Let's end this sorry tale of state neglect and make childhood magical again

Will Hutton

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Britain's neglect of its children is a disgrace - a crisis for too many of our kids but also a condemnation of the absence of a rallying national purpose.

Everywhere you look - at the more than 4 million growing up in poverty, at the treatment of troubled children at risk to themselves and their families, at the evaporation of youth centres or at nearly a million between 18 and 24 not in employment, education or training - the trends are alarming. We should aim to make childhood as magical as we can. Instead, we are allowing the opposite to happen to too many.

It is not as though the multiple dimensions of the problem are unknown by either government or civil society. The preamble to the policy paper that tackles child poverty and frames the government's strategy, expected this summer, sets out the figures starkly, while the children's wellbeing and schools bill, wending its way through parliament, has varying proposals.

What is lacking is the outrage to make this is an overriding priority. In this vacuum, populist Reform flourishes; progressive politics wilts.

Take the little-known deprivation of liberty orders. The concept was introduced with good intent in 1989 to suggest that the handful of children who suffer from terrible self-abuse or abuse by others, causing their behaviour to become seriously troubling, should be deprived of their liberty, quite literally.