Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many concurrent planning arrangements for children have been authorised in each of the last five years, for each local authority.

The department does not collect data separately on the number of concurrent planning arrangements for looked after children. These are combined in the department’s data collection with fostering for adoption placements. The number of concurrent planning or fostering for adoption placements for looked after children at 31 March of the last three years is given in the attached table. This information was collected for the first time in 2015 and so earlier data is not available. Local council level information has not been provided to prevent disclosure of small numbers. This information is taken from Table A2 of the statistical release ‘Children looked after in England including adoption: 2016 to 2017’ at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2016-to-2017.