Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Public Bill Committee, 23 January 2025.

(Morning)

Clause 1 - Family group decision-making

Ian Sollom (Liberal Democrat, St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire)

I beg to move amendment 36, in clause 1, page 2, line 11, leave out “may (in particular)” and insert “should, where appropriate”.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 37, in clause 1, page 2, line 21, leave out lines 21 to 23 and insert—

“(8) The child in relation to whom the family group decision-making meeting is held should be included in the meeting, unless the local authority deems it inappropriate.”

Amendment 18, in clause 1, page 2, line 26, at end insert—

“(10) Nothing in this section permits an extension to the 26-week limit for care proceedings in section 14(2)(ii) of the Children and Families Act 2014.”

This amendment clarifies that nothing in this section should imply an extension to the statutory 26-week limit for care proceedings.

Amendment 49, in clause 1, page 2, line 26, at end insert—

“31ZB Family group decision-making at the point of reunification

(1) This section applies where a care order is to be discharged for the purposes of family reunification.

(2) Usually prior to a child returning home, and no later than one month after the discharge of a care order, the local authority must offer a family-group decision-making meeting to the child’s parents or any other person with parental responsibility for the child.

(3) If the offer is accepted by at least one person to whom it is made, the local authority must arrange for the meeting to be held.

(4) The family-group decision-making meeting should have the purpose of empowering the child’s family network to promote the long-term safety and wellbeing of the child.

(5) The duty under this section does not apply where the local authority considers that it would not be in the best interests of the child for the family group decision-making meeting to be offered or (as the case may be) to be held.

(6) A ‘family network’, in relation to a child, consists of such persons with an interest in the child’s welfare as the authority considers appropriate to attend the meeting having regard to the child’s best interests, and such persons may (in particular) include—

(a) the child’s parents or any other person with parental responsibility for the child;

(b) relatives, friends or other persons connected with the child.

(7) Where the local authority considers it appropriate, the child in relation to whom the family group decision-making meeting is held may attend the meeting.

(8) In exercising functions under this section in relation to a child, the local authority must seek the views of the child unless it considers that it would not be appropriate to do so.”

This amendment would impose a duty on local authorities to offer family-group decision-making at the point of reunification for children in care, analogous to that proposed before care proceedings are initiated.

Clause stand part.

Ian Sollom (Liberal Democrat, St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire)

Broadly, the Liberal Democrats welcome the new requirement on local authorities to offer family group decision making, which gives those who care for children, including family members, the opportunity to be involved in putting together that plan for their welfare. The provision strengthens the right to hear the child’s voice, which as we heard in the evidence session is important.

We have a few concerns. As the provision is currently laid out, it might be a little ambiguous. There are lots of different models of family group decision making around, so we would like clarification from the Minister about the principles and standards that are set out in regard to what it actually looks like in practice. Cases where there is domestic violence or coercive control can be hard to identify, so we would like guidance on the principles around that.

We would also like to encourage local authorities to probe into what family group decision making should look like and who should be involved. One example that came to us from the Family Rights Group was of Azariah Hope, who was a care-experienced young parent very frustrated about how she was not offered a family group conference because the local authority presumed that she did not have a family or friend network to draw on.

Amendment 36 strengthens the right for the child to be involved, but still gives the local authority the power to decide on the appropriateness of who should be involved. We would like to hear more from the Minister about what those principles and standards should be for taking family group decision making forward.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. As this is the first amendment on the first day of our line-by-line consideration, I will briefly say that although the Opposition have lots of serious questions about the second part of the Bill, there is much in part 1 of the Bill that we completely support.

In fact, a lot of the Bill builds on work that the last Government were doing. To quote the great 1980s philosopher Belinda Carlisle, we may find that

“We dream the same thing

We want the same thing”.

It may not always seem like that, because we are going to ask some questions, but they are all about improving the Bill. A lot of them are not our questions, but ones put to us by passionate experts and those who work with people in these difficult situations.

The relevant policy document sets out why it is so important to get this clause right. It highlights the number of serious case incidents, which was 405 last year, and the number of child deaths, which was 205—every single one a terrible tragedy. Around half of those deaths were of very young children, often under 2; they are physically the most vulnerable children, because they cannot get away.

