Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I add my thanks to those expressed by a good many Members to all who have been involved in securing the debate. It has been rich and insightful, and it is extremely timely. As my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan) said, when we get this right, it improves more or less everything in our country: we have a more productive workforce, people who are healthier—with better physical and mental health—a more stable society, and a society in which people are more able and willing to look after one another. All those things are incredibly important for our country’s future.

Josh MacAlister’s report is one in a long line of reports that give us some helpful steers about how we can improve the system. The challenges faced by children growing up in the UK change over the generations. When the Children Act 1989 was introduced, the internet did not exist as something in our daily lives. The growth of online harms and the risk they pose to children in this country are a new challenge that we have to address, and on which there are a lot of things that our social workers, police and all those who care about the effective nurturing of children in our country need to consider.

If we look at recent history, we recognise that quality protects. The Climbié inquiry, the Munro review, the Wood review and the MacAlister review all describe a system that remains based on the 1989 Act and various pieces of legislation that have come along since, including the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 and various Education Acts. They identify that what works best is always early intervention, so when the system spots that a problem is developing and it intervenes early, the outcomes for a child are transformed for the better.

Every single one of those reviews describes a system that is too under-resourced to carry out that early intervention effectively. It is important to be clear that being under-resourced is not just about money, for most local authorities. Certainly from my experience as a councillor and lead member for children’s services for more than 20 years, recruiting qualified and experienced social workers, recruiting foster carers and finding families willing to adopt was not just a matter of budgets. We had money to pay foster carers, but finding the individuals willing to take on that challenge remains enormously difficult.

If debates such as this are going to serve us well, one thing that they can do is illuminate the challenges and remind our colleagues in local authorities who are trying to do this work that Parliament and national Government are really interested in it. Hopefully, to some degree, we can at least raise awareness of the continuing need to invest the time and find the people who are interested in engaging with this work to support our most vulnerable children.

We know that our care system works well. Care is often criticised. Colleagues in the House sometimes say that we should try to keep children away from the care system, but the evidence shows that the earlier a child comes into the care system and the longer they spend in it, the better their outcome. The best illustration of that is probably that a child who is adopted at birth will enjoy outcomes in life that are pretty much the same as their peer group; whereas the most challenged children are those who come to the attention of the care system towards their 16th birthday. Those children find themselves in a situation where most of the damage has already been done, and the effective intervention of brilliant foster carers, potentially even adopters and social workers cannot mitigate that damage.

Our safeguarding services are among the best in the world. The few international studies that provide effective comparisons demonstrate that the UK is seen as an exemplar for effective safeguarding in pretty much every aspect of providing effective child protection. When the MacAlister review set out its case for change, it was helpful that it acknowledged some of this history, enabling us to learn from the successes of past policies while putting them in the context we face today.

There are some very striking statistics in the case for change. For example, over the last decade there has been a 7% rise in the number of referrals to children’s social care from the police, from schools, from the general public and from the health service, and from places like that, but over the same period the number of section 47 inquiries—child protection inquiries where there is evidence that a child is directly at risk—has risen by 129%; the number of child protection plans has risen by 32%; and the number of children brought into the care system, where the local authority has gone to court, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) described, to seek a court order to take them from their birth family and bring them into the care of the state as the only way to keep them safe, has risen by 24%. Something is certainly changing in how our local authorities and child protection services respond to the evidence they see of what is happening in a child’s life.

It is important to recognise that, in a system that is under pressure, we risk raising the threshold at which local authorities, the police and other agencies take action. We see that in the NHS, for example, and we see some evidence of it in the police service. When resources are tight, agencies simply say the point at which they respond will be when things have gone more wrong than would have been the case previously. We need to ensure that we do not get into a situation where tight resources mean there is less and less early intervention and, therefore, a cohort of children going through our system for whom life will be much more challenging, whose cost to the taxpayer will be higher, and whose ability to contribute to and thrive in our society will be reduced.

There are some worrying signs, because the case for change in the MacAlister review identifies that, behind these stats, we have seen a rise in statutory spend—the money local authorities put into the things they must do in respect of risks to children—from £6.6 billion to £8.2 billion, and a drop in non-statutory spend, mainly on early-intervention services, from £3.5 billion to £2.3 billion. It is important that we never have an auction of spending promises, and over that period we have seen a significant rise in this country’s child population, so we would have expected to see some rises, but it suggests there has been a slightly worrying shift of spending in a less productive direction.

It is important to recognise that this is pretty much the only area of local government spend in England that has grown over this period, and it has grown not as a result of additional Government funding but because local authorities have reduced their spending on things such as libraries, planning services, the environment, and sport and leisure, in order to prioritise the urgent needs of children who may be at risk.

