Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what discussions her Department has had with local authorities on the provision in the Children and Social Work Bill [Lords] to give Ministers the power to exempt local authorities from statutory duties to children under the supervision of social workers and children living in care homes or foster homes.

The power to test different ways of working is about creating a controlled environment to allow local authorities to test new approaches to delivering better services for children. This power is not about questioning the fundamentals of what local authorities need to do in relation to children’s safeguarding, but exploring how things could be done better. An Impact Assessment for all measures in the Children and Social Work Bill is available online at: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/impact-assessments/IA16-008.pdf. As the power to test different ways of working simply enables the making of secondary legislation it is not possible to assess the impact of the power as a whole. Individual impact assessments will be produced for each use of the power.

This policy comes directly from our discussions with local authorities, who are telling us that legislation sometimes gets in the way of trying new approaches. During the development of this policy we have engaged with both individual local authorities as well as representative bodies such as the LGA, ADCS, and SOLACE. We have worked in particular with our Partners in Practice local authorities, some of the country’s best local authorities, to understand their initial ideas of how they would use the power.

The power is not about outsourcing or allowing profit making in children’s social care. To put this point beyond doubt Government has tabled an amendment at report stage of the Children and Social Work Bill to rule out the possibility of the power being used to revisit the established position on children’s social care.