Children’s Social Care

Recommendation 78 also urges monitoring the impact where action similar to Falkirk council’s has been taken by English local authorities, so let me put the Minister on the spot: will the Department, given its apt proximity to the Minister for Women and Equalities, the right hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), consider legislating if the impact of local councils’ designating care experience as a protected characteristic is found to be beneficial, but could be enhanced by putting that designation on a statutory footing? What are the Department’s thoughts on that issue? For the Minister’s information, if Councillor Paterson makes it to the Scottish Parliament next year as a Scottish Labour MSP for Falkirk East and Linlithgow, the Department would have a very powerful colleague to support and assist such a measure being implemented in Holyrood.

When the Minister responds to the debate, will he also thank all the organisations throughout the country involved in this work, especially Falkirk & Clackmannanshire Carers Centre and Young Carers, all of their staff and all of the young people on the Falkirk Champs board for their continued advocacy?

I was proud to bring a group of care leavers to Parliament earlier this week. I thank the Minister again for making time at the last moment, with no notice, to meet them, so that they could share their aspirations. Their voices were not only heard in this place; they went to the very heart of decision making—the Department for Education.

I want to talk about three key issues: the importance of getting early intervention right, foster carers, and care leavers themselves. The Government have committed to early intervention and help. In Southampton, I saw the power of shifting from reactive services to preventive services, with early help and intervention. That can reduce the number of children entering care, the amount of time they spend in care, and the damaging impact that being in care for too long can have. For many, it turns them around. Unfortunately, the damage can be compounded by the experience of care, so there is a great need for support. I think I am preaching to the choir when I say that early intervention is absolutely key.

The Government’s response points to the existing grants and the local government finance settlement, which deals with some early interventions, particularly around things such as housing support. Will the Minister please say a bit more about the conversations he is having with MHCLG ministerial colleagues? Will he ensure we seize the opportunity to make a difference? When council funding is announced later in the year, it will be welcomed not only by cabinet members like I was, leaders in this area and people who work in it, but most importantly by young people themselves, who will see that we are taking this issue seriously.

On the recruitment and retention of foster carers, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood made a powerful case setting out why what we are doing is not working. We need to do more. I believe that a national fostering strategy is needed to bring together the good will and the good practice. We know that there are pockets of excellence across the country, and there moments when a particular campaign works well. In Southampton, we were delighted to have one of our former Saints players engage with us on this issue—we could at least win at something, even if it was not football in that season. That joint working to promote the benefits not just to children, but to families who welcome young people into their homes for however long is needed, was a real success. None the less, recruitment numbers go up and down, and I am sure that is replicated across the country.

I hope the Minister will take on board the need to consider again a national fostering strategy that is properly resourced and brings together the comprehensive measures needed for progress. That would help to bring clarity and far greater awareness of the current crisis, and crucially, it would bring hope. As I believe the Minister said the other day, we want there to be choice. We cannot simply say, “Well, we have a foster carer, but they happen to be 20 or 30 miles away and that is the best fit we can get for an individual.” I think we know that we can and should be doing better than that.

On care leavers, our report concluded that it is rightly absolutely unacceptable that young people are left to support themselves financially when they turn 18, particularly if they are in full-time education and have to face either reducing time spent in education or dropping out completely to support themselves. I do not know if anyone has read the book by Ashley John-Baptise about the decision he faced almost 20 years ago either to accept a property that a council had finally been able to offer him as a care leaver, or to take up his place at university. That is not a position we want anyone to be in. Thankfully, the intervention of an MP at that point made a difference. The system should be making the difference, not forcing young people to choose between opportunities that, in most cases, those who are not care-experienced would not even have to consider.

There are things that no responsible parent would allow, and the state—councils—are in loco parentis. Therefore, as this Government are committed to breaking down barriers to opportunity, we must keep the most life-changing opportunity, education, open to all care-experienced young people. Where finance is the barrier, we need to remove that, and where the risk of a placement breakdown is a barrier, we must get extra support for stability. As has been recommended, we need to look at extending corporate parenting to all public bodies that are required to support our children in care. A national care leaver offer, as in recommendation 75, should still be on the table; it would go hand in hand with the local care leaver offer that the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is bringing in.

