Children and Young People: Local Authority Care

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[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 Laming, for securing this important debate. As your Lordships know, when one comes into this place, people tell you about the extraordinary experts who sit in the House of Lords, and I do not think anyone epitomises that expertise in relation to children more than the noble Lord, Lord Laming, which he manages to combine with greater humility than anyone.

In preparing for this debate, I was lucky yesterday afternoon to be able to talk to our Children and Young People’s Advisory Board, made up of children and young people with care experience, and our Care Experience Forum, made up of colleagues within the department who have experience of the care system, to hear first hand about what matters to them. I hope the House will bear with me while I reflect their thoughts. Of course, they do not talk in the language of system change, which all of us can agree is needed; they talked about what mattered to them personally, about the human elements.

They were such simple but powerful things, including the value of great communication. All too often they talked about the fact that they did not know what was happening to them or their siblings, they did not feel that the approach looked at the family in the round—whether that was through a family group conference or the work that FDAC does in a more rounded way—and they did not feel that they were listened to. That was from those who were in the care system but, possibly most troubling, I also heard about a remarkable young woman who had not been taken into care and was desperately unsafe in her family. Then, there is a feeling that it all stops when you get to 16. Similarly, they talked about stability, which the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, picked up; the numerous social workers and the need—why is it so much to ask?—for a reliable adult whom they can trust. The noble Lord, Lord Meston, also reflected on that turnover of staff.

They talked about the need for greater wraparound support for kinship arrangements. One young woman talked about her and her two siblings going into kinship care with her aunt, who was a single parent with three children of her own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that was not sustainable, but she felt that with more support it might have been. I hope very much that our work through the Children’s Social Care: Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy shows our commitment to laying the foundations to address those very human issues as well as all the structural change that needs to happen to make that a reality.

Our strategy recognises that the number of looked-after children has increased by 23% over the last 10 years and, as a number of your Lordships noted, now totals 83,840. This rise is due to two key factors—the number of asylum-seeking children entering the system and children spending more time in care. Since 2019, if one takes unaccompanied asylum-seeking children out of the picture, the figure has gone down for non- unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, from 27,950 children going into the care system in 2019 to 25,910. None of us knows what a right number would be, but I am trying to put some of this in perspective. This is reflected in the number of children coming into the system aged 16 or over having risen sharply by 40% since 2019 to almost 9,000.

Similarly, the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, talked about the issues of children living over 20 miles from home. I thought that figure might have gone up but surprisingly, it has remained relatively stable. It was 20% for children in 2019 and 21% in 2023. However, I am not questioning for a second that we want children as close to home and to their connections as possible.

Almost all your Lordships spoke about the importance of early intervention. We know that families need support before crisis point. We know that early intervention can change the lives of families and help them to overcome challenges before they reach crisis point. We have already invested in this area. We are testing how the multidisciplinary family help teams can provide targeted support through the “families first for children” pathfinders. Overall, we have announced over £1 billion for programmes to improve early help services from birth to adulthood, including through the family hubs.

The tension that we face is whether we can go faster, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Wood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, also challenged in that regard. We are genuinely trying to strike a balance, checking that we get the implementation right before we scale up more rapidly. I accept that other noble Lords may have different views on that, but there are too many examples of individual pilots that have been very successful in this area and then, when they get scaled, the impact is diluted. Therefore, we need to be sure that we are building on solid foundations and understand how to deliver at scale. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, asked whether I would commit to all the recommendations in the independent review. She will have seen the Government’s response setting out what we accept wholly or in part.

A number of your Lordships rightly focused on kinship care. We believe that where children cannot live with their birth parents full-time, it is best for them to live with people whom they already know, trust and love. That is why we are championing kinship care arrangements through our first kinship care strategy and the launch of a financial allowance pilot in up to eight local authorities. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle asked about financial support for kinship carers. Of course kinship carers are incredibly important. We talked about just over 83,000 children in the care system, and the data is not as up to date; we have estimates for 2021 of 121,000 children living in kinship care. That figure alone is greater than all other forms of care put together.

The noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish, asked about family group conferencing. We are implementing a family network pilot to trial family group decision-making in kinship care settings.

My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham picked up the issue of adoption. Adoption remains the best stable, permanent option for some children, particularly younger children, and can provide them with a loving and stable family for life. Adoption orders have increased slightly this year, for the second year running, but there has been a decline in recent years of children under five coming into care, and we know that most children who are adopted are under five. However, the main focus of our adoption strategy is to improve the speed with which children are matched with families. The number of children waiting to be matched with a new family has fallen from 2,800 in June 2019 to 2,210 in June 2023.

I turn to fostering, which was raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, my noble friend Lord Young and many of your Lordships. Over two-thirds of children who are in formal care are in foster care. The numbers of children in foster care again are roughly stable—55,760 in 2019 and 57,020 in 2023. We are investing £36 million to deliver a foster care recruitment and retention programme, and we are working with more than 60% of local authorities to do this. My noble friend Lord Young questioned the effectiveness of this. Our first regional recruitment support hub—Foster with North East—went live in September last year, and the second in the east Midlands in March. We have eight more regions going live this month, so it is a little early to report back on progress.

My noble friend Lord Lexden talked about the important work of the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation. We fully support its work and value it greatly.

Many of your Lordships, led by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, spoke about the importance of children’s home reform. We are committed to resolving the issues which your Lordships raised. The Government are allocating over £400 million to local authorities for children’s homes, increasing both open and secure facilities. The noble Lord, Lord Wood of Anfield, raised the issue of unregulated children’s homes; of course, it is not acceptable that unregistered provision is being used. Running an unregistered children’s home is obviously an offence and Ofsted has the powers to prosecute those involved.

We heard from your Lordships about the huge financial pressures on local authorities as a result of the use of private children’s homes. Your Lordships also referred to the review of the Competition and Markets Authority, which we have accepted; we are implementing all the recommendations to reshape the system.

Obviously, one of the impacts of shortages in that area is the placement of children far from home, so we are introducing a new regional model of regional care co-operatives. We are designing two pathfinders this year with health and justice partners, which will be supported by £5 million of funding. We will announce the successful areas later this year.

The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, asked about funding for the workforce and whether we have a workforce strategy. We do, of course, and we have committed £50 million annually to that. The noble Baronesses, Lady Tyler and Lady Benjamin, asked when we would introduce legislation. In our reform of social care, our focus in these first two years is very much on addressing the most urgent issues.

I close by again thanking the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for initiating this debate, all your Lordships for contributing, and all those who support locally, nationally, within charities, within local authorities and in the department for their support, so that we can help deliver the change that children and young people who are or have been in care deserve and so that they can thrive.