Children’s Social Care: Enduring Relationships Strategy

Monday 8th June 2026 Lords Chamber

Statement

16:09

The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Thursday 4 June.

“With permission, I shall make a Statement on the Government’s progress to reform children’s social care.

Transforming support for families and protection for children is central to our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. That is why we introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which received Royal Assent in April. It has enabled the most significant overhaul of children’s social care in a generation. The whole-system reset that is needed to shift money, staff and attention to earlier intensive help for families, rather than late-stage crisis management, is under way, supported by over £3 billion in funding. I want to use this Statement to focus on the care and leaving care systems that form an essential part of children’s social care. I am publishing the Enduring Relationships strategy that sets out how we will deliver that change.

In 2022, I published the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, a review that was informed by listening directly to thousands of people with experience of the care system. What I heard then, and have heard since, is that our care and leaving care systems are too often breaking rather than building lifelong loving relationships. Care can leave young people isolated, lonely and lacking belonging. This heightens vulnerability to poor mental health, unstable housing and unemployment. In that review, I called for a system where every young person would leave care with someone who loves them—a simple goal, but one that is not the central focus of our current system.

At present, care often prioritises the management of professional anxiety over the nurturing of lasting, enduring relationships that care-experienced people need in order to feel loved and safe. We see this in children being sent to grow up in homes far away from their community, thereby rupturing their school career, their friendships and their family relationships. We see this in the rules that mean foster carers are not trusted to make day-to-day decisions about whether the child they have in their care can have an overnight stay with a friend or have a haircut without seeking permission from a social worker. We see it when the young person turning 18 is pushed towards living independently, when what they really need is a housing and social support model that helps them build community.

The strategy I have published today sets out how we will make creating a loving tribe around every care-experienced young person the central obsession of the care system. To enable this, our reforms cover four key areas. First, all of children’s social care—not just the care system—must prioritise relationships. That means working to bring about change in families for children by strengthening the bonds found in existing family networks. This is at the heart of the families first partnership programme, where family group decision-making and family network support packages are bringing children’s families and their wider networks into their care decisions at an earlier stage.

It also means unlocking the potential of kinship care. Every local authority will be required to publish a local kinship offer, giving families the clarity and support they need. We have also committed £126 million to seven kinship zones, which are now up and running, that will test the impact of a non-means-tested allowance, equivalent to the fostering allowance, for kinship families with a legal order.

Secondly, we must create more stable and loving homes for children in care that support long-term relationships. A shortage of foster homes is leading to too many children being moved far away from their communities and the people they know. It is putting pressure on existing foster carers to be matched with children where their needs and their relationships with brothers and sisters often cannot be met. It is leading to children being placed in residential care inappropriately, at great cost in terms of both money and poorer outcomes.

We are therefore on the cusp of dramatically expanding a new approach to running our care system. This is made up of new end-to-end fostering hubs, where we will pull together individual local authority fostering teams into larger and more specialised fostering services, with more resource and higher expectations on recruitment and support for carers. This is the main action that will deliver the 10,000 additional places in foster care that we need by the end of this Parliament. It is backed with £88 million and includes funding for new innovation, grants to build extensions and home improvements for existing carers, and modernisation of the foster carer recruitment process.

This new system also depends on expanding regional care co-operatives so that the majority of England will be covered by an RCC by the end of this year. RCCs will give areas the scale to create the types of homes that children in care need and the leverage to drive out profiteering and poor-quality practice. My department will use RCCs as the vehicle to roll out a new approach to wrap around children who are on or at risk of a deprivation of liberty order. This programme, called Home Again, will de-escalate crises and be delivered in partnership with health services. I will share more information about this in the coming weeks.

I have also been concerned about the lack of support and attention that has been given to those working in residential care. That is why we have launched an expert-led review to assess the professional development offer to staff at children’s homes and set out instructions for change that we will action this autumn.

