Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

I close by congratulating and agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for sneaking in an amendment on Learn with the Lords, which I did not know was in the scope of the legislation, but which I put my name to.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendments in this second group comprise new clauses on accommodation and capacity in children’s residential care, and seek to improve the capacity and, of course, most importantly, the quality of provision for children and young people. I really welcome this rich debate. Time constraints will be upon me, but a lot of excellent points have been made and I will try to pick out the main ones that hold the whole group together.

Amendment 118, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would prevent local authorities accommodating looked-after children in homes or hostels where young people over the age of 18 also live. The placement of children under 16 in settings other than children’s homes and foster care, or other limited, regulated settings, has, as we have heard, been banned since September 2021. In April 2023, regulations were introduced for supported accommodation for 16 and 17 year-olds, setting national standards and registration requirements for providers. These regulations have been put in place to ensure that 16 and 17 year-olds can be placed in Ofsted-regulated, good-quality accommodation. If a provider is registered, local authorities can accommodate these older children in that accommodation, which may also be used for over-18s. The local authority will consider this when deciding on the suitability of the accommodation for the child. Looked-after 16 to 17 year-olds will continue to reside in foster placements or children’s homes if this best meets their needs. I will come back to that point on further amendments.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, for tabling Amendment 119 on boarding school places. I recognise that he is determined to put more oxygen into this space—this is the second time in just a few days that we have discussed this. Of course the Government want to ensure that all children are given the best possible opportunities to succeed, and we recognise how transformational boarding schools have been for some young people and can be in the future, but we do not believe, as I laid out before, that they should be the default for all looked-after children. I stress again that stable educational placements are crucial to ensuring consistency, well-being and educational outcomes in children’s lives. It is critical that we treat children individually and listen to their views on what they would like to happen. We must minimise disruption. Having said that, where a boarding school placement is in the best interests of that child, we want to ensure that we have that opportunity.

I repeat that this is why the Government continue to support the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation’s broadening educational pathways programme, which provides placement matching and brokerage services to children in need and looked-after children in state boarding and independent schools. It is a discussion that I know we will continue to have, but I acknowledge the comments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Meacher, in particular, that for some young people this will not be appropriate. We have to make sure that we are honest in that assessment when we look at the best provision. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, did an honourable job in his absence on our last day in Committee.

Amendment 129, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, seeks to widen local authorities’ sufficiency duty to include consideration of placements that are near to, as well as within, their area. This was spoken to by the noble Baroness and the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Russell. This theme runs throughout the amendments in this group. The amendment’s implicit support of the Government’s focus on placement sufficiency, including regional collaboration, is welcome. However, the existing duties on local authorities when providing accommodation for looked-after children already include consideration of proximity to the child’s home, so an amendment for this purpose is not deemed to be necessary.

Additionally, ironically, the amendment could lead to increased use of out-of-area placements, because the duty to ensure sufficiency of placements is no longer focused on local authorities’ own areas. Of course, this would not align with local authorities’ duty to provide accommodation within their areas where this is consistent with the child’s welfare. Finally, as we heard in the previous group, the amendment is not necessary to facilitate greater collaborative partnership working or to improve local sufficiency and the Government’s reforms of regional care co-operatives. Establishing effective regional partnerships is going to be important, and of course, the aim is always to assist local authorities with their work in this area and to ensure that they keep working with individual children, reflecting their needs.

I turn to Amendment 144, tabled by my noble friend Lord Watson. I have huge respect for his comments and for all the other contributions to the discussions this afternoon. We acknowledge that there are still inappropriate, unregulated placements out there and they are still being used. This is why the Government are so focused on investing in this area, and we have to make sure that we end these practices, which lead to so many unfavourable outcomes for young people. By way of trying to reassure, although we know that practice is not necessarily keeping up, placement of under-16s in formally unregulated accommodation was banned in September 2021. In 2023, regulations were introduced, as I have set out, setting national standards and registration requirements for supported accommodation, which is an option for 16 to 17 year- olds. All looked-after children under the age of 18 are now required to be in Ofsted-regulated or otherwise regulated accommodation. The majority of looked-after children continue to reside in foster placements, or children’s homes where this is the best option to meet their needs.

The amendment would actually remove the opportunity for 16 to 17 year-olds to develop their independence in a safe, supportive environment, and we do not believe that that is appropriate. I base those comments on talking to young people in my local authority area who came into the care system very late in their childhood. They believe that, where the accommodation is appropriate and regulated, this is the appropriate place for them to be. We need to respect that voice coming from young people themselves.

I stress that this is the basis of Clause 13: the belief that Ofsted needs additional enforcement powers and measures to help it bring this into being. Giving Ofsted the power to impose monetary penalties for breaches of the Care Standards Act, including for persons not registering their children’s social care establishment, is paramount. Registration is vital and ensures that children are safe, staff are checked and there is the right level of oversight through regular inspections. There are far too many vulnerable children living in settings where there is no oversight. Between April 2023 and March 2024, Ofsted investigated 1,000 unregistered settings, which tells us the scale of what we have to deal with. Ofsted can already prosecute people who run unregistered children’s services. However, this is a resource-intensive process and can take a very long time.

