Reform of Children’s Social Care Statement The following Statement
was made in the House of Commons on Thursday 2 February. “With
permission, Mr Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a Statement
about how we plan to reform children’s social care. My first visit
in this role was to a children’s home in Hampshire. The young
people I met were full of excitement and enthusiasm for the
opportunities ahead. One wanted to be a hairdresser or perhaps
a...Request free trial
Reform of Children’s
Social Care
Statement
The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on
Thursday 2 February.
“With permission, Mr Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a
Statement about how we plan to reform children’s social care.
My first visit in this role was to a children’s home in
Hampshire. The young people I met were full of excitement and
enthusiasm for the opportunities ahead. One wanted to be a
hairdresser or perhaps a beautician—she was still deciding—and
another was set to follow his dreams and join the Navy. They all
wanted to have the same opportunities as their friends, and our
job is to make sure that all children should have those
opportunities. It is why levelling up was the guiding principle
of our 2019 manifesto.
On this visit, I could not have seen a more vivid example of how
our dedicated professionals can change young lives. I am sure all
colleagues will join me in paying tribute to the phenomenal work
of our social workers and family support workers, directors of
children’s services, foster and kinship carers, children’s home
staff and so many others across the country. It is thanks to
them, as well as to children’s talent, resilience and
determination to succeed, that many who have had a tough start in
life go on to thrive.
While the care review, the child safeguarding practice review
panel on the tragic deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star
Hobson, and the Competition and Markets Authority pointed to some
good and innovative practice in children’s social care, they were
also unequivocal in showing us that we are not delivering
consistently enough for children and young people. These reviews
provide us with a vision of how to do things differently, and how
to help families overcome challenges at the earliest stage, keep
children safe and ensure that those in care have loving and
stable homes. I accept whole- heartedly their messages, and give
special thanks to those who led and contributed—Josh MacAlister
and his team, Annie Hudson and the rest of the panel, and the
Competition and Markets Authority. Many thousands of people with
lived and personal experience of the system also contributed and
told their stories to these reviews, and I extend my heartfelt
thanks to them for helping us to reach this point.
My honourable friend the Member for Colchester () came to this House eight
months ago and committed to action from day one to respond to the
care review, and I commend him for all his work while he was the
Minister for Children and Families. Since then, we have
established a national implementation board, with members to
advise, support and challenge us on the delivery of reform. We
have set up a new child protection ministerial group to champion
safeguarding at the highest levels. We have launched a data and
digital solutions fund to unlock the potential of technology, and
we have started work to increase foster care placements. This
work, coupled with the direction of the reviews and successful
initiatives such as the Supporting Families programme and the
innovation programme, has provided us the confidence to go
further to achieve our ambitions for children.
I know that both Houses and all parties support bold and
ambitious reform. This Government are determined to deliver that,
and I am pleased to announce that today we will publish our
consultation and implementation strategy, Children’s Social Care:
Stable Homes, Built on Love, which sets out how we will achieve
broad, system-wide transformation.
We want children to grow up in loving, safe and stable families
where they can flourish. The Prime Minister recently spoke about
the role of families in answering the profound questions we face
as a country. Where would any of us be without our family? That
is true for me and I am sure it is true for everybody. My
parents, my brother, my sister and my wider family had a huge
role in shaping who I am, and they continue to do so.
When children are not safe with their families, the child
protection system should take swift and decisive action to
protect children. Where children cannot stay with their parents,
we should look first at wider family networks and support them to
care for the child. Where a child needs to enter care, the care
system should provide the same foundation of love, stability and
safety. Over the next two years, we plan to address some urgent
issues and lay the foundations for wider-reaching reform across
the whole system. Our strategy is backed by £200 million of
additional investment, so we can start reforms immediately and
build the evidence for future rollout. We know this is something
that partners support, including local government. This
investment builds on the £3.2 billion provided at the Autumn
Statement for children and adult’s social care.
After that, we will look to scale up our new approaches and bring
forward the necessary underpinning legislation, subject to
parliamentary time. We will listen to those with experience of
the system as we deliver. This starts today, as we consult on our
strategy and the children’s social care national framework. Our
strategy will focus on six pillars of action to transform the
system. We will provide the right support at the right time, so
that children thrive within their families and families stay
together through our family help offer. We will strengthen our
child protection response by getting agencies to work together in
a fully integrated way, led by social workers with greater skills
and knowledge. We will unlock the potential of kinship care so
that, wherever possible, children who cannot stay with their
parents are cared for by people who know and love them already.