Thirdly, we must support care-experienced children who are transitioning into adulthood by ensuring that we nurture and expand their long-term relationships. This is not to be confused with supporting their relationships with professionals, although that is important, but instead is about the relationships with people who can form a lasting family and tribe around care-experienced people. That starts with what the system measures and how it is inspected. Later this year, a new metric to track the quality of enduring relationships at an individual level will be rolled out in the care and leaving care systems because, whether we like it or not, what gets measured is often the thing that gets done. If we are serious about putting enduring relationships at the heart of the system, the performance of the system itself needs to be judged on whether the relationships around those in and leaving care are getting stronger or weaker. This will, of course, have implications for Ofsted’s inspection regime.

With a new measure of relationships sitting at the heart of the system, we also need to support practitioners to change what they do so that enduring relationships are strengthened. That is why today I am launching a national sprint to roll out family finding services across England by the end of the next two years. We know the impact that ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’-style services can have on building stronger tribes around young people, and we have already seen the impact of programmes such as Lifelong Links. These services need to become the mainstream offer, rather than pilots on the fringe of the system.

In the coming months, I will launch the new Staying Close programme, which will shift the system away from its current focus on preparing young people for independence and instead focus on providing homes for care leavers that build interdependence and connection. This will mean fewer teenagers dropping off the care cliff at 18 and being forced to live in a flat, lonely and isolated.

Finally, I am particularly proud that we will work with faith and belief organisations to design a new lifelong relationships ceremony to recognise the important bonds between care-experienced adults and those who love them. Just as we have christenings and naming ceremonies, Britain is generous enough to also mark these wonderful and unique relationships that give hope and meaning. I want these to start being offered this year.

The most important thing for us in life is our relationships. The state often finds it hard to put itself at the service of building these loving relationships. In fact, too often it blocks or weakens them. That changes today by making one thing very clear: the purpose of our care system, above all else, is to build enduring loving relationships. I commend this Statement to the House”.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this Statement to the House and for her kind words to me earlier. I look forward to working constructively with her in the coming months, in the interests of all children and young people.

We on the Conservative Benches welcome this Statement. Indeed, it was the previous Conservative Government who commissioned the review by Josh MacAlister on which this Government’s social care strategy is based. Children who enter care have often experienced circumstances too horrible for us to imagine. As they enter adulthood, as the report reminds us, they report much higher levels of loneliness and isolation, often lacking a single loving or supportive relationship. It is now well established by the evidence that higher numbers of adverse childhood experiences correlate with poorer life and health outcomes, so we will support, where possible, reforms to improve the care system.

I have some questions today. I particularly welcome the Minister’s focus on kinship care, but I wish to raise some points about the target of 10,000 new foster places—a laudable and necessary target. Surely some proportion of this is more easily achieved through the family. Currently, the proportion of fostering households through kinship care is just 20%, but finding foster carers among a child’s kin could be the surest and most efficient way of getting children into a placement in which they already feel a sense of safety and belonging. The biggest barrier is qualifying as foster carers, even though there are significant advantages to a child which might justify a less than perfect score. This would of course have to be done without compromising safeguarding, but it must merit further exploration. Will the Minister commit to revisiting this in this Session?

We recommend the expansion of regional care co-operatives, particularly to encompass children currently on, or at risk of, a deprivation of liberty order. However, I am concerned about the funding of these RCCs. The two RCC pathfinders in Greater Manchester and the south-east received £3.46 million in programme funding and £5 million in capital funding between them. The Government’s paper cites over £10 million to support the expansion of the six new RCCs. Unless I have misunderstood, that is a large discrepancy in per-RCC terms. Can the Minister tell the House whether she believes that this funding will be enough for all the new co-operatives or whether she expects more to be announced in the future?

We welcome the Minister’s resolution to secure the best possible outcome for care leavers, who too often, as I have said, have not a single enduring relationship in their lives. But there are some unanswered questions about how the new enduring relationship metric will be applied, and I would be very grateful for more information from the Minister. Will support for those who score lower be increased? What form will that support take? Will it allow for early intervention before those identified vulnerable individuals have left care? More information on all this would be very welcome. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I also welcome the Statement. It is important that we in this House send a strong message to young people in care that we are on their side. I know that on many occasions my noble friend Lord Purvis, who has just left his place here, has referred to those young people as having the richest parents—the corporate parents of the state—but often the state, particularly at the local level, has not been there to support them, so we welcome this enduring relationships strategy for children in social care. We have long believed that every child, no matter where they are and what their circumstances are, deserves the best start in life. That is what we want for our children. We the state, at both a national level and a local level, are the corporate parents, and if that is good enough for our own children, it should be good enough for the children under our responsibility.