Our amendment 18 seeks to make clause 1 work in practice. It reflects some, but not all, of the concerns that we heard in oral evidence on Tuesday from Jacky Tiotto, the chief executive of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. The clause states:

“Before a local authority in England makes an application for an order…the authority must offer a family group decision-making meeting”.

In general, those meetings are a good thing, and we all support them—the last Government supported them; the new Government support them. They are already in statutory guidance.

However, we have two or three nagging worries about what will happen when, as it were, we mandate a good thing. The first is about pace. As I said in the oral evidence session, I worry that once family group decision making becomes a legal process and right, people will use the courts to slow down decision making, and that local authorities will sometimes worry about fulfilling this new requirement—although the meetings are generally a good thing—when their absolute priority should be getting a child away from a dangerous family quickly.

Lizzi Collinge (Labour, Morecambe and Lunesdale)

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I will give way; I have finally managed to get my train of thought in order again.

Lizzi Collinge (Labour, Morecambe and Lunesdale)

How common does the hon. Gentleman think the situation that he describes is across our constituencies? Does he accept our understanding of that situation? We see it ourselves in our constituencies and in our inboxes.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I thank the hon. Member for the intervention. A lot of us will have seen such situations where there is not a minute to lose. To complete my sentence, the woman was about to have—I think—her third or fourth child. This is not to criticise her, but a child would not have been safe with her for a single minute. The priority has to be getting children away from people who are dangerous to them.

I worry about pace, and our amendment 18 makes the importance of pace clear. It would insert:

“Nothing in this section permits an extension to the 26-week limit for care proceedings in section 14(2)(ii) of the Children and Families Act 2014.”

I was struck by what the head of CAFCASS told us on Tuesday. She said that the Bill “probably could move” the requirement for the family group decision-making meeting

“down to the point at which there are formal child protection procedures starting so that the family can get to know what the concerns are, work with the child protection plan for longer, understand what the concerns are and demonstrate whether the protection can happen.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 31, Q68.]

This is the bit of her evidence—she knows a lot more about this than I do—that struck me:

“if the Bill were to stay as drafted at the edge of care, I think there are risks for very young children, and babies in particular. The meetings will be difficult to set up. People will not turn up. They will be rescheduled”.––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 31, Q68.]

She went on:

“For very young children when you are concerned, if they are still with the parents, which is sometimes the case, or even with a foster carer, you want permanent decisions quickly. That does not negate the need for the family to be involved. You can have it much earlier because you have been worried for a while at that point.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 31, Q70.]

Our amendment does not encompass all those concerns, but it does seek to ensure that this very sensible provision in clause 1 does not slow down measures to keep children safe.

Given that there we were told a few other things by CAFCASS, I should also be clear about what our amendment does not do. It does not address my concerns about people and families—indeed, extended families—using the move to primary legislation to bring about legal action, such as a judicial review, against the decisions of local authorities, or using lawfare or the threat of legal action against local authorities, perhaps to force their way into a room when most of the social workers and other people involved would much rather they were not there because they are inappropriate people. Protecting against that risk is legally much more complicated, which is why the Government have not tabled an amendment on that point.

Ministers may say that the legal worries are less than I am supposing, but will they agree to look at this issue? The last thing we want, once this goes from being guidance to being statute, is people saying, “I’ve got a right to this meeting. You didn’t have me in the meeting. I am going to challenge this decision,” and all that sort of stuff. Hopefully, there is no risk, but I would love to see Ministers consider that point.

Nor does our amendment address moving meetings earlier in the process. As drafted, the clause encourages LAs to put pretty much all their cases to a meeting at the pre-proceeding stage—it has to be done before it goes to court—but lots of the people we heard evidence from think it would be desirable to have the meetings earlier, before the case enters the much less consensual pre-court process. By the time the case gets to the pre-proceedings stage, it is normally pretty clear that it will be hard to reach an amicable solution.

As I said, these questions do not come from us, but from people who know more about the issues than I do. I would like Ministers to respond to the points made by various experts and official groups. The head of CAFCASS said on Tuesday that we should move the point at which the Bill applies to when a section 7 report is ordered. I was really struck by her saying that, because it would be quite a big change to the Bill. She was very specific, however, and she knows a lot about the issue. She said:

“One suggestion I would like to make on CAFCASS’s behalf is that family group decision making should be offered to families where the court has ordered a section 7 report—a welfare report that, if ordered to do so, the local authority has to produce for the court in respect of what it advises about where children should live and who they should spend time with. I think the opportunity for a family group decision-making meeting for those families is important.”––[Official Report, Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 32, Q72.]