As argued strongly by my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank), designating care experience a protected characteristic is another tool in our box that we could use to make a difference for children and young people. That is recommendation 78, and I would be grateful if the Minister elaborated on what the Government are doing there. Work is ongoing in Parliament, and the hon. Member for Dundee Central (Chris Law), Baroness Longfield and activists such as Terry Galloway and Chris Wild are working on it. We would be pleased to meet with the Minister on an ongoing basis to ensure that we are working towards it.

Finally, I will list a few of the things that Atlas, Mac, Ethan and George told us when they visited this week about what would make a difference to their experience of being in social care, and in particular leaving social care. They are asking for more funding and focus on mental health and wellbeing. That is in recommendation 49. We know that child and adolescent mental health services are in a poor state, whether someone has been in care or not, and urgently need to be fixed. The Government said in their response that they will take a multidisciplinary approach and that they will review statutory guidance. Can the Minister say when we can expect that? The crisis is ongoing. We cannot continue to wait much longer.

Children want more placements closer to home. They want that stability. They want more affordable housing. As has already been outlined, that speaks to the wider challenges in society that the Government have to tackle: child poverty, relieving financial pressures on families, and having better support for parents, which we know will be given through the new Best Start family hubs.

I am glad that parental pay and parental leave are under review so that in the earliest, most crucial days we might see stronger bonds in children. For some, that may remove the likelihood that they have to go into care. There are risks outside the home that we need to fix, and there are risks in the home such as social media and smartphones. Many things impact the stability of our young people’s experience, particularly when they go on to leave care. We need training and experience for the young people themselves, but young people told us that they also want their social workers to be as well trained as possible. Some of them want someone, as they put it, a bit older. They probably mean someone with the deep experience to be able to coach them through the upheaval that many of them face, particularly as they become independent. They want to feel like they are part of a normal family, as much as possible.

I again commend the Chair of the Education Committee for leading this inquiry. It was the first priority of the new Committee. I ask the Minister to make it clear to us and, more importantly, to foster families, to children who are care-experienced, and to those who are leaving care that it is the first priority of this Government. I welcome the many responses that have reassured us of that commitment to make change happen where it is desperately needed, but the Government must not allow this to be a wait and see moment. The Minister must assure us that decisive action will be taken on those recommendations because, as the Chair of the Committee has said, he will be able to count on the Committee’s full support if he does.

When my partner and I applied, we got a lot of our initial information from charities, before we even inquired about an information evening at our local authority. Particularly with ongoing funding challenges, councils are quite limited in what they can do. Staffordshire county council does fantastic work; it has been to many local fairs—when we had a Pride in Cannock Chase it came there with its fostering van, and proactively spoke to people. But obviously it can only do so much, and many of the staff are volunteering their own time to be able to do that.

We also need to look at some of the practical barriers, particularly around things like people in social housing, as was highlighted by the Committee. We clearly do not have a lack of altruistic people in this country who want to put themselves forward to foster, adopt or both. But the dropping numbers suggest that there are many barriers in place that we need to knock down. Fostering and adoption are not luxuries; they are absolute lifelines. Children need stable and loving homes, so we need accessible routes for families to come forward.

I will briefly pick up on the point about priority school admission for kinship carers. I have personal experience of the benefit that having priority admission as an adoptive parent gave us. Unlike most adopted children, whose parents are applying for a school nearby, many children who are going into kinship care are moving further away from home, and I have seen cases where they struggle to get a school place. I appreciate that in its response the Department said that there is limited evidence around that. However, we know that there is limited evidence around a lot of the challenges that are facing kinship carers, because we are only recently waking up to their importance, value and support needs. I hope the Department will do everything it can to gather that evidence and look to see if this is something we can do.

Thirdly, as other colleagues have, I will touch on the adoption and special guardianship support fund. Again, I declare an interest in that as a family we are actively accessing this fund for my daughter. I welcome the Department’s acknowledgment that stability and transparency are critical. As has been said in debates in this Chamber and on the Floor of the House, any support that we can provide through the fund will pay for itself many times over. But we also need to look at the capacity in local authorities to provide support.

As a family we have sometimes found that finding a therapist—often a former social worker who has particular expertise in different areas—can be a challenge. Clearly, local authorities are not going to be able to provide the full gambit of support that might be needed, but for issues such as attachment disorder, which is very common among children in care, it would be wonderful to see more of that support available within local authorities, so that we do not have to use the ASGSF or go out to private providers or charities to access that support.

