Services for Children in Care

Josh Newbury Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

I would like to take this opportunity, as I have not yet had one, to warmly welcome the Minister to his place. I know that he is covering tonight for the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), but I am sure that he will do a fantastic job. I know that in his role on early education, which is also an area of interest for me, he will be a steadfast champion and a fantastic member of this Government, so I welcome him.

I first applied for this debate after a conversation I had at the West Chadsmoor NHS clinic back in June. I had gone there to talk to the team about the fantastic Pride in Place funding coming to our area and to meet some of the brilliant clinicians based there who specialise in areas such as child and adolescent mental health services, paediatric podiatry, occupational health and various forms of family support. As I am sure Members across the House will have experienced, I often leave a visit in my constituency with much more work than I walked in with, but that is of course what I was elected to do, and it is a pleasure to do that work.

One of the conversations I had at West Chadsmoor raised an issue I felt needed to be brought to this House. It was about vulnerable children being placed in Staffordshire by local authorities elsewhere in the country and the problems that arise when the right people are not told that those children are coming. I heard from clinicians that increasingly they are coming across young people who have been placed in our area without Staffordshire county council being notified. Sadly, CAMHS staff sometimes encounter those children for the first time when they are in a serious mental health crisis. The doctors I spoke to described young people who might be self-harming or experiencing suicidal thoughts. These are children who will almost certainly have already experienced deep trauma, family breakdown and considerable instability. Then they are moved miles from home—sometimes hundreds of miles—and the support that they had, we hope, been receiving does not always follow them.

The statutory requirement is for the responsible local authority to notify the host local authority when a child or young person in care is placed within its area. but I am hearing that this does not always happen and does not always include the relevant information regarding identified risks and support needs. Consideration should also be given to the suitability of the placement, such as the availability of local services. When a local authority decides to place a child in another part of the country, that child arrives with their own history, their own vulnerabilities and, often, an established package of support. Yet the authority responsible for receiving them may not even know they are there.

The clinicians who want to do their best to replicate that support are sometimes left on the back foot. They may only discover the child when something has gone wrong and they come to them in a very bad way. That is not a sensible way to organise care for any child, let alone one who is already vulnerable, which is why, of course, the legal duty to inform exists.

In my constituency, we have seen rapid growth in independent children’s homes in recent years, partly because of the relatively low property prices but also, as we know, because of a chronic lack of foster carers. As a former foster carer myself, I very much welcome the recruitment campaign that the Department launched last week.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing forward the debate. He always brings incredibly important debates to Westminster Hall and the Chamber, including on the Adjournment, and I congratulate him on their standard and the contribution he makes to this House on behalf of his constituents, which is appreciated. He mentioned fostering. The Fostering Network found that only 33% of foster carers report that their allowances fully cover the cost of raising a child. Approximately 66% of people believe that they could be a good foster carer if there were no practical barriers. During this cost of living crisis, does he agree that we must recognise the additional pressures and that more must be done to financially support those who have a heart for fostering children to both take this on and be equipped to do so?

[Josh Newbury]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. He always has a kind word to say and a valuable contribution to make to any debate on any topic, which is quite impressive. He is absolutely right to highlight the fact that there are so many people in our country who would love to foster and have the attributes and the motivation to do so, but who simply cannot afford to because the costs they would have to meet exceed the payment they would get. We need to raise awareness of the fact that fostering is paid for—many people do not realise that—and we need to bring those stories to the House, as he has rightly done, to highlight the need to do far more to support our foster carers, who do an incredible amount.

[Dr Allison Gardner (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

I have constituents who are foster parents of children with extremely complex needs. It is a laudable but very challenging vocation. Placements often fail because the foster parents do not get the wraparound support and respite that they need. Such breakdowns can be even more challenging if the children are from out of area and then end up getting moved again. Does my hon. Friend agree that all councils must provide the correct support and respite for our foster parents?

