Oral Answers to Questions

Michelle Donelan Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Let me remind the hon. Lady about the situation we inherited. When I became Prime Minister, nine out of 10 families were getting tax credits, including Members of Parliament. That is how crazy the system we inherited was. We reduced that to six out of 10 families during the last Parliament, although we were of course opposed by Labour and the SNP. Our proposals will now take that down to five out of 10 families. But these proposals are not on their own: they are accompanied by a national living wage for the first time. They are also accompanied by allowing people to earn £11,000 before paying tax, for the first time. Those sorts of measures will help the sort of families she talks about.

[Michelle Donelan (Chippenham) (Con)]

Q7. The Prime Minister spoke movingly at conference about the plight of young people in the care system. Will he tell me what the Government are actually going to do to improve the life chances of those young disadvantaged children and to give them opportunities as they move forward in their lives?

[The Prime Minister]

The most important thing we can do is to speed up the adoption system so that more children get adopted. We have seen an increase in adoptions since I have been Prime Minister, but because of one or two judgments, that has slipped backwards a bit, and we need to work very hard to make sure more children get adopted. For those who cannot be adopted, we need to make sure that our residential care homes are doing the best possible job. That is why I can announce today that I have asked the former chief executive of Barnardo’s, Sir Martin Narey—an excellent public servant who I worked with when he was at the Home Office—to conduct an independent review of children’s residential care, reporting to the Education Secretary and me, so that we can take every possible step to give those children the best start in life.