That this House takes note of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, published on 23 May, and the case for integrated care and support across all services.
My Lords, we find ourselves at a time described by the report of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care as
“a once in a generation opportunity to reset”
the delivery of children’s social care. With the first half of this year witnessing the publication of three major reports on the subject, that statement does not sound like hyperbole.
In March, the Competition and Markets Authority issued the findings of its market study, which declared that action was needed on what was described as the
“dysfunctional children’s social care market.”
Last year, the Government asked Annie Hudson, chair of the national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, to conduct a national review into the shocking deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson. Her recommendations were published in May, calling, inter alia, for the Government to ensure that systems, processes, leadership, culture, and wider services were enablers for our safeguarding professionals, and not barriers placed in front of them.
May also saw the publication of the independent review, led by Josh MacAlister. It involved a fundamental examination of the needs, experiences and outcomes of the children whom the system should support and, to quote again from the report:
“What we have currently is a system increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise.”
The review delivered an ambitious report which is forensic in its detail, containing more than 70 recommendations, many based on the evidence that emerged from the involvement of care-experienced young people. That in itself makes the report stand out, because care-experienced young people should have their voices heard in decisions made about them.
I thank the noble Lord for giving way briefly. He mentioned the central role of social workers, and an important part of the report deals with training recommendations for social workers. Does he agree that it is also important that all those involved in social care provision be given training in trauma-informed practice? That would be of value when dealing with young people. In Northern Ireland, we are seven years in to the children’s services co-operation Act. There has been good co-operation at departmental levels, but that has not always permeated down to practitioners. It is important that any implementation of integrated services deal with not simply the strategic level but the grass-roots level, which deals with individual cases.
Absolutely. There is no substitute for formalised training, or on-the-job experience of situations in which children in need find themselves and how they got there.
I was talking about the proposed restructuring of commissioning and the move to regional care co-operatives. This could be a costly reorganisation that moves decision-making further away from children and young people and the people who know them best, without tackling the supply problems or the excessive levels of profit made by the largest private providers. Such disruption would cause harm to those currently needing in-care and leaving-care services, and there is no evidence of benefit. There seems to be a lack of appreciation that foster care, residential care and kinship care are all different and need different ways of facilitating their provision. This recommendation lumps them all together because they are seen in terms of commissioning and not rights-based quality services.
Professionals must have the key role in supporting and protecting children and young people, and the professional development of social workers as part of the new family help teams is central to this, but there are many grass-root charities, for example, those that form the Centre for Social Justice Alliance, which are well-equipped to assist in providing the services children in their community need.
As noble Lords will know from the many briefings received for this debate, there is widespread opposition, cross-party as well as professional, to the review’s proposal to end the independent review service. This would mean abolishing the independent review officer role, independent child protection chairs and the Regulation 44 independent person. A robust reviewing and regulatory system does not undermine good care; it supports it. Removing independent reviewing officers from all children in care is dangerous. It goes against the evidence base and against the wishes of children and young people. IROs are experienced social workers who scrutinise local authorities’ care and decision-making in respect of individual children and their families.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for introducing and championing this important review, the design group for which I was a member of. I welcome the review’s stress on preventing, where possible, children coming into care in the first place and the care system acting as a conveyor belt into crime and other highly detrimental outcomes. Rightly, it prioritises children having the relationships they need to thrive during care and once they leave it. It is love and relationships which make life worth while.
Currently, relationships with members of birth families and the wider community are an undertapped resource. Sibling and other family relationships are still, too often, treated as disposable, despite tried and tested models such as Lifelong Links. This programme aims to ensure that children and young people in care have a positive support network around them to help them while in care and when they leave. An independent co-ordinator works with a child in care to find out who is important to them and who they would like to be in touch with, then searches for these people in a variety of ways. A family group conference brings them together to make a plan with and for the child, which the local authority supports, so these relationships continue to grow.
DfE’s innovation fund trialled Lifelong Links in 17 local authorities. Over 2,000 young people from 31 councils across the UK have benefited from it already, so this is not a new programme to the Government. Various effectiveness studies, including Oxford University’s evaluation of that DfE trial, found overall positive impacts on the lives of children in care: greater placement stability, an increased sense of belonging and, on average, a more than tripling of the number of their social connections. Perhaps most importantly, Lifelong Links changes the culture and practice of those authorities which use it, so that relationships are not broken in the first place.
It is a decade or more since Family Finding came to the UK, but this proven model is still not standard practice. The independent review calls for it to be part of the national children’s social care framework, and says:
My Lords, I join others in thanking and congratulating my noble friend Lord Watson for bringing this debate to the House. It is a crucial area and one we should discuss more frequently about a group who so often do not have a voice of their own.