We will reform the care system to make sure that we have the
right homes for children in the right places. We must be
ambitious for children in care and care leavers, and provide them
with the right support to help them thrive and achieve their
potential into adulthood. We will provide a valued, supported and
highly skilled social worker for every child who needs one, and
make sure that the whole system continuously learns and improves
and makes better use of evidence and data.
I will set out some of our key activity over the next two years
to deliver this shift. On family help, we will deliver
pathfinders with local areas to test a model of family help, and
integrated and expert child protection, to make sure that we
support family networks and help them get the early help they
need. On child protection, we will consult on new child
protection standards and improve leadership across local
authorities, the police, health and education through updates to
the statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children.
On unlocking the benefits of alternatives to care, we will
publish a national kinship care strategy by the end of 2023, and
invest £9 million to train and support kinship carers before the
end of this Parliament.
For children in care and care leavers, we will deliver a
fostering programme to recruit and retain more foster carers, and
pathfind regional care co-operatives to plan, commission and
deliver care places. We will fund practical help for care leavers
by increasing the available leaving care allowance from £2,000 to
£3,000, and strengthening our offers so that children can stay
with their foster carers or close to their children’s home when
they leave care. In recognition of the great work that foster
carers do and the increasing costs of living, we are raising the
national minimum allowance and foster carers will benefit from a
12.43% increase to that allowance. We will consult on
strengthening and widening our corporate parenting
responsibilities so that more public bodies provide the right
support to care leavers.
On the workforce, we will bring forward a new early career
framework to give social workers the right start, and support
employers with a virtual hub sharing best practice. We will
expand the number of child and family social worker apprentices
by up to 500, and we will reduce our reliance on agency workers
by consulting on national rules related to their use. For this
system, we will assemble an expert forum to advise on how we make
the most of the latest technology and publish a data strategy by
the end of this year. We will introduce a children’s social care
national framework to set out our system outcomes and
expectations for practice, and align this with the work of
Ofsted.
This strategy sets out a pathway towards fundamental,
whole-system reform of children’s social care. We are rising to
Josh MacAlister’s challenge to be ambitious, bold and broad for
the sake of vulnerable children and families. I thank all those
who guided us here, including my honourable friend the Member for
East Worthing and Shoreham (), my right honourable friend the Member for
Chelmsford () and my honourable and learned
friend the Member for Eddisbury (), who contributed so much
along the journey.
Too many children and families have been let down, and we are
determined to make the changes needed. We must remember the
stories and the lives of Arthur and Star and the children who
came before them. We must settle for nothing less than
wide-reaching, long-lasting change. Today we set the direction of
travel and make a pledge on a future system that will help to
provide all vulnerable children with the start in life they
deserve.
As the Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing, my
honourable friend the Member for East Surrey (), noted in November in the
House, our ambition is to lay the foundations for a system built
on love and family. I believe that this strategy and the actions
we are taking now will deliver that. Family will be central to
the way we deliver our ambitions. I commend this Statement to the
House.”
16:01:00
of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, we welcomed the conclusions of The Independent Review
of Children’s Social Care, which quite rightly called for a
radical reset of the childcare system. There will be a lot to
scrutinise in the Government’s strategy, but giving children
stable homes, built on love is something we all want to see. I
thank Josh MacAlister and his team for their inspirational
report. I especially thank those who work with children each day
and, most of all, the children themselves, who played a central
role in the report. The review takes place in a very challenging
context for children’s social care: we have seen Sure Start
centres closing, preventive services stripped away and young
people abandoned in unregulated settings, including some,
heartbreakingly, in semi-independent homes miles away from their
homes.
At the same time, we see some providers raking in, frankly,
obscene profits, and the response from the Government so far is
not sufficient. It is not the radical reset that we need. What
additional funding there is is welcome, but it risks becoming
just another sticking plaster. There is insufficient vision for
the direction of children’s social care; it is still insufficient
in ambition for our most vulnerable children. Government is about
what we do and how, but we still do not know how the Government
will pull together the different departments that must now step
up and work together so that change can be lasting and impactful.
