Children’s Social Care: Enduring Relationships Strategy

Debate between Josh MacAlister and Nusrat Ghani

Thursday 4th June 2026 Commons Chamber

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

With permission, I shall make a statement on the Government’s progress to reform children’s social care.

Transforming support for families and protection for children is central to our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. That is why we introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which received Royal Assent in April. It has enabled the most significant overhaul of children’s social care in a generation. The whole-system reset that is needed to shift money, staff and attention to earlier intensive help for families, rather than late-stage crisis management, is under way, supported by over £3 billion in funding. I want to use this statement to focus on the care and leaving care systems that form an essential part of children’s social care. I am publishing the enduring relationships strategy that sets out how we will deliver that change.

In 2022, I published the independent review of children’s social care, a review that was informed by listening directly to thousands of people with experience of the care system. What I heard then, and have heard since, is that our care and leaving care systems are too often breaking rather than building lifelong loving relationships. Care can leave young people isolated, lonely and lacking belonging. This heightens vulnerability to poor mental health, unstable housing and unemployment. In that review, I called for a system where every young person would leave care with someone who loves them—a simple goal, but one that is not the central focus of our current system.

At present, care often prioritises the management of professional anxiety over the nurturing of lasting, enduring relationships that care-experienced people need in order to feel loved and safe. We see this in children being sent to grow up in homes far away from their community, thereby rupturing their school career, their friendships and their family relationships. We see this in the rules that mean foster carers are not trusted to make day-to-day decisions about whether the child they have in their care can have an overnight stay with a friend or have a haircut without seeking permission from a social worker. We see it when the young person turning 18 is pushed towards living independently, when what they really need is a housing and social support model that helps them build community.

The strategy I have published today sets out how we will make creating a loving tribe around every care-experienced young person the central obsession of the care system. To enable this, our reforms cover four key areas. First, all of children’s social care—not just the care system—must prioritise relationships. That means working to bring about change in families for children by strengthening the bonds found in existing family networks. This is at the heart of the Families First Partnership programme, where family group decision making and family network support packages are bringing children’s families and their wider networks into their care decisions at an earlier stage.

It also means unlocking the potential of kinship care. Every local authority will be required to publish a local kinship offer, giving families the clarity and support they need. We have also committed £126 million to seven kinship zones, which are now up and running, that will test the impact of a non-means-tested allowance, equivalent to the fostering allowance, for kinship families with a legal order.

Secondly, we must create more stable and loving homes for children in care that support long-term relationships. A shortage of foster homes is leading to too many children being moved far away from their communities and the people they know. It is putting pressure on existing foster carers to be matched with children where their needs and their relationships with brothers and sisters often cannot be met. It is leading to children being placed in residential care inappropriately, at great cost in terms of both money and poorer outcomes.

We are therefore on the cusp of dramatically expanding a new approach to running our care system. This is made up of new end-to-end fostering hubs, where we will pull together individual local authority fostering teams into larger and more specialised fostering services, with more resource and higher expectations on recruitment and support for carers. This is the main action that will deliver the 10,000 additional places in foster care that we need by the end of this Parliament. It is backed with £88 million and includes funding for new innovation, grants to build extensions and home improvements for existing carers, and modernisation of the foster carer recruitment process.

This new system also depends on expanding regional care co-operatives so that the majority of England will be covered by an RCC by the end of this year. RCCs will give areas the scale to create the types of homes that children in care need and the leverage to drive out profiteering and poor quality practice. My Department will use RCCs as the vehicle to roll out a new approach to wrap around children who are on or at risk of a deprivation of liberty order. This programme, called Home Again, will de-escalate crises and be delivered in partnership with health services. I will share more information about this in the coming weeks.

I have also been concerned about the lack of support and attention that has been given to those working in residential care. That is why we have launched an expert-led review to assess the professional development offer to staff at children’s homes and set out instructions for change that we will action this autumn.

Thirdly, we must support care-experienced children who are transitioning into adulthood by ensuring that we nurture and expand their long-term relationships. This is not to be confused with supporting their relationships with professionals, although that is important, but instead is about the relationships with people who can form a lasting family and tribe around care-experienced people. That starts with what the system measures and how it is inspected. Later this year, a new metric to track the quality of enduring relationships at an individual level will be rolled out in the care and leaving care systems because, whether we like it or not, what gets measured is often the thing that gets done. If we are serious about putting enduring relationships at the heart of the system, the performance of the system itself needs to be judged on whether the relationships around those in and leaving care are getting stronger or weaker. This will, of course, have implications for Ofsted’s inspection regime.