I congratulate Josh MacAlister and his team on the report. It is very thorough and challenging. I would not say I have read every dot and comma; I no doubt do not agree with every dot and comma. However, it really makes us think and gives us some very good pointers on what we should be doing. My biggest fear is that it will lie on the shelves like every other review of social care for children and somebody in five or 10 years will be talking about it again. I want to concentrate on why that is the case.
Very often in debates in this House, we do not agree to begin with; we come with different ideologies, viewpoints, hopes and aspirations. But on this, everybody agrees: these are important people; we owe it to them to get it right; and we are not doing well enough. I think we all agree that things are going wrong because there is a lack of a co-ordinated approach, the early intervention is too little and too late and we do not tackle underperformance quickly enough when we see it. We undervalue and undersupport the workforce and there is a lack of consistency and stability for children. All of that is not surprising because we also all bemoan the progression route and the attainment these young children have.
My noble friend Lord Watson pointed to the gap in the number of 19 and 20 year-olds not in education or employment, but that is not surprising when you see the attainment gap at key stage 2, which is 28% between the two groups and widens by the time they get to the key indicators at key stage 4. So it is not surprising that care leavers make up 24% of the prison population. So there you have it—we all agree that it is important and that something should be done, and we all say what is working well and know that the results are awful.
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Watson for securing this important debate at such a critical time for children’s services. Understandably in recent years, the ongoing debate on adult social care has dominated discussions in local government relating to structure and funding, but there is now no doubt that the existing and accelerating crisis in children’s social care, with potentially even more hazardous consequences, needs the same focus and attention.
I pay tribute to all those social workers out there who are dealing with this crisis on a daily basis. I declare an interest: my own mum was a children’s social worker, so I saw this at very close hand.
I congratulate the chairman of the review, Josh MacAlister, on a wide-ranging and thoughtful review, which genuinely challenges the Government to properly fund the children’s social care system, as well as setting out a great deal of innovation and initiatives for improvement and a change of focus to prevention, which is really key and also needs to be funded.
The detailed nature of the report means that it is not possible to cover all the ground that it details in a short intervention in this debate so, as I am still a serving county councillor and therefore a corporate parent to children looked after in Hertfordshire, I will confine my comments to those areas where I can best inform from my own front-line experience—that is to say, funding, the voice of young people, joined-up working, kinship care and ongoing support for young care leavers.
As with most of the local government issues that come before your Lordships’ House, the funding situation for children’s social care has gone from bad to worse with successive cuts to funding since 2011. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, reminded me of the decimation of the very valued Sure Start centres, when he talked about family hubs. Those centres were hugely valued, but they have been decimated by funding cuts. The LGA reported a budget gap of £1.6 billion in children’s social care, and that was before the £2.6 billion identified to deliver the outcomes set out in this independent review. This gap is increasing very rapidly: in 2020-21, the amount spent nationally on children’s social care was £10.5 billion, 25% more than the £8.5 billion spent in 2016-17. Councils are, as set out by the chair of the LGA Children and Young People Board, my friend Councillor Louise Gittins,
My Lords, I say well done to my noble friend Lord Watson for securing this debate because the number of children in the care system in England is, as has been said, at an all-time high and rising. The independent review forecast that without reform it will rise to 100,000 and that the current £10 billion annual cost of the care system will rise to £15 billion. The evidence is now overwhelming that the state is failing children for whom it has taken responsibility and we really are in a crisis situation. We have a deep moral obligation to the number of vulnerable children being failed.
The backlog in children’s cases in the family courts is big. The CMA reported that UK has “sleepwalked” into a dysfunctional market for children’s social care, which fails to provide the right services in the right places, with children frequently placed miles from where they live, often separated from siblings and unable to access the care and therapies they need. Yesterday’s report from the cross-party Children and Families Act 2014 Committee concluded that
“a lack of joined up action at all levels, has contributed to children and their families feeling let down by the system”.
I want to focus in my few minutes on the near 200,000 children raised in kinship care families by grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings and friends. The main reasons for a child being in kinship care are parents’ mental health and substance abuse, domestic abuse, parents being unable to cope and parents being in prison. There is a growing concern, even scepticism, I now hear, among that community that while the Government sound supportive, their response to the review will offer little of substance to provide the support they so badly need. I really urge the Government to act now and do three really urgent things.
