Foster Carers

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) for securing this important and timely debate, and for speaking powerfully about her experience. This debate is a welcome opportunity to pay tribute to foster carers across the country for all they do to provide safety, stability, kindness, love and care to looked-after children.

Foster carers are the bedrock of the care system and provide more than 70% of care placements. Fostering is challenging and demanding, but it is also deeply rewarding and can quite literally change the course of a child’s life. Foster carers are both hugely generous and highly skilled, and fostering relationships can last a lifetime—well beyond the duration of a placement, with all the benefits that a stable, long-term relationship of trust can provide.

I am grateful to the Fostering Network for all it does to support foster carers, and for bringing a group of experienced foster carers to Parliament today. It was a great pleasure to meet them earlier, and very moving to hear about their experiences. I thank them for all they do.

We have heard today about some of the benefits and rewards of fostering, but also about the challenges. This has been an excellent debate, and I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have taken part. I do not have time to mention everybody’s contribution, but the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey) spoke movingly about his experience as a foster carer. I thank him for mentioning Sinéad Browne, my constituent, whose organisation, Compliments of the House, is also based in my constituency. She is an absolutely remarkable and inspirational young woman.

There are some very significant challenges with the recruitment and retention of foster carers. The Fostering Network estimates that fostering services need to recruit at least a further 8,100 foster families in England in the next 12 months alone. Nine in 10 fostering services report a shortage of foster carers to meet the needs of children in the local population, with particularly acute shortages for teenagers, large sibling groups, children with disabilities and parent and child placements. More than a third of foster carers said that their allowances did not meet the full cost of looking after a child, and only 53% described the support they received from their fostering service as excellent or good.

Although the interest in fostering has been growing in recent years, the current recruitment process for foster carers has an astonishingly low success rate and the number of applications has been decreasing. In the year ending 31 March 2021, there were 160,635 enquiries from prospective fostering families, but only 10,145 foster carer applications were received. Thirty-two per cent. of those applications were approved, so just 2% of expressions of interest resulted in an approved foster family. The Education Committee has highlighted a lack of diversity among foster carers and the urgent need to recruit new foster carers from a more diverse range of backgrounds to meet the needs of looked-after children.

Those challenges must be considered in the context of a wider children’s social care system that, after 12 years of Conservative government, is in a state of crisis. Almost 50% of children’s services departments are rated by Ofsted as inadequate or requiring improvement. That is a national, not just a local, issue and it requires the Government to show leadership to sort it out.

The Competition and Markets Authority has revealed the scale of the scandal of profiteering among some providers of residential placements for children, with the 10 biggest providers of children’s homes and private fostering placements making profits totalling £300 million. Across the country, social workers are raising concerns about workload and burnout, and councils are struggling to fill vacancies.

All those issues have an impact on the recruitment and retention of foster carers. Poor-performing and under-resourced children’s services departments will struggle to provide the level or continuity of social work support that foster families need. Millions of pounds of public money is being siphoned off in profit by private organisations and is not being spent on the wellbeing of vulnerable children.

Foster carers are clear about the things that make a difference. It is absolutely essential, and indeed acknowledged by the Government, that all the costs to foster carers of providing a placement should be covered in full. With that in mind, I ask the Minister how he calculated the new fostering allowance rates, which took effect at the beginning of this month. The allowance for looking after a two-year-old has gone up by £1 a week in London and not at all in the rest of England. The allowance for looking after a child aged 11 to 15 has gone up by just £5 a week. There is a cost of living crisis bearing down on families across the country, with food, fuel and energy costs all increasing rapidly, and inflation set to reach 9%. Can the Minister explain how he thinks such a paltry increase will help with the recruitment and retention of foster carers?

In addition to financial support, foster carers need to be able to access support in many other ways. Foster carers have told me that the continuity of relationships with social workers is vital, both for them and the children in their care. However, all too often they face a constant churn of new social workers, making it really hard to build relationships and trust and for practical support to be provided when needed.

Peer support is also vital. I would like to pay tribute to the Mockingbird constellation model developed by the Fostering Network, which builds networks of foster families in a local area who provide support for one another, replicating the benefits of a large, extended family for children and foster carers alike. Mental health support is also vital. Looked-after children have often suffered significant trauma and need to access therapeutic support. However, across the country, children are waiting months and even years for children and adolescent mental health services. The Government must fix CAMHS so that foster families can access mental health support as soon as their child needs it.

It is no exaggeration to say that we could not do without foster carers. They are absolutely critical to the role of the state as a corporate parent and to the tens of thousands of children for whom they provide a loving home. Foster carers urgently need more recognition for their vital role. Most importantly, the Government must urgently fix the crisis in children’s social care, so that foster care takes place within a system that can readily deliver the wider network of support that children and foster carers should be able to rely on.