Advice to Vicky Pollard and Friends: Be on the Look-Out for Perambulator Chasers, Sometimes the Law Can Be of Assistance

Civitas, 14 July 2009

“This was a pilot scheme and the point … of a pilot scheme [is] to find out if something works. There is no dishonour in piloting something to see whether it works and if it doesn’t work then acknowledging it and trying to press on and find out what does work.”

So did Harriet Harman cavalierly respond in Parliament last week to the recent revelation of what a disastrous failure the government-funded Young People’s Development Programme (YPDP) has proved.

Funded to the tune of nearly £6 million by the Department of Health between 2004 and 2007, or £2,500 for every young person involved in the programme, its aim was to reduce various forms of socially undesirable behaviour, such as drug-taking, truancy and pregnancy, on the part of young persons. By bringing together for counselling and mentoring those judged especially at risk of engaging in such forms of behaviour, it was hoped the programme would reduce its incidence.

In the case of teen-age pregnancy, the YPDP appears to have had exactly the opposite of its intended effect. According to research into its efficacy, a higher percentage of girls on the programme became pregnant while taking part in it than did a similar number of girls, judged equally at risk, who had not taken part. Whereas 16 per cent of the girls on the programme got pregnant while on it, only 6 per cent of girls did in a comparison group, especially selected for their equal vulnerability.

When researchers evaluating the efficacy of the programme discovered this startling fact, they could only account for it by supposing that participation on the programme had in some way encouraged the girls taking part in it to get pregnant, despite the intent being otherwise. Their conjecture was that, when they met together to receive their counselling, some of these girls proved more effective advocates of the merits of early pregnancy than their counsellors did as advocates of its demerits.

Like Pontius Pilate, Ms Harman seeks to wash the government’s hands clean of responsibility for any of the babies born to girls on the programme, or for any of the abortions other girls may have undergone in consequence of pregnancies that arose as a result of having taken part in it. It was simply a social experiment that went wrong, which the government was perfectly justified in having undertaken, seems to be Ms Harmans’ line.

However, although the researches themselves refrain in their report from commenting on the wisdom of the programme, something in their report suggests that it might well have been known beforehand just how hazardous it was likely to prove. They write:

‘Some previous studies have reported unintended negative effects of interventions targeting at-risk individuals including young people. Various studies have provided empirical evidence that interventions which bring together at-risk participants can, in doing so, alter participants and social networks… such interventions can expose participants to the influence of new friends who are… more positive about and far more engaged in risk behaviours (such as substance abuse or unprotected sex), resulting in increased rather than decreased rates of risk taking.’ (p.75)

There are several questions that I believe need to be raised about the YPDP, given the known prior risks associated with programmes of such a kind.

First, before it was undertaken, did the proposal to carry out the programme go before a Department of Health ethics committee?

Second, were the young persons who took part in it and their parents advised beforehand of the risks of their participating in it, and were they given opportunity to opt out of it, should they have judged the risks unacceptably high?

Should it turn out that the project did not go beforehand before a Department of Health ethics committee, and should the young persons who took part in it and their parents not have been advised beforehand of the known risks of their taking part in it and the opportunity to opt out of it, then it seems to be that the girls who got pregnant during it would have a good case in law against the government for contributory negligence and damages for all the disadvantages that they were counselled to expect to incur as a result of getting pregnant  young.

Word should quickly go out to Vicky Pollard and her friends to be on the look-out for perambulator chasers and that sometimes the law can be of help!