That is a big proposal, but it comes from someone with huge experience, who clearly has some real concerns. Will Ministers agree to take that away and consider it further as we make progress in Committee and in the Lords?

The head of CAFCASS made a second big proposal on Tuesday:

“The Bill tends to focus on those who are in public law proceedings. Two thirds of the children we work with are in private law proceedings, where there are family disputes about who children spend their time with and where they live. Very often, those children are in families where conflict is very intense. There are risks to them; there is domestic abuse. The Bill is silent on children in private law proceedings, and I think there is an opportunity for that to be different.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 32, Q72.]

My second question to the Ministers is: have the Government reflected on that suggestion, and do they have any plans to respond? They might not be able to give us a full and final answer today, but what is their basic reaction to that?

Another expert made some significant and specific suggestions about the clause. Will the Government respond to concerns put forward in the written evidence from the Family Rights Group, a charity that helped to introduce family conferences, which were used in New Zealand, to the UK in the 1990s? It said:

“we are concerned that the family group decision making offer in the Bill is too ambiguous and state-led in the way it is framed, with the state determining how, who attends and even if it happens. Without strengthening the provisions, we fear in practice it will not deliver the Bill’s ambition, to ensure fair and effective opportunity across England for children and families to get the support they need to stay safely together.”

Essentially, it is worried that the form will be followed but the spirit will be lost. It goes on:

“We are already seeing evidence of local authorities claiming to use such approaches, including reference to ‘family-led decision making’ to describe meetings which are led by professionals and where family involvement is minimal. Without clear definition of terms, and a set of principles and standards for practice, it is likely that in many authorities, such meetings will be professionally-led, with the child and family engagement peripheral…If the legislation does not specify what is expected, we are also concerned approaches unsupported by evidence will proliferate.”

The Family Rights Group echoed the concerns that we have heard from others about timing. It states:

“the timing of the offer, at the point the pre-proceedings letter is issued, is potentially too late for some families to benefit…When a local authority is issuing parents with a pre-proceedings letter, the concerns in relation to a child’s welfare will already be serious. The local authority should be working with the family to try to avoid care proceedings, but will also be undertaking assessments to consider who the child may live with if those concerns cannot be allayed. By waiting until this stage, opportunities to bring families together earlier, addressing difficulties before they have escalated and while there is still the possibility of the family supporting the parents as primary carers, could be missed. This includes early in pregnancy, when there’s still sufficient time to address identified concerns, through a plan drawn up at a family group conference.”

It also raised what I thought was a really specific and significant point:

“It would also exclude, for example, teenagers who are at risk of entering the care system, due to exploitation, through a voluntary arrangement. There is no letter before proceedings in such situations.”

Of course, the hook in clause 1 is that these things have to be done before going into the proceedings, but there is a group of people for whom there will not be proceedings. The Family Rights Group goes on to spell out various detailed suggestions for amendments, which I will not read out, to remedy the problems. Given what the Family Rights Group says, my third question is: what is the reaction of the Minister for School Standards to those points? Is she happy to take up those points and look at whether there might be further improvements to the Bill?

Will Ministers consider two further proposals to stop children falling through the cracks? We know that once a pre-proceedings letter is issued, the child protection case is typically transferred to another team. If the child was on a child protection plan, the plan can be dropped, which is particularly dangerous for the youngest children. Will the Government consider an amendment to ensure that a director of children’s services has to sign off any cessation of child protection plans in court proceedings for children under five? Are the Government interested in that as a way of stopping children falling through the cracks, as they are rightly interested in doing?

We know the obvious risks of family group conferences in cases of domestic abuse involving coercion and control. In my constituency, I have seen subtle and chilling examples of coercive control. As we have already discussed, all Members will have come across such cases, which are incredibly creepy. The risk is that all can appear calm when the reality is the exact opposite. A plan can sometimes put other family members at risk. Will the Government consider requiring that a systemic family therapist, who has a strong understanding of family dynamics, is appointed to chair the group? They are the ideal person.

