Children’s Social Care

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq— I hope my voice is going to survive this. I thank the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for everything that she and the Committee have done on this fantastic report. It is a really important piece of work, and it has been wonderful to hear all the personal stories from people in this debate about this issue.

Children in care, and those at risk of being taken into care, deserve the very best start in life. They deserve the love, stability and support that every child should be able to take for granted, yet for far too long this country has failed them. The previous Conservative Government did not grasp the scale of the crisis in children’s social care. Their response to the independent review of children’s social care, which called for more than £2 billion to deliver whole system reform, amounted to less than a tenth of that figure.

That failure to invest is a failure to protect vulnerable children. It is also a false economy, because when we do not provide children with stability, we pay the price later in lost potential, poor health and lives that never had the chance that they should have had. The Liberal Democrats believe that every child deserves the opportunity to reach their full potential, no matter their circumstances. That is why we would make care experience a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010—so that young people who have been in care are not left behind or discriminated against, but recognised and supported.

We have also called for proper support for the 150,000 children in England being raised by grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings and friends—our kinship carers who step up when families fall apart. These carers deserve the same respect and resources as foster carers. We are calling for a weekly allowance equivalent to that for foster carers; paid leave for kinship carers when a child comes to live with them, just as adoptive parents have; and priority access to schools and pupil premium plus funding for the children in their care. Love alone is not enough; it must be matched with practical, financial and emotional support.

The points today on foster care have been particularly well made. My constituency is Frome and East Somerset, and we are desperately short in Frome, particularly of foster care places, which means many children have to go into residential settings, often very far from their home and hard for local people to access, as we have tricky rural bus routes and a lack of trains. It is also much more expensive for a struggling local authority.

Support for families has been undermined by the Government’s handling of the adoption and special guardianship support fund. That fund has been a lifeline, enabling traumatised children to access specialist therapy, healing and hope, yet earlier this year families were left in the dark for months about whether the fund would continue. It was only after Liberal Democrat pressure, led by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) with an urgent question, that the Government confirmed the funding for ’25-26. The truth is that the details of severe cuts were quietly slipped out once Parliament had gone into recess. The therapy limit has been slashed from £5,000 to £3,000, and a separate £2,500 allowance for specialist assessments has been scrapped. Support can also no longer be carried across financial years, robbing families of the flexibility they need.

For some, these consequences are especially devastating. Children with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which I have campaigned on, are among those most affected. FASD is a lifelong condition caused by exposure to alcohol before birth. It can lead to developmental delays, learning and emotional regulation difficulties and a range of physical and cognitive challenges. Many children with FASD are adopted or in special guardianship arrangements. They often require specialist assessments, ongoing therapy and expert support to manage complex needs.

The withdrawal of funding for those diagnostic assessments is catastrophic for those children. Without a proper diagnosis, they cannot access tailored support at school or appropriate interventions at home. The cuts to the adoption and special guardianship fund are therefore not just administrative tinkering; they are an act of neglect towards some of the most vulnerable in our society, including those living with FASD, whose future prospects depend on early and sustained support. We call on the Government to reverse these harmful cuts immediately and to reaffirm their commitment to adopted children, special guardians and kinship carers. Every child, whether in care, adopted or living with extended family, deserves the same chance to thrive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Josh MacAlister]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising what sounds like the very important idea for Georgia’s law. I would be really delighted to hear more from her about that. If there are aspects that I can take forward with Ministers in other Departments, I will do so.

Regarding information sharing, we are making big changes to set the expectations in different systems, so that they can confidently share information. We have a single unique identifier that enables that to happen. Those pilots are under way at the moment, and the Bill will allow for that.

We want to see support for care leavers that is consistent and strong. The Bill includes national Staying Close support, and we will set out soon more details about what that support should include and the expectations across the country for it. It will help care leavers to live independently, but I stress that one of the changes that I would like us to see as a Government is a shift away from always talking about getting care leavers to the point of independence, because what they actually need from the care system is not independence, but inter- dependence, connection, a sense of belonging and love. That should be the driving purpose of both care and the leaving care system. Many of the things we are trying to provide through a state function are much more naturally provided through organic family networks.

Specifically on the question about the Government’s recent announcement of support for higher education, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase, we will guarantee the maximum maintenance support for care leavers going to university, without a means test. That change, announced by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education at the Dispatch Box last week, has been widely welcomed.

Ofsted inspections will, and have already started to, provide a dedicated grade looking at the experience of care leavers, which means that there will be a focus on that.

