Keith Vaz (Leicester, East) (Lab): I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend and his Committee on this very important subject. Did he specifically consider the position of children who had been trafficked into this country—a concern of the Home Affairs Committee in our last report—and had then been left in care, but escaped soon afterwards to carry on being abused by those who brought them here?

Mr. Sheerman: We did so peripherally, mostly in terms of children who turn up in this country with no obvious parents and are in care because of that. One of the other skills of a Select Committee is to determine where to draw the line, otherwise the inquiry would never get finished. Often, when one is doing a good inquiry and really getting under the skin of the issue, that leads to the next inquiry, so my right hon. Friend should not give up hope—we might get there.

When one looks at the care of children in this country, one see that so much always comes back to the quality of the work force and how they are recruited, trained, paid and supported. That is absolutely central to the level and quality of care that is given. As we went on, it became obvious that we had to undertake an inquiry, which we are now doing, on the training of social workers. The two reports will go very well together. My right hon. Friend will know all about that process from his own Select Committee; it is part of the technique. That is how we conducted ourselves, and that is how we wrote, I think, a good and positive report.

When the Committee has taken all its evidence and made all its visits, we have to spend considerable time coming up with a report that we think someone will listen to and will make the difference that we hoped it would. Part of the process is ensuring that the Government listen to what we say—and it is a remarkable opportunity to be here on the Floor of the House being able to debate and discuss the report that we produced. Of course, another part of our role is to tell the outside world, through the media, what our conclusions were on the matter and what changes we want in Government policy. There is no point in producing a report that is put on the shelf, gathers dust and makes no difference to the children in our country.

Let me allude to some figures. In England, there are at any one time about 60,000 children in care, and in the course of a year about 90,000 children will go through care. One can immediately see the difficulties that we face. It is an unstable population. Some children go into care early and stay for a long time—perhaps for all their childhood—while many do so very late having been greatly damaged by their experience in their birth family. There is sometimes an easy perception that England does a poor job in terms of corporate parenting. We found early on in the process of learning the lessons that a high percentage of children who go into care do so very damaged and quite late. Extrapolating the statistics, we found that children in care perform badly in GCSEs and other examinations and in going on to higher education. As one hears the evidence, one does not wonder why that is, because it is clear that many of these children have not been supported in their education; indeed, they have not been sent to school. They have had such a turmoil of a life that going into corporate care is an attempt to bring the shattered pieces together and rebuild it. That is very difficult to do in the case of a child who goes into care at age 13 or 14; I think that some of my colleagues who have worked in the sector will endorse that.

We have to be extremely careful about laying blame and saying that what local authorities and the Government do is much worse than what anybody else does. I do not believe that that is true. This is very difficult area to work in. The churn—the movement in and out of care and the resulting instability in children’s lives—is at the heart of our concerns.

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