I have some specific informational questions that I would like to ask Ministers, which I think it would be helpful for everyone to know, including peers, as the Bill progresses. How often do family group decision-making meetings happen? At present, I do not know precisely what the average percentage is for those who end up in proceedings nationally. Which authorities are using them more and which are using them less? Why do we think that is? What do we know about how often they happen at an earlier stage, rather than pretty close to proceedings or pre-proceedings? What is the Government’s expectation about how often meetings will happen once the legislation is passed? What are we going to go from and to—from X% to Y% of people having such meetings?

On amendment 18, how often do local authorities currently miss the statutory 26-week timeline for taking children into care? The spirit of our amendment is that we must not let the goodness of family group decision making and conferencing get in the way of pacy decision making. There is sometimes already a problem with that as things stand.

Related to that, I was so haunted by the statement from CAFCASS about the risks posed to young children by the Bill’s current drafting, and I encourage the Minister to respond to that. As a consequence, we must also think about how often there will be family group decision making as a result of this legislation, and how we expect clause 1 to change the number, or proportion, of occasions on which that happens.

Following that, do we have some sort of assessment of the Bill’s impact on the number of children in care? I think one of the Government’s hopes for the Bill is that it will reduce, in a safe way, the number of children who need to end up in the care system, which we would all like to see. I know that we are expecting an impact assessment and a children’s rights assessment, but when are we likely to see that? I do not think it is out yet, unless I have missed it, and that is obviously unsatisfactory in so far as we are discussing what it is designed to inform us about. Perhaps Ministers can fill in the holes today. In one sense, that is why I am asking for all this information, because the document is not quite ready. I think the Minister said the other day that the document is stuck in a committee and I know he is trying to get it unstuck as soon as possible.

The context is that the number of children in care under the previous Labour Government went up 27% from 1997 and 2010, and under the last Conservative and Liberal Democrat Governments, it went up another 27% from 2010 to 2024. It has been growing at just under 2% a year since 1994. We all want to see fewer children needing to be in care, but we also know that there are children who will not be safe unless they are taken into care. What is the Government’s sense of the magnitude of the impact of clause 1, and the other measures in the Bill, on the number of children going into care? We saw a very large impact in the randomised controlled trial conducted by Foundations, and we could see that large impact again if we applied it to the total number of children in care.

We obviously agree with the spirit of the clause, but I do not know whether it is appropriate to debate clause stand part here, Sir Christopher. Would you prefer us to come back to that or to discuss it all now?

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

The debate on clause 1 stand part is included in this group.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

Thank you, Sir Christopher. I will include it here—I just wanted to double-check.

Although I have asked lots of questions about it, we totally agree with the spirit of the clause. In fact, in February 2023, the last Conservative Government published a strategy and consultation on reforming children’s social care called “Stable Homes, Built on Love”. That was partly a response to reports published in 2022, including the final report of the independent review of children’s social care, which was very ably put together by the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister). The 2023 strategy said that, over the following two years, the Government would invest £200 million,

“laying the foundations for whole system reform and setting national direction for change.”

After two years, the Government would refresh the strategy, scale up the approaches and bring forward new legislation, and in a sense that is what is happening now. This Government are doing some of the things that we had hoped to do when we were in government.

We are obviously not against new legislation; in fact, as part of the strategy, we provided £45 million to launch the Families First for Children pathfinder in 12 local areas for the following two years. That was going to test some of the measures in the Bill, such as more multi-agency working and early, non-stigmatising help and group decision making. We set up those pilots partly because of one of the measures in clause 1.

Those pilots started in July 2023 and, frustratingly, the results are supposed to be out in the next couple of months. Because of the way that things happen in this place, we are in the slightly frustrating position of having done a proper experiment—we have tested the concepts in clause 1 in the pilot—as we always say we want to do as politicians, but we do not get to hear the results, which are potentially just weeks away.

Have Ministers had sight of early findings from those pilots? Would they be prepared to make them available to Members of this House and of the other place, either in written form or via access to those who have been doing the work of pulling the findings together? It is very frustrating: there is a good piece of evidence, on which a lot of time and money has been spent, and yet, at the point at which we are legislating, we do not quite have access to it. It is weeks away. I hope that Ministers will find a way to share the findings with Members of both Houses.