The main driver of this spend remains neglect. Although important issues such as familial sexual abuse and, indeed, stranger sexual abuse, physical abuse, family alcohol abuse and mental health issues remain significant, neglect is overwhelmingly the reason why a child comes to the attention of statutory authorities in England today. This is where there are some promising signs.

The family hub model, which was piloted by local authorities in advance of being picked up by this House, recognises that, rather than imposing strict periods, such as ages zero to five, when the state will intervene and provide support, we need to recognise that every family and every child is different and that we need to provide a broad range of support at local level, exactly as North Yorkshire County Council’s No Wrong Door project identified, so that families can find and access the support they need, rather than being passed from agency to agency. That will be absolutely critical.

The way in which those family hubs operate needs to reflect the growing evidence base from the What Works centres about how interventions can be tailored to really make a difference in the lives of children. One criticism, borne out by the research, about the Sure Start programme was that although a good many users enjoyed it, found it useful and gave good feedback about it, it did not bring about the difference in children’s lives that it was intended to. I know from my time as a trustee of the Early Intervention Foundation, and having used the work of a number of the other What Works centres in my time before coming to Westminster, that using evidence about what actually makes the difference in a child’s life will be crucial in ensuring that the money available in the system is spent in the most efficient and effective way in the interests of those children.

We recognise that our care system has some great strengths, with one being that looked-after children have the highest school attendance of any group of children in our education system. That is largely thanks to the efforts of virtual headteachers and local authorities, and their determination to make sure that those children get the best possible education. Of course the context for most children is that they are growing up in a community, where early intervention is not always going to be about statutory services. Even family hubs, which we know from the outset are designed to identify families that may be getting into difficulty, will often come a little further down the line for a child when life has gone a bit wrong.

I cannot praise enough the work I saw being done through services such as libraries, sports and leisure centres, and the early years centres during my time at the London Borough of Hillingdon. Simple projects such as story time in libraries, to which new parents can bring young children, in an informal setting, free of charge, were incredibly valuable, and can both provide the reassurance for families and parents who might be struggling, and signpost them on to statutory services that could help with issues such as breastfeeding, toileting and care of infants, and the emerging concerns that they might be beginning to have about children with special educational needs or disabilities. Making sure that we have a system that sees the child in the round and is there to make sure that whichever direction a family needs to go to, they can access that care and support is crucial to ensuring that the mission of making sure every child is nurtured is delivered.

Let me move towards a conclusion. The MacAlister report identifies, in particular, that the big driver of these referrals is children who are being parented in difficult circumstances. We all recognise in this country that while life for most of our people is existing at a stable level—we have a good stable level of employment; good access to work; a strong economy; good schools, on the whole; and good access to crucial public services—a significant number of families remain at risk of falling through the cracks. So I hope that the principles the Department will use as it begins to craft its set of policies will, first, include making the best possible use of that evidence to design the interventions. We need to ensure that those family hubs are picking the programmes where there is the best evidence on things such as parental alcohol misuse and dealing with health issues in children, that those are the programmes we are offering consistently and that we are measuring the impact, so that we can see and test the benefit they bring.

I appreciate that this responsibility sits to some degree with the Department for Education and to some degree with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, but it seems particularly important that we breathe new life into youth work, especially for those young people whose lives are going wrong in their teenage years. Youth work has historically been a great opportunity to get them back on track. I have seen some brilliant evidence in my constituency of uniformed organisations such as the police cadets and the Royal Air Force cadets, organisations such as the Scouts and the Guides, and much less formal youth club community-level organisations providing that extra bit of help and support when parents and extended family have perhaps not been able to do it.

I am aware that, as a Government, we have allocated a significant amount of money towards that agenda, but that money has not yet been spent in a way that is constructive or that has made a difference in terms of enriching those children’s lives and making sure that local authorities and other organisations help support those young people, particularly in their difficult teenage years, to enjoy a transformed set of opportunities. Indeed, there are many philanthropists who are willing to support and fund this activity. I call on the Department, working with colleagues across Government, to have a new strategy for youth work—to think about what that means and how we deploy those resources to support the volunteers and community organisations in a more constructive way.

There is a real opportunity now to look at our focus on the early years. There have been many debates in this House about the cost of, and access to, childcare, but it remains the case that we spend pretty much the least on the early years in our education system. Research evidence shows, however, that the early years has the biggest impact on a child’s life. Leon Feinstein, who went to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner from the Early Intervention Foundation, highlighted that, from a child’s early years foundation stage results, their A-level results later on in life could be predicted. We know that there is a good evidence base that shows the impact that effective early years work has on opportunities for children. Again, it is not just about money, but about making sure that we focus in exactly the right way.

