Oral - Welsh Assembly Government’s Response to the United Nations’s Convention on the Rights of the Child Monitoring Committee Concluding Observations

The UN committee recently examined progress in implementing the UN convention in the United Kingdom. As part of its review, the committee included a consideration of the progress that we have made in Wales in securing children and young people’s rights under the convention.

I would like to share with Assembly Members some of the issues that we are facing here in Wales in relation to implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Assembly Government agreed to adopt the convention as the basis for all its actions in respect of children and young people in 2002. This approach has been reinforced by support across the National Assembly for Wales.

We have had some notable successes: for example, we now have a Minister for children, a Cabinet sub-committee for children and young people, and an Assembly scrutiny Committee for Children and Young People.
In all 22 local authority areas, work on delivering children and young people’s rights forms the basis of statutory children and young people plans, written by multi-agency partnerships and taking into account the views of children and young people. The first plans are currently being published.
Other developments include a national framework for universal advocacy services, and investment to improve the life opportunities of looked-after children. Funky Dragon, the children and young people’s assembly for Wales, is now six years old, and is gaining a powerful voice in speaking out on behalf of children and young people on a wide range of subjects of concern to them. We have made tremendous progress in supporting children and young people to participate in decision-making on issues that affect their lives locally, including teaching and learning, play, bullying and environmental issues.

We are developing and disseminating national standards for participation, and taking a strategic approach to tackling poverty that focuses action on income, participation and service poverty. There is a strong working partnership between Government, the National Assembly for Wales, non-governmental organisations, the statutory and voluntary sectors locally, and the Children’s Commissioner for Wales in driving forward this agenda to which we are all committed. We are supporting children and young people to get involved in developing, implementing and evaluating policies.

Despite our successes, however, we cannot afford to be complacent. We still have a long way to go. The committee’s improved understanding of devolution in the UK means that it recognises our frustration in Wales around recommendations from its previous review that we have been unable to progress—such as a total legislative ban on physical punishment, improvements to the arrangements for juvenile justice, the treatment of children and young people who are asylum seekers, and the incorporation of the convention into domestic legislation. We will continue to press the UK Government to implement the committee’s recommendations in these areas.

We intend to work with children and young people and with our partners to agree on the priority areas for action, and to identify the most effective ways of progressing these actions. High on the priority list already is the need to raise awareness of children and young people’s rights, so that there will be a significant improvement on the current level of awareness among young people. We also need to raise awareness with families, and the entire children and young people’s workforce, and we have some ideas about how we might do that. Another priority is to find better ways of putting policy into practice, so that we achieve the outcomes on the ground that we are aiming for. We know there is much more to do in tackling poverty, particularly in addressing the severe poverty that affects the lives of those children in Wales who are most disadvantaged, and hardest to reach. This is essential if we are to make real progress towards the ambitious targets and tight timeframes that we have set ourselves.

In the field of health, we have plans to improve child and adolescent mental health services, including the development of school counselling services, better support for children in care and care leavers, and strengthened primary mental health services. Standards for a wide range of specialist health services for children will be issued later this year, and continued attention at local level to the implementation of the national service framework for children, young people and maternity services will help to drive up standards and improve access across a wide range of services.

Funky Dragon told us that children and young people had two areas of major concern: they wanted more safe places to play near their homes, and they were worried about high levels of bullying, including homophobic bullying, in and out of school. We will, therefore, look at what we can do to tackle these important issues Other issues to which we will give attention include ways of supporting children and young people from Gypsy/Traveller communities, and those who have disabilities, to enjoy all of their rights.

We will be looking to improve the transparency of our financial processes, so that it is easier to see how much we are spending on children and young people. We want to improve our evaluation and evidence arrangements to ensure that we are getting the best possible return for every pound that we spend. We are also looking for ways to make a rights-based approach part of the way in which we and others in Wales go about our daily business.

Informally, and during the course of the committee’s close examination of the UK delegation, I am pleased to say that, on a significant number of occasions, favourable comments were made about the commitment that the Assembly has shown to children’s rights. Our position on physical punishment, asylum seeking and refugee children, and our pioneering work on participation, were all identified as leading the way in the UK and internationally. Despite the challenges that we face, we can be justly proud of our achievements so far in implementing the convention. We can be confident of making further progress, too, given that our confidence rests substantially on the imagination, creativity and resourcefulness of Wales’s children and young people.