Independent Review of Children’s Social Care
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for securing this extremely important debate. I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage. I do not think I have been in a debate with her before, so I welcome her to her place. I echo others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, on her part in the remarkable turnaround of Leeds children’s services in achieving an outstanding rating. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for her part in leading the post-legislative scrutiny committee and its work on the Children and Families Act 2014. With great respect to my noble friend Lord Balfe, I am grateful for his wisdom and insight relating to his own experience of the care system. Finally, I need to make the same declaration as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, as my mother was also a children’s social worker, so we understand that side of life.
We have had three very important reviews—from Josh MacAlister, the national panel, and the Competition and Markets Authority. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, those reviews and reports give us a burning platform for reform, and I agree that they have brought a renewed spotlight on vulnerable children, and rightly so. But they also show that, despite the extraordinary work of social workers past and present, children and families with experience of the system show that it is not delivering consistently enough for those who really need and deserve it. That is why reforming children’s social care is a priority for this Government, and integration will be at the heart of that.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, anticipated that we are already starting to take action in response to those reviews. I felt that she was perhaps a bit dismissive of some of this and anxious that it would not be followed through. I reassure the House that my right honourable friend the Children’s Minister is absolutely committed to seeing this through with great effect.
We have established a national implementation board to drive reform, and we have set up a new child protection ministerial group to ensure that safeguarding is championed at the very highest levels across government to drive the kind of integrated policy that all of your Lordships have rightly called for and discussed today. We launched a data and digital solutions fund to help local authorities unlock progress for children and families through the better use of technology. Importantly, we are developing recruitment and retention campaigns to increase the number of foster care placements, working closely with local authorities.
We absolutely recognise that these actions are just the beginning. The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care calls for “whole system” transformation, which is why we are developing an ambitious and comprehensive strategy for implementation that responds to those reviews, which will be published early in the new year. I know that your Lordships will understand that, as a new Minister who takes her role incredibly seriously, the Children’s Minister wants to understand and be completely confident in the actions that we are taking. I beg noble Lords’ patience on many of their questions on the detail of what we will do. It will not be long until that strategy is published, and it will include a number of the areas that your Lordships queried, including all of the options around kinship care that the noble Baroness opposite and others raised.
The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, asked me to exert any previous experience that I have. I absolutely assure the House that, wherever I possibly can, I will of course bring that.
On our vision of the future, the care review contends that, with the right support, families are the best means of protecting and nurturing children, and the Government wholeheartedly agree with that. Our ambition for reform will reaffirm the central role of families in the care system and put love and stable relationships at the heart of what children’s social care does. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, highlighted this ambition—this is, as noble Lords know, an important and challenging ambition.
On families, children’s social care services play an important role in promoting safe, stable and resilient families, and they should be enabled to provide effective integrated support to help families overcome the multiple and complex problems that many face, before they escalate. Importantly, the shift in the balance from late-stage crisis intervention to preventive, earlier intervention makes moral, human and emotional sense, but it also makes economic sense, as we heard. The noble Lord, Lord Wood of Anfield, asked whether multiagency work would be an important part of that—of course it will be.
A second priority for the Government is strengthening the child protection system. The awful murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson made us once again confront the terrible reality of child abuse. We owe it to every child to have strong and effective child protection arrangements that help keep them safe from abuse, neglect or exploitation, whether it is inside or outside their homes. We need a child protection system that intervenes quickly and decisively through a more expert, multiagency child protection response. Integration is critical to that, including that of local authorities, police, health, charitable organisations and others.
Thirdly, when children cannot be looked after safely by their parents, our first port of call should be to support the wider family network to step up wherever possible. At the moment, as your Lordships have set out, there are practical, financial and cultural barriers to this which need to be addressed. Finding care for a child within their family network gives them a much better chance to achieve the lifelong stability and network of loving relationships which sustain all of us. As your Lordships have articulated so eloquently, kinship care is a vital part of that.