Finally, I call on the Department to think about the regulatory environment around children’s social care. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) spoke powerfully about the numbers of local authorities enjoying different grades from Ofsted. Many years ago, when he chaired the all-party group for looked-after children, he had an event here in Parliament. What I found striking was the wide group of young people who fed back about their experiences as children in care. As a witness to it, I would not have known from their description of their experience whether their local authority was outstanding or inadequate. We heard very negative experiences from young people who had grown up in outstanding authority areas and vice-versa. It seems to me that we need to focus not just on the institutional outcomes, as important as they are, but on the outcomes for children.

We often hear the Government talk about how great it is that there are many more children now in outstanding schools than was the case previously. There has, of course, been a big rise in the population of children in this country, and schools were not allowed to have any Government capital funding to provide additional places unless they were already outstanding. But recent Ofsted inspections on many of those institutions that had not been inspected for more than a decade has resulted in a lot of downgrading. What that tells us is that, although it is great to be able to be proud of how good schools and local authorities are at getting good or outstanding Ofsted ratings, we need to recognise that that does not always reflect the experience of the children who are going through that system. I have seen a good body of evidence in my time as a councillor, of schools that partly achieved an outstanding rating by denying the opportunity of education in their institution to children whose results they thought would not flatter their position in the league table. That was in the form of things such as the informal exclusion of children with special educational needs or disabilities, and refusal to engage with the local authority about taking looked-after children who they thought would not do so well. I can see a number of Members indicating that, perhaps, they have had the same experience.

We need to ensure that our regulatory environment is not one that is about saying, “Look at how many schools and local authorities are good or outstanding”, although that is important, but, “Look at the outcomes that children for whom we are the corporate parent, for whom the state has chosen to take this action, are achieving.” We should remember that those outcomes at 16 or 18 may not equate to those of their peers, but we need to recognise that we are giving them the chance that a good family would, so that by their early 20s perhaps they will have caught up.

Mr MacAlister’s review is enormously helpful and I think today’s debate has reflected on that. I hope that the wide variety of views that have been expressed by Members will be found to be useful by the Department. There is a great deal of experience in this Chamber, drawn from local government and central Government, which, hopefully will enable us to ensure that the additional resources, the money and the commitment that we see in Government will be spent in a way that will continue to deliver positive, transformational change for the most vulnerable children in our society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

Yes, and we must understand that, too often, we are too keen to show the statistics that prove the underachievement of children who have been in the care system, be that in education or other outcomes. Why should we expect somebody who has been taken from their birth family, who has been deprived of the loving care of their birth parents because they are not able to give them that loving care, who has been abused as a child—who has perhaps been sexually abused as a child, as so many children are—and who has gone through such a traumatic upbringing, to be able to achieve as much as other children without getting that extra support? Whatever form those trauma services take, it is a no-brainer that we should provide them if we are serious about wanting those placements to work, be that a long-term foster care placement, a long-term home placement or, ultimately, an adoptive placement if that is the right place to go. It has to be horses for courses.

What we also did those 10 or 12 years ago is reduce the bureaucracy in the children’s social care system. When I took over as Children’s Minister, the manual for children’s social care, “Working together”, consisted of 756 pages, or something of that order. For the previous 10 years or so, since the death of Victoria Climbié, every time a high-profile safeguarding scandal happened and another child lost his or her life—often at the hands of his or her parents or carers—the Government rushed to legislate. It was a Labour Government at the time, but frankly, we were all guilty of going along with it: “The solution must surely be more legislation and more rules.” Ten years later, we had reached a stage where social workers were so saddled with regulations and rules that they were constantly looking over their shoulder, constantly referring to page 642 in the rulebook to see what they should be doing, rather than using the professional judgment and instincts that we train them for. Being a social worker is not an easy profession: one has to be a combination of a detective, a psychoanalyst, a forensic scientist and whatever else, because people who abuse their children are usually quite smart at covering it up.

The most important thing I said to social workers was, “I want to give you the confidence to make a mistake for genuine reasons”—hopefully not too often, but by using their professional judgment, rather than covering their back by saying, “Well, that’s how it said I was supposed to act in this case on page 602 of the manual.” That was the problem. We tore apart that manual—it was reduced to something like 70 pages—and said to social workers, “You’ve been trained as a social worker. We trust you: you have the nous. You need to go out and get the experience. You need to judge something on having face-to-face time with a vulnerable child or that child’s parents and to make a value judgment on whether you think that child needs to be taken into care, to have some support while staying with the birth family, or whatever. You make that judgment— occasionally, you will make it wrong, but you will make the wrong judgment for the right reasons. That will give you more experience to make sure you make it right the next time.”

