done here. The Mayor of the Greater London Authority, Ken Livingstone, committed himself during his election campaign to making London a
child-friendly city, by immediately establishing a Children’s Strategy for London through the active participation of children, across London. He also promised to:
appoint a Children's Champion from the membership of the Greater London Assembly, to co-ordinate and to establish the Children’s Strategy for London
protect and enhance the lives of London’s 1.74 million children by building co-ordinated services that meet the needs of children and sharing best practice across the 32 London boroughs,
and
ensure children have a voice, through a Greater London Assembly for children and including children in policy development.
Now, all we have to do is help him achieve that! It will be a busy three years.
Moira Rayner CI-A Advisory Panel member and Director of the Office of Children's Rights Commissioner for London
