The Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 22nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for initiating the debate on this statutory instrument. I am afraid that I will probably stray across some of the same ground that he has, but the theme to which I draw attention is one that I raise with monotonous regularity with the Minister’s colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, in the Home Office. It is the need for accurate, timely and informative data, so that one knows what on earth one is doing. You need data to understand the past and present and, above all, to inform decisions you will make about the future.

In that spirit, I have forwarded every single briefing document that I have received to the Minister’s office. I suspect and fear that, in many cases, some of the data and testimonies that come from the front line, from some of the voluntary organisations that have briefed us, are far more incisive, accurate and up to date than the department’s data. That theme tends to recur in this area.

As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, we are indebted to Anne Longfield for her report of last September, a lot of which is shocking. It is shocking partly because she had to go and collect the data to inform her report, because it was not readily available. On page 4, she said that

“The Department for Education commissioned a research report looking at some issues, based on data analysis and interviews with 22 local authorities.”


The point I make is not that that was a bad thing, but that the department did not already know that information, which is why it was done. That is part of the problem. She found that the number of children living in unregulated accommodation has been increasing, year on year, since 2015. That is not a great surprise; the surprise is why the department was not on top of that data and tracking it year by year, or even month by month. I do not understand that.

Anne Longfield’s report lifts the lid on the unregulated accommodation sector, estimated to be worth about £1.6 billion per annum. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, almost three-quarters of it is privately owned, up from two-thirds in 2013. So it has gone up from 66% to 73% privately owned in just six years, and the possible profit margins are extraordinary. There were some cases listed where local authorities were being charged £9,000 a week for a 16 or 17 year-old child.

I do not know whether the Minister was watching television on Saturday evening, but Sky had a documentary called “Lost in Care”, about what we are discussing. It is totally congruent with Anne Longfield’s findings. As I was watching the documentary, which in particular has the detailed testimony of three young people who went through unregulated care—it is quite shocking—I thought of my naive 16 or 17 year-old self and how I would have coped an awful lot worse than those three children did at the time. It was rather shocking. Towards the end of the documentary, the new Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, was shown the evidence by the reporter and asked what she thought about it. She was clearly genuinely shocked and basically said that this is unacceptable; something has to be done. That is what we are discussing here.

As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has done, I want to recollect the five very clear recommendations that Anne Longfield made in her report. I have given notice that I would do that, and I am hoping and expecting that we will have a comprehensive answer from the Minister to each of them. After all, the report did come out six months ago.

The first recommendation is that no child under the age of 18 should be placed in any setting not regulated to children’s home standards, whether they are in care, homeless or unaccompanied asylum seekers. The second recommendation is to increase capacity in the care system, which is a key problem that local authorities are constantly faced with. One of the unintended consequences of this statutory instrument is that it has effectively—quite unintentionally, I am sure—sabotaged the Children’s Commissioner’s attempts to work with a variety of the major children’s charities, such as Barnardo’s, and with some of the more enlightened best-practice local authorities, which are very keen to get into the market themselves and to supply really good accommodation to the best possible standards.

Unfortunately, that work has ground to a halt. Why? First, local authorities and charities cannot compete with the private sector on the basis that it is currently unregulated and because of the fairly minimal regulations that the Government are proposing to put on to the statute book. Quite frankly, unless the Government come up with higher minimum standards—namely, ones that those local authorities and charities such as Barnardo’s could live with, with a clear conscience—they are not going to be able to compete with the private sector on cost. Secondly, as I said, under the current regulatory framework they will not in all conscience set up these homes that they would like to, because they cannot do it and would fail their own standards of care. Lastly, because of those two interlinking points, it is impossible to go to the market to raise finance to try to build expansion in this sector, because of the uncertainty created by what the Government have decided in the statutory instrument.

The third recommendation is:

“Clarification of what care looks like for children”.


Anne Longfield recommended that the Department for Education shape a comprehensive illustration—a description—of what care should look like right the way through to age 18. I would like to know whether that is in hand, about to be in hand, or if it is on the back burner, and when and if we can expect any action.

The fourth recommendation is to do with the “Regulation of unregulated settings”. The worry is that if the statutory instrument is carried out and its standards applied, they will become de facto the norm for many local authorities that are strapped for cash—that will be the automatic decision taken when they are trying to place a child, which they have a statutory duty to do. I do not think that this is what the Government intend, but that is what the sector fears will happen.

The fifth recommendation is to strengthen the role of independent reviewing officers. These individuals are between a rock and hard place: they work for the local authority—they are employed by it—but they are there to act in the best interests of each and every child in a situation such as being in care and needing to be placed. You have a cash-strapped employer basically saying, “Go for the easiest and cheapest option that ticks the box in terms of our statutory requirements, and don’t get prissy about it”, which puts any independent reviewing officer who has a conscience, and is putting the interests of the child first, in a really impossible situation. The recommendation from Anne Longfield was to look at this and what the Government can do to strengthen the autonomy and independence of these vital people to act in the best interests of the child.

What is common across all those five recommendations is that a lot of this is informed by insufficient data; a lot of it is unknown. We know there is a problem but we do not know the real nitty-gritty and detail because we do not have the data. The department is about to navigate its way through the spending review, it has the CMA investigation into children’s residential care, as well as the social care review, so there is a huge temptation to say, “There is lots to be done; let’s wait and see what comes out of it and then we’ll decide”—remarkably like the Domestic Abuse Bill which we have just been through. Please can we not use that excuse, and try to plan strategically what we can do? I am coming to an end. What are the options to increase supply of accommodation? How can we develop new commissioning models, present targeted capital funding applications, and identify and disseminate best practice models?