First, as many have referred to already, they must invest urgently in early help and preventive support for families, to prevent more children facing crisis and becoming looked after in the care system. Kinship carers consistently report that they did not have access to the support and advice they needed at the beginning, and that they felt alone and did not know what their options were or how to navigate the justice system. The independent review called for
My Lords, I sincerely thank my noble friend Lord Watson for securing this timely debate and all noble Lords who made such incredibly well-informed contributions today. I also thank those responsible for the many briefings that we have all received. I declare my interest as a vice-president of the LGA, and express my thanks and gratitude to all those working to protect vulnerable children and young people in such difficult circumstances across the country, and to the many carers who do such extraordinary work in all the different settings that exist.
My personal involvement in children’s services goes back a long way, particularly to 2010, when in Leeds, Labour formed a new administration after the local elections and we inherited an inadequate—a failing—children’s services department. I became the lead member, and as a whole council and city we embarked on a journey to become the first core city to achieve an outstanding rating across the board. I am proud to say that Leeds still maintains the outstanding rating today, despite the pressures, which remain immense.
I mention this to illustrate that major change is possible if the collective will of decision-makers is clear and determined, and focused on putting the needs of our most vulnerable children at the heart of everything we do. “Every child matters” was not an empty phrase; surely it should be the bedrock of any civilised society. In the same way, we took the view in Leeds that enhancing the life chances of children and young people is everyone’s business, involving all agencies and all departments, and reflected in all decisions made across the wider community.
To this end, we established Child Friendly Leeds 10 years ago, launched by Her Majesty the Queen and endorsed by King Charles last month in a visit to celebrate its 10-year milestone. A child-friendly city basically means developing a relentless focus on children and young people and taking hard decisions—for example, on targeting funding—that will benefit those vulnerable children whose lives can be blighted without the timely intervention of services to give them, their families and their carers support. One of our collective main priorities was to safely—and I emphasise “safely”—reduce the number of children and young people coming into our care, and to reinvest the significant savings into expanding preventive and early help services on a cross-agency basis.
My Lords, I was hoping not to intervene. I was quite lenient with the previous speaker but one, but I regret that we are now running a bit short of time. I therefore ask all the following speakers either to stick to eight minutes or to go slightly less than that. We do not want to eat into the Minister’s time.
4:59 pm
20 of 34 shown
I welcome the thrust of the report and almost all its recommendations. To accentuate the role of families, there is a proposal for a “family network plan”, where a local authority can fund and support extended family members to care for a child. The report focuses on enhancing local integrated help for families, with social workers at the core of providing this help.
There is a clear distancing from the commercialisation and excessive profit-making from the care of children, including a call for a windfall tax on organisations doing so. The CMA report to which I referred also highlighted the high prices often paid by local authorities when placing children, and found that the cause of this was to some extent the fragmented system by which services are commissioned. It also pointed to the role, and financial fragility, of private providers of children’s homes, particularly those financed through private equity. I was pleased to hear the Minister say in your Lordships’ House on 7 November:
“I have to say it sticks in my throat to have private equity investors who are responsible for considerable distortions in the children’s home market”.—[Official Report, 7/11/22; col. 449.]
I have to say it sticks in my throat that there is such a thing as a children’s homes market, but I suppose that is a debate for another day.
There are more children needing help from children’s social care than ever before and the numbers continue to rise. Figures published by the DfE show that in 2022 in England there are more than 404,000 children in need, more than 50,000 on child protection plans, and a total of 82,170 children looked after by their local authority. All those statistics show an increase on 2021. In 2022, 38% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 were not in education, employment or training, compared to around 11% of all young people in that age group.
The Government should implement an integrated, top-to-bottom reform programme, to improve the system at every level for vulnerable children and families. As outlined in the report, there needs to be a radical reform of family help, to ensure that the system is able to reach more families before they reach crisis point. It recommends a major investment to support local authorities to transform family help. I welcome that, together with the further recommendation that the Government should ring-fence funding to ensure that the rebalanced investment is sustained.
Appropriate recognition is given in the review that
“The greatest strength of the children’s social care system lies in its workforce.”
Children’s services social care is able to function due only to the long hours that social workers and their managers work, but this was under intolerable strain even before the pandemic. Almost 5,000 full-time equivalent children’s social workers left their roles in the year to September 2021. Levels of pay, working conditions, negative and hostile media coverage and poor public understanding of social work are critical issues. In some parts of the country, the level of abuse and threats directed toward social workers has been appalling, and this can only undermine the work needed to keep children safe and to support families. The Government have a central role in raising awareness and must consider how to improve public understanding of social work.
There is some concern about the proposed restructure of commissioning and the move to regional care co-operatives. This could be a costly—
The National Youth Advocacy Service is concerned that ending Regulation 44 visits could risk the safety of children and young people living in residential care homes. The review proposes that strengthened advocacy in residential children’s homes could replace Regulation 44 visits. However, the two roles are significantly different, as advocates provide voices for children and young people, while Regulation 44 visitors must take a more holistic view of a home’s practices. I recall similar proposals being contained in the Children and Social Work Bill 2016. Labour and others in both Houses fought it off then, and it should be fought off again. Local authorities need to be held to account, but independent review officers do that effectively. This is a bad idea, and it should not be endorsed by the Government.