[David Simmonds]

I commend my hon. Friend for the work he did on slimming down “Working together”, which had a huge impact on boosting the confidence of social workers. Does he agree that this is a good example that illustrates the point about focusing on a child’s outcomes, rather than on the system?

Historically, for example, local authorities were measured on the regularity with which a child in the care system or a child at risk had a meeting with a social worker, not on whether that was the same social worker—the person who knew the child’s case, understood their circumstances and could progress things. We could tick a box to say that the child had met a social worker, but that meeting had not done anything to improve that child’s life. That shift in focus, saying that what is to be measured is the quality of the relationship the child has with the social worker and those caring for them and the progress it enables them to make, should be at the heart of our regulation.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is so right. I fear I am in danger of making a long speech; I rarely do so, but we do have some time this afternoon, and such good interventions are being made that I will indulge them—if you will indulge me, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is such an important subject, and my hon. Friend is right that too often in the past, we have measured things not on the quality of the outcomes, but on the way we can measure them and tick the appropriate box.

At the end of the day, what matters is not whether all the processes and procedures set out in the rulebook have been followed. The only thing that matters is whether the intervention of the state through the medium of the social worker, the local authority children’s social care department, the foster carer, or whoever has had a meaningful and beneficial outcome for the welfare of that child. That is what section 1 of the Children Act 1989—which is still so relevant today, 33 years on—says is how we should judge whether we should be making those interventions, and how we should measure their impacts. I am afraid that it was too much about whether we complied with certain pages in the manual and whether we could tick all the boxes, regardless of the impact or the outcomes for the child.

The problem 10, 12 or 15 years ago was that too many people were studying social work at university because it was an easy degree to get into. A third of them dropped out during the degree, another third dropped out after a year in the social profession, and only a third went on to be social workers. We spent a lot of money on training people, two thirds of whom did not end up in that important profession, which I call the fourth emergency service.

“No more blame game” was appropriately titled, because social workers were always the butt of everybody’s criticism. Social workers do not kill babies and vulnerable children; it is evil carers or parents who do that. For social workers, it is a question of how and when they can intervene, hopefully to lessen the chances of adults doing cruel things to children, which they will always do. All we can hope to do is minimise the opportunities and try to detect them before they manifest themselves.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and I will come on to case loads in a minute.

It is about getting highly motivated and qualified students to go into studying social work. It is about getting better training for those students to become professional social workers and then holding on to them, because we have a real problem with retention at the moment.

We raised the status of the profession by bringing in principal child and family social workers, who were senior social workers with great experience. They were not just put behind a desk and given managerial responsibility when they were promoted. They also had frontline casework, so we did not lose their valuable experience; they were able to pass it on by mentoring newly qualified social workers.

Step Up to Social Work was a fantastic programme, like Teach First, with well-qualified, motivated and energetic people making a change in direction and going into social work. In many cases they were the shock troops, going into really challenging areas and bringing a fresh approach. That approach was carried on by Frontline, to an extent, but its origin was in Step Up to Social Work, and I have to say that it did it in a rather more cost-effective manner.

We created the role of chief social worker. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley will remember well our conversations in 2007 with the chief social worker for New Zealand, which was the inspiration for our recommendation. Of course we should have one—we have a chief medical officer and a chief veterinary officer, so why would we not have a chief social worker to look after the interests of children? That was one of our key recommendations in 2007, and the chief social worker was appointed some five years later.

The new report mirrors the plea that the Munro report made in 2011 for early help—all we have done is rename it family help. As hon. Friends have said, we can be so much more effective by intervening early than by responding retrospectively and firefighting the problem when a child may have been irreparably damaged. We need to ensure that we have vulnerable families on the radar, getting intervention and support services early on, if possible to keep the child with their birth family by giving them the support they need, rather than have the social worker knock on the door when the child is about to be taken into care. It is such a false economy to react rather than intervene proactively. We have lost too much of that proactiveness, I fear.

We find ourselves coming almost full circle to high vacancy rates in the social work profession. Too many experienced, grey-haired social workers are burnt out and leaving the profession early, and are unable to pass on their great wisdom, experience and mentoring skills to new social workers coming into the profession. We find ourselves with case loads that are, again, too heavy. I remember one former, very distinguished director of children’s services, Dave Hill, who very sadly died just a year or two ago. He started part of his career in Essex and later became president of the Association of the Directors of Children’s Services. When he took over the Essex children’s services department after it had been failed and was going through a rough period, he got all the social workers in front of him and said to some of them, “Right, list your cases.” Several social workers went through their cases, and when they got to No. 16 or 17, they started struggling to remember them. Mr Hill’s response was: “That’s probably the limit of the case load you can manage, isn’t it?”

