Foster Carers

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Robertson.

A wide range of issues to do with children’s services have been raised in the debate, but for me an important starting point is to recognise that the UK care system is among the highest performing in the world. In all the debate that goes on, especially when a distressing case hits the headlines, it is often easy to forget that our foster carers, our adoptive parents and our children’s social workers are all part of something that research demonstrates is among the safest care systems in which to grow up anywhere in the developed world.

We know that the drivers of children coming into that care system are many and complex, with neglect continuing to be the No. 1 driver, but as we have seen over the years, the crises of confidence that follow cases like that of Victoria Climbié and Baby Peter Connelly and the consequent toughening of Ofsted criteria result in a consistent pattern of local authorities becoming more risk averse and taking more children than before into the care system; and in due course, the Government begin to look at whether those criteria are correct. As we consider the system as a whole, we must recognise that foster carers are a crucial part of it, and that they, child protection investigations and organisations such as the police and schools, where my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) spent many years, are all part a system through which the state has eyes on children and seeks to keep them safe.

In my contribution, I will draw on my experience with the Local Government Association and with a variety of local authorities, both as a lead member and as one who has done a good deal of work in this space over the years. It is clear that recruitment and retention of foster carers throw up different sets of issues that the Government need to consider. I have met many, many foster carers over the years. I have met people who have been fostering for 30 or 40 years and who have fostered dozens of children. Some talk of specialising in children who are violent and who have been through difficult times, or children who may be sexual abusers of other children and require very intensive and specialist support.

It is clear to me that they are owed a huge amount of respect by our society for the work that they do. I acknowledge that foster carers are paid for that work, but they provide support not just by fostering a child but, in some cases, by fostering a parent as well, so that a parent who is struggling can learn from a foster family how to nurture and support a child, preventing that child going elsewhere in the care system or even into adoption. The job should rightly command a huge amount of respect.

Pretty much every local authority that I have come across tends to have regular opportunities to celebrate the contribution that foster carers make and to thank them for that work, and it is important that we do so here at a national level. There is a national leadership board for adoption, but we have not seen the same focus on fostering by central Government over many decades, despite the fact that a much greater population of our children are in foster care.

From conversations with foster carers, it is clear that their experiences of being foster carers vary enormously. Some are engaged by local authorities; some are engaged by agencies; and some will change between those two types of engagement during their time as foster carers. A number of Members have highlighted reasonable concerns about the role that agencies have played over the years.

Most local authorities use independent fostering agencies to a significant degree, and many agencies provide a high-quality service to vulnerable children in the system, but it is striking that, as a recent report highlighted, the 10 largest children’s services providers have made £300 million in profits from that market in the last year. As a Tory who likes taxpayer’s money, I am concerned that taxpayers are paying £300 million in profits for something that is part of the care market.

I thank BBC journalist Sanchia Berg for the work that she has done over the years to bring to wider attention the role that private equity has played both in foster care specifically and in the children’s care market generally. We need to ensure that, as we develop the quality, we are able to have an effective handle on how good that market is at providing support for children. It is important not to criticise independent fostering agencies, or IFAs, as simply profit-seeking providers. We need to ensure that a limited resource is being spent as effectively as possible, with a real eye on quality of experience for the children who are fostered.

When it comes to recruitment, foster carers have told me many times that the key thing for them has been word of mouth. Although most local authorities have stands in shopping centres, put out leaflets and put things on their websites, hearing what the system is like from somebody who has been through it is crucial. The more central Government promote the stories of foster carers at a national level—so that other people can hear what an attractive opportunity it can be—the better. Those who go to local authorities as potential adopters but are perhaps not ready to take that step are often people who might consider fostering and perhaps go on to do it for a long time.

Fostering is one of those unusual roles. I am aware that there has been legal action in Scotland about whether foster carers should have the status of employees. They are paid to do it, but at the same time, it is flexible and, depending on the circumstances of the child being fostered, some foster carers are able to hold down a full-time job. For others, fostering the child is absolutely a full-time job because of the child’s complex needs. It is crucial to recognise that complexity and what it means to a family and a household to become foster carers, without putting people off.

On retention, I pay particular tribute to my soon-to-be-former Hillingdon Council colleague Councillor Alan Deville, who has fostered many children, some of whom are from very difficult backgrounds. He also been active in creating a foster carers’ association; it is independent of the local authority, but it is there to support foster carers in that local authority area by organising events for the children and opportunities for foster parents and families to get together and share their experiences, and by providing really effective feedback to the local authority and IFAs about the things that make a real difference.

Often, those things were quite simple things. They were about making the “job” part of being a foster carer more straightforward, including knowing that there was someone there who could help them if they had an emergency situation with a fostered child in their household, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. It was also about a foster carer knowing very quickly how they could get consent if a child brought home a form from school to go on a school trip, or if the child needed a haircut or some expenditure over and above the costs that would normally be incurred, or how to get a bank account set up, so that the child’s savings element contained within the fostering allowance could be secured for their future. It was about making sure that those basics were taken care of really well. We hear stories, both from foster carers who have been engaged by local authorities and from IFAs, about how that aspect of fostering could be improved to make the role so much more straightforward.

In conclusion, I have several asks of the Minister and of Government. As we know, the care review is looking at our care system and will come forward with some recommendations. However, the comments that a number of other Members have made certainly resonate with the experience I had during my time in local government and it seems to me that it would be helpful for us to have a more strategic approach to the way we support foster carers, rather in the way that we support those who adopt.

The issues include things such as access to appropriate housing. Local authorities are quite tightly controlled under local government finance rules in terms of what can be done for people who want social housing and assessing their level of need versus the cost of supporting children. We have to make sure that that resource can be deployed as flexibly as possible, so that foster carers who need an extra room, for example, are able to have larger accommodation within the local authority area, thereby removing the need for a high-cost care placement.

Council tax is another example of where the need for flexibility comes to mind. Again, complexities may arise where a local authority offers to pay the council tax for a foster carer; the foster carer may be resident in another local authority area. So how does it pay out?

Of course we must also recognise that sometimes young people are placed 20 miles or more from home, which I appreciate is an issue that the Department keeps a very close eye on. That situation may well arise because the child is being taken away from risks proximate to their local area—from their family, from a drug dealer or from somebody else who is targeting them. So there may be good reasons for such a move.

I hope that a strategic approach will come from the care review. If it does, it will make a transformational difference in the next few years to the quality of the experience that our foster carers have.