Asked by: Ian Byrne (Labour - Liverpool, West Derby)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate her Department has made of the number of Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission customised workshops for researchers that have taken place as of 19 December 2023.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
In 2023, the Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission (TJBCM) hosted an essential research skills workshop series specifically designed for Nurses and Allied Health Professionals, in line with National Health Service ambitions to deliver a research-active clinical workforce. Workshops covered research proposal writing, study design and design appraisal, PPI, statistical methodologies, and research dissemination. Participants also benefited from expert-led consultations to receive tailored support for individual research. These five workshops and consultations took place between October and December 2023.
The Mission is further collaborating with The Brain Tumour Charity and researchers to advise and support any allied health professional seeking assistance in designing a robust study and submitting a high-quality research proposal.
The TJBCM held its first Brain Tumour Research Novel Therapeutics Accelerator Meeting, where it brought together a panel of world class experts to review three early-stage therapeutics and applications for brain cancer. The application deadline for interested applicants will close in January 2024.
The National Institute for Health and Care Research continues to work with the TJBCM and the research community to develop new workshops to further foster and develop research capacity in the brain cancer community to support an increase in quality, quantity, and diversity in brain cancer research in the United Kingdom. The aim is to deliver new workshops in the second half of 2024.
Asked by: Baroness Scott of Needham Market (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is their response to the Barnardo’s report Double Discrimination, which looks at the differential outcomes Black children face both in and leaving care.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department recognises that children in care are more likely than their peers in the general population to have contact with the criminal justice system. The department has a joint national protocol with the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on reducing the unnecessary criminalisation of looked-after children and care leavers and is taking action on risk factors that can lead to criminal behaviour, including through its work to improve school attendance.
Through the care leaver Ministerial Board, the department is working closely with the MoJ to improve support and outcomes of care-experienced people in the criminal justice system.
MoJ is currently updating its strategy for people with care experience in the criminal justice system, to ensure that their time in the criminal justice system is used to support them to lead crime-free lives. The strategy will include a focus on race and its role in shaping the experiences and outcomes of those with care experience and will link to wider departmental efforts to address racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system. MoJ are aiming to publish this strategy in 2024.
The department will continue to work urgently across government and with local authorities to ensure that all vulnerable children, no matter their age, race, ethnicity, or circumstances, are kept safe and receive the support they need. The department will engage with foster carer representative bodies to see how it can further support black foster carers, including considering developing a Black Foster Care Network whilst ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’ sets out the department’s plans to reform the children’s social care system, including improving the education, employment, and training outcomes of children in care and care leavers.
Asked by: Gary Streeter (Conservative - South West Devon)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if her Department will take steps to ensure staff working within local government children's social care receive training to understand the potential altruistic motivation of potential (a) foster and (b) adoptive parents of faith.
Answered by David Johnston - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Local authorities are responsible for the continuous professional development of their workforces, including social workers.
Social workers are critical to the functioning of the wider children’s social care system. They must meet the professional standards set by Social Work England to practise as a social worker. In relation to the altruism of those seeking to foster and adopt, the standards recognise the importance of family and community networks, requiring social workers to work in partnership with these.
To support child and family social workers to continuously improve their practice, the department funds professional development for around 4,000 social workers each year. The new Early Career Framework for child and family social workers will significantly extend the training and support they receive in the early stages of their career, helping to equip them with the knowledge skills they need to support children and families.
Asked by: Gary Streeter (Conservative - South West Devon)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will take steps to ensure that staff working within children's social care receive training to understand the potential altruistic motivation of potential (a) foster and (b) adoptive parents of faith.
Answered by David Johnston - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Local authorities are responsible for the continuous professional development of their workforces, including social workers.
Social workers are critical to the functioning of the wider children’s social care system. They must meet the professional standards set by Social Work England to practise as a social worker. In relation to the altruism of those seeking to foster and adopt, the standards recognise the importance of family and community networks, requiring social workers to work in partnership with these.
To support child and family social workers to continuously improve their practice, the department funds professional development for around 4,000 social workers each year. The new Early Career Framework for child and family social workers will significantly extend the training and support they receive in the early stages of their career, helping to equip them with the knowledge skills they need to support children and families.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to his Department's press release entitled, Employment boost for thousands of parents on Universal Credit, published on 25 October 2023, if he will consider the potential merits of applying similar conditionality requirements for family and friend carers as foster carers.
Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Friends and family carers, also known as kinship carers, provide incredible care to children who cannot remain with their parents. The government recognises the difficult circumstances in which many kinship carers find themselves when they first take a child into their care. As such, for the first year they are only required to attend jobcentre appointments and are not required to search or prepare for work. This allows time for adjustments to the family’s life and for the children to settle in.
The policy for foster carers reflects their particular circumstances. Universal Credit does not provide claimants with financial support for any foster children in their care and only requires foster carers to attend regular appointments rather than look for work.
We have recently made changes to lead carer (including kinship carer) conditionality – an increased frequency of jobcentre appointments for lead carers of 1 and 2 year olds, and an increase to the maximum hours of work-related activity for lead carers of 3-12s. Alongside this, we have increased support with childcare. These changes in conditionality and childcare availability are designed to provide support to lead carers of children, including kinship carers, to help them move into work or grow their earnings and provide the children in their care with the best possible start in life. We believe that this strikes the right balance.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will take steps to ensure that the same Universal Credit work conditionality requirements apply to family and friend carers as to foster carers.
Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Friends and family carers, also known as kinship carers, provide incredible care to children who cannot remain with their parents. The government recognises the difficult circumstances in which many kinship carers find themselves when they first take a child into their care. As such, for the first year they are only required to attend jobcentre appointments and are not required to search or prepare for work. This allows time for adjustments to the family’s life and for the children to settle in.
