Children’s Social Care Implementation Strategy (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I have found this a very helpful, focused debate. I hope that the Minister will find that this debate and our report will be a useful aid to government thinking on the implementation strategy, and on the kinship care plans to be published later this year.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, we heard from many young people who are doing positive things with their lives, despite all the disadvantages of being in the care system. It was impressive to listen to witnesses who supported the Government’s desire to improve the children’s social care system. Generally speaking, people want it to be done more quickly. The strategy is going in the right direction. It can be improved, but can it be sped up? The strategy is to have trials and pilots, but some have a sufficiently robust evidence base now to be rolled out more quickly. For example, elements of family help could be rolled out nationally faster than currently planned. It would be good if all young people could see some benefit from the Government’s strategy over the next couple of years.

We ask the Minister: can we speed up? We can, but the strategy lacks the funding needed to deliver the reforms. As we have heard, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in 2022 said that investment of £2.6 billion was needed over the next four years, and that so far only £200 million is being provided over two years, which is simply not enough. To quote paragraph 28, as a committee our formal conclusion was:

“The level of investment outlined in the Strategy is entirely inadequate and will ensure the Government will fail to achieve its vision for children’s social care”.


It would be helpful if we could have a specific comment from the Minister about that.

We say things in the report around young people’s need for advocacy. It was instructive to hear from young people themselves, who said that they were not listened to by those making decisions about their care. The strategy on advocacy is currently too vague about how to listen to young people, and establishing clear standards will be very important. Can the Minister tell us what the plan is? Will it be an opt-out model, and can she guarantee that it will be independent of local authorities, for it must be?

We were told that there are some 20,000 children in England living as separated siblings. Of course, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Willis, in one case they were twins. Many children are being placed too far from home. It is essential that this issue is addressed, partly through funding, and partly through the structures, which I will come back to in a moment. If there is to be a radical reset in the system, it needs far better cross-departmental co-operation and policy alignment. I am pleased that there is a cross-government care leaver Minister now, but Whitehall needs to be a great deal more joined-up than it is.

We have heard about kinship care. The strategy is due by the end of the year, and it is clear that increased support for kinship carers is needed. It is hard to see why we should wait until spring next year to know what that amounts to, for 150,000 children are living in kinship care, and the Nuffield Trust has shown that young people in kinship care have better outcomes than young people in foster or retirement care.

I ask the Minister, on foster care, whether setting national or regional targets actually works. Are they local enough? The shortage of foster carers seems to me to need to be dealt with at a local level. Getting prospective carers is a much more local matter than the Government realise. On workforce issues, there are apparently going to be 500 apprenticeships in children’s social care. I would be interested to know what the timelines around that are. However, there is an 8,000 staff shortfall in the children’s care system. The Competition and Markets Authority has said that the children’s care market in “dysfunctional”. The demand is not forecast accurately, demand for placements is higher than the supply, young people are being sent too far away because of a lack of placements, and providers can profit from the shortage of placements.

In our committee report, we raised questions as to whether regional care co-operatives are seen as the solution. Are they? Is the Minister confident of that? They are not local, and I do not understand what their accountability regime actually is. It is possible that Ofsted gave evidence to support the suggestion that a regional care co-operative model could cause more children to be relocated further away from their home area, but I hope not. Will regional care co-operatives work in restoring a functional market? Will smaller providers, not only big providers, benefit from procurement? Might the Government look at subregional procurement as opposed to regional procurement, if they are unhappy with very local procurement?

In conclusion, as we have heard from various speakers, we have had lots of reviews in recent years but we need to beware of yet more reviews, because we need action to be taken. The evidence base is there, and we need to ensure that we have more children in safe, loving homes.