Looked After Children (Distance Placements) Bill

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

2nd reading
Friday 28th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Janet Daby)]

I am pleased that the Bill provides the opportunity to consider the importance of residential children’s homes, and the sufficiency of placements. My hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards) will be familiar with the many significant issues that this Government have inherited and are having to resolve in order to fix the foundations, so that we can make a range of reforms across children’s social care. Those reforms include addressing the underlying issues that contribute to the country’s shortage of suitable placements for children in care. I share my hon. Friend’s concerns about the important issues raised in his Bill, and agree that changes are needed to help local authorities better meet the needs of the children in their care.

Reforming children’s social care is critical to giving hundreds of thousands of children and young people the start in life that they deserve. In November, we published “Keeping children safe, helping families thrive,” which set out our approach. As my hon. Friend will be aware, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is progressing through the other place. Our reforms will help to ensure opportunity for not just some but all children. Our approach to reform will break down barriers by shifting the focus in children’s social care to early support, early help and early intervention, so that we can keep families together and children safe. Our plans will help to ensure that children can remain with their families, where that is in their best interests, and will support more children so that they can live with kinship carers or in foster families, and we will fix the broken care market to tackle profiteering and put children’s needs first.

Before I turn to the Bill, I want to put on record that I am clear that a child should be placed far away from their home only when that is in their best interests. In the current system, however, a lack of availability of suitable local placements is too often the deciding factor for too many children, who end up being placed in care far away from their home and community. This situation may have been acceptable under the previous Government, but it is not acceptable to this one. We must change it, and we will. We are already working with local authorities to do so. I have met many campaign groups, and have spoken to young people and professionals about this specific area of change.

Local authorities have an existing duty to collect data on out-of-area placements. Since becoming Minister, I have come to realise that this data is actually published every year. The proposals in this Bill are therefore unlikely to tell us anything new about local authority sufficiency that will help. The data tells us that as of 31 March 2024, more than two thirds of children were placed less than 20 miles from their home, but that 45% of children were placed outside their local authority boundary. That is not good enough. However, the statistics cover many situations where a placement further away was in the child’s best interests, and where that was part of the care plan, rather than it being due to local insufficiency.

I absolutely agree that bold action is needed to improve sufficiency, but the variety and complexity of children’s needs and their individual situations mean that we cannot always easily categorise distance placements as inappropriate. Local authority staff work hard to find placements in really challenging situations. If a placement is found that best meets a child’s needs, but it is some distance away, the issue will be ensuring the child’s safety and wellbeing, and ensuring that contact is sustained, where that is appropriate. Furthermore, requiring national Government to publish sufficiency plans misunderstands the way that duties and funding operate in this space, and risks creating confusion. Responsibility sits at local authority level and it is not for national Government to assess the levels or types of need in each area, or how that need is best met.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley’s Bill includes proposals for—