That will not happen without strong grip from the centre. Whether
it is for looked-after children themselves, kinship carers or
social care workers, the system is just not working: 43% of
children’s services departments are currently rated as inadequate
or as requiring improvement. Does the Minister think that the
announcements the Government have made so far will lead to the
current dire situation improving? I want to think that, but I do
not at the moment.
On the issue of workforce, we have unsung heroes working with
children in every community in the country. They change lives
every day, and we thank them. Sadly, however, the gaping hole in
these reforms is the lack of a sustainable workforce plan, and
without that, so little will be achieved in the long term.
Last year, the 20 biggest private providers of children’s homes
and private foster placements made £300 million in profits. Are
the Government sure that those private providers are offering the
best value for money, the best quality of care, the best services
and, most importantly, the best opportunities for these children?
I welcome the consultation on national rules for the use of
agency social workers. It is a good step, which I hope will help
to achieve better outcomes, but to go after agency social workers
rather than the worst providers is reaching for the low-hanging
fruit and does not get to the root of the problem. The Government
need to do both.
We want stable homes, built on love. I am still worried that
these piecemeal measures will not lead to the long-lasting,
loving relationships that every child in the social care system
deserves.
(LD)
My Lords, I, too, thank all those involved in the care review,
who have done such an important piece of work and pay tribute to
the utter dedication and commitment of all those in the social
care workforce. I welcome the Government’s plans to reform
children’s social care and to rebalance the system towards early
support for families. However, we need to see action quickly,
backed up by funding, because children’s social care is in
crisis.
More than 80,000 children are in care in England, more than ever
before. The record number of children looked after by the state,
and the horrific killings of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star
Hobson, as well as the abuse of disabled children recently
uncovered in residential settings in Doncaster, are powerful
reminders of the urgent need for sustained reform. The care
review estimates that, without this reform, the number will rise
to 100,000 within a decade, with the costs rising from £10
billion to £15 billion a year. As the costs of simply
accommodating children grow, local authorities are spending less
on the critical preventive services that can save money, reduce
harm and keep families together.
I welcome the proposals to trial new family help teams, more
early support and more integrated and expert-led approaches to
child protection and to promote kinship care and develop new
approaches to the planning, commissioning and delivery of care
placements, together with a fostering recruitment drive. In
particular, I welcome the proposal to extend corporate parenting
duties to a range of public bodies and authorities. That is all a
step in the right direction, but—and it is a big but—this
strategy does not address the urgency of the crisis that
vulnerable children face. It does not meet the £2.6 billion
funding commitment called for by the care review, nor the £778
million that local authorities need to close the children’s
social care budget gap. It will not, of itself, address the
chronic shortage of care placements in some parts of England. It
drags the reform processes out by more than a decade, by which
time many of today’s vulnerable children will already be
adults.
I have a number of questions for the Minister. We are told that
the Government will improve social workers’ mental health
expertise, which is good—I welcome it. However, given that
care-experienced children and young people are at a greater risk
of experiencing mental ill-health than their peers, what measures
are the Government taking to improve access to mental health
services for that group? The strategy says that the Government
will launch a recruitment drive for 500 more social worker
apprentices and support local authorities to improve retention to
reduce reliance on costly agencies. That is good but, given the
current high level of vacancies and very high turnover rates,
what else are the Government doing to improve the working
conditions of social workers and promote the professionalism of
the sector?
Will the Minister commit to increased funding for children’s
social care now to stabilise the current system while the reforms
are being implemented? Will she also commit to investing £2
billion into family help once the pathfinder programme is
complete, as was initially recommended by the care review? Can
she tell us what proportion of children in care will be helped by
the proposals in the Government’s implementation plan in this
Parliament? What assessment has she made of the impact that a
delayed rollout of the children’s social care reforms will
have?
We welcome the recruitment of foster carers, but can the Minister
say how exactly they will be targeted so as to recruit carers who
can care for children not currently well served by the system,
such as sibling groups, older teenagers and unaccompanied
asylum-seeking children? Also, what safeguards will the
Government put in place to ensure that the development of
regional commissioning and procurement does not lead to more
children being placed out of area?