As I alluded to, I read the Foundations report. Based on a randomised controlled trial, it states:

“We estimate that if family group conferences were to be rolled out across England, 2,293 fewer children would go into care in a 12-month period”.

That would be about a 7% drop, so that is a very large effect. If the RCT is right and it is not just a pilot effect, the effect would be big. We have that estimate from an external group, but I would like to know what the Government think the clause will do to the number of people in care.

On the one hand, that is very encouraging. Having 7% fewer children safely flowing into care every year would be a glorious and fantastic outcome, which is why both sides are interested in the model. On the other hand, such a big change would bring with it some downsides and risks, as is inevitable when we are talking about so many children. The Foundations report concludes that

“There is a need to undertake further research”.

I therefore have another question for the Minister: what gold standard randomised controlled trial work have the Government planned to understand the impacts of the change if it is rolled out as we expect?

I am speaking specifically of the potential negative impacts, which will be smaller in number and hard to look at. We might think, “Wonderful, we have 7% fewer children flowing into care every year. That is great,” but what happens to the children who do not end up in care but have a bad experience in another way? We all hope that will be a much smaller number, but when there is a big upside, there will probably be downsides as well. It is important to have a piece of research in train to try to measure those downsides and check whether the good consequences that we hope for also come with negative consequences. Unless we have the research that Foundations has called for, we will not find that out.

We do not disagree on the attractiveness of family group decision making in principle, but we need to make it work and to minimise the risks. Our amendment is one way to do part of that. We need to make sure that we are seizing all the opportunities of this legislative moment; they do not come around too often, as the Minister pointed out the other day. As the Bill goes through, we need to get a lot more information about that consequential reform. That will come partly from the Government’s impact assessment, when it is published, and partly from the Government providing the answers to some of our questions.

I have given lots of examples, and I hope that Ministers will think very carefully about some of the suggestions that we are getting from the serious experts who have been doing this for a long time. They are totally independent—they just want the right thing for kids and to ensure that we get the upsides of this change, which we all support in principle, while minimising the downsides.

Catherine Atkinson (Labour, Derby North)

I rise to speak to amendments 36, 37 and 18. It has been a number of years since I was regularly involved in care proceedings as a barrister, but I did so for the best part of a decade. I and a number of my former colleagues hugely welcome this requirement for family group decision making to ensure that it can consistently take place and that all kinship options are considered before there is an application to remove a child from their family and place them in care. I anticipate that the clause will mean fewer cases where lawyers have to get involved and where families are subject to care proceedings.

I am concerned about amendments 36 and 37, however, which would make the Bill more directive about children being present at family group decision making. The wishes and feelings of the child need, of course, to be considered at that meeting and the voice of the child should, of course, always be heard, but that is different from them being present at the meeting. It is really important that the discussion at that meeting is frank and meaningful—often, in that meeting, family members will be finding out, and coming to understand, the risks posed to a child. The appropriate way for a child to be told about their safety or an issue that parents need to tackle is likely to be very different, and more tailored, from what is appropriate for the adults in the room.

The discussion about who will care for the child, if not the parents, can be emotionally harmful for the child. In the presence of family members, a child may also feel conflicted about the views they feel able to share, and family and friends need to be honest about the support that they are able to offer. What if no one puts themselves forward? What if they argue about who is best placed? There is a real risk that children feel rejected.

The child’s presence could also lead to a kinship carer volunteering themselves because they do not want to upset the child, when, actually, they cannot commit. I am concerned that social workers will not always be sufficiently familiar with the family and friends who are present to be able to assess their likely reaction and their input at the meeting, and to anticipate the impact on the child.

In my view, a child’s wishes are better obtained when it is clear what the actual options are. The child must still be listened to but children are not responsible for finding someone to look after them. It will, of course, be important for some older children to be there, when they are already fully aware of their parents’ struggles and the situation their parents face, but that is rare and could be dealt with under the clause as it stands. The prescription in amendment 37 is unhelpful.

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

Does the hon. Lady recognise that amendment 37 proposes a presumption of inclusion but, where

“the local authority deems it inappropriate”—

for example, if the child is too young or because of the nature of the proceedings—the child would not be included? The problem with the Bill as it is drafted is that some local authorities, who do not necessarily respect the voice of the child or ensure that the child is involved, may routinely leave the child out of the discussion, even with teenagers who could be helpfully involved.

