Dear Prime Minister...

Dear Prime Minister, 

A very warm welcome to you – and congratulations on the new job! 

Over the coming days and weeks, I’m sure your inbox will be overflowing with advice, requests and wish lists. I also know the key to Number 10 doesn’t come with a magic wand and, with leadership, comes the responsibility of making difficult decisions. 

However, I hope that you – like me – believe that the most important legacy for any government is to create a better future for our children. 

Like you, I grew up with parents who worked incredibly hard but despite that, at times, struggled to make ends meet. 

Like you, I devoted my career to public service and to making the world a better place for some of the most disadvantaged people in society. 

And like you, I closely follow football (though we do support different teams, so possibly the less said on that, the better!). 

These similarities may seem inconsequential, but I genuinely hope they signify that we’re on the same page in other ways – that we both want to make a difference and to leave things better than how we found them. 

Unfortunately, recent years have been extremely difficult for our youngest generation. Around 4.3 million children are living in poverty, an estimated 1.3 million children have a mental health disorder, and record numbers of children are entering local authority care. 

Research even shows that the UK’s children are getting shorter and are falling behind their peers in developed countries. These are deep, embedded problems, with far-reaching consequences– and they require urgent action. 

Your manifesto made a number of welcome promises, including a commitment to confront child poverty and improve children’s health. I urge you to stick to those promises and would like to suggest seven early steps that can help turn your ambitions into reality:   

1. Put children at the heart of government - I was so pleased to hear Angela Rayner say that ending child poverty is the responsibility of the whole cabinet. Setting up a cross-government strategy for children, and a commitment to spend more of the national wealth on under 25s would be a fantastic start. As Gordon Brown said, every department needs to be a department for children, but an important symbol would be repositioning the Department for Education as a Department for Children and Young People. 
2. Take active steps to end child poverty – starting with putting an end to the two-child limit on benefits. This one step would immediately lift 300,000 families out of poverty, and it would act as a downpayment on broader changes ahead, including through the welcome review of Universal Credit. Whilst breakfast clubs are also a welcome promise, as someone who personally benefited from free school meals for a time, I would also urge you to consider supporting free nutritious school lunches for all primary school children who need them – following the example in London.  
3. Commit to a family centre in every community. Building on Labour’s historic Sure Start initiative, and the more recent family hubs programme, this would be a critical investment in children’s health and wellbeing, and would help prevent families reaching crisis point and requiring more costly support later.  
4. Make the internet safer for children. Build on the Online Safety Act and continue the work of the Pornography Review to make sure children can access the huge benefits of the online world without being bombarded with harmful images and videos that we would never accept in a magazine or a DVD. We’ve long called for a specific offence to outlaw child criminal exploitation and we urge you to legislate early to bring this manifesto commitment onto the statute book.   
5. Address the crisis in children’s mental health. Your manifesto rightly commits to support in every school. Investing in this early and right across England could have a huge impact on children’s wellbeing, on school attendance, and on CAMHS waiting lists.   
6. Be ambitious for children in care and care leavers. It cannot be right that 40% of young people who have been in foster care or residential care are not in education, employment or training when they reach 19. Building on Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review, there is an opportunity now to transform the system so that all children have the care, support and love they need to thrive.   
7. Provide care and support for unaccompanied children arriving in the UK. Children seeking sanctuary in our country have often fled violence, war and other horrors. We have a proud tradition of welcoming children arriving here in these circumstances, just as we did during the Second World War. Now is the time to reassert that commitment.   

Prime Minister, you have some difficult decisions ahead of you and we recognise the scale of this challenge. 

But on behalf of children and young people across the country, I urge you to put them first, to take bold action and help create a legacy you – and they – can be proud of.

I look forward to working with you. 

Lynn Perry MBE

Chief Executive, Barnardo's