- Committee (5th Day)
- 3:39 pm
- Relevant document: 21st Report from the Delegated Powers Committee. Welsh legislative consent sought.
- Clause 10: Accommodation of looked after children: regional co-operation arrangements
- Amendment 107D
- 107D: Clause 10, page 14, line 32, at end insert— “(2A) Regional co-operation arrangements must include the local integrated care board in their development, delivery and governance.”Member’s explanatory statement The amendment aims to highlight the need to include health agencies in the regional cooperation arrangements.
- My Lords, I open this important group of amendments on regional care co-operatives with my Amendment 107D.We will hear later about the stresses and pressures on local authorities in relation to the cost of children’s homes. The establishment of regional care co-operatives was a key recommendation of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, carried out by the now honourable Member for Whitehaven and Workington, Josh MacAlister. I pay tribute to Mr MacAlister MP for his ground-breaking work on this review. He put a huge amount of effort into it and needs to be applauded for that.I look forward to hearing about the amendments tabled by other noble Lords, who I am sure are keen to raise important issues relating to the RCCs. My amendment is very straightforward. It seeks to clarify the role of the independent care boards—ICBs—in the RCC arrangements. In my experience as an MP for a number of years, visiting many care homes and talking to many practitioners in this field, every child in residential care will almost certainly have significant mental health needs and, very often, physical health needs as well. The Minister will be aware of the serious concerns that have been expressed by a number of organisations that the reform of ICBs will lead to changes in the funding allocations for their safeguarding role. This could compromise and undermine their effectiveness. My amendment makes it crystal clear that ICBs must be included in the “development, delivery and governance” of the RCC arrangements.The Minister, a very experienced former Cabinet Minister, will be aware of the concerns expressed by the National Network of Designated Healthcare Professionals—NNDHP—for children and NHS England regarding the health workforce’s ability to implement the relevant clauses in the Bill. In March, NHSE reported that“all current caseload reviews suggest that child safeguarding expertise is already fully committed and at full capacity”.
- 3:45 pm
- My Lords, my Amendments 108 to 116 focus on the distance from home of placements for children in care, and the impact of the move to regional care co-operatives. I welcome the move to regional care arrangements of this kind, as well as the significant increase in investment in children’s social care in last week’s spending review. Put together, they offer a real opportunity to power up on the delivery and implementation of the MacAlister recommendations for children’s social care, with real improvements to the experience of and outcomes for children in care.The distance from home that some children in care have been placed in has, as many noble Lords will know, been an issue for some time. Local authorities across the country have faced increasing challenges in delivering sufficiency of places near to home in recent years, due to increasing demand, rising costs, cuts to early-intervention funding, and workforce challenges, leading to what can be seen only as a broken care market.The national issue has had a significant impact on the experiences and outcomes of children in care, who too often are moved to homes that are unable to meet all their needs or moved far away from those who matter most to them, due to a shortage of appropriate options. Between 2013 and 2024, the number of children in care living more than 20 miles from home increased by 66%, compared with a 23% increase in the overall number of children in care during the same period. In 2024, more than a fifth of all children in care and almost half of those living in residential care were living more than 20 miles from home.Research from the charity Become has highlighted that children living in private children’s homes were two and a half times more likely to be living such a distance from their community than children living in other residential care settings. We have talked before about the negative impact of being separated from communities, support networks, friends, families and schools, and what that can bring—exacerbating adversity in a whole range of different issues.
- My Lords, following on from that, I too wish to support those amendments directed specifically at ensuring placement of children close to home, both in this group and the next. Quite simply, state intervention in the life of a family should, if possible, make things better, not worse. Recent figures from the Department for Education show that one in 10 looked-after children experience three or more placements in a year; this is described as “high placement instability”.There is already in Section 22C of the Children Act an important requirement to accommodate children close to home. It is recognised that such proximity increases the prospects of a child being later returned home. When a child is accommodated away from home and from parents, and away from a familiar area, some parents become unable or unwilling to provide any further support and they disengage, or at least they give up on active engagement.There will remain a need for interaction between the local authority and parents. Parents retain parental responsibility and, even if they do not do so, they should be encouraged to remain involved and see themselves as able to remain involved. That is likely to be reassuring for the child and meet that child’s continuing attachment needs. However, parents and wider family members cannot be expected to maintain involvement unless the placement of the child is reasonably accessible to them. Phone and digital contact are no real substitute.I suspect the Minister might say that the obligation under Section 22C is already referred to in the Bill, but I would support the suggestion that it should be emphasised and reinforced by these amendments. I also support Amendment 117B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, which would ensure that the Bill does not detract from the duty in Section 22C(7) of the Children Act.
