My voice will strengthen to fight for children's rights

At New Year, we often think about the least fortunate and most vulnerable members of society. I fear that 2013 will bring more negative change for our weakest citizens: children. It will affect some of those you work with. It will be particularly hard when parts of families’ income rely on benefits, whether or not the parents or carers work. In some English communities, this is to be the year of the forced house and school move, the colder home, the smaller meals, the heightened tension behind closed doors. It is real, and it is now. But it will last longer and its ripples will spread further than 2013 alone. 

This year, new legislation proposed in the Children and Families Bill is likely to strengthen my role and my office. In a recent scrutiny report on the bill, the Joint Committee on Human Rights recommended amendments that would provide the children’s commissioner with greater independence and powers, and more closely align us to what the UN considers a national human rights organisation for children should do.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires states to have a framework that promotes, protects and monitors how well they honour children’s rights in accordance with the UN’s Paris Principles. These state that an office like mine must be independent of government. I must have a broad mandate to promote and protect children’s rights, and to monitor and critique the state’s implementation of the convention, making recommendations and proposals about existing and proposed policies and their implementation.

I must have powers of investigation and be able to hear complaints and transmit them to the authorities. I must run a sound organisation, adequately funded to do all these things and not subject to financial control that might affect my independence. (I would pause for ironic laughter at that last description, but there isn’t time.)

Change for the better
My office has advisory authority on children’s rights in England. Like most other children’s commissioners, I do much of my work through publishing evidence-based opinions. I focus my gaze most fiercely on where my staff find evidence that adults are denying or violating children’s rights, pressing all concerned to change for the better. My reports make robust recommendations to government, whether or not the work I do is at its request. 

The bill gives us a clearer mandate to hold the government to account through publishing children’s rights impact assessments. If it had already passed into legislation, I would have been able to hold the government more robustly to account with regard to the Welfare Reform Bill, which will affect children who are the most needy, the most vulnerable and the already poor. I predict the popular national narrative will harden even more to have us all believe there are strivers, and then there are scroungers. And yet, two out of three poor English children live with parents who are in, not out of, work.

By 2014, the commissioner is likely to have a more direct relationship with parliament and a firmer platform on which to say what must be said. I expect our voice to have greater emphasis, and our work greater influence. My words would hardly be different from what I have said on these issues to date. But there is a chance they would be listened to, and acted on. So roll on 2014. But beware the changes to come between now and then, and don’t let your voices fall silent or your passions wane. Children need us to say what must be said.
 
Maggie Atkinson is the children’s commissioner for England