On the other hand, one issue that the review unfortunately does not confront should be acted on by government. Any society should be judged by how it looks after its most vulnerable children who are in the care of the state. Latest official statistics on looked-after children, released last month, show that 37% of children aged 16 and 17 are living in unregulated accommodation where they do not receive any day-to-day care from staff. That is nearly 7,500 children. The figures show a 5% increase since last year, when Ministers ignored the arguments of noble Lords and prohibited the use of unregulated, non-care settings for children aged 15 and under but left those aged 16 and 17 unprotected.
Does the Minister believe that the best we can do for 16 and 17 year-olds who are in the care of the state is to put them in a bedsit on their own or pay for them to live in a property alongside adult strangers? How many of us here today would be content for our children and grandchildren to live in such accommodation as they complete their final years of compulsory education and training? These are children who have experienced tremendous loss and trauma, yet somehow the DfE has convinced itself that, unlike teenagers across the country being cared for by parents in the family home, they have no need for care where they live. It really is a scandal, and it should not be tolerated any longer.
It is a highlight of the report that it has made far-reaching recommendations on kinship care. The charity Kinship has found that 70% of kinship carers are not receiving the support they need to meet the needs of their children. I particularly welcome the recommendation in the report for a legal definition of kinship care. The review contains landmark recommendations for kinship care and recognises the need to improve support for families, particularly by introducing a financial allowance, kinship care leave and improved access to peer support and to training for kinship carers.
That said, the review could have made a stronger case for children in kinship care to be eligible for additional support like that provided to looked-after children, such as pupil premium plus, given their similar needs. It is to be hoped that that might be taken up by the Government in their response. That is one of the points highlighted by the charity Kinship in its Value Our Love campaign, of which noble Lords will be aware.
I note that, in its response to the report, the British Association of Social Workers welcomes the recognition that foster care can make a transformational difference to the lives of children and young people. However, the review uses the term “broken” to describe the current system, which the BASW points out is not helpful at all. Foster care is a very complex undertaking, and the current crisis of retention in foster care is not likely to be helped by that sort of language. To some extent, the same applies to foster carers and adoptive parents—not regarding the language, but the support given—both before and after they have taken on their role, to make sure they can do it most effectively.
The title of today’s debate also refers to the need for integrated care and support across all services. The report does not have a great deal to say about integrating services for children, although it helpfully suggests that the Secretary of State for Education should be responsible for holding other government departments to account and should report annually to Parliament on progress. I certainly agree with that.
I was told by an Association of Directors of Children’s Services officer recently that they deal with nine government departments, including Ofsted. There really needs to be more effective Whitehall integration in the delivery of children’s services, and indeed locally. Local authorities, adoption and fostering agencies, social workers, schools, GPs, the wider NHS and the police should all pool resources and pull together to ensure that there is as little duplication as possible and the chances of children falling through the cracks are minimised.
The new Children’s Minister, Claire Coutinho MP, said last month:
“We have also been working closely with other departments across government to rapidly agree on an ambitious and detailed implementation strategy”—
that is, for this report—
“that will respond fully to all three reviews. Ministers from across government are engaged on emerging policies and will agree on the final implementation strategy in due course.”
That is good to hear because, quite simply, the network of support for vulnerable children should be cast as wide as possible.
Before drawing to a conclusion, I want to thank the many organisations that have sent me and other noble Lords their priorities for today’s debate. Having no staff, noble Lords depend on such briefings. They do not only emanate from what might be termed mainstream charities. For example, the review is also of concern to Hope instead of Handcuffs, which campaigns for young people living in or on the edge of care to have the right not to be restrained when being transferred between settings; and to Pause, which works with women who have experienced, or are at risk in future of experiencing, children being removed from their care. A vast array of organisations exists to support vulnerable children and young people, and we are indebted to all of them.
The first step by the Government must be to accept that the £2.6 billion referred to by the MacAlister review is a necessity. That may not be enough but, without secure and stable funding guaranteed to all local authorities, any moves to fund one part of the system will be stolen from other parts—and nowhere is funding currently adequate.
The Government established a national implementation board in July without first announcing what they intend to implement. The Children’s Minister in another place stated recently that she had chaired a meeting of the board last month. What was discussed? Will the board set out plans for public consultation through Green and White Papers? Can the Minister provide approximate timings for when their proposals for children’s social care will be put out to public consultation? Children’s organisations briefing noble Lords for this debate have mentioned the end of January. It is not really acceptable that they are better informed than parliamentarians. Have the review’s recommendations been discussed within Cabinet, and were they considered during preparation of the Autumn Statement? It seems not, as there was no ring-fenced funding for children’s social care in the Statement.