[Josh Newbury]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, who speaks from deep personal knowledge of this topic. She is right to highlight the experience of foster carers in her constituency, who all too often feel that the buck always stops with them and that there is never any let-up. It can be an incredibly challenging role—we are talking about some of the most vulnerable children in our society, who often have incredibly complex needs that present themselves in many different ways. It is the responsibility of our society as a whole to ensure that those children are well cared for, but we also need to ensure that our foster carers have the support and the wraparound care that is needed to succeed, because they play such an incredible role. When my husband and I were fostering, we were very fortunate to have that support from our county council, and we need to ensure that that support is available to everybody.

Staffordshire is increasingly welcoming children who are placed in our county by local authorities elsewhere in the country, and I am very glad that our county is able to play that role in caring for vulnerable young people. The figures for Cannock Chase give us a sense of how the picture is changing. In 2025-26, five children’s homes opened and two closed, with a net increase of seven places. The county council told one of the councillors in my constituency that there are 19 homes for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and seven for children with learning difficulties. Because of the high level of EBD homes, the county council is even taking the step of asking potential providers not to set up new EBD homes in my constituency for the time being, despite the shortages we are all aware of.

As more homes open, our local services clearly have a growing role in supporting children whose previous care arrangements may have been organised hundreds of miles away. I am proud that Staffordshire can provide care for those children, but I want to ensure that the local authorities placing them here are giving our services the information that they need early enough to plan properly. My point is not that Staffordshire should do less to support these children; it is that, if we are going to provide that care, we must have the communication and co-ordination needed to do it as well as possible. These children deserve more than a placement address; they deserve a joined-up package of care that follows them wherever they move to.

The doctors I spoke to explained that, when Staffordshire county council receives the appropriate notification, CAMHS has a chance to contact the young person’s previous NHS trust, establish what support they have been receiving and work out how that support can be continued locally. That is the difference between planning for a child’s needs and reacting when those needs escalate. Without notification, that opportunity is taken away. The receiving services may not know about the child, may not have their clinical history and may not understand what treatment or support has been interrupted. It also means that GPs may not know that a young person has entered their area; diagnoses, risks and existing care plans may not accompany the placement; responsibility for GP registration, crisis support and ongoing care may remain unclear; services might respond without essential clinical and contextual information; and young people may experience avoidable crisis escalation—emergency department attendance and in-patient stays are all too common.

Fragmented arrangements can undermine safeguarding and continuity of care. Commissioning of provision is carried out by local authorities, but if they are not aware of what has been commissioned from the home area, which can often include a comprehensive health package to sustain the placement, it is not hard to see where things can go wrong. In some cases, local services can end up duplicating already commissioned input, leading to double-funded provision.

That complexity is compounded when multiple providers operate within one geographical area. In Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent, there are multiple CAMHS providers, alongside specialist children in care health teams hosted by different organisations. Acute hospitals attended by young people may be managed by separate provider trusts, many of which do not have access to community health records that are held elsewhere. These organisational boundaries can create barriers to timely information sharing and co-ordinated care.

Similarly, when children move between multiple out-of-area placements, information can become fragmented across different systems and accessing records held by external providers may not be possible. The issue is particularly relevant to my constituency and the wider Staffordshire area, where, as I mentioned earlier, we have seen an increase in the number of children’s homes in recent years. As that number grows, we need to be confident that the right safeguards, oversight and support are keeping pace. A children’s home is not simply a property with staff in it—it is a place where some of our most vulnerable children should receive the care, stability and specialist support that they really need.

To give a tragic example of how badly things can go wrong, I will share one story from Cannock Chase. Last summer, a constituent in Hednesford raised concerns with me about the care being provided to a vulnerable young person in an independent children’s home very close to where he lived. That young person had clearly had an incredibly traumatic experience at a young age and had complex needs. The placement was intensive, to the point where the home accepted just one child at a time, supported by several staff, 24/7.

However, the company responsible for that home clearly had no intention of following through on the promised support package, which was not put in place. I heard that CAMHS were not even contacted, despite the company having put in its bid that local CAMHS services in my area were good and dealt with looked-after children very well, and that it had already made preliminary inquiries with CAMHS. The promised two-on-one or three-on-one support was not followed through either, to the point where the young person was at one point left alone and was found by neighbours banging on doors, clearly in extreme distress and mental health crisis.

