Local Authority Children’s Services

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I commend the hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster) for the compassionate way that he spoke, and the dignity that he brought to Sara’s memory. When we have to speak about horrific cases in this place, it can go one of two ways, and I think that he did justice to the young woman today.

Stoke-on-Trent city council is often at the top of league tables that councils would wish to be at the bottom of, and at the bottom of league tables that they would wish to be at the top of. That is a structural failing that we have had for many years, and our children’s services are no different. Although they were rated inadequate in 2019, they now require improvement to be good, and that is partly because of the leadership that has been shown since the 2013 local elections. It is normally us and Hartlepool that are No. 1 in terms of the number of children in care as an absolute number, but also per capita—per 10,000. It is a financial drain on our council, which the Minister has been made aware of, not least because I have told him.

This year, one in three pounds that the council spends will be spent on children’s services. Compared with our statistical neighbours, 1,086 children in care is a phenomenally large number. It is an anomaly that we cannot get to the bottom of. At this point, I want to commend the work of our chief executive at the council, Jon Rouse, who has worked nationally on these issues and has deployed as many techniques as we can muster to get that number down, but it has remained stubbornly high. It fluctuates around 1,000, but that just means that we are spending millions of pounds on children in care at a time when money is tight.

The Government have helped; since the 2023-34 budget—if the Government sign off on this year’s request—the council will have received around £70 million of exceptional financial support to balance the budget, to deal with the overspend driven exclusively by the demand in children’s services. We cannot work out why so many young people are being put into the care system. Our city does have poverty—a lot of places have poverty—and social capital is not high. We are not that dissimilar to our statistical neighbours, and yet our numbers are significant and not coming down at the rate that we want.

The Minister is not immune to the challenges that places such as Stoke face. He knows that there have been complex issues with small local authorities in densely populated urban areas where there are underlying socioeconomic factors, but that should not be a reason to accept these high numbers. It is bad for the city, but also for the young people in care; we all know that care-experienced young people tend to have lower social capital and lower opportunities, and their life chances are disproportionately impacted by the fact that they go into care. We need to work out a solution to that.

I have raised my asks to the Minister privately, but I want to put them on the record today. Can we look at a rigorous partnership working board for Stoke-on-Trent that brings together Government, local authorities and the expertise we have heard about from Members today, to get to the root cause of the problem in Stoke-on-Trent? I will be taking up the offer from my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) to speak to her officials about how they have made their remarkable progress, because if we can learn from that, we absolutely will.

Are the Government willing to look at a rigorous, potentially academic-led investigation into the drivers of social care need in Stoke-on-Trent, so that we can get to the cause, as well as the solution? Can we talk about Ofsted? The city council was doing remarkably well, and then the Ofsted judgment came in and said that we were managing too much risk, so we instantly had to go back to a risk-averse situation that has driven those numbers up. Those are my three asks, and I thank Members for their time and attention.