Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Longfield Excerpts(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Lord Meston (CB)
I, too, want to move on, but I cannot resist repeating my admiration for the admirable Bill last year from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and his work on family hubs. I will concentrate on Amendment 183B from the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and concentrate on just one aspect of school readiness and the proposed healthy child programme.
I would like to see specifically included in the proposed healthy child programme referred to in the noble Baroness’s amendment the promotion and encouragement before starting school of vaccination against preventable diseases. Many other countries provide for the mandatory vaccination of children, backed by various types of sanctions—including, it has to be said, exclusion from certain benefits and services. I am not suggesting that for this Bill; that is a debate for another day. However, children are not being vaccinated as they ought to be, and surely vaccination is something to refer to expressly as part of any suggested healthy child programme. It is an important and probably essential public health intervention. A failure to vaccinate a child in readiness for school is seen by some doctors as a red flag for possible parental neglect, because vaccination is the most important thing to be done to protect children. I would like to have seen it in the noble Baroness’s amendment.
Baroness Longfield (Lab)
I feel the need to add some thoughts of my own to this conversation, which I am very pleased that we are having. I declare my interest as the executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives. I thank noble Lords for their kind comments on that.
This is a really crucial area of policy, and I am delighted that we are expecting an early years strategy and that we have consensus across the House on this—indeed, with the evidence as well. In the spirit of moving on, I hope that there is cross-party consensus going forward on the importance of this, not only for individual children and their families but for the country as a whole, in terms of employment, growth, crime reduction and health.
I could go on for an awfully long time on this, but I shall not. But I wonder whether my noble friend the Minister might say something in her closing remarks about the conversations that she is having with the Department of Health, because that partnership is obviously particularly important for early years and early years development.
Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)
My Lords, I support the group of amendments before us, which are well judged. I appreciate that they are essentially probing in nature, but I will make a couple of brief observations.
First, the amendments are important because they focus our minds on long-term strategy. It is often the complaint about government—about any Government; I do not want to be partisan in that regard—that Ministers will often look at what is in tomorrow’s papers and what is going to lead the politics shows on Sunday. At most, if they have particular levels of vision, they might look at what will get them through to the next election.
We know that there must be a much greater focus within government on long-term strategy. The perils of short-termism are no more acute anywhere than in the issue of education. We know that when we look at interventions, particularly early interventions in education, the true dividends of what we provide and invest in may not manifest themselves until 10 or 15 years down the line, but that is no great reason for us to shy away from them. Indeed, it is something that we need to embrace.
Secondly, as other Members have said—I will not repeat the figures—we know that early interventions can create massive dividends for society. Whether that is on the basis of diversion of young people away from future social problems, from justice issues, or of foregrounding, from a societal point of view, in terms of their education, what I think will become an increasing problem, which is the need for early identification of special educational needs—we have seen the explosion in terms of the cost within that. Those are all, if we take it from a very cynical, crude point of view, massive societal gains for a level of investment in early intervention, but on a personal basis, the biggest single intervention is in changing the lives of those individual children. Because I believe that in a society, education can be the great life changer, it can be the great deliverer for young people as individuals.
Thirdly, I believe it is the right focus. We will, in this Committee and other places, spend a lot of time debating the importance of getting qualifications right, getting school transfers correct at different ages, getting the right provision of schools and dealing with curriculums. All those are, I think, very important educational subjects, but the biggest single intervention that helps to determine how successful a child is in education happens before they walk through the school doors in the first place. That is not just my opinion. When I was Minister of Education for Northern Ireland, we commissioned a report entitled A Fair Start, which gathered experts in the field, whether they were academics or people who had direct life experiences. Their strong conclusion was that the biggest single thing that government can do to tackle educational underachievement and raise attainment levels is in that intervention before a child even reaches school.
Fourthly, I say, without entering into the turf war on Sure Start, that it worked well, and when I was Minister in Northern Ireland, I sought to enhance and support it. However, it is also the case that if we are looking at early interventions, we know that there will be families that are at risk of raising children with low educational achievement, and we know that there are communities out there where socioeconomic barriers create problems. Again, from experience and from talking to a lot of people, I think that if we are to have the best early interventions, we need a sense of co-operation and buy-in, particularly from the communities where we are targeting those interventions. If a community in whatever part of the United Kingdom feels that this is simply a top-down solution which is being imposed upon them, and they are being talked down to, the ability for that community to change and to have a level of ownership of education is greatly reduced.
It is important, I think, whenever we look at early interventions that we not only get it fully supported but get it right, which is why I think that the amendments focusing on a strong sense of strategy and taking a very clear look at this are very important.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Longfield Excerpts(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Baroness Longfield
“(c) a supported accommodation setting in England.”