The review concluded that
“a radical reset is now unavoidable”.
Indeed. That reset of the system needs to enable it to act decisively in response to abuse, provide more help to families in crisis and ensure that those in care have lifelong loving relationships and homes. It is vital that reforms to the care system create greater stability for children in care, so that they can grow up in steady environments and maintain the connections that matter to them. The Government have a major responsibility now to make that happen.
“Because of the evidence around these and other family finding programmes, there should be no delay in local authorities developing these, and all local authorities should have skilled family finding support equivalent to, or exceeding, the work of Lifelong Links in place by 2024 at the very latest.”
I completely endorse this and would go further. Lifelong Links should be available to every young person in care and, as I said in my 2017 review for the Ministry of Justice, to care-experienced young people in a young offender institution or prison.
Healthy relationships are, statistically, the most protective factor against reoffending. Lifelong Links could make the difference between the revolving door of crime for care-experienced young people and custody being the turning point. That, after all, is central to the purpose of prison. Yet why has it taken another major review to state the case for Lifelong Links, when the evidence has already been so assiduously amassed? I ask the Minister: first, what is the department specifically doing to promote its own evidence? Secondly, more generally, how can the Government ensure successful programmes are scaled up and made available as standard in a timely manner?
There seems to be an intolerably long journey from innovation to evaluation to implementation, even when the Government get involved, as they did with Lifelong Links. The journey will often be so long that thousands of children never benefit from transformational innovation during their time in social care. The country is in desperate need, so we must shorten the dispiriting process where organisations do all they can to get evidence of effectiveness, which then appears to be ignored.
The second area I will touch on is the revolution in family help which the review indicates would need roughly £2 billion to build. Putting prevention at the heart of social care in this way would continue the revolution that the Children Act 1989 was intended to bring about, through its emphasis on prevention, keeping children with their families wherever possible and ensuring help is available for deeply struggling parents.
The troubled—now strengthening—families programme started a decade ago and brought another vital wave of change, the success of which must be integrated in children’s social care reform. How will the Minister ensure that this happens? As a director and controlling shareholder of the Family Hubs Network Ltd, which advocates for family hubs and advises local authorities on how to establish them, I welcome the review’s recognition of their role as a delivery site for family help.
Returning to the Children Act 1989, paragraph 9(1) of Schedule 2 states that local authorities
“shall provide such family centres as they consider appropriate in relation to children within their area.”
Forty years earlier Michael Young, one of the architects of the welfare state, called for child welfare centres to fulfil Beveridge’s principle of the preservation of parental responsibility and deal with the emotional cost to children of high post-war levels of family breakdown. Family hubs are unfinished business from the founding of the welfare state. The Government’s early investment in them lays an essential foundation for the implementation of this review. They build on Sure Start children’s centres, but crucially they help whole families with older children. That, respectfully, is where they are an improvement on what went before.
However, I agree there is a funding scale disparity between the two projects. Sure Start investment ran into billions. Family hubs, so far, are attracting around £130 million from central government. The revolution in family help outlined in the review will need a reversal in the lack of investment noted in The Case for Change. The review states:
“Spending on help has reduced significantly in recent years, and the system has become overwhelmingly focused on crisis management and more costly late stage intervention.”
While I wholly support delivering family help from family hubs, local and central government must protect the value and principle of access to all. If hubs are seen as spaces for problem families, going to them will be stigmatised. The review highlights the need for a front door any family can walk through without necessarily being referred, where they will find the appropriate level of help. Some of these voluntary walk-ins might lead to the intensive, preventative help a family would never have received without that universal access point. A mother who can approach a family hub with worries about her son’s possible drug use might get the early help which spares her a visit from the police months later.
I am also looking forward to the Government’s response to this review. In the meantime, can the Minister confirm that the review will be integrated with existing family hubs policy and not skew delivery away from universal access, which its authors would not support?
The challenge now is: why does policy fail in this area in a way that it does not in many others? We would worry if there were any other policy area in the Minister’s department—my former department—where, despite the money that we put in and what we hoped to achieve, it went backwards. It would be a topic of national conversation. If we spent all the money on phonics, literacy and numeracy, and it went backwards, we would do something. But one of the things that came out of this report for me is that we are not standing still but going backwards. If we do not change tack, 30,000 more children will be in care in 10 years’ time. So the problem is that we have a policy in a key area that we all say is important, but it is not working.