I cannot independently verify every detail of that story and I do not want to prejudge any investigation that might take place. I have also visited excellent homes in my constituency, run by people who care deeply about providing the highest quality trauma-informed care, and I believe they are the majority. However, these concerns underline why we need effective oversight and clear accountability for the care being provided.

This is not a narrow issue affecting only children in residential care or those in Staffordshire alone. It speaks to a wider challenge in how we co-ordinate support across local authority boundaries. Figures that I have seen show that in 2024, 45% of looked-after children were placed outside their home local authority, up from 40% in 2015. While 69% were placed within 20 miles of home, that proportion has fallen from 76% in 2015.

The same challenges can affect kinship families. The 2024 annual survey by Kinship found that nearly a third of kinship families lived in a different local authority area from the one the child had lived in before coming into their care. Of those families, 57% reported difficulties accessing support as a result. These are different circumstances, but they point to the same question in my mind: when a child’s life crosses a local authority boundary, does the support they need follow them? Whether a child is living in a children’s home or being cared for by a grandparent, aunt, uncle or another family member, we must not allow administrative boundaries to become barriers to accessing the right support.

That leaves me with four questions for the Minister, who as I said is standing in for the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington, who I know is doing a lot of work in this area. First, what steps are the Government taking to ensure local authorities meet their existing statutory duty to notify receiving authorities when placing children out of area, and to identify where that duty is not being met?

Secondly, how are the Government working with health partners to improve the sharing of information when a child moves, so that their clinical history, existing treatment and crisis support arrangements can follow them and the services can plan ahead? Thirdly, how will the Government ensure that their regulatory and inspection framework provides effective oversight of children’s homes, so that the care and supervision children are promised is the care they actually receive? Finally, as the Government expand placement capacity and roll out regional care co-operatives—a very welcome development to my mind—how will they ensure that these reforms improve not just the availability of placements, but the co-ordination among local authorities, children’s homes and health services?

I began by talking about the clinicians at West Chadsmoor NHS clinic, and I will end by returning to them. They see children who have already faced more disruption to their young lives than most of us can even imagine. They want to give those children the stability, understanding and care that they deserve, and the least we should expect of the system that supports them is that it gives those professionals the information and co-operation they need to do that. A child should not have to experience a crisis before the services around them realise that support has fallen away; a family should not have to become an expert in local government responsibilities before it can access help; and a local authority boundary should never become a barrier to a child’s wellbeing.

I recognise that the Government are taking steps to address the shortage of placements. The £560 million investment in children’s homes and foster care, alongside the roll-out of regional care co-operatives, is intended to help to create more suitable places closer to where children live. That matters, because the best way to manage the challenges of out-of-area placements is, wherever possible, to avoid placing children so far away in the first place. When children do need to move, we must ensure that their care and support move with them.

I welcome the steps that this Government are taking to increase placement capacity, strengthen the system and improve how services work together. The investment in children’s homes and foster care provides an opportunity for us to ensure that more children can be cared for closer to home. My ask is that, as this work progresses, we keep the experience of the child at its centre. That means pushing local authorities to share information, health services being able to plan ahead, and clear accountability for ensuring that the support a child needs is actually there. Every child in care deserves stability, safety and the chance to thrive, wherever they are placed. I look forward to working with the Minister to ensure that the Government’s reforms deliver those outcomes for children in Staffordshire and across the country.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Paul Waugh)]

I thank Members for attending and contributing to this debate. This is a deeply important subject, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) for bringing it before us today. As has already been noted, he is a doughty champion for his constituents and an excellent constituency MP. I had the privilege of knowing his Labour predecessor in Cannock Chase, Tony Wright, and my hon. Friend is more than living up to his example.

This Government are clear that children in care should grow up safe, supported and able to thrive, regardless of their background. Through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and our children’s social care reset, we are delivering the biggest overhaul of children’s social care and child protection in a generation. We are delivering the change that we promised.

