Children and Young People: Local Authority Care

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, no one is better qualified to lead a debate on children in care than the noble Lord, Lord Laming, whom I first met 40 years ago when I was a junior Minister and he was already a colossus in the world of local authority social services. Since then, he has been instrumental in developing national policy on childcare and holding Governments to account.

I begin with a word of tribute to the statutory workforce and the voluntary workforce looking after children. As we have heard, they operate in very challenging circumstances and quite often they enable a child who has had a very difficult start in life to have a happy outcome. I want to focus my remarks on the role that adoption, fostering and kinship care can play in meeting the challenges we have been talking about. I declare a minor interest in that some time ago my wife and I did some respite fostering. I am grateful to Carol Homden of Coram for bringing me up to date.

I welcome some of the initiatives that this Government have introduced, such as the extra pupil premium, the adoption support fund and, recently, the kinship care strategy. In passing, I note that it shows what a Minister, Edward Timpson, can achieve if left in the same place for five years, ably supported by my noble friend on the Front Bench. But the country faces a demographic challenge. As we have heard, the numbers of children coming into care continue to grow and, within that population, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, there are more complex problems because the children who come into care are older.

On the supply side, the people who traditionally fostered and adopted are ageing, and they are not being replaced. The number of children in care who have been adopted has fallen from 3,590 in 2019 to 2,960 last year, and between 2015 and 2022 more fostering households deregistered than were replaced. The traditional families who adopted and fostered are increasingly having to look after elderly parents, and quite a few have grown-up children still living in their home because they have been unable to move on. This trend is reflected in the latest Ofsted figures, which reveal that in the year ending March last year there were 125,000 initial inquiries from potential foster carers, a drop of 9% on the previous year. This was confirmed by Ofsted, which said:

“As the number of children in care continues to grow, matching them with the right carers becomes increasingly difficult. This makes it more likely that very vulnerable children will face placement breakdowns and further disruption to their lives”.


A recent fall of 11% in local authority foster care households has meant, as we have heard, that councils are increasingly turning to expensive agencies, putting further pressure on their budgets. At the same time, they are losing the experience of the foster parents leaving the market. Part 1 of the Children and Families Act was meant to

“speed up the adoption process and enable more children to be placed in stable, loving homes with less delay and disruption”.

This was a worthy ambition, not least since adoption is the most stable form of placement, but adoption has fallen. We see the consequences of not getting this right. Some 25% of the prison population are former care leavers and 25% of those sleeping rough have been in care. As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Wood, and others, children in care are moved too often, further away from home and away from their siblings.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Laming, that as a country we can do better. For example, we saw the response to the Homes for Ukraine campaign when a further crisis confronted this country. We need to encourage more people to adopt, to foster and to enter kinship care. That means looking at the low conversion rate of inquiries to acceptance; only 6% of the initial 125,000 foster care inquiries resulted in successful applications to become a carer. The journey needs to be better advertised, more user friendly and quicker.

We also need to look at the financial offer to the groups I have mentioned, as we heard from the right reverend Prelate, financed by savings on expensive residential care. Should there be such a black and white distinction between adoption and fostering, which discourages many from moving from fostering to adoption? Can we make better use of existing foster parents to recruit new ones? Can we broaden and diversify the fostering population? Crucially, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Meston, can we resource children’s services so that they can recruit and retain qualified staff to supervise the whole process? I hope this debate can build on what has been done and lead to better outcomes for children.