Another thing that struck me about the report is that the language is really strong. It talks about a “dramatic whole system reset” being needed, about a “fundamental shift” and about a “complete rebalancing of spending” and a “radically new offer”. My worry is that we are getting a bit more of the same, and I do not think that that is what the report is asking for or recommends. That is the big worry, and it is what we have got wrong in the past.
I spent some time looking through the Government’s response so far in Parliamentary Questions and debates in the House of Commons. I was surprised that they will develop a framework, that they have set up a pathfinder and that they have a national practice group and a new fund. There were four months in between the first and second meetings on their implementation plan—and, blow me down, Ministers are “engaged” and will agree the implementation strategy “in due course”. That is an absolutely standard set of government responses to any report that comes their way: get a small fund, get a committee together, make a few speeches, think about it and hope that, by then, people will have forgotten the urgency of what the report was saying in the first place. That is why we have a choice. My worry is that more of the same will not work, because it never has.
The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who has a strong and long-lasting interest in this area, talked about pilot programmes that are successful but never get rolled out. That is an absolute mystery, but government does this all the time: we are not good at implementing best practice. I am not sure what the answers are; if I knew the government answers for all this, I probably would have done a bit of it when I was in the department—but that was 20 years ago.
One thing in the report that struck me and made me think was the powerful phrase about putting
“lifelong loving relationships at the heart of the care system”.
As a human being, that makes sense to me, but as a politician I do not think that it would ever have come my way. Government and politics are not good at putting “loving relationships” at the heart of a system—and, in truth, it is not their job. But part of the success of good schools is lifelong loving relationships with the children. If you look at a doctor’s practice or a hospital that works well, you will find that there is a loving relationship—some respect, kindness and understanding. Government cannot mandate that to happen, but it can put things in place to make it more, rather than less, possible. Therefore, the answer to this is in people, not structures—so I have just picked out some of the things that I would pick out if I were in the Minister’s position now.
The people who are most likely to give a lifelong loving relationship are actually the family—the parents, brothers and sisters—if you can make it work for them. That is the value of early intervention. If that does not work, other members of the extended family, which my noble friend will no doubt talk about later, are also good. And if that does not work, and it comes to the state, we have to think really hard about how we can make it possible for social workers to focus on lifelong loving relationships. If we ask them to deal with people only when the child has reached the end of the road, everyone has already let them down, they do not think that anyone cares and nothing has ever worked, we just make it too difficult for social workers to do much good. That is the job we are asking of them, and it is too tough a job to ask any sector of the workforce to do.
My last plea is that we really think about what we do to support the workforce and let them do what they want to do, which is to build relationships with children and families. They do not want to be always in crisis mode, yet if you ask them how they spend most of their time, they will say that it is in crisis mode. I know as a teacher that, if I had spent all my time in crisis mode, I would not have done well with the kids I did well with. You need a gap and a space to build things—that is what matters. I know that the Minister genuinely cares about this, and I hope that she can persuade her department really to make it a priority this time around.
“buckling under significant funding pressures”.
I checked the current situation in my own county of Hertfordshire and, at the end of quarter 2 this year, the overspend on children’s services was almost £9 million. To some extent this funding crisis is being fuelled by the sheer struggle to find placements for the most complex cases, which means that costs for these are escalating and can reach around £12,000 a week for children with the most complex needs. I hope this is not as a result of profiteering by private sector providers, although I suspect that some of it is, but that is something that merits even closer examination. If the emphasis on co-operatives in this report was about replacing that expensive, privately provided care with co-operative provided care, I would certainly support that.
I congratulate the independent review on working with an experts-by-experience board of young people who have lived experience of the care system. I hope that the Government will take this best practice forward as a way of ensuring that it is those with lived experience who are engaged in ensuring that the outcomes detailed in this review achieve its aims. Just before the Covid pandemic, I worked with our CHICC—our Children in Care Council—in Hertfordshire on its own of the local care system. The voices of two of our witnesses have stayed with me; I will call them Justin and Nadine. They were very clear about the two issues that they wanted to highlight. On the first, consistency of care, they outlined that, over and again, when a placement broke down, they would find themselves sitting in a social worker’s office with all their possessions in black bin bags, waiting for their next move. They said that it would have helped them to feel more valued if they had even been given a suitcase.
Their second point related to access to mental health services. It was moving to hear them describe being told that they would have a six-month wait, which made the feelings of despair and isolation far worse. As they said, waiting six months when you are an adult may not feel like the end of the world but, for a young teen, it can seem like an eternity and as though no one really cares how bad you are feeling. The independent review recognises the need to join up the services provided for children in social care. I hope the Government will reflect on just how urgent this is and, particularly for child and adolescent mental health services, provide funding that enables target access times that are much faster than they are currently.
