The Other Railway Children, Chapter 12 - the UK

We had not ignored the situation in our own country. Interestingly, Railway Children was the only member of the Consortium for Street Children that partnered projects in the UK as well as overseas, excluding the large NGOs like Save the Children. We had committed ourselves to spend at least 20% of our income to support runaway children in the United Kingdom and in fact our charitable expenditure on our British programme by 2003 was almost 30%.

Whilst we had worked closely with Centrepoint in the beginning, their focus was on the support of young people over 16 years of age, and we were aware from discussions with our partners that many child runaways under that age had few organisations to whom they could turn. My own association with ‘Get Connected’ highlighted the need when we analysed the number and types of calls our volunteers were receiving. Whilst most of the 15,000 or so annual calls were from 13-15 year olds, there was a significant number from younger children. Family conflict and domestic violence came high on the reasons that children gave for seeking help.

We had analysed the referrals ‘Get Connected’ made and found disturbingly that over 20% of the calls in one year were referred to the Samaritans, an alarming statistic demonstrating the severe nature of the distress some of our callers were suffering. The Samaritans were also the organisation that we were able most reliably to contact when we made a call on behalf of a child caller. The other organisation to whom we attempted to connect a child most often was ‘Childline’ but frustratingly their lines were heavily engaged and one year I remember only 20% of the calls we referred to them were able to make the connection.

We had maintained our support of ASTRA in conjunction with the statutory authority in Gloucestershire and with the ROC project in Glasgow - where, as a result of our funding, the Scottish Executive had made a substantial grant to purchase and renovate a building to act as a 3 bedded refuge - at that time three of only twelve beds authorised for under 16 year olds in the UK outside the provisions made by Social Services through their children’s homes, fostering or emergency overnight accommodation.

However, many children in this situation need time to reflect and discuss their options with an independent counsellor as some children have had ongoing problems with their Social Services contact or have even run away from problems at the children’s home or emergency fostering arrangement in which they’d been placed. Since then, the refuges in Torquay and London have closed through lack of funding and only five beds remained available in 2011 in the whole of the UK - the three in Glasgow and two in the Sheffield NGO, ‘Safe@Last’ which we also support.

The results of the research on Roma children in London which we’d funded through the Children’s Society were published and in the course of this partnership we had come across Andy McCullough, who was leading some of the Children’s Society work on runaway children, closely associated with the research they had carried out with York University on the scale of the problem in the UK. Andy was clearly keen to take this work further and the Railway Children trustees had decided with the growth of our UK partnerships that we needed a full time resource to develop this support.

We therefore advertised the post and were not unduly surprised, though pleased when we saw Andy’s name on the list of applicants. He explained that he was prepared to come to us, if we could guarantee him that he would be allowed to maintain priority on the issue of UK runaways, as he himself had experience on the streets and understood many of such children’s issues and really wanted to see things through to make a real difference. This gelled exactly with our aims too, so we brought Andy on board in the summer of 2005 and realised very quickly how big an asset it was to have someone who could speak with such authority on the issue.

With Andy in place, and with his connections to other UK NGOs and resources within government, we increased our UK portfolio of projects. We joined in partnership with a couple of NGOs in the North West - firstly ‘Safe in the City’ in Manchester who worked for runaway and at risk children and child asylum seekers. We funded a programme aimed particularly at children from different ethnic backgrounds.

Secondly we linked with ‘Talk Don’t Walk’ in Warrington, a counselling centre working in a hub of charities in Warrington town centre next to the local authority’s youth service. This project had a senior seconded police woman working with the NGO staff seeking to defuse problems in families that had arisen before the child actually left home. Their methodology was of great interest and the local police were enthusiastic at the results. The preventative work had substantially reduced the number of child runaways - and children running for a second and even third time - and the number of petty crimes committed by children in the area. As a result, the police calculated that they had saved at least £1 million a year in the costs of dealing with crime, the court appearances and the costs of home visits taking back runaway children and dealing with the consequences. Railway Children were keen to document the process and produce a ‘toolkit’ for replication elsewhere. The local MP, Helen Southworth, took a great interest and in her working with Andy, founded the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Children who Runaway or Go Missing and she initially invited Andy and Railway Children to act as the APPG’s secretariat at meetings in the House of Commons.

Andy felt strongly that many of the smaller UK charities who were working directly with children on the streets or in other extremely vulnerable circumstances rarely got their voices heard by government. Andy started talking about the value of creating a coalition of charities working for such children in the UK with first hand experience at a grass-roots level, and within a couple of years had formed the English Coalition for Runaway Children and was voted its Chair by the membership.

Being Chair of the Coalition and Secretary to the APPG gave Andy and Railway Children access to government ministers and Andy was appointed to a Working Group considering guidelines to local authorities on child runaways by the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls. This Group published their guidelines, called ‘Young Runaways Action Plan’ in 2008, identifying that recent reports had recommended the delivery of coordinated, multi-agency responses to vulnerable young people, especially integrated front-line service delivery. It set out a number of actions for government and local authorities and stated that progress would be monitored by one of the ’National Indicator Sets’ for Local Government - NI 71. Andy remained part of a cross-Departmental working group for young runaways.

One of the concerns raised in the Action Plan for Runaways was the need for emergency accommodation for some children supported by counselling and advice from a number of services. I have already mentioned the reduced specialist independent refuge capacity available and Andy came to the Railway Children Board with a proposition to help the Sheffield NGO ‘Safe@Last’, to buy and provide such a refuge and work in close consultation with agencies in the Sheffield area. This was done and a two bedded refuge was eventually given authorisation under the 1989 Children’s Act to house children under 16 years of age for up to 14 days while their problems and issues were addressed and the children counselled on the options available to them.