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/// Brown announced that “from now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes”. ///
That was not compulsory. Teenage mums could opt in or not as they wished.
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Teenage pregnancy
Confusion over Labour's plan to house young mothers in supervised homes
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Amelia Gentleman
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 September 2009 20.18 BST
Pregnant woman. Photograph: Katie Collins/PA
The prospect of supervised homes for teenage mothers was one of the most eye-catching policy announcements Gordon Brown made in his speech, but the absence of any clear detail about how the commitment would be implemented triggered unease from charities who support young parents.
"I do think it's time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of 16, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own," Brown told the conference.
"From now on all 16- and 17-year-old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly. That's better for them, better for their babies and better for us all in the long run."
Many such supervised homes exist already, but currently the decision of whether or not to be housed in one is left to the individual young parent. The government's teenage pregnancy strategy, launched in 1999, has already pledged to offer sheltered housing to those young parents unable to continue living at home. Despite this commitment, teenage parent support groups say sufficient resources have not so far been made available to fund enough buildings to be fitted out as mother-and-baby hostels – some areas have good provision, others have opened fewer homes.
The commitment to providing more of these homes was met with clear support from charities, but the suggestion lingering underneath that there might be an element of compulsion to the scheme elicited alarm.
No details of how the policy would work were immediately available from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, prompting one campaigner to ask if there was to be "compulsory internment" of teenage mothers in hostels. There was no information available about whether there would be extra funding for such a scheme, or whether there would be any obligation for teenage parents to move into supervised housing.
The Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group welcomed the prime minister's announcement that there would be more support for young parents, adding: "Many young parents are still living in unacceptable housing conditions and we welcome the government's commitment to address this situation."
However, in the absence of further details of the commitment, other charities were concerned by the tough tone that accompanied the pledge, which several saw as an attempt to engage with a middle-England contention that teenage girls get pregnant in order to get council accommodation.
Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said: "This is an ill-thought out sop to an ill-informed section of public opinion that misunderstands the causes and consequences of teenage pregnancy."
Hilary Pannack, chief executive of Straight Talking Peer Education, a charity that works to reduce teenage pregnancies and to support teenage parents, said: "There is an assumption in Gordon Brown's speech that all teenage parents are bad parents but this is not the case."
In 1998, Labour announced a target of halving teenage pregnancy by 2010. Since then, overall rates of teenage pregnanc