I will touch on the recruitment and retention of social workers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood did. We hear continually from social workers about how there is immense instability in the workforce, and that is undermining everything that they are trying to do, from early intervention to post-adoption support and preparing care leavers. We know that this is a challenge for almost every local authority in the country. A national workforce strategy is critical. We need to offer meaningful career progression and improved pay in many areas—pay disparities even between neighbouring local authorities can be huge.

I have heard about the difference between Birmingham and Worcestershire, for example, and many social workers being sucked out of the counties that ring the west midlands conurbation into those urban authorities because they can pay much better. They therefore often have better staff teams, whereas those in the surrounding shires are struggling. Many newly qualified social workers do not have the mentorship and support from more experienced colleagues, so they are leaving not long into their career, which is tragic. Stress and workforce pressures will always be there for social workers as it is an incredibly demanding job, but anything we can do to foster a culture that values and uplifts social work, and that means that people have some of the trickier tasks taken away—for example, so they do not have to fill out as much paperwork—would help.

Finally, I will touch on care leavers and the need for a universal support offer. We have repeatedly heard heartbreaking stories of care leavers aged 18, or even 16, moving out of their local authority and often losing support. That is why a national care offer would be a catch-all across the country. Staying Close provisions are really welcome, but they need to be fully rolled out so that we can smoothly transition young adults to independence with emotional and practical support intact. It cannot be a postcode lottery. I have heard from many care leavers that they want to move out of their home authority—they may have done so when they were a young child—but they often remain reliant on the original local authority in which they were taken into care for support. Those local authorities are often far less likely to offer support to someone living far outside their area.

There was also a recent announcement on care leavers and student loans. It would be great if the Minister could provide more information around that, because my understanding is that care leavers already have independent student status and can therefore already get maximum loans in all but a small number of cases. I have been asked to seek a bit more clarity on that so we can see who that announcement will benefit and whether there is any data on that.

I echo my thanks to the Education Committee and the Department for all their work on this, but highlight the need for a national recruitment campaign for foster carers and adopters; as much support as possible for adoptive parents and kinship carers to do their absolute best for their loved ones; a well supported, sustainable social-work workforce; and a care leaver offer that transcends geography, so that young people can access what they need, wherever they are.

The points today on foster care have been particularly well made. My constituency is Frome and East Somerset, and we are desperately short in Frome, particularly of foster care places, which means many children have to go into residential settings, often very far from their home and hard for local people to access, as we have tricky rural bus routes and a lack of trains. It is also much more expensive for a struggling local authority.

Support for families has been undermined by the Government’s handling of the adoption and special guardianship support fund. That fund has been a lifeline, enabling traumatised children to access specialist therapy, healing and hope, yet earlier this year families were left in the dark for months about whether the fund would continue. It was only after Liberal Democrat pressure, led by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) with an urgent question, that the Government confirmed the funding for ’25-26. The truth is that the details of severe cuts were quietly slipped out once Parliament had gone into recess. The therapy limit has been slashed from £5,000 to £3,000, and a separate £2,500 allowance for specialist assessments has been scrapped. Support can also no longer be carried across financial years, robbing families of the flexibility they need.

For some, these consequences are especially devastating. Children with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which I have campaigned on, are among those most affected. FASD is a lifelong condition caused by exposure to alcohol before birth. It can lead to developmental delays, learning and emotional regulation difficulties and a range of physical and cognitive challenges. Many children with FASD are adopted or in special guardianship arrangements. They often require specialist assessments, ongoing therapy and expert support to manage complex needs.

The withdrawal of funding for those diagnostic assessments is catastrophic for those children. Without a proper diagnosis, they cannot access tailored support at school or appropriate interventions at home. The cuts to the adoption and special guardianship fund are therefore not just administrative tinkering; they are an act of neglect towards some of the most vulnerable in our society, including those living with FASD, whose future prospects depend on early and sustained support. We call on the Government to reverse these harmful cuts immediately and to reaffirm their commitment to adopted children, special guardians and kinship carers. Every child, whether in care, adopted or living with extended family, deserves the same chance to thrive.

If we can get children’s social care right, the rewards could not be greater: difficult starts giving way to new beginnings; great potential given the promise of a fair chance; and, as the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood said, a reduction in some of the social problems that we contend with in other parts of Government.

