Children’s Social Care: Enduring Relationships Strategy

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord knows from his experience about the range of traumas that young people, even those who have not been in care, may well be reflecting. As he says, severe mental health needs may be one of them. That is why we are introducing mental health support into schools at an earlier stage. It is why, through the Department of Health, there is investment in 8,000 new mental health professionals and the development of a mental health strategy to ensure that children and young people in particular are getting support with mental health challenges at an earlier and more effective stage.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement from the Government. It is uplifting to see the shift from being just the corporate parent to it being our responsibility—all our responsibilities—to ensure that for those children who enter the care system, for reasons we may not like and they may not like, we understand that the important thing for them is enduring relationships. I want to ask my noble friend about one aspect of the Statement in particular: long-lasting relationships. I have done work with Family Rights Group for many years now. It did the initial work on this, which has been followed up by Foundations, the What Works Centre, asking how you establish for young people in the last couple of years before they leave care a lifelong relationship.

All your children will have aunts, uncles, cousins and friends they can go to, even when they have fallen out with their mum and dad. These children have no one. I know from talking with them that, when they re-establish a relationship with a long-distance schoolteacher they had a good relationship with, or with somebody from their nursery or another area of their life, or they find a long-distance relative they did not know about, it makes an enormous difference. I know we are going to make sure that Ofsted is covering these things. Can my noble friend assure me that the slimmed-down Ofsted will have the resources to make sure these changes have the real effect that they are meant to?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

On the last point that my noble friend made, it is precisely because of the importance of accountability that we will work with Ofsted to ensure that the measurement of enduring relationships and the development of enduring relationships are at the heart of the inspection process.

My noble friend also makes a very important point that, particularly for those young people who are in care but have already lost their most important relationships, it is not enough to simply say that is there nothing we can do to help them rebuild those. That is the reason for the announcement in the Statement about what is described as the

“national sprint to roll out family finding services”.

Those services do exactly what my noble friend has said: they sit down with young people, talk to them about who is now or was an important link and support in their lives, and then help them to remake those links to those people, who will support them while they are young but, as my noble friend says, will also be the people alongside them as they go into adulthood.