With a new measure of relationships sitting at the heart of the system, we also need to support practitioners to change what they do so that enduring relationships are strengthened. That is why today I am launching a national sprint to roll out family finding services across England by the end of the next two years. We know the impact that “Who Do You Think You Are?”-style services can have on building stronger tribes around young people, and we have already seen the impact of programmes like Lifelong Links. These services need to become the mainstream offer, rather than pilots on the fringe of the system.

In the coming months, I will launch the new Staying Close programme, which will shift the system away from its current focus on preparing young people for independence and instead focus on providing homes for care leavers that build interdependence and connection. This will mean fewer teenagers dropping off the care cliff at 18 and being forced to live in a flat, lonely and isolated.

Finally, I am particularly proud that we will work with faith and belief organisations to design a new lifelong relationships ceremony to recognise the important bonds between care-experienced adults and those who love them. Just as we have Christenings and naming ceremonies, Britain is generous enough to also mark these wonderful and unique relationships that give hope and meaning. I want these to start being offered this year.

The most important thing for us in life is our relationships. The state often finds it hard to put itself at the service of building these loving relationships. In fact, too often it blocks or weakens them. That changes today by making one thing very clear: the purpose of our care system, above all else, is to build enduring loving relationships. I commend this statement to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the shadow Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Josh MacAlister]

I thank the hon. Member for the spirit in which he shared his remarks and the questions that he put to me. He is right to say that this issue requires serious and sustained attention from the House and from parties across every corner of the Chamber.

It is worth highlighting to people the disparity between what care-experienced people tell us about their experience and the experiences of the general population. Some 22% of care leavers are always or often lonely, and 15% of care leavers do not have a really good friend. Compared with the general population, those numbers are so much higher, which illustrates why this issue is so important.

Let me turn to the questions asked by the hon. Member. The adoption and special guardianship support fund is hugely important, which is why we have increased the fund by 10% this year to ensure that we can reach more families and young people with that support. The consultation response will come later this year. At the moment, the Department is focused on implementing the changes and improvements that we set out in the consultation a few months ago.

The fostering hubs will be allocated in the next few weeks, and I hope to make an announcement next month on the fostering hubs and RCCs that will be rolled out and extended further. In terms of improving matching, regional care co-operatives will play an important role in the future system in enabling us to get a much better sense, looking ahead at the years to come, of the actual sufficiency required for children in their areas.

Finally, let me turn to the new metric. The Department has worked with foundations to set out a shortlist of options of standardised measures that are valid and can be used at a practitioner and young person level but do not create undue bureaucracy or distract from the important relationships that are needed in those conversations. I am confident that we can find and roll out a measure this year that will achieve that goal.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Chair of the Education Committee.

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

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister on his commitment to making a difference for children in the care system and for care leavers. It is a shocking reality that our care system has, over a long period of time, become so far removed from putting the essential needs of children and young people for secure, loving relationships at the heart of everything it does.

May I acknowledge the magnitude of the shift that the Minister has announced today? We do not often have moments like this in the House—we should have them more often. Having spoken to many, many care leavers over a long period of time, I know the difference that what the Minister has announced today has the potential to make for them. I welcome the fact that many of his commitments are consistent with recommendations from the Education Committee in our report.

May I ask the Minister for further detail on two areas? First, can he give an assurance that, as he works to deliver this transformation of the care system and support for care-experienced people, he will retain a focus on restoring the early intervention and family support that prevents children from entering the care system in the first place? Secondly, with the focus on regional care co-operatives, may I press him on their geography? They cover quite large geographies, and it is possible for a child to be placed in a regional care co-operative and still be placed a long way from home. In delivering on the detail of regional care co-operatives, will he give his attention to that issue and pay attention to the distance that children will need to travel within them?

[Josh MacAlister]

I thank my hon. Friend, the Chair of the Education Committee, not just for those remarks, but for the Committee’s work over the last few years in keeping a focus on these issues. I also thank her for her support for the Government always going further and taking more actions to improve outcomes for children and their families.

In answer to my hon. Friend’s first point, the fundamental shift required in this Parliament is that we start to see funding across the children’s social care system being rebalanced away from late-stage crisis spending towards earlier, intensive support for families. We are not leaving that to an annual check-in. Every quarter, my officials and I are monitoring the pounds being spent by children’s social care across the country, and we will be prepared to support and, if necessary, to intervene if the system reset that we expect is not being seen on the ground in how spending is done.