It is not rocket science. If a social worker is struggling even to remember the names of the vulnerable families they are looking after, they probably have too many families. That approach was not rocket science but common sense. Too often, social workers’ case loads are too heavy and they are chasing their tails from one case to the next. That is when things get missed. In their complex and challenging profession, social workers have to notice things, and they can do that only when they cross the door threshold, look in the fridge to see why the kids are not being fed properly, inspect their wardrobe and eyeball the mother who they suspect is not looking after the kids properly. It is not all done on a computer, and it cannot be done if social workers have to rush to their next appointment because they have so many cases to get through within an eight-hour working day.

[David Simmonds]

Does my hon. Friend agree this is another good example of where the regulatory environment and the use of data at a local level are important? I say that because during the course of a peer-review visit to a local authority that was exceptionally challenged, we discovered that there were two vacant social worker posts on the system that held 174 child protection cases between them. It was clear that because there were no staff to do that work, nobody was working on those 174 cases, and that had the effect of reducing the caseload across the workforce. It is important that the expectations that the Department places on lead members and directors of children’s services are not just about chasing numbers to make the institution look good, but about ensuring proper engagement with the lives of the children.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is, again, absolutely right. It is a false economy to look after too many cases but do them moderately well or badly rather than concentrating on a small number of cases and doing them effectively, which offers a better chance of meaningful interventions before things reach crisis point.

It is, in many cases, depressing that despite all the energies spent and all the legislation, changes and regulations that have gone through, we still find ourselves, 10 years on, facing many of the problems outlined in the MacAlister report, to which the solution are, frankly, no different from what they were 10 or so years ago. We now have 82,170 children in the care system in England and Wales, a 23% increase over the last 10 years. Barnardo’s estimates that currently, 80% of all local authority spending on children and young people currently goes on late intervention services, up from 58% in 2010-11. That means that rather less is going towards early intervention services, which stand a better chance of getting a better bang for the buck and achieving a better social outcome by preventing families from getting to crisis point. That is the most depressing and alarming statistic to have come out in the last 10 years, and it is such a false economy.

In 2021-22, 10% of all children in the care system were moved three or more times. Almost a third of all children in care were moved two or more times in the space of a year. At least 16,970 children in the care system were placed more than 20 miles away from home in the last year, often away from friends, family and the communities that matter most to them. In 2022, 43% of all children in care were placed outside their local authority area. For some children that is appropriate—some children need to be taken well away from an environment where they were subject to abuse and where there are still safeguarding issues. However, for many it represents a serious disruption. Having had the biggest disruption a child can probably have in their childhood by being taking away from their parents, then to be taken away from any other anchors of continuity, whether extended family members, friends, schoolmates or their school, is doubly disorientating. Although there will be children for whom it is more appropriate that they are out of that environment, or put in specialist services if they have particular problems that need to be addressed, we need to do better to try to keep some degree of continuity for children who cannot have the continuity of their own parents bringing them up through their childhood.

Again, these problems are not new, but they have not been solved. It makes it even harder for children to make friends and to succeed at school when they are going from one school to another, say if their foster placement at one end of the county breaks down and then they are at another end of the county. Some 11% of children in care have experienced a mid-year school move in the space of the last year. That is hugely disruptive. Bright Spots research from 2020 suggested that only 35% of children in care reported having the same social worker for 12 months. Some 27% of children reported having had three or more social workers in the last year. When someone does not have their parents to confide in, trust in and be their rock and their point of contact, having a different social worker turn up every few months—when they do turn up—is hugely disruptive. We have still not addressed that problem. That cannot be in the best interests of continuity for those children.

What happens? Not surprisingly, the outcomes for those children are well below the outcomes for those lucky enough to be brought up with their own parents. In 2022, 38% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 were not in education, employment or training, compared with just 11% of all young people aged 19 to 21. There are long-term consequences from not getting this right. They were there in 2010, they are still there in the MacAlister report in 2020, and it is such a false economy not to be doing more about it.

I have a few more comments, if I may, because there are still huge differentials in outcomes and intervention levels for children across different parts of the United Kingdom. We did a lot of work on that in the all-party parliamentary group for children. This is a couple of years out of date now, but a child in Blackpool is something like eight times more likely to be in the care system than a child in Richmond. Now, there are reasons why we see a differential between Blackpool and the rather more leafy, affluent Richmond in the suburbs of London, but eight times more likely? How can we justify such huge differentials, if we are giving each vulnerable child who needs the care and attention of the state as good care and attention as we can? Something is not working properly there.