We are building a children’s social care system that puts families at the heart of our work. My hon. Friend has already referenced kinship care, which is really important in that. We know that keeping children in their immediate and wider family network is key for improving outcomes, but we want a system that builds rather than breaks relationships, ensuring that every care-experienced young person starts adulthood with loving, enduring relationships.

Let me address directly the questions that my hon. Friend put to me. On what steps the Government are taking to ensure that local authorities meet their existing statutory duties when placing children out of area and what happens when those duties are not met, let me be clear: if a local authority has to place a child outside their area, not notifying the incoming local authority is a breach of the law. It is imperative that that happens so that ongoing support can be arranged in the new area.

We know that far too many children are currently placed out of their local area when they come into care or are moved during their time in care. In 2025, 22% of children in care—that is 18,000 children—lived more than 20 miles from their home community. Sometimes, that distance is for a good reason—children might be moving to live with their wider family network—but too often, children are placed far from home, which disrupts their relationships with family and friends, their education and their access to the services that support them.

Where concerns arise that duties are not being met, as has been indicated by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase, they should be escalated through local safeguarding arrangements, with relevant partners working together to identify risks and co-ordinate action. Furthermore, Ofsted takes account of whether local authorities are complying with that duty through its ILACS inspections—the inspecting local authority children’s services framework—including whether the placing authority promptly notifies the receiving authority when a child moves into its area and ensures they can access services that meet their needs. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 strengthens the information sharing between agencies, while multi-agency safeguarding arrangements support safeguarding partners in identifying risks, sharing intelligence and co-ordinating action for children placed outside their home area. Additionally, as part of a wider communication, the Department wrote to local authorities earlier this year, reminding them of their statutory duty to inform host local authorities when placing children out of area.

My hon. Friend asked about working with health partners. Statutory guidance is clear that relevant services, including integrated care boards, should be notified before a child moves between placements, so that arrangements can be made to meet their needs. Where a move is made in an emergency, notification must follow within five working days. The guidance also recognises that identifying the right contact can sometimes be difficult, and it suggests practical steps, such as using generic inboxes to help ensure that information reaches the right organisation. More broadly, though, the new information-sharing duty strengthens the requirement on safeguarding partners, including in health, to share relevant information when a child relocates, so that important information about their safety and welfare is never lost. Importantly, the absence of a formal data-sharing agreement should not prevent information from being shared, where that duty applies. The Department for Education, the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS are working closely together to improve health outcomes for looked-after children and care leavers, and to ensure that information flows effectively between services and that there is no barrier to children receiving the support that they need.

Our reforms to children’s social care strengthen multi-agency working and information sharing, and the Home Again programme will bring social care, health, education and youth justice together around a single plan for children with the most complex needs. Just last week, we announced the new mental health pilot in Greater Manchester, which embeds mental health professionals in children’s social care teams. That pilot, which is called Care Together, replaces fragmented provision with faster access to expert, needs-led mental health support, including family therapy and support for parents and primary care-givers. I am excited to see the impact that this £9.4 million pilot will have on 7,000 children and their families across my constituency of Rochdale, as well as in neighbouring Stockport and Tameside.

Turning to my hon. Friend’s question about how the Government will ensure that their regulatory and inspection framework provides effective oversight of children’s homes, the Minister for children and families, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), keeps the adequacy of the regulatory framework under regular review. In April 2026, Ofsted introduced updates to the social care common inspection framework to promote high-quality inspections for children’s homes and other settings. That focus on the impact of services on the lives and relationships of children and families is crucial. Ofsted has recently consulted on further improvements to its inspection framework for children’s social care, and will set out plans for 2027 in due course.

[Josh Newbury]

It is good to hear that Ofsted is adapting and growing its inspection regime to reflect the fact that many children’s homes are opening, and the variation in practice seems quite large. Will my hon. Friend ask the Minister for children and families to look into whether Ofsted’s capacity to carry out inspections matches the growth in children’s homes in certain parts of the country, such as mine? We are seeing rapid growth in a short space of time. We need to make sure that the situation does not run away from us in those areas, and to avoid poorer practice in areas where there are not as many inspectors as we need.

[Paul Waugh]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I will certainly pass that on to the Minister for children and families. He is right that we need the capacity to match the requirements that we are imposing.