Catherine Atkinson (Labour, Derby North)

Giving that discretion is really important, but by saying “should”, amendment 37 would give a directive to the local authority to first look at including the child, and only reject that in circumstances where it can be demonstrated that including them would be harmful and inappropriate. In my view, that fetters the discretion and pushes things into a potentially harmful situation, especially given the number of children that we are talking about—not younger children, but definitely those at the upper end. In my view, we should not fetter the discretion. I do not think that that kind of directive is helpful in those circumstances.

On amendment 18, I do not need to be told how important it is that childcare proceedings are conducted quickly and without delay. At the moment, the 26-week time limit set out in the Children and Families Act 2014 is not met in over two thirds of cases. I think we are averaging 41 weeks—which is better than last year, when it was nearly 45 weeks—and that includes cases where everything is agreed and not contested.

My former colleagues are regularly involved in cases lasting over a year and some lasting over two years. I do not think that, in the 10 years since the 26-week limit was enacted, the majority of cases have ever been completed within six months. The amendment is therefore somewhat incongruous given what we have seen over the last 10 years—I think that a number of my former colleagues would consider it brass neck.

The amendment does not do anything to ensure that we deal with cases rapidly, because the 26 weeks starts when an application is made, but the whole point of the clause is that family group decision making needs to take place before an application is made. In my view, the amendment does nothing to restrict the time to 26 weeks, because clause 1 does not have an impact on that timescale at all, and it certainly does not prevent local authorities from holding family group decision making earlier.

I am somewhat provoked to note that it was the coalition Government’s Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 that cut all legal aid for private family law cases unless there are allegations of abuse. Out-of-court or pre-proceeding discussions and settlements, and the involvement of professionals, have therefore become far harder since 2012.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I rise to speak to amendment 49 regarding family group decision making at the point of family reunification.

Reunification—the process of returning a child in care to their family—is the most common route by which children leave care, accounting for 27% of all children who left care in 2023. It is also one of the most sensitive and significant transitions a child can experience. When done well, it can offer children stability, security and permanence at home with their family, but too often the reunifications fail. In fact, one in three children who return home then re-enter the care system, so thousands of children are enduring yet more displacement, disrupted attachments, instability and broken trust.

The human cost of those failed reunifications is immeasurable, but the financial cost is also stark. Failed reunifications cost the public purse £370 million annually—money that would be better spent supporting families in the first place. Research tells us that too many reunifications break down because families do not receive the support that they need to make that process successful, tut there is no national strategy for supporting reunifications. Support across the country is inconsistent, and alarmingly, 78% of authorities report that the support that they offer is inadequate—the authorities report that themselves.

Amendment 49 provides a clear, practical, evidence-based solution—effectively a mirror to the Government’s clause 1. The amendment would require local authorities to offer family group decision making no later than one month after the discharge of a care order for the purpose of family reunification. Of course, in practice, it is envisaged that the family group decision-making process would be offered before the child returns home to support that return.

As the Committee has already heard and discussed, family group decision making is a powerful tool. It brings families together to identify solutions, develop a plan and build a network of support around the child. It can empower families to take ownership of the challenges that they face, and foster collaborative work with professionals that promotes the safety and wellbeing of the child while also amplifying the child’s voice. My argument is that that is as important towards the end of a care process as it is at the beginning.

Family group decision making is well established and recognised as best practice by professionals. We already have clear evidence on its effectiveness, and we are awaiting more, as the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston said. However, the lack of a statutory duty to offer it has led to patchy practice across the country. One third of local authorities do not offer family group decision making at all during reunification. Amendment 49 addresses that gap. It would ensure that every family in England has the opportunity to benefit from that approach. The requirement in the amendment is to offer it; it does not impose any sort of time limit.

Some Members might worry about the practicalities or cost of introducing the duty, but as I have already explained, the breakdown of family reunification is an incredibly costly process, both financially and for the child’s welfare. The amendment is a financial cost-saving measure as well as a child-centred one. Research shows that providing support to meet a family’s needs during reunification costs just £7,857 per child. By contrast, the cost of a single reunification breakdown is £105,000. Amendment 49 would be

The amendment is practical and allows for professional judgment, recognising that every family is different. Where a meeting is not in a child’s best interests, the local authority would be exempt from the duty to make the offer, and that flexibility ensures that the needs of children always come first. The amendment also complements existing provisions in the Bill. It effectively mirrors the duty to offer family group decision making before care proceedings, and therefore offers a coherent support framework at both ends of the care process—effectively bookending it. It brings much-needed consistency to a fragmented system.

