Children’s Social Care

Debate between Lord Wood of Anfield and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I make no comment about the Treasury, but the noble Lord is right to bring us back to the most important element of these reforms: how we can ensure that we not only listen to children’s voices—he is absolutely right that they should be at the heart of our work—but do everything we can, cross-party and with local government, the voluntary and charitable sector and elements of the private sector that are providing a good service, to reform our system so that it puts children and their welfare at the heart of what is happening.

I am not quite sure what the noble Lord means by “children’s departments”. All local authorities have directors of children’s services and those who are responsible for ensuring that children get the services they need appropriately. We also have excellent social workers across the country who deserve credit, alongside those who support them, for their work in protecting and safeguarding our children and, as he rightly says, listening to them so that their voices can be at the heart of the reforms we are making.

[Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a question about a category of children who are perhaps the most vulnerable within the category of extremely vulnerable children: those who are subject to deprivation of liberty order. The Children’s Commissioner recently highlighted that the number of people for whom there has been an application for deprivation of liberty has doubled in the last three years, and the conditions in which some of these children are placed are really appalling: roughly 50% are in unregulated or illegal placements. I very much applaud the idea of integration, a comprehensive approach and clamping down on profiteering, but what is the plan for taking urgent action for the most vulnerable children in these appalling circumstances while the longer-term plan is assembled?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right: there has been an unacceptable increase in the number of children subject to deprivation of liberty orders. That is because there is not the often very specialised and regulated provision that is appropriate for them. That is why they need the order to place them in what is essentially unregulated provision. Going back to the urgent action that we need to take to increase the number of placements, I come back to the point I made about the £90 million additional investment. Part of its work will be to find new forms of secure accommodation that can safely, and with high quality, care for the sort of children my noble friend rightly brings our attention to.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Debate between Lord Wood of Anfield and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wood of Anfield]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to implement the recommendations of the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, reforming children’s social care is critical to giving hundreds of thousands of children and young people the best start in life. It is also necessary to achieve financial stability for local authorities. The previous Government oversaw the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in 2022. This Government have already moved quickly to set out our legislative programme. The children’s well-being Bill will deliver on our manifesto commitment to ensure that all children can thrive in safe, loving homes.

[Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer and say “Hello” to her with her new hat on. All of us know that the state of our children’s care system is totally unacceptable. It is a system with growing financial shortfalls, where rising numbers of placements squeeze spending on prevention and, most importantly, where the most vulnerable children in our country are, for cost reasons, being sent sometimes hundreds of miles from their home and their kinship circles. Can I ask the Minister about regulation in response to this? Last week, Ofsted said that it should be given the powers and resources to stop unregulated children’s homes, where hundreds of children currently reside, and to equip Ofsted to regulate private equity-run companies that increasingly dominate children’s care services, often based overseas and facing little regulatory oversight. Can the Government commit to meeting these important Ofsted demands?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is right, I am afraid, in his description of the enormous challenge in children’s social care at the moment, particularly by identifying the role of Ofsted. As I outlined in this House last week, Ofsted will be working closely with the children’s social care sector to determine how it can protect children in the way that he described. Also, on the particular challenges in the children’s social care placement market that my noble friend outlined, local authorities are facing enormous rising costs for these places and, as my noble friend says, for places which increasingly are not serving the needs of children. This Government are clear that excessive profiteering from vulnerable children in care is unacceptable. Through the legislation that we will bring forward, and through the regulation that he described, we will tackle this.