Joined-up services are a key focus of this review and highlighted in its powerful recommendations on kinship care. I was struck by the experience of one client at the food bank where I was volunteering, Dennis. Dennis was a gentleman in his late 50s coming to the end of his working life when, tragically, his daughter became unable to look after her four very young children as she struggled with alcohol and drug addiction as well as poor mental health. Dennis took the children into his home and cared for them, but unfortunately against a backdrop of bureaucracy and a minefield of barriers put in his way, particularly by the DWP, which had neither the systems nor the compassion to understand the situation he found himself in. It was this that meant he had to resort to using the food bank and his issues took almost 12 months to resolve. I hope that one outcome of this review is to smooth the path for those involved in kinship care, ensuring that they get the support they need, including a key worker whose job is to help join things up. It will also be necessary to ensure that all departments involved have absolutely clear systems and processes designed to meet the needs of kinship care and the will to work together in the interests of families.
I want to talk, lastly, about an area touched on in the review but which I believe needs a great deal more work—the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, called it lifelong links. More thought and discussion are needed, particularly with those who have lived experience of the care system, to ensure that care leavers do not fall off a cliff edge when they reach an age at which they are no longer formally supported by the system. Most parents and foster parents go on supporting young people they care for long after they reach adulthood at 18 but, sadly, some care leavers do not have that experience. There is so much more that could be done—for example, by exempting them from council tax payments, giving additional preference in social housing allocation, providing subsidised travel for access to work, college or training and continuing consideration of fast-track access to mental health support. No children should ever live in unregulated settings. The comments made about the loving relationships around those children also really struck home with me.
The Government need to act now to avoid a catastrophic situation in children’s social care. I know that the Local Government Association has serious concerns that the cost of living crisis will push more families into poverty and crisis, which means that more of our children will require support. None of the recommendations in the review will be achieved without significant increases in funding and guaranteeing that funding is sustainable, including in meeting the gap that already exists. The cost of not doing so is immense, as the ongoing harms and damage to life opportunities for those young people who are let down when the system does not work properly place immeasurable costs on their lives and the public services that will need to support them in the future.
“a revolution in family help”,
so that families can access responsive, respectful and effective support. This would include, as has been said, family help teams based in community settings.
Family group conferences have been revolutionary in New Zealand, and some parts of the UK, bringing a child’s wider family together early on, when support for the parents might allow the child to remain at home or find relatives who could become kinship carers. The APPG on Kinship Care inquiry consistently heard about the importance of friends and relatives being able to access free and early advice when there are concerns about a child’s welfare, so that they are informed from the outset about their rights and options as potential kinship carers. More families could come forward as kinship carers and avert more children going into care if support was available earlier. We hear too often about missed opportunities and family options not explored.
The review called for a major injection of funding over the next five years, targeting 500,000 children. Investing in early help and family-led solutions will cost less in the long run and provide better outcomes for children. The social cost of each looked-after child across public services is about £70,900 per year: resources are better targeted earlier to prevent children even going into care or getting into crisis.
Secondly, the Government should extend legal aid to more kinship carers. The compelling evidence is that carers are left to navigate the family justice system without the legal aid and representation they need. Many incur significant debt from paying legal costs or find themselves sidelined in important decisions about the child, directly increasing the risk that more children will end up in care. The extension of legal aid to protect special guardians of children in private law cases is welcome but it is not matched in public law proceedings, where the majority of guardianship orders are pursued. Here, children are in a crisis situation.
There are two key areas in public law cases where legal aid provision urgently needs to be considered. At the formal pre-proceedings stage, prospective kinship carers have access to only limited advice. This is means tested and merits tested, and remunerated at such low rates that few solicitors will offer advice on taking on the care of a child. During care proceedings, prospective kinship carers are still entitled to only very limited advice. Only where the prospective carer is made a party to the court proceedings or where they make a private law application may they be entitled to legal aid. Many carers do not have the early advice even to know that becoming a party to proceedings is an option, or how to make a private law application.
That so many barriers are put in the way of kinship carers—I have heard them articulate this—who have the necessary strength of character it takes to give these children better life outcomes, at great savings to the state, is beyond dysfunctional. The very people who could help and protect these children face barrier after barrier to prevent them doing so.
Thirdly, the Government should give kinship carers a statutory right to a period of employment leave, akin to adoption leave, when they take on kinship children. The law recognises that those who give birth or adopt need a period of protected leave from employment to adjust. If you step up to care for children in crisis to whom you did not give birth, the law covers its eyes and turns away. That has to stop. It is simply wrong to leave these carers in that position. They have stepped up to the plate, often at high personal cost.