Finally, the recent Health and Care Act—which so many noble Lords
in this Chamber, myself included, were involved in—included a
commitment for the Department for Education to come back to
Parliament within one year with the results of a review of the
sharing of data and information and the practicalities of the use
of a consistent child identifier. The social care implementation
plan mentions proposed approaches to data and information
sharing. Can the Minister confirm that the Government are still
in favour of the use of a consistent child identifier? If the
Minister is not able to answer my questions now, will she write
to me?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for
Education () (Con)
My Lords, I thank both noble Baronesses for their remarks and
questions and for recognising the incredibly important work that
our social workers do all around the country. I echo in
particular their thanks to those care-experienced young people
who worked with the department in putting together our response
to the reviews and who are, in many cases, continuing to work
with us through implementation.
If I may, I will start with the importance of implementation, but
I think that I will also finish with the importance of
implementation. All the points that both noble Baronesses have
raised are valid questions to ask, and I will do my very best to
answer them, but we know that this is an area that is not a new
problem. The problem may have evolved and may be in a particular
state at the moment, but the need to implement change
effectively—and implement high-quality responses, which I know
both noble Baronesses and all your Lordships care deeply about—is
vital. That is why we have chosen the approach of “test and
learn” through pathfinder sites so that, when we come to scale
up, we can be as confident as it is possible to be that we have
the evidence of—as the noble Baroness opposite said—not just what
we are going to do but, at a local level, how it is going to work
on the ground from the beginning to end of the experience of that
child and family coming into contact with services.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, questioned whether this was
really a “radical reset”—she used the term “sticking plaster” and
spoke about a lack of vision. Our ambition is aligned to that
which Josh MacAlister set out in his review. We believe that the
changes we are proposing and will be testing are radical. Through
this work, we are sending the system a very clear message about a
focus on family help. I know that both noble Baronesses will have
read the Government’s response; the theme of family help goes
through pretty much every one of the pillars.
We have talked a lot in your Lordships’ House about the truly
preventive work that we believe is going on, and will go on, in
family hubs. This will be at the earlier intervention end of the
spectrum, as opposed to truly preventive, but some of the work
that we will be doing to merge early help teams and children in
need teams will respond to what children and families tell us,
which is that they feel that they are being endlessly assessed
and not getting enough support. We want less assessment—we want
good assessment, but to have that as streamlined as possible—and
more help.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, spoke about the 80,000 children
in the care system and she is right that that figure is very
high. There are some particular factors that have influenced
that: one is obviously a growth in population; the other is the
number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who are in this
country, many of whom stay in the care system much longer than
might be the case for children who have gone into care in other
ways. Obviously, the proof of the pudding will be in the delivery
and that is why we will be putting so much focus and emphasis on
the 12 pathfinder sites.
Both noble Baronesses raised the question of the children’s
social care workforce, which of course has risen in absolute
terms and is currently at 32,500, but we are absolutely aware of
the pressures within the workforce. The noble Baroness, Lady
Tyler, asked what else we are doing. She will have seen that we
will be introducing an early career framework for social workers.
We are supporting recruitment more broadly, including in relation
to apprentices: we have seen some local authorities offering
apprenticeship opportunities in this area and it is something
that we think we can learn from, build on and support. As the
noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, said, we are consulting on the use
of agency staff. The level of use of agency staff has risen a
lot, it puts an important financial burden on local authorities,
and we want to understand better the reasons behind it and what
appropriate levels might be.
As for our confidence that the system is improving, the noble
Baroness will be aware that in 2017 only 36% of local authorities
were judged good or outstanding by Ofsted. That figure is now 56%
and the number of inadequate local authorities has fallen from 30
to 16. There has been, and continues to be, very active
intervention and support from the department for those local
authorities and we think we are on a good trajectory with that,
but we recognise that there is still more to do.
On children’s homes, I think the noble Baroness knows my views on
some of the profits, so I do not need to repeat them; I think my
popularity on the Benches opposite rose at that point. The House
should be aware that we have already announced an investment of
£259 million to expand the number of children’s homes. We agree
that it is not acceptable that children are sent miles from their
roots. We are going to do a pathfinder for two regional care
co-operatives, which we think will support the sector better in
future.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, asked about the focus on foster
carers—she might have spoken my briefing for me. The areas she
highlighted were sibling groups, unaccompanied asylum-seeking
children and others, and those are exactly the areas where our
investment in expanding the number of foster carers will be
focused. The Government still support the consistent child
identifier to which she referred.