We have long advocated for children in care because they have often been the ones who are overlooked, particularly those who reach adulthood but clearly still have issues. This overlaps with the debate that I am sure we will have following the Milburn review on NEETs, because those who have been in care are often overrepresented as NEETs. I am sure I will come back to that topic at a later date.

For too long, we have talked about the fact that some young people live in broken relationships. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Tyler, who wanted to be here but could not, because she has long campaigned for children. Often, one sibling is in care and the other is not. Maintaining that relationship is something for which she has campaigned for many years. I thank the Minister for her efforts to support the efforts of my noble friend, so that we were able to get that into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act in the last Session of Parliament. That was an important change in the law and guaranteed that children in care are supported to stay in contact with their brothers and sisters. We want to make that upbringing closely mirrored to the ones that we all had and that, for example, my children are having.

Kinship care has a vital role in society. So often, that support is something that holds families together, and we have long called for the Government to support it financially. While they are there to support foster carers, we feel that kinship carers should also be better financially supported. Although we support the Government’s intentions, we must remind them that kinship carers still lack financial support. We tried to fix that during the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, but on that occasion we did not succeed.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister. The Government mention a new financial allowance pilot for kinship carers. Will the Minister explain why the Government did not support the kinship care amendment to the Bill in the last Session? Similarly, the Government state that their goal is to shift children’s social care towards stronger families and stable homes, and that is welcome. But when a relative or close family friend willing to take on a child is located, they often face immense financial barriers. When will the Government guarantee financial support for kinship carers on a par with that for foster carers?

[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lords opposite for their welcome of the Government’s proposals around enduring relationships. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, is right that the independent review of children’s social care was commissioned by the last Government and led by my honourable friend Josh MacAlister, the Minister for Children and Families. In that, he called for a relentless focus on enabling care-experienced children to build lifelong relationships, creating a tribe around them as they grow up. That is the basis of the enduring relationships strategy that we have published. It is framed around our central ambition to allow every child in care to maintain the loving, supportive and trusting relationships that they need to thrive. It builds on our recent work to legislate for social care reform, to reset how the system operates and to give our partners clarity on delivery.

In November 2024, the Government published Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, which laid the foundations for reform. We followed through with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which many of us spent many happy long hours discussing as it wended its way through this House—I am sure we will have a suitably chunky Bill for the noble Baroness to enjoy in this Session. This has enabled the most significant overhaul of children’s social care in a generation, and these changes are supported by over £3 billion in funding across programmes, capital investment and implementation. Most recently, on 21 May, we published our implementation plan to support local partners to deliver these reforms. This work has laid the foundations.

Now, as noble Lords have recognised, we must move to the full implementation phase to bring about a real and tangible difference to children’s outcomes. A key focus of our reforms, as identified by Josh MacAlister in his review, is to help care-experienced children build long-lasting and loving relationships. Every young person needs relationships like these to form a strong sense of identity and to reach adulthood with confidence. The evidence is clear, as the noble Baroness identified, that just one stable, trusted and loving relationship can transform a child’s life. It can improve their resilience, health, education and long-term outcomes. Yet too often, the system does the opposite of facilitating the permanency that allows these relationships to grow.

In our strategy, we are setting out a new focus for children’s social care. We know that many social workers, carers and professionals work extremely hard to support young people to build and sustain trusted relationships, but often this depends on individual commitment rather than reliable structures. Therefore, to deliver this, our reforms will be aligned to four key outcomes. First, children’s social work must prioritise relationships, not just as an add-on but as the core purpose of practice—the lens through which every professional judgment is made. This is at the heart of the families first partnership programme, where mandatory family group decision-making will bring children’s families and wider networks into their care decisions at an earlier stage.