All of this is a false economy financially, as I mentioned. Much of it is down to preventive support that could be given to parents. I chair the all-party parliamentary group for the first 1,001 days, which is concerned with perinatal mental health. One in six mothers at least—it has got worse since the pandemic—will suffer from some form of perinatal mental illness, making attachment with their child far less easy at a time when that child’s brain is developing exponentially, and when attachment to a parent or carer is so essential.

One of the most alarming statistics in the research we have done in that group is that for a 15 or 16-year-old teenager suffering from some form of depression or low-level mental illness, there is a 99% likelihood that his or her mother had some form of depression or mental illness during pregnancy. It is as stark as that. Perinatal mental illness costs this country in excess of £8 billion a year. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) is working on the Best Start for Life programme, which the Government, to their credit, are rolling out, but we need more urgent roll-out. That is so essential in ensuring that children have a better chance of bonding with their parents in the early years and that parents are given all the support they need when facing the challenges of perinatal mental illness—that means mum and dad; we need a two-partner solution, where that is possible.

In addition, child neglect costs this country in excess of £15 billion every year, so we are spending more than £23 billion—the budget of a small Government Department —on funding failure by not intervening early and appropriately for some of the most vulnerable people in society. It is a false economy financially, and it is a hugely false economy socially not to do this for our future, which happens to be our children.

Josh MacAlister—slightly depressingly, I thought—described in his report the social care system as a

“30-year-old tower of Jenga held together with Sellotape”.

I do not think it is as bad as that and, frankly, I do not think that such a description properly respects the huge amount of hard work, dedication and professionalism of the many thousands of social workers, foster carers, care home managers, IROs, youth workers and others whose lives are dedicated to looking after some of the most vulnerable children in society. They have dedicated their careers to looking after vulnerable children, and we need to do better to support them. The problem is that we are still losing too many experienced social workers by overloading them. We need a better workforce retention and recruitment strategy, as the hon. Member for York Central said.

I have some criticisms of the report. The review takes an unnecessarily antagonistic view of the independent sector, and I disclose my interest here. If we did not have the independent sector, the whole children’s social care sector would collapse. If we looked at the relative costs, we would find that there is better value to be offered in the independent care sector, which often ends up with the most damaged and most challenging children passed on by local authorities. Frankly, I do not care whether a child is being looked after by a local authority, a third sector organisation or an independent provider. All I care about is whether we are getting the best outcomes for that child in the care system, so that the child will come out of the system in a better shape than they went into it. We need to work in partnership with whoever has the expertise, the capacity, the resource and the dedication to provide that. We need a partnership of those different sectors to ensure that we are doing the best by that child.

There is a shortage of places in this country, which too often means that we have a costly spot purchasing system, which is most expensive to local authorities and too often based on where there is a vacancy and a gap in the system to fit that child, rather than the system being fitted around the child based on what they most need at that point in time. They may need a foster carer, a specialist foster carer, a residential home or an educational residential home placement. The only consideration should be what is best for that child at that particular time, not what is actually available. Too often on a Friday night, when a social worker is desperately ringing round, it is about what is available, rather than what is most appropriate for a child who has just come into the care system through a local authority. We need—I fear that the MacAlister report does not highlight this enough—better, smarter, more long-term partnership planning, with smarter commissioning and long-term agreements between all those different sectors to achieve a better outcome for children. We need a system that is centred on the needs of the child; that is the be-all and end-all.

I want to mention a couple of other things, and then I will finish, although we have left plenty of time for those on the Front Benches to make their important speeches. I am really pleased with the John Lewis advert this year. It is one of those heart-tugging adverts, better than the usual dross we often get from the supermarkets at Christmas, but it is not just an advert; it is a cause and a mission.

By flagging up children in care in its Christmas advert, John Lewis is not just trying to sell more crackers and turkey; it has actually invested in children in the care system. I believe it has taken on 17 young people who have been in the care system and it is giving preference to care-experienced young people in apprenticeships and work. It has been working on the issue for the last 18 months. In partnership with Action for Children and the Who Cares? charity, it supports young people moving from care to independent living. It is raising awareness of the disadvantages and inequalities that children in the care system face. I say three cheers for John Lewis for that, and I hope it continues. I also hope that it will raise awareness among its customers and that other people will follow its example.

The foster care organisations that I work with have already seen an increase in the number of people interested in becoming foster carers. If the new Minister has not already, I am sure that she and the Government will want to work with John Lewis and other employers to have a national recruitment campaign for foster carers. Goodness knows that we desperately need them, given the increasing number of kids who are coming into the care sector.

