Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if her Department will take steps to increase the use of Deprivation of Liberty orders.

Depriving a child of their liberty must always be a last resort in order to keep the child safe. A growing number of children in England and Wales, often with complex behavioural needs, are being deprived of their liberty through Deprivation of Liberty Orders (DOLOs) under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court, due to a lack of suitable registered placements.

The department would like to see fewer children given DOLOs and an improved quality of provision for these children. As set out in the department’s recent policy statement, ‘Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive’, we want to see new forms of provision to address the rising need for suitable, registered homes capable of depriving a child of their liberty. This provision needs to be able to respond flexibly to children’s changing and fluctuating needs, as well as provide the crucial therapeutic care and, when necessary, restriction.

The department intends, when Parliamentary time allows, to amend primary legislation to provide a statutory framework for local authorities seeking to place children in such new forms of accommodation, rather than relying on a DOLO. This new legislation will ensure that, where a secure children’s home cannot meet a child’s needs, there are clear criteria for when children may need to be deprived of liberty and mandatory review points to ensure that no child is deprived of liberty for longer than is required to keep them safe, while in high quality, registered provision.

This is part of a wider programme of work to improve outcomes for children with complex needs. This includes a programme of capital investment to support local authorities to maintain existing capacity and expand provision in both open and secure children’s homes, including for children with complex needs. This also includes the creation of 350 additional open children’s homes placements by March 2025. The recent Autumn Budget 2024 announced £90 million for the 2025/26 financial year which includes a multi-million pound package of match funding to support local authorities to build additional open children’s home placements. This will provide high quality, safe homes for some of our most vulnerable children and young people.

We have also recently commissioned independent research to understand the existing system and how we can achieve better outcomes for children who are, or are at risk of, being deprived of liberty. We aim to publish this in summer 2025. This will build on the insights gained from the research commissioned by the department from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s ‘Children with complex needs who are deprived of liberty’ report, published on 18 November, which interviewed children with complex needs who are deprived of liberty, their parents and the professionals who support them.