The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, quite rightly raised the issue of kinship care. We are strengthening kinship care. Every local authority will be required to publish a local kinship offer, giving families the clarity and support they need. We have committed £126 million to pilot seven kinship zones, including family network support packages, which will tackle the barriers that can prevent families stepping in to support their kin. That work and investment will give us the basis on which to develop, as noble Lords have said, this important provision for young people. We have also strengthened local authorities’ duties to promote sibling contact for children in care, and the noble Lord is right about that. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, made a strong case for this during the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. At every point in proceedings, we must ask not only whether a child is safe but who matters to this child and how we can enable and nourish those relationships.

Secondly, we must create stable homes for children in care that support long-term relationships. That is why we are investing £88 million and working in partnership with fostering hubs and the sector to reform fostering and recruit 10,000 new foster carers. That will, in response to the noble Baroness’s question, involve reviewing standards, ensuring national consistency so that the rules in place support a child’s safety rather than limit the ability of foster carers to come into the system. Far fewer children should be in residential care and only when it is the best place to meet their current needs. Creating a route back to family life should be the focus of children’s care. Too often, the right residential care is not available, leading to child placement according to what is available rather than what is needed. That is why, to improve the planning and commissioning of residential care places, we are rolling out regional care co-operatives. We will have more to say about where those co-operatives will be and what support will be available for them in the near future.

Thirdly, we must support children’s transition to adulthood through supporting their long-term relationships. We are strengthening support for care-experienced young people so that they can move to independent living, supported by strong, trusted relationships. Through Staying Put and Staying Close, we are ensuring continuity of care and connection. Through strengthened corporate parenting, we are ensuring that public services step forward to support young people who have left care. Many children currently in care have already lost their most important relationships. That is why we are launching a national sprint to roll out family finding services in every local authority.

Finally, as noble Lords have said, we must embed the primacy of children’s long-term relationships through accountability and inspection. Care must be judged not on placement numbers or types but on children’s experience of them. We will have more to say soon about the measures that we will use for recognising success here. We are already working with local authorities and with Foundations, the What Works Centre for children’s social care, to determine how we will measure success here. We will announce more about that soon. Long-term relationships must be the standard by which the system judges success, so we will introduce an enduring relationships measure to gauge improvement and provide accountability. That also means that we will work with Ofsted to build enduring relationships into inspection criteria.

I welcome the support of noble Lords for these measures today. I look forward to working with noble Lords across the House as we make this fundamental difference to ensuring that all care-experienced children have not just the care and the safety that they need but the ability to keep, or rebuild, the enduring relationships that will be so important for their success in future life.

16:25

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, most children who appear before the criminal courts display evidence of serious educational needs and an alarming number of those children show signs of florid psychiatric illness. In the sunshine of very welcome reform, can the Minister assure us that we will not lose sight of the great clouds presented by those issues?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord knows from his experience about the range of traumas that young people, even those who have not been in care, may well be reflecting. As he says, severe mental health needs may be one of them. That is why we are introducing mental health support into schools at an earlier stage. It is why, through the Department of Health, there is investment in 8,000 new mental health professionals and the development of a mental health strategy to ensure that children and young people in particular are getting support with mental health challenges at an earlier and more effective stage.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement from the Government. It is uplifting to see the shift from being just the corporate parent to it being our responsibility—all our responsibilities—to ensure that for those children who enter the care system, for reasons we may not like and they may not like, we understand that the important thing for them is enduring relationships. I want to ask my noble friend about one aspect of the Statement in particular: long-lasting relationships. I have done work with Family Rights Group for many years now. It did the initial work on this, which has been followed up by Foundations, the What Works Centre, asking how you establish for young people in the last couple of years before they leave care a lifelong relationship.