The report makes clear the consequences when we do not get it right. Children in care often experience trauma, abuse and neglect. They are more than four times more likely to suffer emotional or mental health problems than other children of their age. The Committee reported on the poor outcomes for too many care leavers—the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood mentioned this in her speech. Some 39% of care leavers between the ages of 19 and 21 are not in education, employment or training; one third of care leavers become homeless within two years of leaving care; and almost a quarter of the prison population has spent time in care.

Many fantastic organisations, such as Cangle Foyer in Haverhill in my constituency, do so much for vulnerable young people who find themselves with no place to live and little hope of getting the skills they need or a job they would like without professional help to get themselves established. Demand for such help would obviously be less necessary and less urgent if we were successful in improving the social care system for children. I know, after a recent Ofsted report into children’s services in Suffolk, how much work there is still to be done.

The Conservative party agrees with the Committee’s recommendations for a national sufficiency strategy for children’s social care and a reduction in the number of out-of-area placements; the development of a national care offer to harmonise support for care leavers; a new national fostering strategy and a register of foster carers; better financial support for kinship carers in line with support for foster carers; and permanent funding for the adoption and special guardianship support fund.

We broadly welcomed the measures relating to children’s social care in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and the policy paper, “Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive”. Much of that is a welcome continuation of some of the policies that we pursued in office, including powers to regulate the children’s social care provider market, to cap profits, if necessary, and to regulate the use of agency workers in children’s social care.

The Conservative party has argued that there are some ways in which the Government might be able to go further. For example, we proposed amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to require the Education Secretary to report annually on the work and impact of multi-agency child protection teams, which would have included their effectiveness in improving information sharing, risk identification and service co-ordination.

There are also important questions about the relationship between social care and special educational needs. I know from our experiences in Suffolk that demand for special educational needs and disabilities places outstrips supply. Parents are waiting and waiting for education, health and care plans, and the system is buckling under the pressure. I look forward to hearing very soon what the Government intend to do in relation to SEND.

Vulnerable children are often not getting the care they need. They are falling out of the education system, sometimes altogether, or travelling great distances—often more than 75 minutes—at great expense, and sometimes leaving them more exposed to harm, to get to schools that can meet their needs. I know that the plan for the White Paper has been delayed into next year, but I would be grateful if the Minister told us more about the Government’s broad intentions and how he sees the interaction between special educational needs and the social care system.

We also have to raise some questions to which the Government have to date been reluctant to give answers. The Casey report into the rape gangs did not focus specifically on the systemic failings in social care, but it showed how children’s services departments repeatedly failed to protect and support victims—vulnerable children who were in the care of the state.

In Rochdale, for example, Baroness Casey said that health services

“repeatedly shared their significant concerns with the police and children’s social care about the organised sexual exploitation of children in the area”,

but nothing happened.

Anwar Meah, who was a social worker in Bradford, notoriously attended the so-called wedding of an under-age girl in his care to her abuser. I find that absolutely extraordinary and am surprised there was no prosecution in that case. Will the Minister tell us what the Government will do to earn the trust of the victims involved with the inquiry? Finally, when will the national inquiry into the rape gangs get under way?

Every child deserves the best possible start in life. That is why this Select Committee report is a welcome contribution. This debate has been so important. Members across the House, regardless of party politics, have an important duty to be constructive, to work together and to do everything we can for every young person in our country. It is a duty, and we cannot let them down.

Ahead of National Care Leavers Month in November, we are focused on ensuring that the Government celebrate role models for care-experienced young people. My hon. Friend is one of those role models. I am sure many care-experienced young people will look at what he does here in the UK Parliament and consider what they can go on to achieve themselves.

I was struck by the clarity of Atlas, Mac, George and Ethan when I met them earlier this week. I thank my hon. Friend for bringing them into my office. They cut through a lot of the noise I hear as a Minister. Having had hundreds of conversations with care-experienced people over the years, I was again reminded of just what it is that we need to get on and deliver.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) for sharing his own experience, and I strongly associate myself with his remarks, particularly on the need for changes in the fostering and adoption system. I will come back to that later.

I welcome the cross-party nature of this debate. I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine), and I will return to aspects of adoption support and the ASGSF, as she raised some important points. I also thank the Conservative spokesperson, the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), for the spirit in which he approaches this issue. I recognise the importance of the connection between the overall children’s social care system and how essential it is that we strengthen the country’s child protection arrangements. A major part of that is tackling harms outside of the home, child abuse, child sexual abuse, group-based violence and the rape gangs he mentioned.

