Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Debate between Lord Weir of Ballyholme and Lord Watson of Invergowrie

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, we find ourselves at a time described by the report of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care as

“a once in a generation opportunity to reset”

the delivery of children’s social care. With the first half of this year witnessing the publication of three major reports on the subject, that statement does not sound like hyperbole.

In March, the Competition and Markets Authority issued the findings of its market study, which declared that action was needed on what was described as the

“dysfunctional children’s social care market.”

Last year, the Government asked Annie Hudson, chair of the national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, to conduct a national review into the shocking deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson. Her recommendations were published in May, calling, inter alia, for the Government to ensure that systems, processes, leadership, culture, and wider services were enablers for our safeguarding professionals, and not barriers placed in front of them.

May also saw the publication of the independent review, led by Josh MacAlister. It involved a fundamental examination of the needs, experiences and outcomes of the children whom the system should support and, to quote again from the report:

“What we have currently is a system increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise.”


The review delivered an ambitious report which is forensic in its detail, containing more than 70 recommendations, many based on the evidence that emerged from the involvement of care-experienced young people. That in itself makes the report stand out, because care-experienced young people should have their voices heard in decisions made about them.

I welcome the thrust of the report and almost all its recommendations. To accentuate the role of families, there is a proposal for a “family network plan”, where a local authority can fund and support extended family members to care for a child. The report focuses on enhancing local integrated help for families, with social workers at the core of providing this help.

There is a clear distancing from the commercialisation and excessive profit-making from the care of children, including a call for a windfall tax on organisations doing so. The CMA report to which I referred also highlighted the high prices often paid by local authorities when placing children, and found that the cause of this was to some extent the fragmented system by which services are commissioned. It also pointed to the role, and financial fragility, of private providers of children’s homes, particularly those financed through private equity. I was pleased to hear the Minister say in your Lordships’ House on 7 November:

“I have to say it sticks in my throat to have private equity investors who are responsible for considerable distortions in the children’s home market”.—[Official Report, 7/11/22; col. 449.]


I have to say it sticks in my throat that there is such a thing as a children’s homes market, but I suppose that is a debate for another day.

There are more children needing help from children’s social care than ever before and the numbers continue to rise. Figures published by the DfE show that in 2022 in England there are more than 404,000 children in need, more than 50,000 on child protection plans, and a total of 82,170 children looked after by their local authority. All those statistics show an increase on 2021. In 2022, 38% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 were not in education, employment or training, compared to around 11% of all young people in that age group.

The Government should implement an integrated, top-to-bottom reform programme, to improve the system at every level for vulnerable children and families. As outlined in the report, there needs to be a radical reform of family help, to ensure that the system is able to reach more families before they reach crisis point. It recommends a major investment to support local authorities to transform family help. I welcome that, together with the further recommendation that the Government should ring-fence funding to ensure that the rebalanced investment is sustained.

Appropriate recognition is given in the review that

“The greatest strength of the children’s social care system lies in its workforce.”


Children’s services social care is able to function due only to the long hours that social workers and their managers work, but this was under intolerable strain even before the pandemic. Almost 5,000 full-time equivalent children’s social workers left their roles in the year to September 2021. Levels of pay, working conditions, negative and hostile media coverage and poor public understanding of social work are critical issues. In some parts of the country, the level of abuse and threats directed toward social workers has been appalling, and this can only undermine the work needed to keep children safe and to support families. The Government have a central role in raising awareness and must consider how to improve public understanding of social work.

There is some concern about the proposed restructure of commissioning and the move to regional care co-operatives. This could be a costly—

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

I thank the noble Lord for giving way briefly. He mentioned the central role of social workers, and an important part of the report deals with training recommendations for social workers. Does he agree that it is also important that all those involved in social care provision be given training in trauma-informed practice? That would be of value when dealing with young people. In Northern Ireland, we are seven years in to the children’s services co-operation Act. There has been good co-operation at departmental levels, but that has not always permeated down to practitioners. It is important that any implementation of integrated services deal with not simply the strategic level but the grass-roots level, which deals with individual cases.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

Absolutely. There is no substitute for formalised training, or on-the-job experience of situations in which children in need find themselves and how they got there.

I was talking about the proposed restructuring of commissioning and the move to regional care co-operatives. This could be a costly reorganisation that moves decision-making further away from children and young people and the people who know them best, without tackling the supply problems or the excessive levels of profit made by the largest private providers. Such disruption would cause harm to those currently needing in-care and leaving-care services, and there is no evidence of benefit. There seems to be a lack of appreciation that foster care, residential care and kinship care are all different and need different ways of facilitating their provision. This recommendation lumps them all together because they are seen in terms of commissioning and not rights-based quality services.

Professionals must have the key role in supporting and protecting children and young people, and the professional development of social workers as part of the new family help teams is central to this, but there are many grass-root charities, for example, those that form the Centre for Social Justice Alliance, which are well-equipped to assist in providing the services children in their community need.

As noble Lords will know from the many briefings received for this debate, there is widespread opposition, cross-party as well as professional, to the review’s proposal to end the independent review service. This would mean abolishing the independent review officer role, independent child protection chairs and the Regulation 44 independent person. A robust reviewing and regulatory system does not undermine good care; it supports it. Removing independent reviewing officers from all children in care is dangerous. It goes against the evidence base and against the wishes of children and young people. IROs are experienced social workers who scrutinise local authorities’ care and decision-making in respect of individual children and their families.

