Services for Children in Care

Paul Waugh Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Paul Waugh)]

I thank Members for attending and contributing to this debate. This is a deeply important subject, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) for bringing it before us today. As has already been noted, he is a doughty champion for his constituents and an excellent constituency MP. I had the privilege of knowing his Labour predecessor in Cannock Chase, Tony Wright, and my hon. Friend is more than living up to his example.

This Government are clear that children in care should grow up safe, supported and able to thrive, regardless of their background. Through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and our children’s social care reset, we are delivering the biggest overhaul of children’s social care and child protection in a generation. We are delivering the change that we promised.

We are building a children’s social care system that puts families at the heart of our work. My hon. Friend has already referenced kinship care, which is really important in that. We know that keeping children in their immediate and wider family network is key for improving outcomes, but we want a system that builds rather than breaks relationships, ensuring that every care-experienced young person starts adulthood with loving, enduring relationships.

Let me address directly the questions that my hon. Friend put to me. On what steps the Government are taking to ensure that local authorities meet their existing statutory duties when placing children out of area and what happens when those duties are not met, let me be clear: if a local authority has to place a child outside their area, not notifying the incoming local authority is a breach of the law. It is imperative that that happens so that ongoing support can be arranged in the new area.

We know that far too many children are currently placed out of their local area when they come into care or are moved during their time in care. In 2025, 22% of children in care—that is 18,000 children—lived more than 20 miles from their home community. Sometimes, that distance is for a good reason—children might be moving to live with their wider family network—but too often, children are placed far from home, which disrupts their relationships with family and friends, their education and their access to the services that support them.

Where concerns arise that duties are not being met, as has been indicated by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase, they should be escalated through local safeguarding arrangements, with relevant partners working together to identify risks and co-ordinate action. Furthermore, Ofsted takes account of whether local authorities are complying with that duty through its ILACS inspections—the inspecting local authority children’s services framework—including whether the placing authority promptly notifies the receiving authority when a child moves into its area and ensures they can access services that meet their needs. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 strengthens the information sharing between agencies, while multi-agency safeguarding arrangements support safeguarding partners in identifying risks, sharing intelligence and co-ordinating action for children placed outside their home area. Additionally, as part of a wider communication, the Department wrote to local authorities earlier this year, reminding them of their statutory duty to inform host local authorities when placing children out of area.

My hon. Friend asked about working with health partners. Statutory guidance is clear that relevant services, including integrated care boards, should be notified before a child moves between placements, so that arrangements can be made to meet their needs. Where a move is made in an emergency, notification must follow within five working days. The guidance also recognises that identifying the right contact can sometimes be difficult, and it suggests practical steps, such as using generic inboxes to help ensure that information reaches the right organisation. More broadly, though, the new information-sharing duty strengthens the requirement on safeguarding partners, including in health, to share relevant information when a child relocates, so that important information about their safety and welfare is never lost. Importantly, the absence of a formal data-sharing agreement should not prevent information from being shared, where that duty applies. The Department for Education, the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS are working closely together to improve health outcomes for looked-after children and care leavers, and to ensure that information flows effectively between services and that there is no barrier to children receiving the support that they need.

Our reforms to children’s social care strengthen multi-agency working and information sharing, and the Home Again programme will bring social care, health, education and youth justice together around a single plan for children with the most complex needs. Just last week, we announced the new mental health pilot in Greater Manchester, which embeds mental health professionals in children’s social care teams. That pilot, which is called Care Together, replaces fragmented provision with faster access to expert, needs-led mental health support, including family therapy and support for parents and primary care-givers. I am excited to see the impact that this £9.4 million pilot will have on 7,000 children and their families across my constituency of Rochdale, as well as in neighbouring Stockport and Tameside.

Turning to my hon. Friend’s question about how the Government will ensure that their regulatory and inspection framework provides effective oversight of children’s homes, the Minister for children and families, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), keeps the adequacy of the regulatory framework under regular review. In April 2026, Ofsted introduced updates to the social care common inspection framework to promote high-quality inspections for children’s homes and other settings. That focus on the impact of services on the lives and relationships of children and families is crucial. Ofsted has recently consulted on further improvements to its inspection framework for children’s social care, and will set out plans for 2027 in due course.