All the recommendations in the MacAlister review around kinship care are being carefully considered. Just to be clear about what we have already committed to doing, the Ministry of Justice has made a public commitment to extend legal aid entitlements to special guardians in private court proceedings, which is a partial implementation of the care review’s recommendation in this area, and we are working with the MoJ to make that change as quickly as possible. We have also made early progress in investing in the current financial year and next year in a partnership with the charity Kinship to establish more than 100 peer support groups for kinship carers across England.
The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, asked about recruitment of foster carers. As I mentioned, we are working on a recruitment campaign with local authorities to recruit more carers. In relation to the care system itself, where family is not an option, the care system should provide stable and loving homes. We are committed to making sure that there are more places for children to live of the right kind, quality and location to meet our children’s needs. We are determined to set and deliver ambitious missions for children in care and care leavers, covering our aspirations for their loving relationships, health, education, employment and housing.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, asked about children living in independent and semi-independent provision. There are cases where high-quality supported accommodation can be the right option for some older children, but we also know that some of that provision is not currently good enough, which is why Ofsted will be regulating and inspecting all provision for looked-after children from next autumn.
We are also providing £99 million of funding to local authorities to increase the number of care leavers who stay living with their foster families in a family home up to the age of 21 through the Staying Put programme. We have provided £36 million to increase the number of young people who, when they leave residential care, receive practical help with move-on accommodation, including ongoing support from a keyworker through our Staying Close programme.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, and other noble Lords raised the importance of the children’s social care workforce. I echo the appreciation and acknowledgement of other noble Lords of the extraordinary work that social workers and others in the children’s social care system do. But we also know that they need support to be empowered and freed up to do the job that is so critical for our children’s lives.
Over the current spending review period, we will invest more than £50 million every year to recruit, train and develop child and family social workers to make sure that the workforce has the capacity, skills and knowledge to support and protect vulnerable children.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Taylor of Stevenage and Lady Tyler of Enfield, asked about funding for local authorities. I am sure other noble Lords also asked about this, so forgive me for those I did not note down. Your Lordships will be aware that the Government announced that approximately £6.5 billion will be made available to local government to deliver core services, including children’s services, in 2023-24 and in 2024-25, in addition to what was agreed for local government in the 2021 spending review.
Early intervention, focused on by many noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Drake and Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, and my noble friend Lord Farmer, is of course critical. It is really helpful to have had the example of Leeds and how expenditure there was recalibrated to focus on early intervention. I appreciate that that is an easy thing to say and an incredibly difficult thing to execute, but it is helpful to have those examples to give confidence to the system that it can be done.
We have announced over £1 billion for programmes to improve family services, including for family hubs, the Supporting Families programme and the Start for Life programme. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, talked about being sceptical and anxious—I think they were her words—about these pledges. As I say, I have every confidence in my ministerial colleagues and their focus on this—apparently, I have only two more minutes, so I apologise: I will have to write to your Lordships.
My noble friend Lord Farmer asked about how the department was using its own evidence and how we can scale up successful programmes. I absolutely agree with my noble friend about the importance of this. We are committed to scaling up programmes that work. One example is the £84 million Strengthening Families programme, which is scaling up well-evidenced programmes across 17 local authorities.
In relation to excessive profits of independent providers, we are absolutely clear that we need to avoid profiteering from any provider, and the key to this is growing capacity in some areas. That is why we are supporting local authorities to expand their provision and reduce reliance on the private sector.
I would just like to finish with the words that my honourable friend the Children’s Minister in the other place used in closing a debate in November. She said that
“this is a programme for a long-term, once in a generation reform. We will start by laying the foundations for a system that is built on love and the importance of family.”—[Official Report, Commons, 24/11/22; col. 539.]
In quoting that, I am reminded of sitting outside my mother’s office as a child after school. I would wait for her to finish work—which never seemed to happen—and look at the pictures that the children she worked with had drawn of their families. Those pictures will live with me for ever.