Care Leavers

Jonathan Brash Excerpts

Monday 3rd November 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Josh MacAlister)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster Central (Sally Jameson) for securing this debate at the start of Care Leavers Month. She brings to this place her insights from the prison system, in which she saw the tragic and avoidable over-representation of the care-experienced community.

There have been many excellent interventions and contributions by Members from across the House. I particularly want to mention the repeated mention of the important role that supported lodgings can play in our care system. I agree that they are underused—I thank the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) and others for flagging that. I will gladly work with all Members to improve outcomes for this group throughout my time in this role. On calls for a national approach to care leavers in custody, I can share that my colleagues in the Ministry of Justice are looking at this, and will give Members an update by the end of 2025.

Let me start by making a point that may seem obvious: the disadvantage faced by the care-experienced community is one of the greatest social justice issues of our time. Ensuring that those who grow up in the care of the state have a shot at a good life is a collective obligation, and for too long, we have been found wanting when it comes to ensuring that the obligation is met. That is in part because meeting it is about providing assets that any Government or service would struggle to provide. These assets are so fundamental. They are the need for belonging—a tribe—and the need for something intrinsic to the human condition: lifelong, loving relationships. That is why, at the start of this first ever Care Leavers Month, I say plainly, as the Minister for Children and Families, that the creation and sustenance of those relationships must become the obsession of the care and leaving care systems in England.

When we fail care-experienced people in that endeavour, we leave them with lives that are more isolated, a weaker sense of belonging, and questions about their self-worth. The tragic consequences for some is a life cut short. Suicide and early death are, tragically, a part of the care experience for too many. To start to solve a problem, we must first confront it. That is why I have commissioned the Department for Education to review the shockingly high number of early deaths in the care-experienced community.

However, we do not need to wait to act, and this Government certainly have not waited. We have a comprehensive plan to fix the children’s social care system at every single level. That is core to the relentless focus of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on breaking down barriers to opportunity at every stage. Let me give the House a sense of the recent action that we have taken to improve support for care leavers. We have removed the local area connection test in social housing allocations for care leavers. That is crucial for those who have grown up in care and moved around between different local authorities. We have expanded corporate parenting duties to public bodies, especially the NHS. We have committed to expanding Staying Close and local authority offers of support for housing. We have disapplied the intentionally homeless test for eligible care leavers, meaning that they should no longer have to declare themselves homeless to their corporate parent in order to receive housing support. Very recently, the Secretary of State for Education automatically made care leavers able to get the highest level of maintenance support at university. Overall, we have doubled down on the Families First programme, which will see many more families stay together successfully, avoiding the need for the care system, including through much greater support for kinship care.

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has outlined the vast range of steps that the Government have taken in short order to fix a very broken care system, but these things take time, and local authorities are under unimaginable pressure—they are at breaking point in many cases. What can he do in the short term to ensure that local authorities can continue to provide care for looked-after children and do not reach breaking point?

[Josh MacAlister]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. As a country, we must reset the children’s social care system. We must move away from the crisis-led approach that the system has been stuck in for far too long, and towards earlier effective intervention for families. Local authorities need help and support to do that. They will have my full backing in making that transition. We are rolling out a national programme that will leave no local authority behind in the pursuit of that goal. I will speak to local authorities at the end of this month to set out more detail of how they will get the Government’s full backing to make those changes.

Further to that point, we must do much more to support the recruitment and retention of foster carers across our country. Much of what we see in the care system is a symptom of a fostering system that has been in decline for too long. Next year is the centenary of the fostering system in England, and I cannot think of a better time than now to reset how we do fostering.