Both noble Baronesses challenged the amount of funding that the
Government have committed at this point. I think it is important
that we do not compare apples and pears. Josh MacAlister’s review
was for a five-year period and national implementation, and he
recommended £2.6 billion of investment. We have announced, at
this point, £200 million over two years, with a focus on
pathfinders principally in those 12 areas that I referred to,
although there will be two regional care co-operatives and seven
additional specific pathfinders in relation to kinship care. So,
we are not comparing the same things there.
I understand and very much respect the challenge from the noble
Baroness opposite about the speed of implementation. We are
balancing quality versus speed and if we are successful in those
12 pathfinders, delivering in the way the whole House hopes they
will deliver, we will be able to scale up and review the funding
that is required at that time.
16:20:00
(CB)
My Lords, the steps taken to expand kinship care are extremely
welcome, but does the Minister recognise that they are also
extremely modest? They are really just scratching the surface of
the problem and until the Government are prepared to grasp the
nettle of funding for kinship carers, we are not going to get the
big expansion we ought to have. Does she also agree that there is
now a lot of evidence that kinship care is a cost-effective way
of addressing the problems of children who need care and that it
will, in the end, be less costly than their being fostered or
sent to homes? If that is so, could the Government please get on
with it?
(Con)
The Government are getting on with it. As I said earlier, there
is a huge focus in our response on family-led solutions, and
kinship care is an invaluable part of that. In addition to the £9
million we have committed for training and supporting kinship
carers—who do an extraordinary job—we will be publishing a
national kinship care strategy by the end of the current year.
That will look at a number of the issues that have been rightly
raised, such as educational entitlement, training, improved and
more consistent local authority practice, and exploring financial
allowances. I accept the noble Lord’s point that kinship care is,
most importantly, a hugely valuable part of what is offered and,
secondly, cost-effective.
(Con)
My Lords, one of the previous initiatives announced by the
Government is priority admission to schools for looked-after and
previously looked-after children. Obviously, the priorities are
to get them into good and outstanding schools—where not just the
education but the leadership, pastoral care and safeguarding
systems are good—and for schools to know that they have to plan
and keep places available in case looked-after children come into
their area. Can the Minister outline what progress has been made
on this? Do we have the data on a local authority area to see in
which schools children end up—free school meals data is not a
proxy for this because if you have been adopted, you may no
longer qualify for free school meals—and whether the children are
getting into good and outstanding schools? Is there an awareness
of these issues? I have had to advise people informally, even
though they have been through a lengthy process to become foster
carers, because they did not seem to be aware that if they take
in children, that comes with priority school admission.
(Con)
My noble friend is right that getting looked-after and previously
looked-after children into the right school and getting them the
support they deserve within that school is a really important
element of changing their life trajectory. My understanding is
that it varies between local authorities, in part because of
different levels of school places, but if there is data on that I
would be very happy to write to my noble friend and share it.
(Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the fact that the Government have broadly
supported the recommendations of Josh MacAlister’s report, but I
am sure the noble Baroness will recognise that I am somewhat
underwhelmed at the pace and conviction of actually making sure
it happens quickly enough to change, in real terms, the
opportunities for many of the most vulnerable children in our
society.
I echo what others have said about kinship care, which I have
talked about a lot in this House before. What kinship care does,
and what we need to look at in other settings, is to allow
children and young people to have a consistent relationship with
the person who is caring for them. One of the shocking
discoveries, in a sense—it was not unknown—was the number of
social workers and carers, and the fact that children would go
out in the morning and not know which carer was going to be there
when they came back in the evening. That really has to be
addressed.
When do the Government expect to roll out the pathfinders, and
when do they expect to move from a rollout to a more universal
service? What is happening with family hubs? The only way we will
change from the crisis intervention we now have is through much
more effective early intervention. Family hubs are the model that
the Government are going with, and I am very happy with that. As
the Secretary of State said last week, it needs to be a universal
service, but we are a million miles and a lot of money away from
that. Can the Minister tell the House about that unrolling of
family hubs so that we really can have universal preventive
services?
