Children’s Social Care

Lord Laming Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Laming (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on this encouraging and very ambitious Statement on the development of services for families and vulnerable children. If it is implemented and put into practice, it will be good for children, good for families and good for society.

Will the Minister do all she can to rebuild the family support services that have been robbed of so much of their resources, and rebalance children’s services away from ridiculously expensive and very distant residential care, in order to ensure that there are preventive services to reduce the ever-growing number of children coming into public care? The continued increase of children coming to public care ought to alarm us. What we need is a better balance between preventive services and coming to care, so that when children do come into care, they are given the opportunity of living in a substitute family, be it kinship care or fostering care, and so that residential care is not robbing the other key services that we so much value.

I will ask the Minister one question. This is an ambitious Statement, and it has attracted widespread support. Is the Minister willing regularly to update the House on what progress has been made? Most of us see this as both a great opportunity and a great challenge, and we do not want that challenge to be lost.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, who has done as much as anybody to improve the lives of vulnerable children, for his recognition of the principles that lie behind this Statement, which are exactly as he says: to prevent children getting into the statutory system in the first place by bringing in services and support for families much earlier on, and by ensuring that all agencies are working together to provide for that. We will of course bring forward the legislative elements of this Statement in the children and well-being Bill, which we hope to introduce when parliamentary time allows. I said to the noble Baroness the other day that we announced it in the King’s Speech and I hope and expect that it will be introduced reasonably soon.

Whether or not it is a formal update, I have no doubt, given the interest noble Lords have shown in this area of work since I have been in this House, that there will be ample opportunity for me to update the House on the progress we are making on what he rightly says is a very ambitious and wide-ranging programme of reform.