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

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for her excellent introduction and the brilliant way in which she chairs the committee. I also thank her predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for her continued commitment to child social care. It is very rewarding to see.

Oddly for me, I also thank the Government for recognising that there is a crisis and for their willingness to take on board the urgency of the findings of the plethora of challenges outlined in Josh MacAlister’s independent review. Unfortunately, despite some positive recommendations, the Government’s response is neither radical, urgent or financially credible considering the scale of the challenge. Far too many calls for further evidence is incredibly disappointing.

The challenge was illustrated to me when the committee had the opportunity and privilege to meet a number of young people with direct experience of the current social care system. One highly articulate young woman, now aged 20, had, together with her twin sister and younger sibling, been placed in care at the age of 11. Her grandmother had previously cared for the children but was deemed unsuitable due to financial reasons—an issue for kinship carers that we highlighted in our report. After a year, the children were split up. The youngest child stayed, but the twins were put into residential care, only to be moved through four different foster homes before eventually being separated. “Stable homes built on love” is a distant dream.

On her journey, our witness was moved without explanation from inner London to a rural setting, where she felt totally out of place and was bullied. She regularly asked social workers to move her back to London and an urban environment, which did not happen until post-16, when she was moved to a hostel in London. To the committee’s amazement, she was not bitter. She recognised the challenges of the care system, but urged the committee to plead with the Government for the voices of children to be heard and for changes to be explained by those making decisions before the changes actually happened.

She commented to the committee:

“I am not a number, I am a person … we are all humans”,


as she reflected on the inability of the system to act as corporate parents and the lack of time that social workers have to work with individual children. What was so rewarding for me was that, despite the frequent changes, she had really enjoyed her schooling, had now secured a care leavers’ internship and was able to articulate her concerns just a few weeks ago on an ITV programme.

I have spent most of my adult life, 36 years, working in the most deprived areas of Leeds and Cleveland as a youth worker, teacher and head, and I know the price that society pays for its lack of investment in our most at-risk young people. More than half of children in care have a criminal record by the age of 24—four times more than those not in care—with 18% receiving a custodial sentence before they are 16. That is a staggering set of statistics. Only one in 50 of these children gained five GCSEs, and 92% had special education needs and disabilities.

It is so important to recognise that, to children in care, education is a vital key to help solve so many problems. But, as the recent findings of Action for Children reported, between 2019 and 2021 more than half of children with social care referrals failed either English or maths at GCSE. Trying to separate school from social care, when a third of a child’s early life is spent in education, is a gross mistake. They are part of the same. It is this need to fundamentally change how we approach the education and support of children in care that makes me urge the Government to think again about their funding proposals.

It is difficult to know what to think when an inquiry which looked at the whole detail looks for £2.6 billion, and we end up with £200 million to be spent over two years. It is really quite insulting to all the people who made such a commitment not only to our inquiry but constantly to the issue of trying to make a better life for children.

My worry with regard to this report, which I think has been well received not simply by the Government but by all the organisations involved in child social care, is that next year when we have a general election and things get knocked even further back, there will be yet another set of reports and ideas. What we will see is not 2026, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, indicated, but 2036 coming without a great deal of change. This is far too important for party-political diversity. It is such an important issue and we all, whatever our backgrounds and political requirements, must get behind this report and seek from the Government the sort of commitment they have. I plead with the Minister to ask young people what they think when they are in care, because that is one of the key principles that should be added to the six principles that they have quite rightly put in their answers.