Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for introducing and championing this important review, the design group for which I was a member of. I welcome the review’s stress on preventing, where possible, children coming into care in the first place and the care system acting as a conveyor belt into crime and other highly detrimental outcomes. Rightly, it prioritises children having the relationships they need to thrive during care and once they leave it. It is love and relationships which make life worth while.

Currently, relationships with members of birth families and the wider community are an undertapped resource. Sibling and other family relationships are still, too often, treated as disposable, despite tried and tested models such as Lifelong Links. This programme aims to ensure that children and young people in care have a positive support network around them to help them while in care and when they leave. An independent co-ordinator works with a child in care to find out who is important to them and who they would like to be in touch with, then searches for these people in a variety of ways. A family group conference brings them together to make a plan with and for the child, which the local authority supports, so these relationships continue to grow.

DfE’s innovation fund trialled Lifelong Links in 17 local authorities. Over 2,000 young people from 31 councils across the UK have benefited from it already, so this is not a new programme to the Government. Various effectiveness studies, including Oxford University’s evaluation of that DfE trial, found overall positive impacts on the lives of children in care: greater placement stability, an increased sense of belonging and, on average, a more than tripling of the number of their social connections. Perhaps most importantly, Lifelong Links changes the culture and practice of those authorities which use it, so that relationships are not broken in the first place.

It is a decade or more since Family Finding came to the UK, but this proven model is still not standard practice. The independent review calls for it to be part of the national children’s social care framework, and says:

“Because of the evidence around these and other family finding programmes, there should be no delay in local authorities developing these, and all local authorities should have skilled family finding support equivalent to, or exceeding, the work of Lifelong Links in place by 2024 at the very latest.”


I completely endorse this and would go further. Lifelong Links should be available to every young person in care and, as I said in my 2017 review for the Ministry of Justice, to care-experienced young people in a young offender institution or prison.

Healthy relationships are, statistically, the most protective factor against reoffending. Lifelong Links could make the difference between the revolving door of crime for care-experienced young people and custody being the turning point. That, after all, is central to the purpose of prison. Yet why has it taken another major review to state the case for Lifelong Links, when the evidence has already been so assiduously amassed? I ask the Minister: first, what is the department specifically doing to promote its own evidence? Secondly, more generally, how can the Government ensure successful programmes are scaled up and made available as standard in a timely manner?

There seems to be an intolerably long journey from innovation to evaluation to implementation, even when the Government get involved, as they did with Lifelong Links. The journey will often be so long that thousands of children never benefit from transformational innovation during their time in social care. The country is in desperate need, so we must shorten the dispiriting process where organisations do all they can to get evidence of effectiveness, which then appears to be ignored.

The second area I will touch on is the revolution in family help which the review indicates would need roughly £2 billion to build. Putting prevention at the heart of social care in this way would continue the revolution that the Children Act 1989 was intended to bring about, through its emphasis on prevention, keeping children with their families wherever possible and ensuring help is available for deeply struggling parents.

The troubled—now strengthening—families programme started a decade ago and brought another vital wave of change, the success of which must be integrated in children’s social care reform. How will the Minister ensure that this happens? As a director and controlling shareholder of the Family Hubs Network Ltd, which advocates for family hubs and advises local authorities on how to establish them, I welcome the review’s recognition of their role as a delivery site for family help.

Returning to the Children Act 1989, paragraph 9(1) of Schedule 2 states that local authorities

“shall provide such family centres as they consider appropriate in relation to children within their area.”

Forty years earlier Michael Young, one of the architects of the welfare state, called for child welfare centres to fulfil Beveridge’s principle of the preservation of parental responsibility and deal with the emotional cost to children of high post-war levels of family breakdown. Family hubs are unfinished business from the founding of the welfare state. The Government’s early investment in them lays an essential foundation for the implementation of this review. They build on Sure Start children’s centres, but crucially they help whole families with older children. That, respectfully, is where they are an improvement on what went before.

However, I agree there is a funding scale disparity between the two projects. Sure Start investment ran into billions. Family hubs, so far, are attracting around £130 million from central government. The revolution in family help outlined in the review will need a reversal in the lack of investment noted in The Case for Change. The review states:

“Spending on help has reduced significantly in recent years, and the system has become overwhelmingly focused on crisis management and more costly late stage intervention.”


While I wholly support delivering family help from family hubs, local and central government must protect the value and principle of access to all. If hubs are seen as spaces for problem families, going to them will be stigmatised. The review highlights the need for a front door any family can walk through without necessarily being referred, where they will find the appropriate level of help. Some of these voluntary walk-ins might lead to the intensive, preventative help a family would never have received without that universal access point. A mother who can approach a family hub with worries about her son’s possible drug use might get the early help which spares her a visit from the police months later.

I am also looking forward to the Government’s response to this review. In the meantime, can the Minister confirm that the review will be integrated with existing family hubs policy and not skew delivery away from universal access, which its authors would not support?