Looked After Children (Distance Placements) Bill

Fred Thomas Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 28th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jake Richards (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I am grateful for the opportunity to bring this Bill before the House. On entering politics, I was determined to raise the issue of children in care and, in particular, the lack of safe, decent accommodation for the most vulnerable children. The state’s enduring failure to meet its most basic duty to care for those children for whom their family are unable to care continues to shock me, as it should shock us all. I want to play my part and make a difference, because this matter is close to my heart—not from experience of the care system myself, but from the insights I took from an adjacent perspective before being elected.

I practised as a barrister before entering this place, often in public law and family law, working on complex and heartbreaking cases involving children in care. I represented local authorities trying to safeguard children, parents fighting to keep their families together and children at the heart of the proceedings. Time and again I saw the same pattern: children were removed from their families for their own safety, but they had no place to go. On a Friday afternoon, when I was a very junior barrister, I would often be instructed to attend court for an urgent application to remove a child from their family before the weekend. Those were distressing cases, but upon drafting the order my work would be done. I would set off to enjoy the weekend, but I knew that for the social work team and, more importantly, for the family involved, the traumatic set of events had only just begun.

The process of removing a child can of course be incredibly difficult; the police may be involved, and parents can be forced into an emotional goodbye. Even once a child was in the care of a local authority, there would be desperate last-minute searches for suitable temporary accommodation. Foster carers would be asked if they could take the child just for a weekend, and residential units would be called to see if they had a spare bed. Too often, I was told by social workers of children waiting at local authority offices late into the night while these inquiries took place. On one occasion I was told that a child slept on an office floor because there was no safe place for them to be placed.

My Bill aims to make a very modest but significant change to the way we approach our responsibility to the children’s social care estate—in particular, the lack of any meaningful strategy or local initiatives to ensure that there are good, safe care places in every locality across the country, so that children are not placed miles and miles away from their communities, families, schools and friends.

In recent years we have seen a deeply troubling trend of children in care being placed far from home, sometimes hundreds of miles from their communities, schools and support networks, and those placements are no longer exceptional: they are becoming the norm. New data obtained through a freedom of information request I submitted reveals that nearly 10% of all children in care in England now live more than 50 miles from home. Some 4% live more than 100 miles from home. The number of children placed more than 50 miles from home has risen from just over 6,000 in 2020 to well over 7,000 in 2024. Those are not isolated outliers; they are thousands of children sent far from their schools and support networks, and often their siblings and other family members, not because it is in their best interests, but because there is simply nowhere nearby for them to go.

Even more worryingly, some children are now being placed across borders. The number of children in England moved out of the country, primarily to Wales and Scotland, has risen by 9% since 2020. Placements in Wales alone have increased by 15% over that time. These cross-border moves are even more complex, taking children away from the oversight of their placing authority and often into different jurisdictions, with entirely different education and care systems. Those decisions are not taken through incompetence; they are the result of a system that lacks capacity, co-ordination and meaningful planning, and the impact on children’s lives, their education, their mental health and their relationships is profound. Because these are looked-after children—a phrase that ought to promise protection but too often rings hollow—their needs are bureaucratised, their voices are marginalised and their lives are shifted like chess pieces on a board they never asked to be part of.

Distant placements are no longer exceptional, but systemic. In some local authorities, more than 70% of looked-after children are placed outside the home area.

[Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend not just for his passion in bringing forward this Bill, but for his service as a lawyer before entering this place. He brings that expertise from his previous profession here. Will he join me in acknowledging that in places such as Plymouth this problem can be even more acute? Plymouth is not particularly near other large cities, so the tendency is for children to be placed in care very far away—sometimes 50 or even 100 miles away, as he highlights. As he gets to the part of his speech where he highlights some statistics, will he just acknowledge—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. May I just point out to Members that interventions, while always welcome, do need to be briefer than that?

SEND Provision

Fred Thomas Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) for securing this important debate. We have heard from many Members how dire the situation is in their constituencies, but can we for a second celebrate the incredible staff who already put so much effort and passion into the provision they arrange for children? My first visit as an MP was to Mill Ford school in Ernesettle in Plymouth, which supports children and young adults with complex needs. I have to pay tribute to the incredible staff there and congratulate Mill Ford school on recently being rated as “outstanding” by Ofsted.

I am pleased that we are moving away from one-word Ofsted ratings, because it is impossible to capture what Mill Ford does for people in just one word. While visiting Mill Ford, we stopped by their daily singalong in the hall. Pupils from all age groups were having an incredible time, singing in various tunes and volumes and quite literally jumping for joy. It was a fantastic scene. Despite this, huge challenges remain. For example, at that school the corridors are so narrow that two wheelchairs cannot be wheeled past each other.

The situation in Plymouth is similar to that in many hon. Members’ constituencies, but some statistics we have already heard do not match quite how dire it is. In Plymouth, 18.5% of pupils have a SEND need—well above the national figure of 13%. The number of children and young people with an EHCP in Plymouth has increased since 2010 by 125%—more than doubled. We know that there is no quick fix for the crisis in SEND. Special educational needs are complex and wide-ranging, so they require complex and wide-ranging solutions. We need to listen carefully to education professionals, support staff and especially those with lived experience of SEND as we move forward. I am proud that I ran for Parliament on a manifesto that pledged to take a community-wide approach to special educational needs, improving inclusivity in mainstream schools as well as ensuring that special schools are fit for purpose.

[Anna Dixon]

As in my hon. Friend’s constituency, in Shipley the number of pupils with SEND has increased again this year. It is putting huge pressure on our teachers and teaching assistants in mainstream schools. Does he agree that the cuts to school funding under the previous Government have contributed to the problem, and that further steps need to be taken to ensure appropriate training for all our school staff, particularly those in mainstream schools?

[Fred Thomas]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s point about the funding cuts. I was going to respond to a point made by the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey), but I removed it from my contribution due to the time constraints. She asked earlier whether the Government had conducted feasibility studies on the removal of VAT exemptions from private schools. I would respond by asking whether the previous Government, which we had since 2010, conducted feasibility studies on SEND when they made deep cuts to education.

I started by speaking about the fantastic Mill Ford special school in Plymouth Moor View. Expanding capacity at Mill Ford is central to Plymouth city council’s plan to address the SEND crisis, but it is much harder to access funding to replace or rebuild a school than it is to build new schools. Will the Minister commit to working with me to help expand capacity at Plymouth Moor View’s special schools?