(Con)
I share the noble Baroness’s desire that everything should be
done as quickly as is humanly possible. I hope she would agree,
though, that the Government are sending a very strong signal to
every local authority that a family-first approach, if you like,
is important and gets the best outcomes for children. That is why
we are investing £30 million in programmes such as Lifelong Links
to make sure that extended family connections for children in
local authority care are explored as much as possible—family
finding, befriending, mentoring and all those services. Those
things will be happening quickly and are directed at our most
vulnerable children.
The first pathfinders will start this autumn, and there will be a
second tranche next year. They are running for two years, at
which point we will review the next steps. On family hubs and
universality, if I understood what my right honourable friend the
Secretary of State said last week, and as the noble Baroness
knows, we are rolling out family hubs in 75 local authority
areas. Access to them is universal. If I am right, I think the
distinction is that there were certain eligibility criteria in
Sure Start’s early stages in particular. The noble Baroness is
shaking her head; perhaps I misunderstood, but that was my honest
impression. If I am wrong on that, I apologise. I am confident
that there are no eligibility criteria for family hubs, and
obviously there is a wider age range.
(CB)
My Lords, first, I declare my interest as a governor of Coram,
which has been adopting and looking after children since 1739. I
want to ask the noble Baroness a question about leadership. There
are a variety of institutions in our country which are in a state
of crisis and require strong leadership to turn them around. I
point out that in the decade between 2007 and 2017, there were
four Children’s Ministers in office, and in the five and a half
years since June 2017, there have been no less than eight. I
suspect that there is a degree of correlation between the
deterioration in the system and the lack of consistent
leadership. I suspect that it is above her pay grade—it is
certainly above mine—to influence who is and is not the
Children’s Minister. However, I suggest, from a long experience
in helping businesses try to change, that it would seem a
sensible insurance policy to make sure that within the ministry
there is a core team of individuals who are completely focused on
the breadth and depth of these recommendations; who are properly
resourced; who are the best people to be in charge; and who are
there to ensure continuity as Ministers change, to get them up to
speed as quickly as possible and to make them as effective as
possible.
(Con)
Of course, the noble Lord is right that leadership is incredibly
important. As regards the core team, that is what we are lucky
enough to have in our senior civil servants, who have huge
subject expertise—I spent time with them earlier today—and an
extraordinary personal commitment to delivering on these
reforms.
(Con)
My Lords, following on from the question asked by the noble
Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, particularly about lifelong
relationships, I welcome the Government’s emphasis on ensuring
that children in care have good-quality, lifelong relationships.
On that subject, Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes both lived
with unrelated adults—a situation in which children are nearly 50
times as likely to die of inflicted injuries than if they live
with both biological parents. The national review said that the
risk from new partners was not considered in either case. Apart
from the reducing parental conflict programme, what else are the
Government doing to make parents and professionals aware of the
greater risks from parental relationship breakdown—the elephant
in the room—which ultimately leads to so many children coming
into care, or worse?
(Con)
Sadly, my noble friend is right about the problem that he
articulates, which is very clear. I think that the experts and
professionals working in the sector are clear that relationship
breakdown, and domestic violence and abuse in particular, are
very important reasons for children being taken into care. My
noble friend is right that more needs to be done to raise
awareness around some of the specifics that he cited. However, I
suppose I feel that it is not sufficient to be aware of it; as my
noble friend suggests, one needs to know what we then need to do
about it. Work will come out of this review on the standards that
we will be setting for all multiagency partners, and being clear
about information sharing, which is a theme that comes out of
every serious case review that I have ever read. However, with
all that we just need a relentless focus on the quality of
implementation, which is what we plan to bring to this.
(Lab)
My Lords, the Government refer in their six pillars of
transformation to one of those being unlocking the potential of
kinship care, and I want to return to that. Although developing a
national kinship care strategy is welcome and a significant step
towards ensuring that kinship care is properly supported and that
more children remain safely in their family network, for it to be
delivered and for it to make a real difference it needs
cross-government buy-in, from the Treasury, the DfE, the MoJ and
from BEIS—not just conversations but real buy-in, with the money
following through from that. So I would really welcome even
stronger assurances from the Minister unequivocally that the
strategy has cross-government buy-in and that the adequate
funding to match the ambition will be provided. On the current
budget it cannot meet that ambition—we all know that intuitively.