All your children will have aunts, uncles, cousins and friends they can go to, even when they have fallen out with their mum and dad. These children have no one. I know from talking with them that, when they re-establish a relationship with a long-distance schoolteacher they had a good relationship with, or with somebody from their nursery or another area of their life, or they find a long-distance relative they did not know about, it makes an enormous difference. I know we are going to make sure that Ofsted is covering these things. Can my noble friend assure me that the slimmed-down Ofsted will have the resources to make sure these changes have the real effect that they are meant to?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

On the last point that my noble friend made, it is precisely because of the importance of accountability that we will work with Ofsted to ensure that the measurement of enduring relationships and the development of enduring relationships are at the heart of the inspection process.

My noble friend also makes a very important point that, particularly for those young people who are in care but have already lost their most important relationships, it is not enough to simply say that is there nothing we can do to help them rebuild those. That is the reason for the announcement in the Statement about what is described as the

“national sprint to roll out family finding services”.

Those services do exactly what my noble friend has said: they sit down with young people, talk to them about who is now or was an important link and support in their lives, and then help them to remake those links to those people, who will support them while they are young but, as my noble friend says, will also be the people alongside them as they go into adulthood.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, from these Benches, I also warmly welcome what is in the strategy. Enabling children in care to sustain or make long-lasting relationships is absolutely crucial. When it comes to the lifelong relationship ceremonies, we on these Benches are certainly very interested in looking at what can be done to effect that. My question has come out of the work I did on my Private Member’s Bill for care leavers in the last Session. So many care leavers need to move from one local authority area to another, perhaps to maintain those relationships or to rebuild a relationship with a sibling, yet what traditionally happens is that the authority they have left washes its hands of them and the authority they land in considers it has no responsibility because they were never in care in that authority. What will the Government do to ensure that, where young people move from one authority area to another after they have just left care, they do not fall through the net any longer?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The right reverend Prelate makes a very important point. It is, of course, the objective of the Staying Close programme to enable young people, once they have left care, particularly if they were in residential care, to be able to continue to receive support. I will certainly go back and talk to my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families about this point. I think that that is partly covered in the requirement for all authorities to have a support package for those who have left care, but the point about how we maintain the relationships that are at the heart of this strategy is a really important one that I will take up with him.

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, in welcoming the Statement, I also welcome my noble friend Lady Cash to the Front Bench. She brings great knowledge and understanding and, most importantly in this role, compassion, and we look forward to her further contributions. It is a tragedy in modern Britain that care leavers can emerge from care with no one they feel is there for them and no one they feel they can trust. For many of us, the source of those enduring relationships outside the family would be found in faith communities and sports clubs. Specifically, uniformed youth groups such as the Scouts, Guides and cadets built great relationships and instilled young people with essential self-discipline, self-worth and mutual respect. Does she agree that these are precisely the qualities that could benefit not only care leavers but all young people? If so, will she undertake to engage specifically with the uniformed youth groups to see how they can support this welcome initiative?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a really important point—notwithstanding the fact that my relationship with the Guides lasted about three weeks so could hardly be described as enduring. However, for many people, faith groups and youth groups of the sort that he has identified could well be the types of environments that could provide that support, that external help and some of those long-lasting links. I will certainly take that point back to my honourable friend as well.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is quite clear that the Government are taking an important step forward here to support those from the care system and that everybody has recognised the lack of parental support going on into the early years of adulthood, which is incredibly important. Could the Government go a little further in how they are trying to bring these bits together? We have heard about the voluntary sector, schools and possibly even kinship care, but what will be the point at which we identify the hub that will connect these bits?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