With more children in care than ever before, as we have noted, and with children’s services under immense strain, the amendment represents a real opportunity. By embedding family group decision making we can enable more families to stay together, reduce the number of children returning to care, which is an incredibly damaging process, and relieve pressure on an overstretched system, all while delivering better outcomes for those children. This is about fairness, consistency, investing in what works and ensuring that all reunifying families, not just some, are given the help they need. It is about recognising the importance of successful reunification within the care process. I very much look forward to hearing the Minister’s reflections on the proposal and the other questions raised this morning.

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

Of course I agree with and entirely support the spirit of what the Government are doing. It forms part of the strand of development intended in the “Stable Homes, Built on Love” strategy; across the House, we share similar motivations on all these matters.

On the comments from the hon. Member for North Herefordshire on reunification and amendment 49, I do not think an amendment to a Bill is the moment to introduce such a thing, but I am sure that in their continuing work, Ministers and officials will look at how the reunification process can be improved for all the reasons that she rightly gave.

I have a couple of questions on the inclusion of children in meetings, which is relevant to clause stand part and to amendment 36. My first question is: what guidance will accompany the new provisions? In some cases it will be obvious that a child should not be present, but beyond that it is perhaps difficult to generalise. Of course we trust professional judgment, but I wonder about the extent to which further guidance may be useful. I am thinking particularly of children with learning disabilities, who sometimes feel that things are done that affect their lives in a big way and they have less of a say than other children, because somebody has made that judgment when perhaps they did not need to. Secondly—this is a minor point in the grand scheme of things—I wonder why the legislation and the explanatory notes do not say that a child may be present for part of the meeting. It may be appropriate to have part of it with the child and part of it without them.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

I call the Minister. [Interruption.] I call Tom Hayes. It is helpful for the Chair if you rise in your place if you intend to speak.

Tom Hayes (Labour, Bournemouth East)

Thank you, Sir Christopher; that is helpful advice.

I associate myself with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North, and will speak to oppose proposed amendments 36, 37 and 18. I think the Bill is in fact very child-centred; it is focused on the needs of children.

Before I was elected to this place, I ran a mental health and domestic abuse charity, so multi-agency working at a local level is very familiar to me. From that role, I know just how little local authorities have felt empowered by central Government, but so much expertise and experience sits at that level. There is so much passion and knowledge in the social workforce, yet social workers do not feel empowered and trusted to get on with their job. By providing them with the ability to deem what is appropriate and to progress on that basis, we are showing our social workforce that we respect their judgment. On balance, from working with social workers, I know that they are significantly motivated by the interests of the child and they always speak on behalf of the child.

The service that I ran embedded caseworkers within social care settings. It was intended to provide support to children in difficult circumstances, often arising from parents experiencing significant mental ill health, domestic abuse, substance misuse—mainly those three things—and other related issues. Most children sitting in the meetings will be in their teenage years. They should not be sitting in those meetings. The meetings would traumatise them. Expecting them by default to attend would not serve the needs of the child, or the needs of those around the child who want to provide wraparound support, have frank conversations and arrive at what is best for the child. That is why I support the Bill.

I listened carefully to what Mr O’Brien said, and I take the point that he made about—

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

Order. You need to refer to people by their constituency, rather than by their name.

Tom Hayes (Labour, Bournemouth East)

In that case, can Mr O’Brien remind me of his constituency? [Interruption.] The acoustics in this room are quite bad, so I did not catch all of that, but I will write the constituency down next time; I apologise, Sir Christopher. I have listened carefully to what the Opposition spokesperson said, and take his point about wanting to assess the number of children who will no longer be in care as a result of these measures.