In addition to all the support structures that are needed, which
have been articulated by others in this debate, we have the
issues of advice services that are critical, legal advice,
financial support to these families and employment rights, all of
which need to be addressed if we really are going to fulfil the
ambition of unlocking the potential of kinship carers, because,
as I have said on previous occasions, the barriers are quite
dysfunctional at the moment.
(Con)
The noble Baroness asks me to predict the outcome of the strategy
that we are consulting on. Obviously, I cannot do that, but I can
share with the House the scale of the Government’s ambition and
the value that the Government place on kinship care. This is the
first time that there will be national training and support for
kinship carers, so it is an important step forward in the short
term. We know that there has already been a move from the
Ministry of Justice in terms of extending legal aid to special
guardians in family court proceedings. We are exploring other
workplace entitlements with colleagues across government for
kinship care, as in cases where they have special guardianship
orders or child arrangement orders—and, as I said, we will be
looking at educational entitlements, local authority practice,
training, and financial allowances, which I think encompasses
quite a few government departments.
(Con)
My Lords, further to the excellent question asked by the noble
Lord, Lord Hannay, and the last question, from the noble
Baroness, one of the conclusions that I reached after dealing
with many constituency cases was that so many social service
departments do not involve the wider family—aunts, uncles,
grandparents. We all agree that it is incredibly important to
prioritise kinship care. What is the Minister going to do to
change the culture and attitudes of different social service
departments?
(Con)
I mentioned earlier that we are keen to establish and clarify, as
your Lordships and my noble friend have highlighted this
afternoon, that there is variability of response, understanding,
support and capacity from local authorities in relation to
kinship care. We want to be clear about what good practice looks
like. We are also working with Ofsted to raise the visibility of
kinship care in its inspection framework. Everyone violently
agrees about the value of kinship care. The question is how we
make sure that it is available and supported, and that some of
those barriers to which my noble friend refers are removed.
(Lab)
My Lords, the report has some very positive elements. Overall, I
share the view of many noble Lords that it is a disappointment. I
would not call it a missed opportunity, because time will tell on
that. However, Mr MacAlister himself must be disappointed,
because the call that he made for a once-in-a-generation
opportunity to reset the delivery of children’s social care will
not be met in terms of the report and its contents thus far.
There are two more consultations. I want to hinge again on the
question of funding, which is well short of what MacAlister asked
for. In the Statement, the Government say that they are
determined to deliver
“bold and ambitious reform”.
Well, that will not be achieved with the sort of funding that we
have heard about so far.
Kinship seems to be the central theme of this session. In the
Statement, the Government say that they will
“invest £9 million to train and support kinship carers before the
end of this Parliament.”
Well, that could be 18 months away, and £9 million would be about
£50 per kinship carer. If that is not scratching the surface, I
really do not know what is. It is not like him, but if anything,
the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, understated the case when he talked
about the financial benefits that kinship carers bring. They save
the Government countless millions and do not get the recognition
either of that fact or of the work that they do.
Perhaps I might ask the Minister another question on kinship
care. The review called for a single legal definition of kinship
care to be written into law to improve recognition of the varying
forms of kinship care arrangement and to improve access to the
support that carers and their children need. Does the Minister
recognise the many benefits to having a clear definition of
kinship care enshrined in legislation?
(Con)
On funding, I have made the point that we are talking about a
two-year programme in selected areas, not five years nationally.
The reason for that choice is that we believe it is critical to
get the quality of implementation right, on the ground, before
scaling. Secondly, I remind the noble Lord that spending on
children’s social care is £10.8 billion annually. There was a
£3.2 billion uplift to the adult and children’s social care
budget in the autumn, so the Government are already committing
very large sums of money to this area—as we rightly should.
On the definition of kinship care, we want to strike a balance
that retains flexibility, as every family potentially has a
slightly different model for how kinship care works, and absolute
clarity, as we want to make it easy for families to deliver this
and for them to feel supported. Whether that is through a
definition or not is a slightly different question, but it is our
aspiration to retain those two things.
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