Baroness Longfield (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 142 is in my name. It sets out to make the case for the inclusion of supported accommodation in the scope of the proposed profit cap. Following clarification from my noble friend the Minister, including in answers to questions in earlier groups in Committee, I am content that that is the case, and that the intention is to include supported accommodation within these measures, so I will not be moving this amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Geddes) (Con)
I am sorry but, having spoken to the amendment, the noble Baroness must move it so that others can comment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, Amendments 142A to 142C, 504A and 505A are in my name. I will not speak to Amendment 142 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and I thank her for giving me advance notice of her intentions. I will also probe the merits of Clause 15 standing part of the Bill.
Amendment 142A mirrors my earlier Amendments 138D, 138E and 139A, which would have excluded natural persons with a role in the management of a business from receiving personal financial penalties. I have reread the Minister’s remarks in Hansard from our debate on Tuesday, and I confess I am still not entirely clear about the status of a natural person who is registered at Companies House. The Minister said earlier that the figure of 10 operators out of over 2,700 was based on Companies House data. Forgive my ignorance, but I do not know what legal status an organisation registered with Companies House has if it is not a company. If it is a company, I am not sure what the status of a natural person is.
The reason for these amendments is simple, as I set out before. It is based on a concern that, without these amendments, the Bill will limit the number of people who are prepared to take senior management responsibility in such providers and will lead to providers exiting the sector. I may have misunderstood what is meant by “an operator”—namely, that it is the owner of a business rather than the senior management—but perhaps the Minister could clarify both those points when she sums up.
Amendments 142B and 142C would limit the maximum fine for a provider to 10% of its turnover and, if imposed on a natural person, to £100,000. We have heard that margins in the children’s home sector average 22%, although in the LGA-commissioned report this figure is taken from, the range of margins is very wide. If we took 10% of a company’s turnover and accepted an average margin of 22%, that would be almost 50% of its profits, which surely is a very strong incentive to avoid being fined. Can the Minister set out what level of fine the Government expect to impose and what the criteria will be for different levels of financial penalty?
Amendments 504A and 505A would delay the commencement of Clause 15 until the Secretary of State has published a report that sets out the current levels of capacity in independent children’s homes, independent fostering agencies and, perhaps, based on the Minister’s remarks on Tuesday, supported accommodation. Again, I wonder whether she could confirm that last point.
The report would also need to have an impact assessment on the number of available placements in relevant homes or agencies. I am definitely not an expert on regulatory impact assessments, I confess, but the Government’s own regulatory impact assessment has, to my amateur eyes, clear gaps; hence the need for my Amendments 504A and 505A.
In the section of the document titled “Expected impacts on businesses”, it states:
“It is not possible for the department to monetise the impact of any future profit cap at this stage. This is because the impact will depend on both the level at which any future cap is set and the market conditions—including profit levels, supply and demand and diversity of provision—at the time that a cap were introduced. Attempting to include straw man figures at this stage—far in advance of any decision about whether or not to introduce a profit cap—would be unhelpful and would have the potential to adversely impact the market by driving providers to make incorrect assumptions about the future level of any future cap based on such figures”.
My amendments would bridge this gap by requiring the publication of an impact assessment when the Government are clear on what their approach to a profit cap will be and by capturing the baseline data on capacity so that the impact of a future cap can be analysed and understood.
My reason for questioning the approach to capping profits as set out in Clause 15 is based partly on the concerns expressed by the Competition and Markets Authority. It was very clear in its report that
“taking measures that directly limit prices and profits, would further reduce the incentives of private providers to invest in creating new capacity (or even to maintain some current capacity)”.
I wonder what assessment the Government made of this risk which led them to ignore the CMA’s advice. Can the Minister set out what impact the department believes this measure will have on investment in sector? What do the latest figures show?
More broadly, there is an important point of principle here. As David Rowland, the director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, wrote in a blog published by the London School of Economics in December 2024, if the Government decide that one sector has excessive profiteering and will cap the level of profit in that sector,
“there is no good reason for it not to be extended to other areas as well”.
I wonder what other areas the Government might be considering. David Rowland’s work has highlighted other areas where companies are profiting from—I quote the right honourable Secretary of State for Education—the trauma and abuse of
“some of the most vulnerable children in our country””.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/11/24; col. 27.]
This includes in the management of sexual assault referral centres which serve children, where he cites one business as generating 25% margins after tax—much higher than the 22% margin on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation generated by the average children’s home. Might this be an area in which the Government are considering profit caps?
It would also be helpful if the Minister could confirm what operating margin, as opposed to EBITDA margin, the Government think is acceptable for operators of children’s homes, independent fostering agencies and supported accommodation. What is the figure for operating margins today? The figures in the LGA-commissioned report that the Government reference in their regulatory impact assessment are for earnings before interest, depreciation, amortisation and tax, and date from 2023. They are for around the 20 largest providers only. Why have the Government not done their own analysis of profitability across the sector, rather than relying on an external document that is two years old and looks at only part of the sector?
