Children in Care

Janet Daby Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Janet Daby)]

It is a privilege to speak with you in the Chair, Sir John. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby) on securing a debate on this important subject, and I thank hon. Members for their interventions. I will attempt to respond to as many as possible in the time that I have.

I know that this subject is close to my hon. Friend’s heart, because he has been a foster carer for many years; as a former children and families social worker and fostering manager, it is close mine, too. I am delighted and proud to be part of a Government who are making such a difference for children in care. I thank all foster carers for the care that they provide to foster children across our country.

Children in care are among the most vulnerable in our society. My hon. Friend is correct that the number of children in care has increased year on year since 2010, under the previous Government. The problems facing the children’s care system were set out in a 2022 review led by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), and the Competition and Markets Authority also reported on failings in the children’s social care market that year. Both called for radical action. This Government inherited a broken care system that is failing too many children, despite the heroic efforts of social workers, carers and all those who champion children’s outcomes.

We are taking action. Since the election, we have announced funding in the Budget to enable more children to stay in family-centred environments, including the largest ever national investment in kinship care of £40 million. We have also published a policy statement with ambitious plans to reform children’s social care and focus the system towards early help for families.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

On the point about early intervention and prevention, I thank the Minister for agreeing to visit Sussex later this year to meet me and an organisation called Pause, which works with mothers who have had a child taken into care. It works across a number of local authorities but by no means all, and I hope that the Government will look favourably upon its work and enable more funding to support it in more areas.

[Janet Daby]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention and I look forward to visiting Sussex.

In the local government finance settlement, we announced two grants that will double settlement investment in preventive children’s services to over £500 million in 2025-26. We have introduced legislation to underpin our reforms, in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The actions we plan to take do not stop there: we have a vision to improve services for children in care and we are on that journey.

Foster carers offer crucial support to some of the most vulnerable children in our society. They provide love, stability and compassion to children and young people when they need it most. We recognise that there are sufficiency challenges in foster care and we want to recruit more foster carers, so that foster care is available for more children who need it, in the places where they live. On that point, I say to anybody listening to the debate who is interested in becoming a foster carer: please do contact your local authority children’s services.

In the autumn Budget, we announced an additional £15 million to expand the fostering recruitment and retention programme. My Department is currently supporting two thirds of local authorities across England in 10 regional hubs. The extra funding will expand our approach to ensure that every local authority has access to that support. The regional hubs support foster carers from their first inquiry through to providing a retention model. Our aim is to boost the number of approvals among those who apply to become foster carers, and take further steps to retain those who we have. I note the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales about the need to retain foster carers and I absolutely agree with him.

No foster carer should be financially disadvantaged because of their fostering role. We expect all foster carers to receive at least the weekly national minimum allowance, in addition to any agreed expenses, to cover the full cost of caring for each child placed with them. In January, local authorities were sent a letter to remind them of their duty to provide the national minimum allowance and to notify them of the latest 3.55% uplift. Fostering service providers can choose to pay above the minimum allowance or to pay additional fees. Qualifying care relief, a tax relief, is also available to support foster carers. The threshold for the relief has been raised in recent years to ensure that the vast majority of foster carers will not pay tax on their care income. We encourage fostering service providers to adhere to the foster care charter, which sets out clear principles for how foster carers should be treated and recognises their invaluable work.

For most children in care, foster care is the best option when they cannot live in kinship arrangements. Kinship care, which has been mentioned by Members across the Chamber, is an area where the Government are investing. We recognise that for some young people, kinship care is absolutely where they need to be, and that kinship carers need support to enable them to care for their children. We announced £90 million of capital funding in the autumn Budget to fund new places in children’s homes and to secure children’s homes.

We are using that money in two ways. First, we are providing funding to maintain existing provision and expand capacity across both secure and open children’s homes. That will provide 180 additional open children’s home placements by late 2025. It will also help local authorities to support our most vulnerable children accommodated in specialist care in secure children’s homes, including continuing plans to create two brand-new secure homes in London and the west midlands. We recognise that we need a variation of care dependent on the care needs of the child.

Secondly, we are taking action to provide increased provision specifically for children with multiple complex needs who have been, or are at risk of being, deprived of their liberty. For such children, their needs will be a response to complex ongoing trauma. We have invited local authorities to bid for new capital funding to build 200 new places in local authority children’s homes. Local authorities and health partners will be encouraged to work together to deliver suitable packages of care and plans to support these young people. Alongside that, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will create a new statutory mechanism that allows children with complex needs to be placed in safe, flexible and secure community-based provision that keeps children safe. All young people should receive consistently high-quality care. To improve the quality of children’s homes, the Bill will strengthen Ofsted’s powers to hold provider groups to account where there are quality issues.

The current children’s social care placement market is dysfunctional. It is not delivering enough safe, loving homes for children in the right parts of the country at a sustainable cost to the taxpayer. As has been mentioned, some councils are on the brink of bankruptcy, in part due to the rising cost of spending on children in care, while some providers are making excess profits despite sometimes providing sub-par care for our most vulnerable children. The Government are clear that profiteering from vulnerable children in care is absolutely unacceptable, and we are committed to stamping it out where it occurs in the children’s social care market.

We are introducing a package of measures to fix this. The measures will rebalance the market and improve competition, regulation and the commissioning of placements. They will shine a light on the levels of profit being made and bring greater visibility to the prices that local authorities are paying. The measures, which are in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, form a key part of our strategy to address the problems of the market.

I am enormously grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales for speaking so eloquently and passionately about children in care, his experiences and the many issues to do with children’s social care. This subject means a great deal to him, as it does to me and to our Government. We need to get this right. There is a lot to do. I acknowledge the dedication that he has shown in his working life. Our opportunity mission is focused on breaking the link between children’s backgrounds and their success. I am determined to support and to improve the life chances of children in care, and this Government have an ambitious plan.

Question put and agreed to.