First of all, there is the structure being put in place through the implementation plans that the Government are producing, through the national framework, which has been relatively recently reviewed, and through the structures being proposed as part of the strategy. The best way to think about this is that what brings all these things together is the child or young person. If we change practice so that, at every point in thinking about decisions that are being made about children who have come into the care system, we ask ourselves, “What is the best way to enable relationships for this young person to be enduring or developed?”, that is the way in which we bring together the range of policy and investment that the Government are putting into this.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am sure that we will not hear any objection from your Lordships’ House to the strategy’s aim of putting enduring relationships at the heart of the children’s care system, but there is no mention in the Statement or strategy of the substantial barriers to that. They do not talk about the impact of for-profit companies, particularly those owned by hedge funds and other financial companies, on the provision of extremely expensive, often poor-quality care provided by lowly paid, frequently changing staff. We discussed this in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and heard very little defence from any corner about this kind of provision. What are the Government’s plans to end this exploitation of some of our most vulnerable children? Have the Government set targets to reduce the provision of care by these deeply disturbing companies?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The reason why we discussed that in the proceedings on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was precisely because we were taking action in that legislation to tackle this problem. We are empowering local authorities to secure the best placements for looked-after children at a price that is fair to the taxpayer. We know that local authorities cannot do this alone, so we are also taking action at national level to reshape the market through our package of measures, including those set out in the Act. We are rebalancing the market and improving competition, regulation and the commissioning of placements through the regional care co-operatives I have already talked about, and we will shine a light on the level of profit being made and bring greater visibility to the prices that local authorities are paying. In that legislation, we also took provision to introduce a profit cap if necessary.

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

My Lords, like all the other speakers, I very much welcome what the Government have done in this area and the emphasis they have placed on the importance of enduring relationships. I am very pleased to see that they have in many ways taken up the cause that my noble friend Lady Armstrong has championed for many years. How will the Government integrate these enduring relationships, whether with grandparents, aunts and uncles, former teachers or sports coaches, into the care process right from the outset, so that it is not an add-on but something that is fundamentally integral to the process?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

That is a very important point. One of the important things we legislated for in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act is the requirement for the use of family group decision-making in precisely that way, when thinking about children coming into the care system, by engaging their families and those who might have the capacity to support them at that point. That is a really important statement at the very beginning of the process about the need to think about kinship care and the support that families can provide.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I had the pleasure of working with the Minister in Committee on the Bill on the regional care co-operatives, and I am very grateful to her for agreeing to many of the things the Opposition were keen to have in the Bill. The successful expansion of the RCCs will depend to a large extent on good will and co-operation with local authorities in its implementation. Can she say something about how this will be achieved in the context of local government reform, which will mean many existing local authorities will be turned into unitaries and there will be a lot of changes across a number of counties and other areas?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that this is a period of local government reorganisation. It is also a time when local government finances are under considerable pressure, not least from having to find placements in an unplanned way, which is likely to lead to unexpected and very high costs. The very fact that local authorities can group together to use the planning and spending power of a regional care co-operative is beneficial to them at a point at which local government reorganisation is going on. Even more importantly, it is beneficial for the children who are more likely to have a placement that works for them, rather than simply one scrambled together on a Friday afternoon.

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, can the Minister give us some indication of what is being done to address the culture to make sure that these enduring relationships last? Is anything being done differently in the way the professionals involved are being trained? Is anything being done about the information given to the families in the first place? I was a youth worker for more than 35 years, and the most powerful relationships were where the family knew their rights and were pursuing them and could meet the professionals halfway. Are the Government doing any work to change the way in which the professionals now do their duties because of the new priorities of the Government?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an important point. To come back to the point I made earlier, we have changed things in the law such as the requirement for family group decision-making at an earlier stage. In this strategy we spell out clearly the need to change practice to focus on relationships at all stages of a child’s experience of coming into and being in care. I agree with the noble Lord that there needs to be a change in culture, and we are providing support for kinship care pilots and other initiatives such as the recruitment of 10,000 more foster carers. The central message here, as I suggested earlier, is that at every stage in a child’s journey social workers will be asking themselves: what do we need to do at this point to enable this young person to maintain or re-find the enduring relationships that will set them up for and support them for the rest of their lives?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, since there is time, my question relates to the ongoing monitoring of progress underneath this strategy, particularly whether the Government will be setting up a regular programme of listening to children in the care system and those emerging from it to see how fast progress is being made, what is being done better and what could still be strengthened. Will they be really listening to the children regularly as this strategy goes forward?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes an important point, and we talked about this at various points during the passage of the Bill. I assure her that in all the action that we take, particularly in children’s social care, we will want to centre children’s voices in the action being taken at a local level and listen to them in the development of policy.