Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Lord Wood of Anfield Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Wood of Anfield]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to implement the recommendations of the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, reforming children’s social care is critical to giving hundreds of thousands of children and young people the best start in life. It is also necessary to achieve financial stability for local authorities. The previous Government oversaw the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in 2022. This Government have already moved quickly to set out our legislative programme. The children’s well-being Bill will deliver on our manifesto commitment to ensure that all children can thrive in safe, loving homes.

[Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer and say “Hello” to her with her new hat on. All of us know that the state of our children’s care system is totally unacceptable. It is a system with growing financial shortfalls, where rising numbers of placements squeeze spending on prevention and, most importantly, where the most vulnerable children in our country are, for cost reasons, being sent sometimes hundreds of miles from their home and their kinship circles. Can I ask the Minister about regulation in response to this? Last week, Ofsted said that it should be given the powers and resources to stop unregulated children’s homes, where hundreds of children currently reside, and to equip Ofsted to regulate private equity-run companies that increasingly dominate children’s care services, often based overseas and facing little regulatory oversight. Can the Government commit to meeting these important Ofsted demands?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is right, I am afraid, in his description of the enormous challenge in children’s social care at the moment, particularly by identifying the role of Ofsted. As I outlined in this House last week, Ofsted will be working closely with the children’s social care sector to determine how it can protect children in the way that he described. Also, on the particular challenges in the children’s social care placement market that my noble friend outlined, local authorities are facing enormous rising costs for these places and, as my noble friend says, for places which increasingly are not serving the needs of children. This Government are clear that excessive profiteering from vulnerable children in care is unacceptable. Through the legislation that we will bring forward, and through the regulation that he described, we will tackle this.