Local Authority Children’s Services

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you for chairing the debate, Mr Western. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster) for representing his constituents so well in this debate, and in particular, given the horror story that he shared, I express my condolences to Sara’s family.

Colleagues may have heard York’s story, but those who have not are about to hear it. The hon. Member for Woking was right to say that York moved from the position of “requires improvement” to “outstanding” in one go. I have to point out to the Minister that our local authority has the lowest level of funding per capita after the fair funding review, which does not seem fair at all because we are not the most affluent place by far.

The catalyst for the change in York comes down to two people: Martin Kelly, the director of children’s services, and his deputy, Danielle Johnson. I pay tribute to them. If hon. Members want to learn about York’s journey and the outstanding achievements that have occurred, the director and his deputy are open to dialogue. At the heart of the change was a new practice model with a committed workforce. We moved from 45 agency staff to zero, on the basis that if someone was not committed to the service and the children, they had no place in the authority. A pioneering approach puts children at the heart, builds on co-production, innovates for change and evidences practice. Through reform, costs have been cut by £7 million. Through co-ordination across services, the local authority has built stability and made a difference to every child.

We are desperate to do more—to reshape services, drive change and press ahead with transformations. The model moves from transactional to relational, risk avoidance to risk management, safe certainty to safe uncertainty—that is just about being honest about risk—and short-term interventions to long-term outcomes. Every decision has the child at its centre and considers the long-term implications of each decision, developing resilience all the time. Its strength-based approach seeks out every opportunity for the child and is summed up,

“Our children belong in York, connected to the people they love and supported by the network around them.”

But the journey does not end there. A child or young person’s holistic needs should be met in one place, so here are my asks of the Minister. Mental health services must be integrated around the child, not separated in the child and adolescent mental health services, which is failing all our young people. We have a SEND hub in the city where all children can gather, along with parents and professionals, in an integrated way, but we need CAMHS as part of the conversation. That will remove the need for a diagnosis, because a label does not describe where a child is on multiple spectrums. We must have fully integrated support around a child’s needs.

We need to start young, so I urge the Minister to put the investment into the 1,001 critical days. We know that in the case of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, for instance, we need to ensure at the very start of life that we have got the right interventions around the parents, including during the nine months of pregnancy. We will then have a stronger opportunity to prevent care orders in future and ensure that there is appropriate antenatal care, as well as comprehensive support for the family.

We also need funding in York. I mentioned how low our funding is. We have eight areas in the lowest quintile of deprivation in our city. Everyone, including Ministers, talks about how York is a beautiful city, about the Vikings, and about the walls and the Minster, but that does not make a child safer. In fact, many of the children have never seen those assets, and many are struggling because we simply do not have the resources we need. When it comes to per capita funding, York is in the lowest 25 for schools and 23rd for higher needs funding. Our city needs more funding, because a child in York is worth as much as a child in Camden, and yet we have about a third of the funding to do things. More than that, we want to be able to push our model further, provide more services for parents and ensure that we can keep the family together, which is our objective as we seriously reduce the number of children in social care.

We also want to drive our model of good practice further, so that we can draw on the world’s best practice and bring it into York, particularly in the early years—those pre-school years—to support parents on their journey as well. We must work with a child’s developmental pathway, not against it. We therefore need to ensure that we have the right pedagogies in place. I was disappointed earlier in the week in the debate on play in education. To work with children we really need to understand the way that the mind develops.

My plea to the Minister is to look through a prism of poverty. We have significant areas of poverty in York, and yet if we put in the right investment, we know that we can make a difference to our children.

We are ambitious in York, and I am proud to showcase all that we have done, but we desperately want to go further. We know we can do it—in York, we have always been a laboratory of social change, a pioneering spirit built within all of us—and therefore I urge Government to work with us to deliver more not only of the Government’s objectives but of our own, for our children.