Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sure that I am not the only person in this House who has been inspired by the noble Lord’s work over decades, and I thank him deeply for that and for the leadership and hope he brings in this area. I will pass on his remarks to my colleagues in the department.

I would say two things in response to his reflections. First, investment in preventive services is absolutely critical and we will be reviewing that in detail. Secondly, we also need to push ourselves to understand the local authorities prioritising those services, how they are making that work and how we can replicate that across the country. The noble Lord will be familiar with the Hertfordshire family safeguarding model; there are other early intervention models in Leeds and other places around the country. We want to understand those too so that we can act on evidence of what actually works in practice. On the commitment from the Secretary of State and the ministerial team, I cannot underline strongly enough how passionately we aim to address this.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank Josh MacAlister, his team and all the people from within the system he worked with. Josh came to the Public Services Committee, which I chair, as part of giving evidence in our review of vulnerable children.

There are so many things I want to put to the Minister today. Maybe she can help me get a debate on the Floor of the House on our report, and then I will not feel as if I am short-changing the vulnerable children I want to argue for. I will concentrate on one issue only: how do we prevent children having to go into the system? However good it normally is, children suffer when they go into the care system. Our committee uncovered that, since 2010, £1.7 billion a year has been cut from early intervention and prevention services. That was largely for two reasons. First, the overall money going in, particularly to local authorities—whether for children’s centres, youth work or other prevention programmes—was under pressure. Secondly, because they were not statutory responsibilities, authorities shifted the money to the statutory responsibility for looked-after children. Therefore, children have become older as they enter the system. I can tell noble Lords that difficult adolescents are much more difficult to deal with than very young children. Will the Government introduce a system which will ensure that money can go to early intervention and prevention services for the long term and will not be allowed to be switched into crisis work?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right to focus on how we prevent children needing to go into the care system or, indeed, needing a social worker at an earlier stage. I highlighted the Secretary of State’s three priorities in response to this report, the second being supporting families to raise their children effectively, happily and in a way that enables them to thrive. One of the strengths of the report is its emphasis on relationships and whether the immediate family—or the wider family—can provide those stable relationships, and how we can create them. As the report uses the term “relentlessly focused”, we must ask: how do we have a relentless focus on those relationships?

We will follow up on all those issues, but in the meantime—we were pleased that Josh MacAlister acknowledged the value of the programme—as we announced in April, we will back the supporting families programme with an additional £695 million over the next three years, which will support 300,000 families to provide the safe and loving homes their children need, as well as other investments in family hubs and other early intervention.