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[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I hope I can take it as good news that they are meeting next week with Minister Georgia Gould, so hopefully the purse strings will be loosened.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

The noble Lord may say that.

In my personal experience, there is no reason why local areas cannot put these arrangements in place. There have been circumstances with agencies in the past—I am sure this does not happen now—where police have gone into a situation of domestic violence, for example, and not even known that there were children hiding under the beds upstairs. That is the shocking result of a lack of joining up—of agencies not speaking to each other. Provisions in the Bill will go a long way to making sure that this becomes normal—a culture shift. It is normal to tell a school if one of its young people has a change of circumstances that could affect them in many different ways. I am delighted that Government Ministers are coming together, and we will await the outcome with interest.

Amendment 170 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, concerns the publication of a national capacity plan for children’s homes intended to highlight the issue of distance placements. I highlight the Government’s commitment to supporting local authorities to meet their sufficiency duty through a range of reforms that will boost system capacity and better meet the needs of children in their areas. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, and others added to the discussions on this amendment. While the amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual national capacity plan, it would also take significant local authority resource to collect, collate and submit additional information on an annual basis to inform the plan, all at a time when their resources for children’s services are rightly focused on implementing reforms to actively improve services. A range of complex contributing factors across the children’s social care system can lead to the use of distance placements, which the Government are addressing through reforms in the Bill and investment in fostering kinship care and local authority children’s homes. Paramount in these decisions is the issue of risk to the safety of the young person. Sadly, in some cases, distance is a necessary factor when considering placements.

Finally, Amendment 134B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, seeks to introduce a duty on the Secretary of State to carry out a review on the distinction in the planning regime between children’s homes and domestic dwelling-houses, and to consider whether it should be removed. I would like to reassure the noble Baroness that the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government continue to work together in this important area. In the last two years it has been clarified via a joint Written Ministerial Statement that planning should not restrict the timely delivery of children’s homes, and we have changed the National Planning Policy Framework to make it explicit that planning authorities must plan to meet the needs of looked-after children.

As we said in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, we will continue to make progress on further changes that support the delivery of children’s homes where they are needed. This includes data collection and an analysis to translate the data and work out how it needs to be used, which is often overlooked, I am sad to say. In my experience of dealing with an application for a small home in the ward I used to represent, we went out for intensive consultation with the residents living around the home. I am very pleased to say that, in the end, after some scepticism and reservation, when we went through it carefully and they met the people running the home and understood how many children would be there, it went through and was an enormous success. They came and asked how they could help to support the children in the home through their local connections. So there are reasons to be optimistic, but there is a great deal to do, which is why, as I have said before, we have this Bill before us. I thank everyone for their comments but, for the reasons I have outlined in these remarks, I hope the noble Lords will not press the amendments in their names.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, for that comprehensive reply. I think the most important amendment in this group was Amendment 144. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, we should not be looking at placing children in unregulated accommodation. We are taking powers in this Bill to deal with unregulated schools—quite rightly, and I hope a great deal better than we have in the past.

The idea that we are putting children into unregulated homes, or, as one of my amendments will address later, unregulated alternative provision, is really not acceptable. In Clause 30, we are giving power to the same local authorities that are making these placements to override parental judgment as to the best interests of their child. We really need to get our thinking straight in this area. Unregulated accommodation is not acceptable, particularly when we are talking about people charging at the level they are. We ought to be doing something clear about that in the Bill. I am glad that the Government say that they aim to end this practice, and that it should be done away with, but we need a stronger commitment than that.

I was glad to hear the support for boarding schools. I had a miserable time at my boarding school. I would rather have been on the barge of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, frankly, such was the quality of accommodation. But I have seen the hugely transformational effect it can have when it works well, so it is very much a matter of choosing the right child for the right school.

I hope my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton will pursue her campaign when it comes to the Planning Bill, because we need to be sharper than we are. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Russell, will pursue Amendment 165, which is so clearly achievable. If we are moving towards a consistent identifier for children, this is just the sort of thing that ought to be being done.

My noble friend Lady Cash was told that it would be a burden on local authorities to collect the data. I hope that the Department for Education will wander down the road to their friends at the science department and look at what they are doing with AI, because that sort of function of data collection is so much quicker, cheaper and easier if you design the right systems. It ought not to be a matter of cost; it ought to be a matter of course.

Lastly, I felt that that was a rather disappointing response to my amendment. I cannot see that it is ever going to be right to place a 17 year-old in an adult hostel. Children take a long time to grow up. A 17 year-old is not in a position to be with troubled 25 year-olds as their principal companions. I will look again at the Minister’s reply, but for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.