Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Watson for securing this important debate at such a critical time for children’s services. Understandably in recent years, the ongoing debate on adult social care has dominated discussions in local government relating to structure and funding, but there is now no doubt that the existing and accelerating crisis in children’s social care, with potentially even more hazardous consequences, needs the same focus and attention.

I pay tribute to all those social workers out there who are dealing with this crisis on a daily basis. I declare an interest: my own mum was a children’s social worker, so I saw this at very close hand.

I congratulate the chairman of the review, Josh MacAlister, on a wide-ranging and thoughtful review, which genuinely challenges the Government to properly fund the children’s social care system, as well as setting out a great deal of innovation and initiatives for improvement and a change of focus to prevention, which is really key and also needs to be funded.

The detailed nature of the report means that it is not possible to cover all the ground that it details in a short intervention in this debate so, as I am still a serving county councillor and therefore a corporate parent to children looked after in Hertfordshire, I will confine my comments to those areas where I can best inform from my own front-line experience—that is to say, funding, the voice of young people, joined-up working, kinship care and ongoing support for young care leavers.

As with most of the local government issues that come before your Lordships’ House, the funding situation for children’s social care has gone from bad to worse with successive cuts to funding since 2011. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, reminded me of the decimation of the very valued Sure Start centres, when he talked about family hubs. Those centres were hugely valued, but they have been decimated by funding cuts. The LGA reported a budget gap of £1.6 billion in children’s social care, and that was before the £2.6 billion identified to deliver the outcomes set out in this independent review. This gap is increasing very rapidly: in 2020-21, the amount spent nationally on children’s social care was £10.5 billion, 25% more than the £8.5 billion spent in 2016-17. Councils are, as set out by the chair of the LGA Children and Young People Board, my friend Councillor Louise Gittins,

“buckling under significant funding pressures”.

I checked the current situation in my own county of Hertfordshire and, at the end of quarter 2 this year, the overspend on children’s services was almost £9 million. To some extent this funding crisis is being fuelled by the sheer struggle to find placements for the most complex cases, which means that costs for these are escalating and can reach around £12,000 a week for children with the most complex needs. I hope this is not as a result of profiteering by private sector providers, although I suspect that some of it is, but that is something that merits even closer examination. If the emphasis on co-operatives in this report was about replacing that expensive, privately provided care with co-operative provided care, I would certainly support that.

I congratulate the independent review on working with an experts-by-experience board of young people who have lived experience of the care system. I hope that the Government will take this best practice forward as a way of ensuring that it is those with lived experience who are engaged in ensuring that the outcomes detailed in this review achieve its aims. Just before the Covid pandemic, I worked with our CHICC—our Children in Care Council—in Hertfordshire on its own of the local care system. The voices of two of our witnesses have stayed with me; I will call them Justin and Nadine. They were very clear about the two issues that they wanted to highlight. On the first, consistency of care, they outlined that, over and again, when a placement broke down, they would find themselves sitting in a social worker’s office with all their possessions in black bin bags, waiting for their next move. They said that it would have helped them to feel more valued if they had even been given a suitcase.

Their second point related to access to mental health services. It was moving to hear them describe being told that they would have a six-month wait, which made the feelings of despair and isolation far worse. As they said, waiting six months when you are an adult may not feel like the end of the world but, for a young teen, it can seem like an eternity and as though no one really cares how bad you are feeling. The independent review recognises the need to join up the services provided for children in social care. I hope the Government will reflect on just how urgent this is and, particularly for child and adolescent mental health services, provide funding that enables target access times that are much faster than they are currently.

Joined-up services are a key focus of this review and highlighted in its powerful recommendations on kinship care. I was struck by the experience of one client at the food bank where I was volunteering, Dennis. Dennis was a gentleman in his late 50s coming to the end of his working life when, tragically, his daughter became unable to look after her four very young children as she struggled with alcohol and drug addiction as well as poor mental health. Dennis took the children into his home and cared for them, but unfortunately against a backdrop of bureaucracy and a minefield of barriers put in his way, particularly by the DWP, which had neither the systems nor the compassion to understand the situation he found himself in. It was this that meant he had to resort to using the food bank and his issues took almost 12 months to resolve. I hope that one outcome of this review is to smooth the path for those involved in kinship care, ensuring that they get the support they need, including a key worker whose job is to help join things up. It will also be necessary to ensure that all departments involved have absolutely clear systems and processes designed to meet the needs of kinship care and the will to work together in the interests of families.

I want to talk, lastly, about an area touched on in the review but which I believe needs a great deal more work—the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, called it lifelong links. More thought and discussion are needed, particularly with those who have lived experience of the care system, to ensure that care leavers do not fall off a cliff edge when they reach an age at which they are no longer formally supported by the system. Most parents and foster parents go on supporting young people they care for long after they reach adulthood at 18 but, sadly, some care leavers do not have that experience. There is so much more that could be done—for example, by exempting them from council tax payments, giving additional preference in social housing allocation, providing subsidised travel for access to work, college or training and continuing consideration of fast-track access to mental health support. No children should ever live in unregulated settings. The comments made about the loving relationships around those children also really struck home with me.

The Government need to act now to avoid a catastrophic situation in children’s social care. I know that the Local Government Association has serious concerns that the cost of living crisis will push more families into poverty and crisis, which means that more of our children will require support. None of the recommendations in the review will be achieved without significant increases in funding and guaranteeing that funding is sustainable, including in meeting the gap that already exists. The cost of not doing so is immense, as the ongoing harms and damage to life opportunities for those young people who are let down when the system does not work properly place immeasurable costs on their lives and the public services that will need to support them in the future.