The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Edward Timpson)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) on securing this important debate. As my successor as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on looked-after children and care leavers, he is well placed to bring to the House the concerns and views of the many children and young people who actively participate in the group’s work. Like him, I completely recognise the vital need for care leavers to be provided with good-quality, stable accommodation and support if they are to make a successful transition to adulthood. Likewise, I am sure that he recognises my personal commitment, and that of the Government, to making substantial improvements to services for care leavers. That will include ensuring that young people are given help to access suitable accommodation with the right support.
As has been said, we recently announced our intention to place a new legal duty on local authorities to provide staying-put arrangements, supported by additional funding of £40 million to local authorities over the next three years. We will introduce a new clause into the Children and Families Bill to place a duty on local authorities to give young people the opportunity to “stay put” with their former foster parents from their 18th birthday until they are aged 21. We have worked closely with the Who Cares Trust and other interested parties to ensure that we get the wording of the new clause right, and I look forward to tabling it soon.
That is not the only step we are taking. This is all part of our wider reform programme to provide care leavers with much better support as they move into adulthood. Other reforms include changing the rules so that 16 and 17-year-olds remain in care until they are ready to move out, and providing much greater financial support for young people leaving care at 18.
My hon. Friend has secured this debate in order to express his concern about the potential for inequity between young people in foster care and those in children’s homes. So let me be clear: I want to ensure that all care leavers, whatever their placement while in the care system, are provided with the appropriate support when they leave care. As my hon. Friend is aware, one of my two adopted brothers came to live with my family from a children’s home, so I have a deep personal interest in wanting to see all children’s homes provide the best-quality care and support on offer, both during a child or young person’s time in care and as they move on to independent living or other accommodation.
My hon. Friend says that for some young people staying in the children’s home is the right thing to do. I agree, and the law is clear that local authorities can already provide funding and support to a young person to stay with their former foster carer or to remain in a children’s home beyond their 18th birthday, and we know and see examples of that already happening. The issue, however, is whether it is appropriate to place a new duty on local authorities to provide a particular type of support to all young people in children’s homes.
The evidence for placing such a duty on supporting staying-put arrangements for young people in foster care is robust. Staying-put arrangements were tested out in pilots, and proved to have a positive impact on their outcomes. Research from the Fostering Network since the pilots ended shows that, where these arrangements continue, they show similar positive outcomes. Making the transition from a children’s home and from a foster home are very different, however. For some children, leaving a children’s home means moving into residential accommodation for adults. For others, it will be supported accommodation back in their home community; I acknowledge that many—too many—children’s homes are miles from where their families live. We also know that a disproportionate number of young people leave children’s homes and go home to live with their families.
There are also a number of practical and legal issues we would need to consider and test out before placing a duty on local authorities to have to provide staying-put arrangements in children’s homes. A key barrier would be having vulnerable adults living alongside much younger vulnerable children. My hon. Friend addressed that point, but children’s homes are, in law, establishments “wholly or mainly” for children and are registered as such by Ofsted, which, as my hon. Friend mentioned, inspects children’s homes and makes judgments on how the home is achieving outcomes for children. As part of our wider reform of residential care, a much stronger inspection regime will be put in place to help drive up quality standards.
Given that most children’s homes are now very small—typically 2, 3 or 4 beds—extending staying put could result, for example, in a home accommodating two or three care leavers and one child. In this case it could not be registered as a “children’s home”, as it would mainly be an establishment accommodating young adults, which could cause difficulties for the only child living there. For the same reason, Ofsted would not have any legal scope to regulate and inspect this service.
I recognise, however, that these should not be viewed as insurmountable barriers, so my hon. Friend will be pleased to know that I have asked my officials to work with the National Children’s Bureau, the Who Cares Trust and Catch 22 to look at the practical issues of introducing staying-put arrangements in children’s homes over the coming year.
Craig Whittaker
The news my hon. Friend has just announced is very welcome and I thank him for it, but I want to challenge him on some of his points about children’s homes and the number of adults staying in them. He has said that local authorities can already allow someone who is 18 to stay in care. Surely if that is allowed, the problems he is bringing up are not insurmountable and can be put right.
Mr Timpson
I have expressed a clear view about some of the legal and practical issues that remain. It is right that we consider them carefully and understand the consequences more widely across the residential care sector before taking any further steps. I want to be absolutely clear that I am not looking to find excuses not to do this. I am trying to establish what we will need to do to make me feel confident that any further steps we take will achieve what we all want, which is much more stability in placements, whatever that placement may be while in care, and a much better transition into adulthood that is co-ordinated and planned properly as a consequence of the input from the professionals involved in that young person’s life.
