Care Crisis Review

Debate between Anna Turley and Lucy Allan

Wednesday 5th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the findings of the Care Crisis Review.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David.

I take the opportunity to put on record my thanks to the Minister for his recent announcement about the new exploitation unit. I know that he will continue to work closely with the Home Office on the exploitation of vulnerable children, and I am extremely pleased with how well he understands his brief. When he has appeared before the Select Committee on Education, he has been passionate about his commitment to children in care. He shares my passion, I know, to do everything possible to support and strengthen families. That is why he has engaged with the findings of the care crisis review. I would like to build on that and ask the Minister to acknowledge the scale of the problem, with alarming numbers of children being taken from their families and placed in state care. I would also like him to acknowledge the apparent lack of a long-term strategy to address the problem.

Although money is never the whole solution to any problem, I urge the Minister to commit to funding early support for struggling families and to ensure that the funding is ring-fenced so that it is not eaten up by statutory crisis interventions. The care crisis review was facilitated by the excellent Family Rights Group, which does so much important work in this area, and funded by the Nuffield Foundation. It was undertaken in response to the unprecedented increase in the number of children being taken into care, as a way of finding a series of solutions to bring about change. It has come up with 20 solutions—I will not go through all the findings because the Minister is familiar with them, but I will highlight one or two that I urge him to take on board.

Over the last 10 years, in the wake of the tragic case of Baby P, there has been a dramatic and consistent increase in the numbers of children being taken into state care. The figures show something like a 151% increase in 10 years of children in child protection investigations, and 73,000 young people in care in 2017—those figures are higher for 2018, although the numbers are not yet out. That translates into 90 children a day being taken into care. That is not sustainable and it is not necessary. Often, taking children into care helps councils and social workers to be protected from any accusations of failing to act, but sometimes it is not necessary.

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. She makes a really important point about the number of children being taken into care, sometimes unnecessarily. Does she agree on the importance and value of kinship carers and wider family support networks? At the moment, there is patchy and inconsistent support for those families. Many do not get the financial support and counselling they need to take care of their children and to keep them out of the care system.

[Lucy Allan]

The hon. Lady has done wonderful work in Parliament promoting the role of kinship carers. She is absolutely right: the opportunity to explore other avenues before taking children into care is often overlooked. Too often, social workers say, “This person won’t be suitable,” but they have not actually done the due diligence to determine whether extended family can be supported to help keep a child connected with their identity, school, friends and network. All those things are so important to the stability of children. I hope that the hon. Lady will continue to do work on kinship carers. If I can assist her in any way, I would be more than delighted.

It used to be considered that increasing the number of children in child protection investigations or taking more children into care was a good thing. Thank goodness we no longer think that way. Clearly, it places intense pressure on children’s services and on the family court system. Too often, statutory intervention does nothing specific to help a family and is more punitive than supportive. Often, it is all that is available at the end of a long process. If all we can offer struggling families is care proceedings, of course they will not engage and work collaboratively with social workers.

Children in Care

Debate between Anna Turley and Lucy Allan

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to take steps to help reduce the number of children entering the care system by bringing forward measures to support more children to remain safely at home with their family or extended family.

I am most grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this debate to take place. The voices of children in care and their families are rarely heard, yet they are among the most vulnerable in society and have the greatest need of representation.

Over recent years, steadily rising numbers of children have been taken into care. There are now 70,000 looked-after children in this country. The rise began in response to the very tragic case of baby Peter Connelly in 2008, but has since continued. Some argue that an increase in the number of children in care shows that local authority children’s services are getting better at identifying those at risk of harm, and that it must therefore be a good thing, but we need only look at the outcomes and life chances of care leavers to realise that a childhood in care creates its own risks.

I could cite many deeply saddening statistics on levels of poverty, addiction, suicide, poor educational attainment, over-representation in the prison population, and higher levels of mental health difficulties compared with the population as a whole. However, perhaps the saddest statistic is the number of care leavers whose own children are then taken into care. There is a self-perpetuating cycle of loss, with wounds that never heal, when the bond between parent and child is broken. Children in care will tell us of multiple fostering placement breakdowns, the sense of being unwanted, unloved and abandoned, the loss of identity in being split up from their siblings and grandparents, repeat changes of schools and loss of friendship circles, and the feeling of never truly belonging.

The tragic, high-profile cases of child abuse and neglect have left professionals with an entrenched fear of getting it wrong. Understandably, they face significant pressure to take steps to secure the removal of children rather than finding the optimal solution for every child. I say that if the state is going to intrude in the private family life of an individual, it must guarantee better life chances for those children. Of course the welfare of a child must always come first, but in many cases their welfare is best served by staying with their parent, if that parent can be supported properly, rather than facing an uncertain future in care.

Instead of supporting a family when experiencing stress, the situation may be left until a crisis point is reached, and then the family experience compulsory state intervention. Inevitably, this is a time of scarce resources for local authorities, but it is hard not to argue that prevention is better than a life in care.

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Lady join me in thanking and paying tribute to the many thousands of family members around the country who step in and support children when the parental relationship has broken down? Those kinship carers, as they are known, do a fantastic job, and we would like to see more support for them, perhaps on an equal partnership basis with those who adopt. They save the state an awful lot of money and give kids a life chance they might not otherwise have had.