Dr Rhian Croke & Professor Simon Hoffman
10.6.24
As in Scotland, children under the age of 16 in Wales cannot vote, but nevertheless they are a big part of the communities that elected local councillors (elected members or councillors) represent. Children use public services such as schools, hospitals and social care institutions, and so their views and their rights ought to be taken into account by local councillors who are responsible for how these essential services, and others, are arranged and delivered in communities across Wales.
In this blog we reflect on how local councillors, who are elected to represent communities in the 22 local authorities (councils) across Wales, adopt a Children’s Rights Approach. When preparing this blog, we have drawn in part on our experience of advocating for local authorities to adopt a Children’s Rights Approach to service planning and delivery, and partly on recent research Cardiff City Council (CCC), which seeks to adopt a principled Children’s Rights Approach to service planning and delivery (i).
We have framed our comments and reflections according to the 5 principles of a Children’s Rights Approach.
Embedding children’s rights
Although there was a high-level commitment to children’s rights in CCC’s corporate plan, a challenge we identified was how to ensure councillors had sufficient knowledge of the UNCRC to actively consider children’s rights in their decision making. The high-level commitment to children’s rights, however, was certainly strengthened by elected councillors who act as designated Champions for Children’s Rights.
– Designated champions for children
‘We agree wholeheartedly that having as many political and senior decision makers as champions for children’s rights as possible, is incredibly important’. (local councillor).
The research with CCC identified that having designated councillors who are nominated champions for children and their rights helped raise the profile of children’s rights and drew attention to the challenges children face: particularly as children are not always offered a seat at the decision-making table. Designated champions were seen to have an important role of leading and motivating others within CCC to adopt a Children’s Rights Approach.
– Training on children’s rights and scrutiny of policies and budgets
Our research with CCC confirmed the importance placed on councillors being able to access ongoing and regular training on children’s rights to help them to adopt a Children’s Rights Approach. Training on the UNCRC is essential in order that councillors can scrutinise local council policies, and budgets. With knowledge and understanding of the UNCRC, councillors should be able to determine whether policies, or budgets are compliant with children’s rights, and to offer critical and constructive challenge to council officials if they are not.
A Children’s Rights Approach, properly implemented, means local councillors across Wales should consider if children’s rights have been:
- Taken into account and properly reflected in any policy/budget.
- If the policy/budget will have a negative impact on children or specific groups of children.
- If children have been consulted and given child friendly or accessible information on the policy/budget.
- If an opportunity has been given for children to complain about the policy/budget etc.
Our own reflections, based on our experience of CCC, but also more generally of councils across Wales, is that support is needed to help councillors translate their knowledge and understanding – acquired through training – into ensuring policies and budgets are properly and comprehensively scrutinised for compliance with children’s rights. Some councils we know of in Wales have scrutiny committees that have an explicit focus on children. This helps to ensure a sharp focus on whether children’s rights are being complied with. This is also another way to encourage higher political priority for children’s services as well as increased sensitivity to the impact of council decision-making on children and their human rights.
Empowering children
A Children’s Rights Approach means children need to be empowered to understand the role of local councillors, and they need information and resources, and opportunities, to develop their skills, so they can influence decision making by local councillors. Councillors should work to ensure children have accessible information about policies and budget decisions that affect their lives, including information in child friendly language. They should take opportunities to provide information and discuss issues with children to empower them to take advantage of their rights, e.g. by explaining how to access services or resources or to sign post them to legal advice, advocacy providers, independent human rights institutions.
Our research with CCC suggests that councillors may be daunted by the prospect of speaking directly with children. This concern was echoed by an official working for CCC:
‘Going back to hearing children’s voices in terms of Local Councillors generally, I think they’re really enthusiastic actually about supporting children’s rights. But, sometimes, they’re not always quite sure how to do it. So, we had the training session when we had a lot of new and Local Councillors, but you can’t just give them one training session and think that is enough.’
With this in mind, we feel that any training on children’s rights should include direction on the tools that are available to enable councillors to engage constructively with children and to empower children to influence council decision making processes.
Participation of Children
Children can offer particular insights into the issues facing the communities they live in, and can offer different perspectives, and make suggestions for improvements to services that will have a positive impact for themselves and other children, as well as other generations. A crucial mechanism to influence how local services are planned and delivered is voting in local elections. Local politicians who want to be elected to represent their communities will only be elected if they listen to, and ‘represent’ the views of those who vote for them. However, as children under the age of 16 cannot vote, they cannot influence local councillors through elections – which makes it even more important that other mechanisms are available so that their insights and views are listened to, and taken into account by elected councillors.