As I said to my hon. Friend when I recently gave evidence to the Education Committee on this issue, if I believed that including children’s homes and staying-put arrangements was the right thing to do at this juncture, I would do it in a heartbeat. However, I think it would be premature to place a new duty on local authorities now or to pilot a scheme before the work being carried out by the National Children’s Bureau is completed. I also think such a move would be wrong when we know there needs to be fundamental reform of children’s homes, as the 2012 report by the Deputy Children’s Commissioner and the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults illustrated so clearly.
I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend that children’s homes should not be seen as a last resort and should be a positive option for many, as I have said on several previous occasions in public and am happy to reiterate this evening. However, too many current homes are simply not good enough. He has said that Ofsted inspection reports show that most homes are rated as “good”, but that is under the current system of national minimum standards. Although there are undoubtedly some excellent children’s homes, and we should applaud them and try to encourage what they do well to be spread more widely, we do not think these standards—the “good” standards—are good enough, and neither do many of the children and young people in residential care. We want to raise the bar and move to much higher quality standards.
Young people living in residential care are more likely to make an early transition from care at aged 16 compared with those living in foster care. Those who do leave at that stage are less likely to be in education, training and employment, as my hon. Friend said. That is why I have introduced a new duty that directors of children’s services must sign off the pathway plan where it suggests a young person should leave care between the ages of 16 and 18. As I said a few moments ago, research has found that many young people are dissatisfied with the support they receive, and report shortfalls in planning and preparation for leaving care, which leaves their needs unmet.
Our immediate priority is to press ahead with driving up the quality of residential care, and we have set out a substantial programme of work to do that. We also want to test out new ways of delivering residential care via the children’s services innovation programme I recently announced. It will catalyse the development and spread of more effective ways of supporting children and of new approaches to commissioning—the point my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) made—and managing that support. Part of that may well include a move away from spot purchasing and towards more regional commissioning, as well as the extension of a children’s homes remit further into adulthood. Our approach will build on the call for change from the field, as evident in the Association of Directors of Children’s Services “What is care for” report and in the Local Government Association’s report on the strategic commissioning of children’s homes.
The “What is care for” report proposes a more fluid boundary between care and community services and new, more flexible models of care, particularly for troubled adolescents who often end up in care and placed in children’s homes. By winter 2014, we will support the developing, testing and implementation of the most promising approaches both in delivery and around the structure of services. I encourage all those who want to see improvements in residential care and its role in the transition to adulthood to come forward with their own ideas as to how best to achieve just that. We must get the system right before considering whether to run pilots or impose a duty on local authorities that requires them to provide staying-put arrangements in children’s homes. We must be confident that homes can offer children provision of the highest standard and that the £1 billion per year that we spend on placements in children’s homes is truly delivering for those living in them.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, this all comes against the backdrop of a wider reform package for care leavers. It is important to remind the House that, to date: the Government have launched the care leavers’ charter, which sets out the support that care leavers can expect right up to the age of 25, with more than 120 local authorities now signed up; we have introduced the junior independent savings account for all care leavers, with more than 40,000 accounts now open, and with a £200 contribution from government; I have written to all local authorities calling for a dramatic improvement in financial support for care leavers, resulting in a tripling in the number of councils now paying £2,000 or more through the setting up home allowance; and we have published the first cross-government care leavers strategy, which sets out in one place the steps government is taking, from housing to health services, and from the justice system to educational institutions, to support care leavers to live independently once they have left their placement.
I will take away the valid point raised by my hon. Friend about the post-care use of child benefit, and the correspondence that he has had with the Department for Work and Pensions. I am happy to work with him to ensure that the response that he receives from my ministerial colleagues in the DWP is sufficient to push that issue further forward, and I will happily discuss that with him in due course.
I am determined to improve the outcomes of all care leavers, and I hope that the action that this Government have taken to date amply illustrates that endeavour. However, I am not yet convinced that placing a duty on local authorities to offer staying-put arrangements in children’s homes is the right thing to do at this time.
I am acutely aware of the disappointment that this brings to many of those young people currently in residential care, and I share the ambition to see staying-put arrangements take hold in children’s homes, as has been the case and will now more widely happen in foster homes. Councils can, in certain instances, already do that. We first need to see more fundamental reform. We need to be confident that any change to the law is founded on good, sound evidence and that it will deliver what we all want to see. Sadly, we have not yet reached that point, but I hope my hon. Friend recognises my ongoing commitment in this area, as well as the significant progress that the Government have already made. I am grateful to him for securing this important debate.
Question put and agreed to.