I listened to a young woman who gave up her legal training and her job—she gave up everything—to take on her sister’s two children. Her sense of moral duty and love for those children has come at a high price. There has been no support; she has had to use her own wit and wisdom to find a way through to get guardianship of those children. It was quite humbling to see her strength of character and listen to her articulate her story.
Over half of kinship carers have to give up work when the children come to live with them. Many are forced into a benefits system that is not necessarily sympathetic to their needs. We now face the highest fall in household incomes on record. We all know that that will create even more families in crisis and even more vulnerable children. Even more kinship carers will be needed to provide the support to get those children through the crisis. This is time-critical stuff; it is not just an interesting debate. Anybody who walks the streets outside highly affluent areas can see the crisis emerging from falling household incomes.
Rather than our just having a nice debate, can the Minister pledge that the Government will increase urgently the total funding available for early help and preventive support for families so that fewer children enter crisis and the care system? Can they extend legal aid in public law proceedings and give kinship carers, who would prefer to stay in work and are often making big sacrifices, a statutory right to employment leave so that they can have some margin to take on and manage these often traumatised children? Can we have some pledges, not just sympathetic commentary? People are becoming sceptical and anxious about the quality of the Government’s response to this review.
I was the chair of the children and young people’s board at the LGA, and in that capacity I worked with Josh MacAlister and the review team—along with the noble Lord, Lord Farmer—on the design group, inputting in particular from a local government perspective and bringing Leeds’s experience into the process. I pay tribute to the review team and all the many people who contributed to the process, bringing their rich personal experiences to the discussions and exploring, as we have heard, the commitment to lifelong, loving relationships.
I am deeply disappointed to hear that the Government have delayed issuing their next steps following the publication of the review earlier this summer. We need action now. I am even more concerned that the review will become submerged into the spending review and be seen as a cost problem rather than as an enabler to improve services, achieve better outcomes for young people and their families, and lead to major savings in the wider societal areas that are impacted so heavily by failure in this space.
By way of example, research shows us that roughly 25% of the prison population has had some care experience. That is shocking. Of the young care-experienced people who enter prison, roughly 45% present a substance misuse problem and 61% have a record of being disengaged from education. Indeed, ONS figures released yesterday show that 52% of care-experienced children had been convicted of a criminal offence by the age of 24, and 92% of those who received a custodial sentence had previously been identified with special educational needs. Some 18% had been permanently excluded and 81% had been suspended during their time in education. How much more evidence do we need that action is urgent and that government needs to respond immediately to the recommendations in the review and take action?
The recent figures re skyrocketing incidence of mental health presentations and the worries concerning SEND provision following the scrapping of the education Bill further add to the enormous concern among practitioners. There are so many aspects of the review to highlight. Tackling the workloads and staffing issues in social care remain critical. We hear constantly about the pressures on adult social care budgets but, as said by my noble friend Lady Taylor, we need to shout about the pressures on children’s social care budgets: a 25% higher spend by councils over the last five years, with pressures of over £1 billion estimated for each year. This is simply unsustainable.
From my experience in Leeds, I welcome the focus on early intervention in the review—the right time and the right place being the key focus. I particularly welcome the proposals for strengthening support for kinship carers—we have heard a great deal about this today. Working with kinship carers has been one of the key components of our journey, recognising the huge significance of close family and friend relationships based on understanding and love. The estimate that 162,000 children are being raised by kinship carers across England and Wales is probably an underestimate. I am sure we have all seen the briefings that estimate that every 1,000 children raised in kinship extended families rather than the care system save the Government £40 million and increase the lifetime earnings of those children by £20 million.
In that context, surely the recommendations in the review are fairly modest: for example, non-means-tested financial allowances that match the minimum fostering allowance; the introduction of kinship leave on a par with adoption leave for all special guardians and kinship carers; and, importantly, a requirement for local authorities to use “family group decision-making” as a means to identify kinship arrangements earlier by introducing “family network plans” to offer flexibility, intensive support and funding to give an alternative pathway to children entering local authority care. The focus throughout these recommendations is that better outcomes for children and young people are paramount. I hope the Government will take note of good practice in the sector and learn from its example.
In conclusion, I specifically ask the Minister to assure us that the Government have the ambition and resolve to deliver reforms urgently. By that I mean legislative changes introduced now, and certainly in the next Session. Also, is the urgent need for expanding the number of foster carers being gripped, alongside the support for kinship carers, as I have outlined? We cannot ignore the cocktail of circumstances that are exerting pressure on our families, poverty being front and centre, as well as the mental health experience of parents and children, and domestic violence, to name but a few. Can the Minister assure us that she will use all her experience in this space to personally steer the Government’s response to focus on these issues?