Children’s Social Care Implementation Strategy (Public Services Committee Report)

Debate between Lord Evans of Rainow and Lord Carter of Coles

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carter of Coles (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been a harrowing privilege to serve on the committee that produced this report. Before moving on, I pay tribute to the highly consultative but steely chairing of this inquiry. It has been extremely well done, and we are all very grateful to the committee clerk, Sam Kenny, and Tom Burke and Claire Coast-Smith, who have really backed us up and have been tremendous.

Going back a little bit, many years ago in my late teens I spent a number of vacations working in a home for children in care. The local authority was the LCC, now redundant, and the model of care, now redundant, was a large campus with hundreds of children, based on the public school model of houses, playing fields, a chapel and a lot of open space. Since then, we have moved on; we have moved people back into the community by and large and have provided local services—standards have improved. But here we are at a moment of inflection, when radical change is needed: just as it occurred all those years ago when we changed the model of care, we have to do it again. So we have this opportunity—and the MacAlister report showed us the way. However, as other noble Lords have said, it could be characterised as high on ambition and aspiration, but I do not quite see how it is going to happen. I shall return to the money in a minute.

I turn to the question of pace. It is wonderful— I sometimes wonder whether all government reports are like this: you commission a report, you buy a bit of time, you consult, you buy a bit more time, you run a pilot, you buy a bit more time, then it fades away—time and again. This, however, has to be different, because this is a critical group of people.

I want to touch quickly on four areas, which cover the generalities. First, there are 13,000 children in residential homes. That is still an enormous number. There should be better ways of caring for them. However, while we have them, we also need better regulation. We need to see what Ofsted is doing to develop that inspection framework. Another point is proximity. Those children are often sent away to care homes that are remote, and they are often remote because the property is cheap. In other services, proximity has become key. We should be moving the children closer, not only culturally but physically, to where they come from.

Other noble Lords have talked about voice. We heard about some very moving cases. It seems that, at both the micro and macro levels, the voices have not been listened to. We need to get out there. Again, the concept is there; we know that we need to develop opt-out advocacy services. We need to develop these things, and it should be a question of when, not if. It is easy just to say the policy.

Other Members have touched on workforce. How can we be 7,900 people short? That is bound to lead to bad care being provided. Similarly, in residential care, people are badly paid and the churn is colossal. There may be the right number of people for the CQC inspection, but the fact that some are coming and some are going obviously affects the quality of care. Can the Minister say when the shortfall in care workers will be eradicated? Are we paying enough? How do we get this level of temporary labour down. It is amazing—it is a sign of a bad system.

For me, perhaps the most important thing—beyond early intervention—is kinship care. The report touched on this. Some estimates show that there are about 150,000 to 200,000 in such care, as opposed to 57,000 in foster care. This is a worthy thing of course—it is how families used to do it; they would group together. In recent times, the funding has made that much more difficult; it is patchy and depends on the postcode. We need to see what we can do about that. A review is due, so let us hope it is comprehensive and has some money attached to it. If, however, it is another aspiration and another pilot, taking longer and longer, we will fail to grasp the opportunity. This is a terrible situation. Often, a grandparent is taking a grandchild, and it often means the grandparent walking away from their own children; they are separated from them. That is harrowing, and we need to back those people up as far as we can and as quickly as we can.

As others have said, it all comes down to being long on aspiration. It would be really helpful to put some dates on things, and then put some money behind it all, so that progress can be monitored rather than the can constantly being kicked down the road. Pace and ambition have been mentioned but, for me, it is about the practicality of how we do it. As ever, we know what to do; the fault often is that we do it only once. This is about taking forward a national programme.

I end quickly by quoting Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead—many noble Lords may have read it. She says in her dedication:

“For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who've lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you”.


I hope that the Government can make it for them as well and move on.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I briefly interrupt to remind noble Lords that there is a five-minute advisory speaking time. There have been some wonderful speeches and we want to hear everyone in the fullness of time.