Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Watson for giving us the chance to have another look at this issue. I chair the Public Services Committee, which produced a report on vulnerable children earlier this year. It did not look at the care system in detail, because this review was going on. Josh MacAlister did give evidence to the committee before our report was published and again after it was published, in September. I congratulate him on the report before us. He was given the clear mandate to do this without talking about a lot more money. He made a proposal that would raise the money that is undoubtedly needed to change the system.

My committee and I felt that we need to face the fact that this crisis is getting worse. When we were doing the report, it was very clear that the pandemic was having a devastating effect on many children—not just those who were considered vulnerable at the outset of the pandemic. We know about the increased prevalence of mental health need among adolescents, and, now, about the number of missing children that services have simply lost. They do not know where they are. We know of children who have fallen further behind at school, and of those who have experienced increased domestic abuse in their families, during the pandemic. We also know that the number who are subject to grooming and county lines is estimated to have doubled in the last two years.

Critically, as colleagues have talked about, we had a real-terms reduction in funding for children’s and young people’s services after the 2010 election, whether that was in children’s or Sure Start centres. My committee paid tribute to Leeds City Council for resisting the pressure to close all its children’s centres, but youth work has virtually disappeared in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, addressed some of the evidence-based programmes. I introduced, I think, three evidence-based programmes when I was at the Cabinet Office, one of which was endorsed by every Prime Minister until Theresa May. They endorsed that programme, said it was working well and that it should be extended elsewhere, but then externalised it, so it has not disappeared totally, but almost has. We renamed that the Family Nurse Partnerships Programme. These were serious long-term programmes of prevention and early intervention, which would mean that children would not end up in crisis.

That is the issue and that is what this report demonstrates: local authorities, in too many cases, now have no money for early intervention and support, because the need for money for their statutory duties under the Children’s Act has diverted funding into that crisis work. This is most acute in the most deprived areas, and our report spells that out.

Following our second evidence session with Josh MacAlister, the committee wrote to the Minister on three issues. The first was to push the Government to establish long-term protected funding for early intervention. Unless we do that, what we have seen happen in the last decade will continue. Local authorities say they would like to do preventive work but, actually, have money to do only the crisis work. Unless we have protected funding for early intervention, we will fail family after family.

Secondly, we asked the Government to go ahead more quickly with the family hub proposal to embed early intervention and support for families in every community. I ask the Minister: how far have we got in meeting that commitment?

Thirdly, we must be more supportive of kinship care, because in the broken system we have, kinship care is in many senses a beacon of light with far better outcomes for children. I have a lot more to say about that, but it has been very well said, particularly by my noble friend Lady Drake; she and I have done quite a lot of work together on this.

The review makes it clear that the system is broken. I entered my professional career training as a family caseworker and was a family caseworker in Newcastle just after Seebohm, when we had the first social services department. The reality is that I left after about three years to divert into community work because, even then, it was not as easy as I think the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, was telling everybody. I had a hundred cases, which meant that I was unable to give particular, definitive attention, but I worked out very quickly that early intervention was far more important than trying to pick up the pieces, as we were doing then. I went into community and youth work from that beginning.

So I have long believed that the system does not deliver for children in the way it needs to. It needs to be transformed in order to give children the necessary opportunities. This will take significant investment, but I absolutely believe that simply throwing money at the status quo is not the answer. Can the Minister therefore assure us that this is recognised, that some of the ways of funding a better system outlined in the review are being seriously considered, and that, in recognising the need for this significant shift, the Government will properly fund it? That is what children need, what families need, and what this House should hold the Government to account for.