Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness O'Neill of Bexley Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, in many ways the test of the Government’s success in reforming public services will be whether we can crack the tough nut of children’s social care. It has been quite clear from the debates on the last three groups that this is a major challenge. I declare my interests as the founding chair of Social Enterprise UK, and I am on the social economy APPG. I am an associate of Social Business International and, for the past 10 years or so, I have been working with leaders of social enterprises that provide public services.

I might have preferred to have made this speech in the earlier debate, at the beginning of the afternoon, but I am afraid I could not make it here in time for its opening. However, this is an appropriate group because we are talking essentially about procurement and finance.

As the noble Lord said earlier, I think it was in the previous debate, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, led by Josh MacAlister, described how the current system leads to unacceptable, poor outcomes for children and rising costs—private equity was referred to by the noble Baroness. It found that care packages are dictated by the market, not by children’s needs. Excessive profiteering has minimised resources and created public disgust. His central recommendation was for government to launch a reform programme, a radical reset to fix the broken care market, which has failed our most vulnerable children.

While I absolutely welcome the Government’s spending review commitments to fund family help, capital for residential care and fostering and other reforms linked to the MacAlister review, I feel that you cannot throw money at children’s social care and expect things to get better unless we actually also change. I want to see commissioners lever the well-evidenced voluntary sector, social enterprise and other forms of care to have a diverse marketplace in children’s social care.

At Second Reading I mentioned the wonderful Juno community interest company in Liverpool, Social AdVentures in Manchester and the Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust in London. All are boosting the life chances of our most vulnerable young people, and all exist for public service and benefit. They are efficient, entrepreneurial, transparent and accountable. They are sustainable and plough their profits into their social mission, often providing preventive and complementary services.

These organisations win tenders in open procurement processes yet are exceptions in a system that incentivises what you might call “social washing”—let me explain. Commissioners plan and design services to meet local needs and must consider social value when choosing providers, a concept brought into law by the social value Act, which I was very pleased indeed to help get on to the statute book, along with other noble Lords.

Scoring bids for social value means that public bodies consider and try to measure public and community benefits alongside value for money when they procure services we depend on, but in practice the system can be gamed or the process inadvertently rigged. Bidders promise outputs that they will never attain and do not achieve, and are barely held accountable.

Many commissioners know that social enterprises, co-operatives, mutuals, leisure trusts, employee-owned businesses, charities and trading charities deliver high-quality public services that meet community needs, and many have long wanted them to take a bigger role in public services. This chimes with the public’s view too.

The recent Procurement Act gave commissioners new tools and flexibilities and came into force in February this year after Cabinet Office Minister Georgia Gould introduced the national procurement policy and the social value procurement notice, which referenced the role of these kinds of organisations and the idea of codesigning with communities. There is no point in having the best regulation—which I am very proud of—if we do not use it and the opportunities it gives us. Commissioners can collaborate with social enterprise providers, charities and other businesses. Procurement regulations should be an enabler, not a barrier.

What in the Bill will allow this real change to take place? Do we need to strengthen the Bill in some ways to allow these redesigns to happen? In the earlier debate, I was very struck by the question of planning and so on—because of course it is the whole system that needs to be thought of. Might my noble friend the Minister organise a round table where we could address the new role of procurement to bring about the change we need in this particular marketplace before we reach Report?

[Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to support my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton on Amendment 134A. Noble Lords will not be surprised to know I shall be championing local authorities around the cost of children’s homes.

I want to give noble Lords a bit of a reality check, and to do so I am going to reference two examples. The first is about supported living for care leavers aged 21 to 25. They are nearly adults, need very little support and are very nearly independent. A semi-detached house is created that can take up to five young people with very little supervision. The cost for one young person in that provision is actually £500 per week. That is nearly as much as any landlord would get to rent out that property for a month: £2,000 a month. If you have got five young people in there, that is one hell of a profit margin. You can see why people go down that route and why we are having to grapple with the costs.

The second case is about a property that had been sought and used as secure accommodation with 24/7 support. It was another council that placed it in our borough. It was worth it getting the property and having 24/7 support for secure accommodation. Obviously, it had made the decision that either it could not afford to get that accommodation through normal routes or that this was good value. We first knew about it when we read police reports saying this young person, who is in 24/7 secure accommodation with two people, had gone missing. I was jumping up and down saying, “We’ve got a young child gone missing”. But it was not our child—we did not even know this young person was in our borough. That is expensive accommodation.

Earlier on, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said that you would know if people were placed in your borough—but you do not. I am sure the Minister will have something to say about that. In addition to the knowledge that this young person is placed in your borough, the cost of 24/7 care and accommodation for one person in your borough is phenomenal. Local authorities are not perfect, but we are grappling with some of these things on a daily basis, which push the costs up, and some of this transparency might deal with it. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I must apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, for missing her first few seconds. When someone said, “I want a quick word with you”, I should have jumped around them as opposed to trying to politely brush them off.

All these amendments are looking at financial control. It is probably overdue, but it is extremely difficult. It is a case of transparency. We need something in here, and, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has just pointed out, the Government are actually dealing with it on a last-minute, we-must-do-something basis. Having some control over that is an extremely sensible idea, but they will not get rid of the fact that it will have to be done through emergency contingencies or whatever. It is still going to happen that way. We are trying to extract from the Government the limitations of what they are proposing and to get it more on the record.

On my own amendment—I probably should have slightly reworded it—of all the things accused of costing too much, special educational needs spending is probably right up there, and often it is the private sector. It depends on what you are dealing with, because there is not a right sum of money for that.

I am on a committee looking at the Autism Act at the moment. I just went to see a school that had one full-time member of staff for every two pupils and TAs on top of that, because it is needed. Usually, the private support comes in to support somebody who has struggled in the education system—it may not be autism and it may not be that severe, but they are usually playing catch up and repair, to put it bluntly. So, they are going to have high staffing needs and it is going to vary from person to person. I would hope that this transparency may be a defensive thing from people who are providing a service that is needed.