We need to recognise much more than we have in our debates in this Parliament that some of the underlying vulnerabilities of young girls stem from failings in our care system. I see far too many instances of young people who, when something has gone wrong, are sent to live in an institutional setting far away from people who know them and what their face looks like. Because of the vulnerable position that the care system puts them in, they are far too often left prey to violent and appalling criminals. We need to root that out at source.

The Government’s overall response is the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is landmark legislation that we tabled within weeks of coming into government. There will be £2 billion of investment over this spending review period, with hundreds of millions being put into the Families First Partnership programme, which is all about building a multidisciplinary family help system.

We are now shifting gear—and this responds directly to a point made by the Chair of the Select Committee—away from pathfinders and tests to whole-system programmes of change that take in the entire country. I am grateful to the Committee for its work, carefully considered recommendations and the in-depth evidence it took, particularly from those with direct experience.

I will move briefly through the areas covered by the Committee’s recommendations. First, regarding the need for early intervention and intensive support, I reassure hon. Members that, at their centre, our reforms are about creating multidisciplinary family help teams in every corner of England. These will be staffed not simply by social workers working in a high-assessment, high-referral, paper-based, bureaucratic administration, which is the description that many social workers have of the current orthodoxy. This is about moving towards multidisciplinary, locally based, low-stigma and well-evidenced support for families when they need it, with a focus not only on child protection but on the vast majority of families who are not posing significant harm to their children but simply need support and help.

To reassure Members, I should say that that is not being taken forward solely by the Department for Education, but is a cross-Government endeavour. In a couple of weeks, I will be taking other Ministers and senior officials from the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care to see one of the most successful examples of multidisciplinary family help teams and multi-agency child protection teams. I am meeting ministerial colleagues at the Ministry for Communities, Housing and Local Government next week to have explicit conversations about how we grip the money we are putting into family help reforms, so that we can get effective change through the system. This is not simply about handing money out to local authorities and expecting change to happen; it is about managing a nationwide programme of reform, with investment alongside it, and holding each other to account to deliver the change that families urgently need.

Secondly, on foster care, I made the point—not as a Member of Parliament, but as someone who chaired the review, giving evidence to Select Committees in this place—that, within a year, we were able as a country to do a remarkable thing in creating 100,000 homes for Ukrainian families from a standing start. If we could do that, why was it not possible for us to do better than approving only 1,800 foster carers last year? That number is not even large enough to replace those who are retiring and leaving the vocation of fostering.

I reassure members of the Committee and Members of this House that we will invest tens of millions of pounds very soon in major changes to the fostering system. Regional care co-operatives and fostering hubs will sit at the heart of those changes. I will come forward soon with a comprehensive set of measures to ensure that we boost the numbers of foster carers and the types of foster care that children need. It is a personal priority for me as the Children and Families Minister.

On multi-agency child protection, the Government are taking forward bold structural changes to create multi-agency child protection teams in every local authority across the country, by fusing together different professionals from across the safeguarding partnerships so that, within one team, they can share the information they need and take joint expert action. The Government will put in place more guidance and extra support for the practitioners in those teams, because identifying significant harm, doing that with accuracy, taking action with pace once harm has been identified, and then holding other agencies to account for results is often what is missing in serious incidents where things go wrong.

Included in that will be a sharp focus on harms outside the home—I make that point because the Chair of the Select Committee emphasised it. During the review, I saw too many times that agencies were coming together in lots of meetings and describing the same concerns, but were not taking action. Parents themselves were sometimes the ones crying out for help when their children were at risk outside the home. Our child protection framework has to work in keeping children safe from harms where those harms are not based on the family network. I will also be setting out details of a consultation on the child protection authority very soon, which will support some of these efforts.

On the question of the adoption and special guardianship support fund, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase and the Front-Bench spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset, I am attracted to my hon. Friend’s idea about wider support. There are options for wider support. I met adopters and adoption support staff myself in recent weeks, and especially during National Adoption Week, and there are a number of options. I want to bring forward a longer-term plan for the ASGSF, to provide confidence and certainty, and I want to continue speaking to Members of this House, but also to members of the adoption community and to special guardians, who are part of that community. We will come back with more detail on that issue, but I recognise the importance of what it provides.