The National Youth Advocacy Service is concerned that ending Regulation 44 visits could risk the safety of children and young people living in residential care homes. The review proposes that strengthened advocacy in residential children’s homes could replace Regulation 44 visits. However, the two roles are significantly different, as advocates provide voices for children and young people, while Regulation 44 visitors must take a more holistic view of a home’s practices. I recall similar proposals being contained in the Children and Social Work Bill 2016. Labour and others in both Houses fought it off then, and it should be fought off again. Local authorities need to be held to account, but independent review officers do that effectively. This is a bad idea, and it should not be endorsed by the Government.

On the other hand, one issue that the review unfortunately does not confront should be acted on by government. Any society should be judged by how it looks after its most vulnerable children who are in the care of the state. Latest official statistics on looked-after children, released last month, show that 37% of children aged 16 and 17 are living in unregulated accommodation where they do not receive any day-to-day care from staff. That is nearly 7,500 children. The figures show a 5% increase since last year, when Ministers ignored the arguments of noble Lords and prohibited the use of unregulated, non-care settings for children aged 15 and under but left those aged 16 and 17 unprotected.

Does the Minister believe that the best we can do for 16 and 17 year-olds who are in the care of the state is to put them in a bedsit on their own or pay for them to live in a property alongside adult strangers? How many of us here today would be content for our children and grandchildren to live in such accommodation as they complete their final years of compulsory education and training? These are children who have experienced tremendous loss and trauma, yet somehow the DfE has convinced itself that, unlike teenagers across the country being cared for by parents in the family home, they have no need for care where they live. It really is a scandal, and it should not be tolerated any longer.

It is a highlight of the report that it has made far-reaching recommendations on kinship care. The charity Kinship has found that 70% of kinship carers are not receiving the support they need to meet the needs of their children. I particularly welcome the recommendation in the report for a legal definition of kinship care. The review contains landmark recommendations for kinship care and recognises the need to improve support for families, particularly by introducing a financial allowance, kinship care leave and improved access to peer support and to training for kinship carers.

That said, the review could have made a stronger case for children in kinship care to be eligible for additional support like that provided to looked-after children, such as pupil premium plus, given their similar needs. It is to be hoped that that might be taken up by the Government in their response. That is one of the points highlighted by the charity Kinship in its Value Our Love campaign, of which noble Lords will be aware.

I note that, in its response to the report, the British Association of Social Workers welcomes the recognition that foster care can make a transformational difference to the lives of children and young people. However, the review uses the term “broken” to describe the current system, which the BASW points out is not helpful at all. Foster care is a very complex undertaking, and the current crisis of retention in foster care is not likely to be helped by that sort of language. To some extent, the same applies to foster carers and adoptive parents—not regarding the language, but the support given—both before and after they have taken on their role, to make sure they can do it most effectively.

The title of today’s debate also refers to the need for integrated care and support across all services. The report does not have a great deal to say about integrating services for children, although it helpfully suggests that the Secretary of State for Education should be responsible for holding other government departments to account and should report annually to Parliament on progress. I certainly agree with that.

I was told by an Association of Directors of Children’s Services officer recently that they deal with nine government departments, including Ofsted. There really needs to be more effective Whitehall integration in the delivery of children’s services, and indeed locally. Local authorities, adoption and fostering agencies, social workers, schools, GPs, the wider NHS and the police should all pool resources and pull together to ensure that there is as little duplication as possible and the chances of children falling through the cracks are minimised.

The new Children’s Minister, Claire Coutinho MP, said last month:

“We have also been working closely with other departments across government to rapidly agree on an ambitious and detailed implementation strategy”—


that is, for this report—

“that will respond fully to all three reviews. Ministers from across government are engaged on emerging policies and will agree on the final implementation strategy in due course.”

That is good to hear because, quite simply, the network of support for vulnerable children should be cast as wide as possible.

Before drawing to a conclusion, I want to thank the many organisations that have sent me and other noble Lords their priorities for today’s debate. Having no staff, noble Lords depend on such briefings. They do not only emanate from what might be termed mainstream charities. For example, the review is also of concern to Hope instead of Handcuffs, which campaigns for young people living in or on the edge of care to have the right not to be restrained when being transferred between settings; and to Pause, which works with women who have experienced, or are at risk in future of experiencing, children being removed from their care. A vast array of organisations exists to support vulnerable children and young people, and we are indebted to all of them.

The first step by the Government must be to accept that the £2.6 billion referred to by the MacAlister review is a necessity. That may not be enough but, without secure and stable funding guaranteed to all local authorities, any moves to fund one part of the system will be stolen from other parts—and nowhere is funding currently adequate.

The Government established a national implementation board in July without first announcing what they intend to implement. The Children’s Minister in another place stated recently that she had chaired a meeting of the board last month. What was discussed? Will the board set out plans for public consultation through Green and White Papers? Can the Minister provide approximate timings for when their proposals for children’s social care will be put out to public consultation? Children’s organisations briefing noble Lords for this debate have mentioned the end of January. It is not really acceptable that they are better informed than parliamentarians. Have the review’s recommendations been discussed within Cabinet, and were they considered during preparation of the Autumn Statement? It seems not, as there was no ring-fenced funding for children’s social care in the Statement.

The review concluded that

“a radical reset is now unavoidable”.

Indeed. That reset of the system needs to enable it to act decisively in response to abuse, provide more help to families in crisis and ensure that those in care have lifelong loving relationships and homes. It is vital that reforms to the care system create greater stability for children in care, so that they can grow up in steady environments and maintain the connections that matter to them. The Government have a major responsibility now to make that happen.