The policy for foster carers reflects their particular circumstances. Universal Credit does not provide claimants with financial support for any foster children in their care and only requires foster carers to attend regular appointments rather than look for work.
Asked by: Lord Bishop of Durham (Bishops - Bishops)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the provision of specialist foster care for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children across the UK.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department recognise that local authorities across the country want to recruit more foster carers to provide loving homes for the children in their care, including for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC). The government is investing over £27 million in this parliament in a fostering recruitment and retention programme that will support local authorities to ensure that there are more foster carers available for the children who need them, including UASC. This will include a recruitment support hub which will work alongside a regional recruitment campaign to drive interest and enquiries in fostering. This may include specialist support and targeted campaigns to recruit specialist foster carers who are able to care for UASC. The department will work with regions to look at their local data to inform where efforts need to be targeted. This could include sibling groups, teenagers and UASC.
UASC are transferred to the care of local authorities through the National Transfer Scheme, ensuring their care is distributed fairly across the UK. Local authorities have a duty to accommodate all UASC who arrive in their area and these children are entitled to the same protections and support as any other looked-after child, which includes ensuring decisions about their care and accommodation, including where UASC are placed in foster care, are made with the best interests of each individual child.
Asked by: Helen Hayes (Labour - Dulwich and West Norwood)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment her Department has made of the capacity of the regulated accommodation sector for child social care placements.
Answered by David Johnston - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
While the statutory responsibility for ensuring sufficient places for looked after children sits with local authorities, the department understands the current challenges in the looked after children placement market. Both the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and the Competition and Markets Authority’s Children’s Social Care Market Study made recommendations around the commissioning and sufficiency of care placements. In the Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, we set out our response to these reports and our plans to reform children’s social care to ensure that there are enough of the right homes in the right places for children who need them.
To support local authorities to meet their statutory duty in ensuring there is sufficient provision for children in their care, the department has announced £259 million capital funding to maintain capacity and expand provision in secure and open children’s homes that provide high quality and safe homes for some of our most vulnerable children and young people across England.
The department is investing £27 million this Spending Review to deliver a fostering recruitment and retention programme to make foster care even more readily available for more children. This will boost approvals of foster carers in areas of specific shortage, such as sibling groups, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, teenagers, mother and baby placements and children who have suffered complex trauma.
We have also improved the offer of support, raising the national minimum allowance for foster carers by 12.43% to reflect the increasing costs of caring for a child and increasing the amount of income tax relief available to foster carers up to £18,140, from £10,000.
We are also developing two Regional Care Co-operatives (RCCs) pathfinders, each pathfinder will also receive up to £5 million in capital funding to develop new provision. These pathfinders will trial an approach to make RCCs work within the current legal framework ahead of bringing forward legislation when parliamentary time allows. In the long term, RCCs will plan, commission and deliver children’s social care placements. Through operating on a larger scale and developing specialist capabilities, the RCCs will be able to develop a wide range of places to better meet children’s needs. This, in turn, should lead to improved placement stability and fewer out of area placements.
Asked by: Lord Bishop of St Albans (Bishops - Bishops)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what programmes exist to support 18 year olds leaving the care system.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
As set out in the Children Act 1989, local authorities have the primary responsibility for supporting care leavers. The 2017 Children and Social Work Act imposed a new duty on local authorities to consult on and publish their ‘local offer’ for care leavers, setting out their legal entitlements and any further discretionary support that the local authority provides, such as Council Tax exemptions.
All care leavers up to the age of 25 are entitled to support from a personal adviser to help with access support from mainstream services, such as housing, health, and benefits. Personal advisors also provide practical and emotional support to help them prepare for and cope with the challenges of living independently.
The department is providing over £230 million over this spending review to support young people leaving care with housing, access to education, employment, and training, and to help them develop social connections and networks to avoid loneliness and isolation.
To support young people leaving the care system the department has:
Our ambitions for reform, set out in the ‘stable homes, built on love’ strategy and consultation, put loving and stable relationships at the heart of children’s social care. This includes the mission that by 2027, every care-experienced child and young person will feel that they have strong, loving relationships in place.
As outlined in ‘stable homes, built on love’ the department is providing over £30 million in the next two years to significantly increase the number of local authorities with family finding, befriending and mentoring programmes. The department also wants to increase the accessibility and take-up of the Independent Visitors offer by working with the sector to reinforce current good practice and developing standards for Independent Visitor services. Additionally, the department is assessing levels of interest in introducing a way for care-experienced people to legally formalise a lifelong bond with someone they care about, such as a former foster carer or family friend. The ‘stable homes, built on love’ consultation is attached.
Asked by: Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government how they will measure the effectiveness of actions set out in 'Optimising personalised care for adults prescribed medicines associated with dependence or withdrawal symptoms: Framework for action for integrated care boards (ICBs) and primary care', published on 2 March.
Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The framework for action sets out five actions for integrated care boards (ICBs) to consider to further reduce inappropriate prescribing of high-strength painkillers and other addiction-causing medicines, like opioids and benzodiazepines.
ICBs should take a population health management approach using data on primary care prescribing and health inequalities to monitor implementation of the actions. This includes looking at data on access to services, patient experience feedback and outcomes for communities within the integrated care system that often experience health inequalities.
There are several data resources used to give insights to ICBs and foster improvement at the local level, with data being available on an Opioid Prescribing Comparators dashboard. This dashboard can be used to review up-to-date data, highlight variation, and support local work to reduce harm from the prescribing of dependence and withdrawal forming medicines, as well as equip users with the tools for ongoing monitoring. The dashboard will be continually reviewed and updated with more metrics and views. More data is also available on duration of treatment of opioids, benzodiazepines, and z-drugs, as well as the number of patients prescribed a dependence forming medicine who have received a structured medication review.