A Children’s Rights Approach can help overcome the ‘democratic deficit’ which means many children are excluded from voting by requiring councillors to make every effort to take children’s views into account when making decisions that affect children’s lives. It is essential that they reach out to children and take opportunities to visit children in the everyday places where they live their lives. For example, councillors should visit schools, youth clubs, sports clubs, hospital or care homes, or youth offender institutions, to speak with and listen to children. Councillors should also take advantage of existing mechanisms that represent the views of children across Wales, e.g. the National Youth Parliament, local authority youth forums, and school councils. They should make every effort to find out about children’s day to day lives, and children’s views on the services they use or need.
Children are experts on their own lives and their lived experience can offer new and unique evidence on the challenges they may be experiencing. Our research with CCC confirmed that direct engagement with children and hearing about their lived experience was considered very important. The research also suggested that it is important to listen and not be defensive when children are expressing their views, a point made by a CCC councillor,
‘I think sometimes it’s harder to actually listen to what’s coming back and it’s very easy if you’re an elected politician to get a bit defensive and think well, you know that you meant something with the best of intentions, but people are criticising it, it is quite easy for you to think, well that’s not fair because I did XYZ rather than them actually hearing what they’re being told.’
A Children’s Rights Approach also confirms that children should be given feedback after they have been asked for their views on an issue, so they can be confident that their views have been taken seriously, and so they can understand what action has been taken in response. Once again, reflecting on the experience of this aspect of participation across Wales suggest that councils, and local councillors, need to do a lot more to inform children of how their views influence council policy.
Equality and non-discrimination
A Children’s Rights Approach recognises that children should not be excluded from local decision-making because they are children, and they should not be overlooked by local councillors when decisions are made which affect children’s lives. In other words, children should not be subject to age discrimination or face discrimination purely because they are children.
What’s more, when councillors are examining and scrutinizing the impact of council decisions on children, they need to be aware that children are diverse and made up of many different groups, e.g. Ethnic minority children, Care experienced children, Disabled children, Asylum seeking children, Roma Traveller Children etc. Councillors really need to be aware of the damaging impact of discrimination against any children, and be particularly aware of the many barriers that children (and specific groups of children) can experience when trying to access services.
Our reflections on our work with CCC, and taking account of our wider experience across Wales, we see councillors as having an important role to play to voice concerns if children are subject to unfair treatment or need specific services or support to overcome discrimination and enjoy their rights. However, we do not see much evidence that councillors in local authorities across Wales are embracing this role, and so more work is needed to ensure that elected councillors assume the responsibility of tackling discrimination affecting children.
Accountability to children
Finally, a Children’s Rights Approach requires a local authority to be accountable to children for how they plan and deliver services, and for ensuring their rights are properly taken into account – including by the adoption of all of the above principles. Councillors need to demonstrate, in an open and transparent way how they comply with the above principles – in particular to confirm that they are using their power as elected representatives to constructively challenge council decision-making at every level to ensure children’s rights are respected, protected and fulfilled.
Once again, on reflection we see councillors as having an important role to play to ensure local authorities are accountable to children. CCC took a significant step forward in this regard by convening a panel of children to test, challenge and report on how CCC is giving effect to children’s rights (ii). This is also discussed in the blog ‘Children evaluating the work of a public authority: A Children’s Rights Approach’.
However, in general we are not convinced that local authorities across Wales are properly accountable to children, and we see the need for greater adoption of mechanisms such as the scrutiny process followed by CCC, or, e.g. child friendly complaints mechanisms. In conclusion, while we see many examples of good practice from a number of local authorities across Wales, and you can see examples collated by the Children’s Commissioner for Wales (iii), we remain concerned that local councillors are yet to make a strong contribution to implementing a Children’s Rights Approach. We are fairly confident (based on our experience) that this is not through a lack of interest in children or children’s rights, but rather through a lack of understanding or support to discharge their role in ways which reflect a Children’s Rights Approach. In this respect, and consistent with a Children’s Rights Approach, local authorities should take steps to train councillors and to support their development to enable them to adopt a Children’s Rights Approach in the discharge of their role as elected members.
Endnotes
i) Reflections and quotes have been drawn from a piece of participatory action research undertaken by Dr Croke and Helen Dale supporting a Committee of Young Experts to evaluate the Cardiff Child Friendly City programme from a children’s rights perspective. The report can be accessed here: https://cardiffyouthcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Cardiff-Committee-of-Experts-Report-May-23.pdf
ii) See above for a report on this process.
Together (Scottish Alliance for Children's Rights) 