Ministers are set to attempt to tone down recommendations on accommodation for vulnerable young people contained within a hard-hitting report.

The special report, on the need for more and better accommodation for vulnerable young people, paints a shocking picture of at-risk youngsters cast adrift from the care system, with some ending up living with drug dealers and others fearing sex demands from unscrupulous landlords.

It contains 21 recommendations and is set to go before Tynwald next week. But the Council of Ministers has indicated it will seek to amend some of those recommendations and reject others.

The report was published in the summer following an investigation. It hit out at a lack of leadership from the government on dealing with the problem and called for a better system to support those who leave the care system at 18 - along with better controls on landlords.

There were shocking stories of the problems faced by young people when they left the care system.

One said: ’I lived in bedsit with a drug dealer - they used to hide drugs in the bathroom.’ Another told the investigation: ’One of the other people in the flat told me that if you paid rent late then they would ask you for sex to cover the debt.’

Care and supervision orders for children expire when they reach 18 and the investigation, led by Ayre and Michael MHK Tim Baker (pictured below), raised concerns at what happens at that point, saying young people faced a ’cliff edge’ and there was an ’over-reliance’ on the third sector.

One recommendation was that the government work with UK homelessness charity Depaul - which runs Nightstop schemes for people aged 16-25 and places them in the homes of approved volunteers - to set up a similar scheme here.

But the government wants to amend that to ask the Department of Health and Social Care to commission a feasibility study to ’establish the need and development of a nightstop or similar support scheme within the Isle of Man context’. It argues the original recommendation is too prescriptive in terms of service provider and, when a similar scheme was trialled by a local housing charity, there was ’limited success’.

But ministers insist the principle is ’fully supported’.

Corporate parent

The government accepts a recommendation for it to work with the voluntary sector to develop a cross-government strategy on accommodation for vulnerable young people.

But it wants to amend a recommendation calling for services for vulnerable young people to be benchmarked against what would be considered ’good enough for one’s own child’. The benchmark should be measured against ’agreed corporate parent’ standards, they say. The corporate parent, in terms of vulnerable young people, is usually the government.

And ministers are against a recommendation that corporate parent duties should extend beyond the current level of 18 years. But that is because, they say, current practice is to act in that role up to the age of 21 and with discretion to go on after that.

Additional duties are set to be included in a planned update of the 2001 Children and Young Persons’ Act.

The report calls for Treasury to trial a scheme in which it would act as guarantor for care leavers seeking accommodation could be watered down, if ministers get their way, to instead hold a review of current law and conduct an impact assessment on the idea.

And a recommendation that the government, as the corporate parent, assesses ’periodically’ the suitability of private sector housing occupied by care leavers and, where necessary, help them find better accommodation, could be instead replaced with the establishment of ’management quality standards’ to be met by the accommodation provider.

A proposal for a £3,000 grant to care leavers seeking accommodation will be opposed, because government policy already allows for this and the procedure is set to be formalised when the CYP Act is updated.

Ministers also insist, in their response to another recommendation: ’There is currently sufficient semi-independent accommodation contracted for young people up to age 18.’