My hon. Friend’s last point, which was about the impact of regional care co-operatives on improving sufficiency and co-ordination, is really important. We now have seven regional care co-operatives covering more than 100 local authorities, including his own, Staffordshire, through the west midlands partnership. I can confirm that regional care co-operatives are not simply about increasing placement capacity; as we have heard tonight, children in care can be involved with multiple services, across local authorities, health and justice, so co-ordinated regional planning and partnership working is a core requirement for these new regional care co-operatives. By bringing these partners together to forecast need and commission care more strategically, regional care co-operatives will help ensure that provision and wider support are better joined up around children’s needs—a point that my hon. Friend was right to make repeatedly. We should be focusing on the child; all the services around them should be child-centred.

I recognise the concerns about the distribution of children’s homes across England. They are legitimate, and they are shared cross-party. Some areas have a disproportionally high concentration of homes, while others have insufficient provision. That can contribute to children being placed further away from their support networks and can lead to poor outcomes. We know that can be driven by a focus on maximising profits; some providers are attracted by lower property costs. We know for sure that this is happening in the north, and in the west midlands.

We are taking action to reshape the children’s social care market and improve placement sufficiency to combat those problems. Through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, we are rebalancing the market, increasing transparency, and helping local authorities to secure the placements that children need. We want the right homes in the right places, so that children, when it is in their best interests, are kept close to their communities. Our aim is to support provision where there is a clear need and the children’s needs can be fully met. We are also providing significant capital funding to deliver 540 new placements in local authority-owned children’s homes by March 2029, in 75 authorities. Two hundred will be specialist placements for children at risk of deprivation of liberty; 237 are already completed, registered and operational.

Several Members have mentioned the work that we are leading on fostering reforms to ensure that as few children as possible need to enter care in the first place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner) rightly pointed out, there should be respite support for foster parents, but all too often, it is not there. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in the Chamber, was right to say that we should be removing the practical barriers to fostering. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase has personal experience of the impact of being a foster carer, and I want to put on record our thanks to him and all the foster parents who do such a marvellous job, day in, day out, and week in, week out, with some of the most vulnerable children in society. We owe them a deep debt of gratitude.

In March last year, 67% of all children looked after in England were living with foster families, but 46% of those children were placed out of their local area. That is why the Government have launched the fostering action plan that my hon. Friend mentioned. We are committed to creating 10,000 more foster places during this Parliament. The plan includes an England-wide recruitment campaign—I hope that Members have already read about it—which is challenging the myths that prevent people from considering fostering, and recruiting thousands more foster carers who can give children the loving, stable homes that they need and deserve. The plan is backed by an £88 million investment over two years, which includes funds for the expansion of dedicated regional foster carer recruitment hubs; support to enable foster carers to adapt their homes, so that they can care for more children; an increase in the number of Mockingbird peer-support clusters, which I know are greatly valued across the country; and the launch of a fostering innovation programme to support better outcomes for children.

We know that the best way to keep children safe and give them the best possible start in life is to support families before problems reach crisis point. Our “families first for children” pathfinders have tested that approach in 10 local authorities, bringing together earlier, more intensive family help, expert multi-agency child protection and wider family networks to identify problems sooner and help children to remain safely within their families, whenever that is in their best interests. We are now applying those lessons nationally through the families first partnership programme, backed by £2.4 billion over the next three years, including £853 million in 2026-27. This represents a fundamental shift towards prevention, strengthening families and ensuring that when serious safeguarding concerns arise, children benefit from co-ordinated expertise across agencies.

Let me again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase for bringing this important matter to the House, and reiterate the Government’s aim that every child in care should receive the same joined-up support, stability and opportunity that we would want for our own children. We recognise that local and national Government, health and education authorities, and every partner must work together for each child in our care. I know that my colleague the Minister for children and families—who has done such marvellous work in this regard, both inside and outside Government—will continue to push through the reforms we have discussed this evening, which the system needs so urgently, so that children are safe, supported, close to the people and places that matter to them most, and able to thrive.

Question put and agreed to.