On the question of the adoption and special guardianship support fund, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase and the Front-Bench spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset, I am attracted to my hon. Friend’s idea about wider support. There are options for wider support. I met adopters and adoption support staff myself in recent weeks, and especially during National Adoption Week, and there are a number of options. I want to bring forward a longer-term plan for the ASGSF, to provide confidence and certainty, and I want to continue speaking to Members of this House, but also to members of the adoption community and to special guardians, who are part of that community. We will come back with more detail on that issue, but I recognise the importance of what it provides.

[Anna Sabine]

Is there any chance that when the Minister is looking at the point about children with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, he could look at the fact that certain groups of children, with certain conditions, may require much higher levels of financial support than others to get the diagnoses they need?

[Josh MacAlister]

I certainly will. The recognition is there that we need to provide a children’s social care system that is able to intuitively wrap itself around all sorts of shapes and sizes of families, who may have very different needs. Too often, the system is not able to do that, and when it fails to, problems often escalate, costs go up and the state ends up picking up the bill anyway, but it is much greater, provision is much less effective and the outcomes are worse. So I do recognise the description that the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset has given of that.

On kinship care, we will be bringing forward a pilot for kinship allowances soon. It will benefit up to 5,000 children, and I can confirm that, as part of the pilot, payments will be equivalent to foster rates. I am looking at whether we can widen out some of the support that comes with that as well, and information on that will be shared soon, with a launch. Carers with special guardianship or child arrangements orders will receive payments equivalent to foster rates. I want to be clear about that. There will be an independent evaluation that goes alongside this, to inform the roll-out, and that should give us very strong data and hopefully a strong case in the course of this spending review period.

In terms of regulation and profit, I am concerned about the level of profiteering in the children’s social care system about the level of profiteering in the children’s social care system and the rising reliance on private providers, particularly of residential children’s homes. The Bill will strengthen Ofsted’s powers, improve oversight and make more data publicly available. I strongly believe that regional care co-operatives can be a powerful vehicle for getting back control of the broken care market. The Government will use the profit cap if necessary; that is why we have taken those powers in the Bill.

I understand the case made for a fresh, universal set of care standards that are more intuitive and that allow us to regulate and set packages of care around children, regardless of where they live, while they are in the care of the state. The Government’s focus at the moment has been on the Bill, but I will continue to look at opportunities to improve care standards. In the meantime, I want to make sure that the options for 16 and 17-year-olds meet their needs. During the review, I met young people who felt abandoned at 16 and 17 because of the type of accommodation they were in. But I have also met 16 and 17-year-olds who do not want the same type of children’s home care they may expect to get at the age of 11 or 12. We must design care standards that work for the whole population.

In terms of the children’s social care workforce, we are introducing changes to support those in the residential care system. Specifically on social workers, the Government have a sharp focus on improving post-qualifying support, so that we can build expertise through training, both to support the roll-out of multidisciplinary family help teams and to strengthen the expertise we need in multi-agency child protection.

Regarding disabled children, we will consider the Law Commission’s 40 recommendations, which have recently been published, and provide a full response. Regarding advocacy, changes will be made, but I am keen to look at what more can be done even once those have been shared. Advocacy can be an important and protective factor for many children who are in institutions where they do not feel as though their voices are heard.

To respond to the Chair of the Select Committee regarding family group decision making, the reason not to push for a specific model of family group decision making in primary legislation is that there is always the possibility in the next few years—I would love it if this did happen—that more impact evaluations come out that show a slightly different model of FGDM, which local authorities should have the choice to use.

As a Government, we are trying to build an infrastructure that sets the national framework with the outcomes that we want children’s social care to achieve; practice guides that lay out the best available evidence, and I hope to have practice guidance for FGDMs as part of the roll-out; and then an expectation, through inspection and accountability, that service designers and practitioners are following the best available evidence in order to achieve the outcomes set out by the Government. I hope that reassures the Chair of the Select Committee.

In closing, I give deep thanks to the Committee for its interest in this issue. Children’s social care is an area of Government policy that is often overlooked. On the eve of Care Leavers Month—this is the first time we are celebrating it as a month, with an Adjournment debate I am looking forward to taking part in—I thank everyone for their contributions, and I welcome their interest and challenge on this important set of changes. I reassure Members—as my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen asked me to—that this issue is my top priority, and I encourage them to get behind it, as part of a cross-party endeavour that can truly transform children’s lives.