[Josh Newbury]

It is good to hear that Ofsted is adapting and growing its inspection regime to reflect the fact that many children’s homes are opening, and the variation in practice seems quite large. Will my hon. Friend ask the Minister for children and families to look into whether Ofsted’s capacity to carry out inspections matches the growth in children’s homes in certain parts of the country, such as mine? We are seeing rapid growth in a short space of time. We need to make sure that the situation does not run away from us in those areas, and to avoid poorer practice in areas where there are not as many inspectors as we need.

[Paul Waugh]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I will certainly pass that on to the Minister for children and families. He is right that we need the capacity to match the requirements that we are imposing.

My hon. Friend’s last point, which was about the impact of regional care co-operatives on improving sufficiency and co-ordination, is really important. We now have seven regional care co-operatives covering more than 100 local authorities, including his own, Staffordshire, through the west midlands partnership. I can confirm that regional care co-operatives are not simply about increasing placement capacity; as we have heard tonight, children in care can be involved with multiple services, across local authorities, health and justice, so co-ordinated regional planning and partnership working is a core requirement for these new regional care co-operatives. By bringing these partners together to forecast need and commission care more strategically, regional care co-operatives will help ensure that provision and wider support are better joined up around children’s needs—a point that my hon. Friend was right to make repeatedly. We should be focusing on the child; all the services around them should be child-centred.

I recognise the concerns about the distribution of children’s homes across England. They are legitimate, and they are shared cross-party. Some areas have a disproportionally high concentration of homes, while others have insufficient provision. That can contribute to children being placed further away from their support networks and can lead to poor outcomes. We know that can be driven by a focus on maximising profits; some providers are attracted by lower property costs. We know for sure that this is happening in the north, and in the west midlands.

We are taking action to reshape the children’s social care market and improve placement sufficiency to combat those problems. Through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, we are rebalancing the market, increasing transparency, and helping local authorities to secure the placements that children need. We want the right homes in the right places, so that children, when it is in their best interests, are kept close to their communities. Our aim is to support provision where there is a clear need and the children’s needs can be fully met. We are also providing significant capital funding to deliver 540 new placements in local authority-owned children’s homes by March 2029, in 75 authorities. Two hundred will be specialist placements for children at risk of deprivation of liberty; 237 are already completed, registered and operational.

Several Members have mentioned the work that we are leading on fostering reforms to ensure that as few children as possible need to enter care in the first place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner) rightly pointed out, there should be respite support for foster parents, but all too often, it is not there. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in the Chamber, was right to say that we should be removing the practical barriers to fostering. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase has personal experience of the impact of being a foster carer, and I want to put on record our thanks to him and all the foster parents who do such a marvellous job, day in, day out, and week in, week out, with some of the most vulnerable children in society. We owe them a deep debt of gratitude.

In March last year, 67% of all children looked after in England were living with foster families, but 46% of those children were placed out of their local area. That is why the Government have launched the fostering action plan that my hon. Friend mentioned. We are committed to creating 10,000 more foster places during this Parliament. The plan includes an England-wide recruitment campaign—I hope that Members have already read about it—which is challenging the myths that prevent people from considering fostering, and recruiting thousands more foster carers who can give children the loving, stable homes that they need and deserve. The plan is backed by an £88 million investment over two years, which includes funds for the expansion of dedicated regional foster carer recruitment hubs; support to enable foster carers to adapt their homes, so that they can care for more children; an increase in the number of Mockingbird peer-support clusters, which I know are greatly valued across the country; and the launch of a fostering innovation programme to support better outcomes for children.

We know that the best way to keep children safe and give them the best possible start in life is to support families before problems reach crisis point. Our “families first for children” pathfinders have tested that approach in 10 local authorities, bringing together earlier, more intensive family help, expert multi-agency child protection and wider family networks to identify problems sooner and help children to remain safely within their families, whenever that is in their best interests. We are now applying those lessons nationally through the families first partnership programme, backed by £2.4 billion over the next three years, including £853 million in 2026-27. This represents a fundamental shift towards prevention, strengthening families and ensuring that when serious safeguarding concerns arise, children benefit from co-ordinated expertise across agencies.

Let me again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase for bringing this important matter to the House, and reiterate the Government’s aim that every child in care should receive the same joined-up support, stability and opportunity that we would want for our own children. We recognise that local and national Government, health and education authorities, and every partner must work together for each child in our care. I know that my colleague the Minister for children and families—who has done such marvellous work in this regard, both inside and outside Government—will continue to push through the reforms we have discussed this evening, which the system needs so urgently, so that children are safe, supported, close to the people and places that matter to them most, and able to thrive.

Question put and agreed to.