I take issue with the MacAlister report’s recommendation to abolish independent reviewing officers, which the hon. Member for York Central mentioned. IROs are not perfect, but they do an important job. When I was at the Department, I spent a lot of time going out with IROs, particularly in Leeds, which doubled the number of IROs it employed 10 years ago. IROs are the confidantes of young people in the care system, who often have nowhere else to go. When they work well, they are the advocates, ambassadors, representatives and shoulders to cry on for young people—they make sure that children get a better deal and they are a trusted voice. As in many professions, they are of mixed quality, but the principle is right. I take issue with that recommendation, although I understand why the review made it.

I absolutely agree with the review on kinship care. One of my great disappointments is that we could not do more about that. Some 180,000 children in this country are raised in kinship care, often by grandparents who have other caring responsibilities and have to give up work to take on a child whose mother or father is unable to look after them, frequently because of substance misuse. The grandparents take on the child as an alternative to them being adopted in the hope that one day, as often happens, they can be reunited with their birth parent when those problems have been solved.

In other countries, kinship care is the primary way that children are looked after. In New Zealand, two thirds of children in the care system are raised with kinship carers. Not all kinship carers are brilliant, but in most cases they are doing it for the right reasons—the love of the child. We have never properly given them the recognition that they deserve. I pay tribute to the grandparent charities that I have been involved with while in this House and beyond, which support those who simply want to look after their grandchildren when the parents cannot, but who need a bit of help in many cases. We need to have a proper, new legal definition of kinship care and to look at financial allowances for kinship carers, because they are too often seen as a cheap alternative to having to pay foster carers or for other placements.

[David Simmonds]

Kinship care is an area where the Department could do some productive work. Does my hon. Friend agree that, given that the typical cost of a child in the care system to council tax payers is £54,000 a year, and the cost of a child with higher needs is, on average, in excess of £130,000 a year, kinship care offers not only a better and more familiar experience for the child, but potentially significant savings for the taxpayer?

[Tim Loughton]

It is a no-brainer. It is much cheaper to do it that way and people are much more likely to do it for the right reasons. Social workers looking for a placement can either place a child with a foster carer who has been properly vetted, is on their books and has a vacancy, or they can do a lot of new work to assess whether a kinship carer relative is appropriate. The easier and the more expensive option—and, again, not necessarily the best option for the child—is to go with the foster carer.

We should be placing far more children with kinship carers, but with ancillary support from the social workers; not just dumping the child with their grandparents and running, but making sure that that sort of support is available, as with the adoption support fund, so that the child is suitably resourced and cared for, with all the stuff that needs to go with it. I think we need to look at a new kinship care leave entitlement as well, particularly where we have kinship carers who have given up employment opportunities to take on the role.

We still have a particular problem with separated siblings. Nearly 12,000 children in the care system in this country are not living with at least one of their siblings. I had four groups of young people who used to come to visit me in the Department for Education every three months: a group of kids who were adopted, a group of kids who were in foster care, a group of kids who were in residential homes, and a group of kids who had recently left care. They would all come, without any adults in the room apart from me and a couple of officials from the Department, and we would give them lots of crisps and sandwiches. They would just talk and tell us what was going on, and I got my best information from those children. Why would I not? They are our customers, they are at the frontline, and they are the ones who are experiencing day in, day out the results of the decisions that Ministers, local authority directors of children’s services and social workers make for them.

One of the most common stories I heard was, “I haven’t seen my sister for the last year.” When children have been taken away from their parents, away from the stability and anchor of growing up in a happy childhood—which I guess most of us here take for granted—if they cannot have that continuing link with their parents, they want something close to that, which is another relation. In some cases they are separated from siblings for good reason: the sibling may present a problem for their welfare, but that is in a minority of cases. In most cases, however, surely it would be better to keep those children together, but it does not happen simply because the resource is not there. We can do smart things, as I have seen local authorities do, such as pay for a house extension to provide an extra bedroom so that a sibling group of three can be taken together, rather than split up. That has to be in the best interests of those children. Kinship carers, if given that support, which may include financial support, are more likely to be able to keep a family together, and surely that is what we want.

I have two other points. Staying Put and Staying Close were great schemes that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury—he is not here at the moment—progressed and that we brought in some years ago. I do not think we are ambitious enough in just wanting to extend Staying Put and Staying Close from age 21 to 23. It should be 25, and I think we should be doing more of this. My youngest child is about to be 25, and her brother and sister are slightly older. They still come home quite a lot, particularly when they want something. Children do not get cut off from their family just when they hit the age of 21 or 23, and that is the end of it; kids need to have that ongoing support, love, care and somebody watching out for them. Those schemes do that so brilliantly, with really dedicated foster carers or people who have worked in residential homes who have a vested lifetime interest in the life of that child. We need to do better.