The geography of RCCs will be large. In some areas, they will have the footprint of a mayoral combined authority or multiple mayoral combined authorities, but there will be a specific target for creating homes that keep children in close proximity to their existing communities.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I have no doubt that it is a moment of immense pride for the Minister to be able to announce as Government policy many things that he recommended in his own independent review, and we welcome them.

Every child deserves to have deep, trusting, lifelong relationships, yet, as we have heard, too many children in care are torn away from those whom they are able to trust, unable to keep in touch with them for the stability they need to enter adulthood. We know from the Milburn report, published last week, that care-experienced children are five times more likely not to be in education, employment or training at the age of 17 than the general population. As Milburn says, the care system produces an intense concentration of changes

“at precisely the ages when continuity matters most.”

The Liberal Democrats therefore welcome today’s announcement—the strategy, the accompanying investment, and the marked shift away from harmful short-term thinking and a transactional system towards a holistic approach that puts the child front and centre of decision making, alongside long-term relationships. The Minister will know that my noble Friend in the other place, Baroness Tyler, campaigned hard to close the loophole that prevented children in care from being able to contact siblings not in care, and we hope that today’s announcement will build on her brilliant campaigning.

As the Minister alluded to, the number of children in care living more than 20 miles away from home has increased by 41% over the past decade, and that has a damaging long-term impact on those children’s relationships. When will we see a reduction in the number of children in care living far from their families and friends? What are the current accountability measures when children are moved to the other side of the country although that is not in their best interests, and how can that accountability be improved through the regional care co-operatives?

The Minister also referenced the new financial allowance pilot for kinship carers. He knows that my party and I have long campaigned on that issue, and I very much hope that he will move at pace, working with the Treasury, to scale those pilots up quickly nationwide. He knows how beneficial it is to put kinship carers’ allowances on a par with foster carers’ allowances. I also urge him to work with Ministers in the Department for Business and Trade to ensure that statutory leave for kinship carers is part of the parental leave review.

Finally, the adoption and special guardianship support fund has been mentioned. I note that the Minister has increased the fund overall, but the cuts to the individual grants persist. He knows that those cuts are damaging to the families affected, so will he please consider reinstating those grants?

[Josh MacAlister]

I thank the hon. Member for her questions and, again, for the spirit in which she has made her contribution. I also thank her for her leadership on this issue—she has spent a lot of time in this place raising many of these points time and again. She is right to highlight the work of the noble Baroness Tyler in the other place, and I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) in this place; both of them, working cross party, have long highlighted the importance of brothers and sisters in the care system. The most important relationships can often be relationships with siblings.

I want the number of distant placements to start to come down in this Parliament. The leading indicator of that would be an expansion of fostering, and we are monitoring that at the moment. We need to start seeing those numbers go up in a big way so that the homes are created close to where children already live, and there is not a need for distant placements.

Turning to accountability, we definitely need greater visibility on those numbers in the system; if the metric I talked about in the statement is embedded across the system as well, we will start to see the strength of those relationships. We speak to young people who have been moved two hours away from their home community; earlier this week, I spoke to a young woman who that had happened to. It was impossible for her to keep the quality of relationship that she wanted to with her father, which was safe. We need to measure that. That needs to be the central focus, and then everything else will flow from it, including the location of placements.

Finally, on kinship allowance, the take-up has been impressive already; it is only a few weeks into the roll-out, and I have looked at the data. I look forward to going to Grimsby soon, hopefully, with my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) to see one of the areas that, at the moment, is more successful than the others—there is a competition under way—and see the success of that programme.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

There are wonderful kinship carers down in Sussex Weald, and the Minister is more than welcome to visit.

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

I warmly welcome the Minister’s statement today and pay tribute to him for his enduring commitment to this issue, which started long before he came to this place. Improving the lives of children in care and care leavers must be our highest priority, and Hartlepool’s previous Labour council stood four-square behind the Minister’s intent to rebalance the system. As he knows, though, I am really concerned about the legacy of this broken system—the firefighting that councils are having to do, the financial pain it has caused them, and their inability to make that rebalancing happen. Can the Minister give me a little more information about how he is working with his colleagues at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to support those councils, which are under such huge financial pressure?