Children’s Homes

Simon Danczuk Excerpts

Tuesday 19th April 2016 Westminster Hall

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Gillan. I start by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) for securing this important debate. She has done excellent work on such matters, for which she should be commended.

I also pay tribute to an outstanding constituent, Jonathan Rigg, whose company, Meadows Care, is responsible for the safe running of a number of children’s homes in Rochdale. I have witnessed the standard of service and the facilities that the company’s premises provide, and it is a credit to the childcare sector. The standard of the homes is second to none. The social care sector has faced a wave of pressures, but those homes have remained a stable and integral service to many vulnerable children. The private sector receives a lot of negative press on health and social care provision, but Jonathan and Meadows Care are evidence that individuals who are wholly passionate about the provision of care, whether public or private, can have a positive impact on the care industry. Indeed, I do not take the general view that seems to be in fashion in some places that all private is bad and all public is good; the situation is obviously much more complex.

My hon. Friend touched on the distance of children’s placements from their original home. Although it may be a concern that some children are moved many miles from their original area, I have spoken to a number of professionals in the sector, and many looked-after children require specialist care. Some have suffered severe mental or physical trauma and abuse, and they have sometimes missed many years of education. Such children are likely to require bespoke treatment, which is the important point. In such situations, geography is likely to fall way down the list of priorities. It sometimes is not appropriate to place children close to their family, or close to where they originally came from, if they have suffered abuse or trauma. We need a flexible approach to placing children in care homes that puts their needs and requirements first. We must not allow ourselves to substitute quality for locality.

The gap between referrals and placements is a growing concern, as discussed in the “State of the Market” report by the Independent Children’s Homes Association. The report states that the number of referrals received by homes is going up. Some 66% of providers report higher referral rates, but only 32% report growth in occupancy rates. What appears to be happening is that local authorities are just blanket emailing and bombarding providers with possible referrals. They are not checking whether the provider is appropriate for an individual child or sifting to find the most appropriate provider to make a referral to, which shows the disregard within local authorities of trying to get a bespoke service for each individual child. Just bombarding providers wastes their time and does not get the best deal for the young person—local authorities need to look at that.

Another concern in the “State of the Market” report is the lack of market confidence within the children’s homes sector. There is still significant uncertainty in the sector, with 60% remaining unsure, or worse, about their current outlook. Although that is down on the previous year’s figure of 78%, it is still worrying that the majority of respondents in the sector remain uncertain about how they will operate. There are a number of reasons for that. As I have outlined, there is the complexity of cases and the occupancy rates, but there is also the lack of funding for children’s homes. Unless we begin to address those problems, confidence and service delivery will begin to be negatively impacted. We must do more to relieve the pressures on the sector, which needs proper funding.

Those who run children’s homes provide a vital service to people who have fallen on the toughest of times. We should be doing everything we can to make life easier for such service providers and to allow them to provide the care that they want to provide. The points that they have raised are a warning sign that we cannot ignore. If we do, we will be failing some of the most vulnerable people in our society by not allowing them to grow and develop the opportunities that so many of us have been fortunate enough to enjoy.