Another point on which I take issue with the hon. Member for York Central is the regional care co-operatives proposal, which has been put forward before. Too much of what has happened in children’s social care over the last 15 years has been about processes and changing structures. We need smarter commissioning. We do not need to set up yet more structures. I want every local authority to be working closely with other good-quality providers of children’s social care from whatever sector they come. The more regionalisation of this that we bring in, the further we take it away from the needs and the voices of the children on the ground whom we are there to serve. Frankly, I think that is a non-starter.

My apologies for speaking for so long, Madam Deputy Speaker. In conclusion, children’s social care is still not working properly despite the best intentions and best policies—and, in some cases, legislation—over the last 20 years. I am not trying to make a partisan point. I said earlier that we have too much legislation, which has crowded out best practice and the most effective use of resources in too many areas.

I support most of the things in the report; I just want them to happen. The revolution in family help identified in the Munro report 11 years go is all about investing to save and getting those children before crisis impacts. The MacAlister report recommends:

“A just and decisive child protection system”

and the appointment of an “Expert Child Protection Practitioner” among social workers. That is fine—I have no problem with that—but that is the job of every social worker. Every social worker should have the training, the nous and the professionalism to want to sniff out another potential Star Hobson or Arthur Labinjo-Hughes —the more recent successors to Victoria Climbié, Baby P, Daniel Pelka and the litany of other children who lost their lives in such tragic and cruel circumstances.

The report goes on to refer to:

“Unlocking the potential of family networks”,

along with kinship care, better, smarter foster recruitment, and

“fixing the broken care market”.

I do not regard it as a market; I regard it as using all the talents and resources that we have, from whatever sector, to ensure that we have the best possible support available and placements for those children who most need them.

The report then covers the five missions for care-experienced people, which Josh MacAlister calls

“the civil rights issue of our time.”

It should be. They are the most vulnerable people in our society: children who do not have a voice. They are those who are too young to have a voice and those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be growing up with parents incapable of looking after them properly or, at worst, wanting to do them harm. It is a national scandal. Of course, we need to solve the adult social care crisis, but we cannot do that at the exclusion of remembering the children’s social care crisis that is still ongoing.

The review continues to

“realising the potential of the workforce”.

We need to remove the barriers that are diverting social workers from spending time with families. We tried to do that 12 years ago, but there are still too many barriers and too much bureaucracy. As its last point mentions, we need to be

“relentlessly focused on children and families”.

That needs a multi-agency safeguarding approach, but still the different interested parties are not working together. There is nothing new in every safeguarding report that comes out; there is just a different set of characters, players and circumstances. Basically, it comes down to somebody not picking up the ball when it stopped with them. People did not share information and did not know when to intervene, or did not have the confidence to do so, when that intervention needed to happen.

I ask the Children’s Minister: are the things in the MacAlister report going to be implemented? When will the panel get on with its work? When will we see the Government’s response and the implementation plan? What will the timetable be? Will there be resources to go with that? Resources will be required to do that. It is a huge challenge for the new Minister, who I know will rise to that challenge no less than her predecessors did beforehand. But we need to rail against the system, because these are the most vulnerable people in our society, and if we cannot make it work for them, they cannot make it work for themselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes]

I thank the hon. and learned Member for his intervention. If he thinks that 50% of children’s services departments across the country being rated as “inadequate” or “requires improvement” is an acceptable situation, I fear that he somewhat misses the point. The Government have, of course, intervened in some local authorities, and local authorities of all political hues experience challenges and are not performing as well as they should be. However, I see no evidence of a real grip from the Government. Where is the support and challenge programme? Where is the sharing of good practice? Where is the drive, every single day, to make sure that no local authorities children services departments are failing children?

[David Simmonds]

The children’s improvement board, which was set up as a partnership between the Department for Education, the Local Government Association and Ofsted, was the main vehicle that provided the drive. It is important to recognise, in respect of local authority judgments, that Ofsted has been clear that “requires improvement to be good” is an above-the-line judgment—that is, an authority that is performing “adequately”, in the old parlance, but which needs to be on the journey to be “good” to make improvements. We need to be clear that it is only authorities that are “inadequate” that can be considered to be performing less well than they need to be to serve the interests of children in that area.

[Helen Hayes]

We need to have a higher aspiration for children across the country to be supported by the best possible services. I welcome the Minister’s comments on the ongoing work to achieve that, but I believe much more can be done. That requires political will, and greater attention in this place, to drive improvements in performance.