Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Young of Hornsey and Earl of Listowel

Monday 14th October 2013 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, this amendment would allow young people in care to remain with their foster carers until the age of 21 where they and their foster carers agreed to do so. I hope that it might be helpful if I give a couple of examples of practice in this area already. Before I do so, I would like to correct an omission that I made earlier. The Minister was kind enough to say some good words about my work in this area, and I omitted to thank him for them. I appreciated what he said.

I recall a couple of relevant episodes while on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked After Children and Care Leavers. One young man described his experience of being set up in independent accommodation. Pretty soon the local drug dealer had decided that he wanted to join this young man, and soon afterwards he lost his accommodation. I think that he also ran up a big back rent. A foster carer talked to me about a young girl who had been excited by the prospect of moving into independent accommodation at 17 or whatever, and his comment was, “Well, she was doing so well at school while she was with me, but now that she’s independent she obviously has other priorities”. We should try to normalise the experience so that it is what we would want for our own children: we want them to keep in touch with us and we do not want them disappearing goodness knows where, getting mixed up with goodness knows whom.

If I may make just one more comment, there has been a lot of concern about the experience of young women in care in recent years—the past 18 months, I suppose. One has to remember that many of these girls and women leaving care have had poor experience of men in their lives, and unfortunately many of them may turn to men who will not treat them well. For them this has been the norm and their experience. It has been striking for me, in recently meeting young women who have been allowed to stay with their foster carers past the age of 18, that they have a good continuing relationship with their male foster carer—and one can hope that they have a better model of how a man can relate to a woman than many of those who move out earlier.

Young people are living at home longer than ever, with an average of leaving home now at well over 24, yet many children in foster care, who are arguably among the most vulnerable in society, are still required to leave their foster home at the age of just 17. Those who get to stay past their 18th birthday are either the lucky few, funded by their local authority, or fortunate enough to have foster carers who can afford to offer them a home for free and support them out of their own pockets. Research shows that the longer a young person can stay with a foster family, the more successful they are later on. In 2011-12, only 320 young people remained with their foster carers past the age of 18, which is only 5% of care leavers; in the most recent year, only 10 more young people stayed put. It has been put to me that, in the current rate of progress, to reach the Government’s aspirations of 25% of young people staying put would take about 140 years.

Care leavers are more likely to be unemployed, young single parents, mental service users, homeless or in prison than those who grew up in their own families. This amendment to the Children Act 1989 is really important, in that it would allow young people to remain with their foster carers up to the age of 21. Staying Put has been piloted already in 10 local authorities across England, with great success. Young people who stayed with foster carers were twice as likely to be in full-time education at 19, compared to those who did not. Those staying put gave young people more control over their lives and their transition from care. Studies have shown that allowing young people to remain in care until 21 is associated with increased, post-secondary educational attainment, delayed pregnancy and higher earners.

The benefits to care leavers and to society of extending care have been found to outweigh the cost to government by a factor of at least 2:1, so staying put represents value for money. The department’s evaluation of the pilot found that to implement the policy nationally would require £2.7 million per year. This modest funding could be found partly through a smarter use of existing expenditure but, given all the burdens being placed on local authorities, it is only reasonable, especially as central government will be the greatest beneficiary in the long term, that a sum is set aside to enable local authorities to make the transition to this new arrangement, with many more—we hope that soon it will reach 25%—staying put.

To point out the saving to state-funded services, I turn first to housing. For every young person staying put with their former foster carer instead of independent living before they are ready, a one-bedroom flat is freed up locally, so this saves on local authorities paying rent on such properties in the private sector at high expense. Many care leavers who are forced to live independently before they are ready build up huge rent arrears, and that money is rarely recouped. Staying put is successful also in tackling the benefits cycle that young people are often at risk of entering. The one-to-one support and guidance offered by foster carers to young people in their transition to adulthood is crucial to ensuring that they can be helped on the road to becoming net contributors to society as adults, rather than a drain on resources. Those who stay put are more likely to be working full-time or part-time, or studying, and hence claim less housing benefit and income support.

The Children’s Minister strongly shares our belief that more young people should be allowed to stay with their foster carers for longer, and I am grateful to the Minister for taking a couple of occasions over the summer to talk to me about this issue. I recognise that the Government really want to see this happen, but they are in favour of a voluntary approach. As I have said, over the past year, only 10 more young people have taken up the Staying Put offer, so overall there has been a 0% increase because the number of young people coming into care has increased over the period.

What is happening is that, even in the current situation, many young people and foster carers have had to fight with their local authorities to allow and support Staying Put placements. We need an end to this postcode lottery. It is unacceptable that at a time when young people should be focusing on their education and training, as the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, said, they face doubt and anxiety over their future. Interviews with former pilots show that half had scaled back the provision, either by reducing the maximum age from 21 to 19 or by excluding NEETS, who are the people most in need of support and guidance. While I welcome the Government’s current interest in care leavers and the many important measures that they are bringing forward, I believe that without legislation, too few fostered young people will have a realistic chance of staying with their foster carers beyond the age of 18. This is a rare opportunity to change the law and ensure that the next generation of care leavers is given a better start in adult life. My parents would not have wished there to be any uncertainty that I would not get the support I needed to go through my education and go to university. I am sure that noble Lords as parents would also want to be certain that they could support their daughters and sons through whatever they chose to do during their transition to adult life. So far, I have not heard anything from the Government to reassure me that we will see this happen soon. If we introduce this provision in the legislation, within a short time we would see hundreds of young people on a better course as they left care. I look forward to the Minister’s response and I beg to move.

[Baroness Young of Hornsey]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. As I said earlier, it is part of a suite of amendments aimed at making the lives of young people in care more palatable. The idea of being told at the age of 16, 17 or 18 that you are going to be independent and that you will live in a flat, with minimal training in handling a budget and coping with the unwanted visitor referred to by my noble friend Lord Listowel who will derail your attempts to study or work, is unthinkable in relation to our own children. There is a concept that we should think of children in care or looked-after children as being our children, so we should do everything we can to ensure that they do not experience even more disadvantage.

I am not going to repeat all the statistics, research and evidence put before the Committee by my noble friend; suffice it to say that the Staying Put scheme was piloted in 11 local authorities. As he has said, the outcomes for the young people who stayed with their foster carers were significantly and substantially better than for those who were not able to do so. It gave them an opportunity to take more control over their lives and to make more successful transitions from care towards independent adulthood. The Fostering Network found that none of the pilot authorities reported significant problems with foster carer provision as a result of offering the Staying Put scheme, which I know is a concern that has been expressed by some people. While a minority did say that staying put would mean that in theory a former foster bed would no longer be available, it is often the case that foster carers plan to retire after the placement ends and would have been retiring at whatever age the young person left, whether or not it was beyond the age of 18. In addition, foster carer recruitment strategies have simply been amended to suit the new needs of the service.

I shall quote a leaving care manager who participated in the Staying Put pilot scheme. He said:

“Nowadays we do not even recruit foster carers who would not want to offer Staying Put. Indeed, because many of them now want to provide a Staying Put placement, we are keeping them happy and ensuring their future commitment to our service by allowing them to keep young people living with them. They see it as the natural and obvious thing for a professional fostering service to do and they want to play a part in that”.