Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Emma Hardy Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I thank my hon. Friend for all the work he did as Children’s Minister when he was at the Department. He is right to say that we have to ensure that the implementation of this report and review is different from what has gone before. It may not shock him to know that in the back of my mind I have the 2014 special educational needs and disability review; that plan was bold and ambitious, and many considered it to be the right one, but the implementation was not and, as a result, it was not delivered and we have had to revisit it. That is why I am not going at this like a bull at a gate.

There are 80-plus recommendations and they have to be considered very carefully. We have to listen to the sector, stakeholders and others to make sure we get it right. That is why, although I have responded immediately to set out the things we can do right now, I am also setting up an implementation board to ensure that we listen to the sector experts with experience of transformational change, so that we can deliver the change that we all so desperately want to see. I know that my hon. Friend will welcome the level of ambition and that he is desperate to see change, too.

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

I urge the Minister to look in particular at what happens to care leavers when they reach the age of 18 and how the support immediately falls away. Two organisations have been working on this issue for a long time: one, Every Child Leaving Care Matters, has been campaigning for a long time for additional support for people when they reach 18, and the other, Wild Intervention, is in my constituency. When the Minister does his review and comes to his conclusions, will he find out what happens when somebody goes from 17 to 18 years old? I do not want to speak for everyone, but I am not sure that I would have been capable of doing everything independently at the moment I turned 18. We seem to expect an awful lot from these young people.

[Will Quince]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. By bringing about some of the changes I have outlined, we will really change the game and turn around the life chances of some of the young people who have adverse experiences both in the care system and after it. I will of course look carefully at the detailed recommendations in the review. The key thing is not to see children’s social care as a siloed issue, because it is not just a Department for Education issue. Every Department, every local authority and even, dare I say, businesses need to step up, recognise some of the challenges that care leavers face and make appropriate changes. We are taking some immediate steps—over the next two years, we are investing £172 million in programmes such as staying put and staying close, and in support for personal advisers—but I am conscious that we need to do far more in this policy space.