On Tuesday, after I gave my back-of-the-envelope figure of, from memory, £500 million or £600 million, the Minister quoted the sector as having a combined EBITDA of £310 million. But this figure from the Government’s own report, which is taken from the LGA’s analysis, covers just the 19 largest providers of children’s homes. The report goes on to say that the top 22 providers own 40% of children’s homes. That, of course, will not necessarily equate to 40% of profit, but it seems clear that £310 million is not the right number. The Minister should set the record straight at some point—if not now, then in a letter.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Scott of Needham Market) (LD)
The noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, has the right to reply.
Baroness Longfield (Lab)
I have already indicated my intention to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply.
On the point of principle—why you would put a profit cap on one area of the economy where you think there is profiteering on the back of vulnerable children, but not on another—the Minister said that there was no intention to extend this; indeed, she said that she hoped it would not be used. I certainly agree with that, but I do not really understand why, where children have been sexually assaulted or raped and companies are making far higher profit margins than the ones we are talking about here, the Government would choose to apply a profit cap on one and not the other. That does not feel very coherent to me.
I also felt that the Minister was slightly selective in the quotes she chose to identify from the Competition and Markets Authority report. The CMA was clear that it thought that a profit cap was not a good idea. I would also like to clarify something for the record. I think the Minister suggested that I said that current margins were driving supply. I said that current margins, according to the recent data, are uneven and actually falling, so I did not suggest that they were driving supply.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Longfield Excerpts(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
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Baroness Longfield (Lab)
My Lords, my Amendments 108 to 116 focus on the distance from home of placements for children in care, and the impact of the move to regional care co-operatives. I welcome the move to regional care arrangements of this kind, as well as the significant increase in investment in children’s social care in last week’s spending review. Put together, they offer a real opportunity to power up on the delivery and implementation of the MacAlister recommendations for children’s social care, with real improvements to the experience of and outcomes for children in care.
The distance from home that some children in care have been placed in has, as many noble Lords will know, been an issue for some time. Local authorities across the country have faced increasing challenges in delivering sufficiency of places near to home in recent years, due to increasing demand, rising costs, cuts to early-intervention funding, and workforce challenges, leading to what can be seen only as a broken care market.
The national issue has had a significant impact on the experiences and outcomes of children in care, who too often are moved to homes that are unable to meet all their needs or moved far away from those who matter most to them, due to a shortage of appropriate options. Between 2013 and 2024, the number of children in care living more than 20 miles from home increased by 66%, compared with a 23% increase in the overall number of children in care during the same period. In 2024, more than a fifth of all children in care and almost half of those living in residential care were living more than 20 miles from home.
Research from the charity Become has highlighted that children living in private children’s homes were two and a half times more likely to be living such a distance from their community than children living in other residential care settings. We have talked before about the negative impact of being separated from communities, support networks, friends, families and schools, and what that can bring—exacerbating adversity in a whole range of different issues.
The move to regional care co-operatives is, as I said, welcome, and is an opportunity for better planning. But there is a risk that without effective mitigation, the proposal to regionalise the commissioning and delivery of homes for children in care could lead to more children being moved far from their support networks in communities but within the region. I know that that is not what anyone wants.
That is why I have tabled these amendments, which, taken together, would provide an important mitigation to stop children in care increasingly being moved far away from their support networks but still within the region. I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister and her team would consider these changes to provide children in care the surety that they can stay close to those with whom they have relationships and to support networks when that it is in their best interests.
Lord Meston (CB)
My Lords, following on from that, I too wish to support those amendments directed specifically at ensuring placement of children close to home, both in this group and the next. Quite simply, state intervention in the life of a family should, if possible, make things better, not worse. Recent figures from the Department for Education show that one in 10 looked-after children experience three or more placements in a year; this is described as “high placement instability”.
There is already in Section 22C of the Children Act an important requirement to accommodate children close to home. It is recognised that such proximity increases the prospects of a child being later returned home. When a child is accommodated away from home and from parents, and away from a familiar area, some parents become unable or unwilling to provide any further support and they disengage, or at least they give up on active engagement.
There will remain a need for interaction between the local authority and parents. Parents retain parental responsibility and, even if they do not do so, they should be encouraged to remain involved and see themselves as able to remain involved. That is likely to be reassuring for the child and meet that child’s continuing attachment needs. However, parents and wider family members cannot be expected to maintain involvement unless the placement of the child is reasonably accessible to them. Phone and digital contact are no real substitute.
I suspect the Minister might say that the obligation under Section 22C is already referred to in the Bill, but I would support the suggestion that it should be emphasised and reinforced by these amendments. I also support Amendment 117B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, which would ensure that the Bill does not detract from the duty in Section 22C(7) of the Children Act.