- My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 116B, 117B, 117C and 117D in this group, which are tabled in my name. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and to the noble Lords who have already spoken. I agree wholeheartedly with what has been said so far.The intention behind these amendments is to address the issues of attachment, disruption and trauma, which can ensue from housing children too far from home—noble Lords who have already spoken have addressed this. We know that we can minimise the damage and effects of being housed too far away by proximity. I have therefore tabled amendments in a probing manner to invite the Minister to reflect on whether there is some way in which these concerns, as expressed in Committee today, could be accommodated in this legislation.Amendment 116B essentially proposes a duty to collect sufficiency data. It would address the basic idea that you cannot plan what you do not measure. We know from the MacAlister review and from many other organisations which support RCCs—as, indeed I do—that there are concerns about current provision already, and that we need to make sure there is strategic visibility, so that RCCs working together know how many foster carers, residential beds and emergency places are truly needed and where investment is most urgent. In the independent review commissioned by the last Government, the now Labour MP Josh MacAlister was very clear that data should drive the planning. I urge the Government Benches to consider that viewpoint. This amendment would give legislative force to his recommendation. It would allow readily available data to be collected so that we could target spending wisely, empower the local leaders who are responsible for assigning the places and avoid waste.Amendment 117C just builds on the previous proposal requiring the RCCs to publish an annual sufficiency report. It is a basic governance issue of transparency and accountability, which would allow the local authorities, providers, Parliament and, most importantly, children and their families, to know whether the system is, in fact, working. Placement decisions, as we know because there has been a lot of coverage of it, are currently shaped by what is available at the time. Many of us in this House have concerns about supply being driven by various commercial providers. The amendment would help to reverse some of that by making the data transparent at a ready time. It would also ensure that the RCCs are open and responsive to their stakeholders, the local authorities, and to Ofsted, ensuring that young people and foster carers were accommodated rather than the commercial providers. This public report would really just amount to good governance.
- My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 117 in my name, and I thank my noble friend Lady Walmsley, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for adding their names to it.This is an important group. Many times in discussions on the Bill, and more generally, we have talked about the dangers of children being placed far away from home. That is why this is such a critical group. I strongly support everything that has been said so far and the amendments that have been tabled specifically with regard to trying to prevent children from being placed far from home when there are any other viable alternatives.The intention of my amendment is quite simple: it is to ensure that those making decisions affecting children and young people seek and take into account their wishes and feelings. I shall say a couple of words of general context. I welcome the Government’s ambition to be a child-centred Government, and I support the important steps taken in the Bill to strengthen systems that intend to do that and to keep children safe, but there is more that the Bill could do to be truly child centred. At the moment, it needs to do more to embed real consideration of children’s wishes and feelings—hence my amendment, which was discussed on an earlier occasion, about children’s wishes and feelings being respected in relation to family group decision-making.In 1991, the UK ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In so doing, we recognised that children have a distinct set of rights that uniquely value all that it means to be a child. In short, it recognises that children are expert in their own lives. As we know, in cases of abuse and neglect, giving children the opportunity to express their views is a critical factor and lever in building trust and keeping children safe.
- 4:00 pm
- Amendment 117 would require the Secretary of State to seek to ascertain the views of children with expertise of the care system when making regulations that relate to accommodation for children in care, particularly in the context of these regional care co-operatives that we are talking about. I know that many local authorities recognise the value of consulting care-experienced children and young people when making strategic decisions about local provision, and that the Government have already taken welcome steps to engage with children as they think about their future policies, but surely it cannot be right that children and young people’s voices are consigned to
- “such other persons … the Secretary of State considers appropriate”.
- As those most directly affected, surely children and young people should be named in the Bill. That is what this is about, and I think it is quite a modest ask. I really hope that the Government will look sympathetically on this amendment. Every child should be confident that they will be involved in decisions that affect their lives.
- My Lords, at Second Reading I said that, while I welcomed the Bill, it was a cause of great sadness that the late Baroness Massey of Darwen was not there to participate. It is a cause of sadness that, had she been here, she would have had her name on this amendment rather than me, with much more power and justification behind it. At the time of her untimely death, she was working with a group of us in this House to try to find ways of having the voices of children heard more regularly in the day-to-day work of this House, particularly in some of our committees. That is work that is yet to be completed, and we must carry it on.The Josh MacAlister review showed us that, while we have a plethora of different organisations trying to look after the needs of the young people we are talking about in a variety of different ways, with an enormous amount of data about what they are and are not doing, the fact that we had to have a large-scale review to collate and understand this data—which required tremendous resources but which was carried out very effectively—and that we spent as much time understanding what it was not telling us as what it was telling us, is in itself telling.I particularly support the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Cash. In trying to improve a situation that has developed over the last 20 or 30 years, and which at the moment is causing local government across this country huge difficulties because of the statutory duties that we have heaped upon it in legislation after legislation, with the best of intent, we have a system that is not working. We have an opportunity in the Bill to learn from the lessons of trying to do the right thing but clearly going about it in the wrong way, and to do it in a much better way.I particularly took the points that, first, children should be listened to, and, secondly, that, in trying to provide the right services for these young people, we should be driven by the demands they require to make their lives better, rather than by the inadequacies of the current range of supply, which is hugely varied in both its coverage and the type of delivery, and the good or bad effect of that delivery.
- My Lords, I support Amendment 117, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Tyler and others. The decision on where a child is cared for in the system is crucial to the child’s life, so we should listen to children with care experience. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, it may affect their ability to keep contact with wider family and friends, and other factors were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Meston. It will make a difference even to their ability to keep in contact with a teacher who they might trust—that can be quite important in children’s lives. It can otherwise be very disruptive to their education if they are put a long way from where they previously went to school. As we know, children with care experience usually have less of a chance to get good educational qualifications than other children, and that has an effect on their whole-life chances.As my noble friend says, it cannot be left to the Secretary of State under the title of “such other persons”. The category of those most directly affected by these regulations must be named in the Bill, and it is vital that children have the confidence that they will be heard. The slogan, “Nothing about us without us”, is very apt in this context.