Let me broaden the debate out. A significant reason for care proceedings is that parents are experiencing mental ill health, so making progress on tackling some of the major reasons why parents in our society have mental ill health will bring significant benefits. In my experience, those reasons tend to fall into three categories: employment security, housing security and income security. The measures this Government are introducing on housing security will see a significant improvement in the families’ conditions, and the Government’s measures on employment security will see a significant improvement in families’ security. The measures to tackle the cost of living crisis that people are experiencing, such as the Bill’s provisions on free school breakfasts and the cap on uniform items, will help families with some of their cost of living concerns.

I do not agree with the amendments. The measures in the Bill are satisfactory. I will leave it there.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

It is an honour to serve under you as Chair, Sir Christopher, and to be a part of this thoughtful and considered Committee, which is taking this landmark legislation through Parliament. I thank hon. Members for the spirit in which they have discussed the safeguarding aspects of the Bill. I appreciate the support that has been expressed, and thank Members for their questions, concerns and amendments, which I will seek to address.

Amendments 36 and 37 stand in the name of the hon. Member for Twickenham but were presented by the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire. I thank him for his support for the clause and acknowledgment that family group decision making is a family-led process. A family network is unique to every child, so we decided not to be prescriptive about who should attend the meetings. That will be assessed and determined by the local authority, which will consider who it is appropriate to invite, and we will publish updated statutory guidance to make it clear that the local authority should engage with the full scope of the family network. That should take place with a view to supporting the wellbeing and welfare of the child, because the child’s voice and views are an integral part of the family group decision-making process.

The process is, by its very nature, child-centric, and is designed with the best interests of the child in mind. The meeting facilitator will talk to families and the child about how best the child might be involved in the meeting. I recognise some of the points made about the extent to which the child should take part in the process, but the child’s participation will clearly depend on several factors, including their age and their level of understanding, and an independent advocate may also be used to help the child to express their views.

As has been set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North, in some cases it may not be appropriate for the child to attend. However, there is time for the child to voice their experiences or concerns through the dedicated preparation time for those meetings. The facilitator will take further action where they think it may be required if they think that there are safeguarding concerns, and we are confident that local authorities will continue to be guided by what is in the best interests of the child. For the reasons that I have outlined, I ask the hon. Member for Twickenham not to press her amendments.

Amendment 18 has been tabled by the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston. I thank him for the spirit in which he presented his amendments and put on record his concerns about the situation that children find themselves in and wanting the best outcome for them. The amendment relates to the 26-week rule for children subject to family court proceedings. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Children and Families Act 2014 introduced the 26-week limit on courts to complete care and supervision proceedings when they are considering whether a child should be taken into care or placed with an alternative carer. I reassure him that we prioritise reducing unnecessary delay in family courts and securing timely outcomes for children and families.

Clause 1 relates to a specific and critical point before court proceedings are initiated. It gives parents or those with parental responsibility the legal right to a family-led meeting when they are at the point of the risk of entering into care proceedings. There is robust evidence to show that strengthening the offer of family group decision making at that crucial stage will in fact reduce applications to the family courts and prevent children from entering the care system at all.

As much as we acknowledge the concern raised, we are confident that no provisions in clause 1 would result in an extension to the statutory 26-week limit for care proceedings, which starts when the application for a care or supervision order is made. We think it is right that families are given the time and support to form a family-led plan. By strengthening the offer of family group decision making for families on the edge of care, concerns about children’s safety and wellbeing can be addressed swiftly, with the support of skilled professionals, and avoid escalation into potentially lengthy care proceedings. We want to avoid missing those opportunities for children to remain living safely with their families, so the child’s welfare and best interests are very much at the heart of clause 1.

If the local authority believes that the child’s circumstances or welfare needs might have changed at any point during pre-proceedings and it would no longer be in their best interests to facilitate the meeting, the court proceedings can be initiated immediately. The local authority should always act in accordance with the child’s best interests. Indeed, that family work can continue throughout court proceedings being initiated, and family group decision making can also continue. For the reasons I have outlined, I kindly ask the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston not to press his amendment.

Amendment 49 is in the name of the hon. Member for North Herefordshire. Clause 1 gives parents or those with parental responsibility the legal right to the family-led meeting at the specific and critical point, which I referenced, when they are at risk of entering into care proceedings. As I said, we have the clear evidence to show that involvement of the wider family network in planning and decision making at that pre-proceedings stage can divert children from care and keep more families together.

Although clause 1 focuses on the critical point at the edge of care, we already encourage local authorities to offer these meetings as early as possible and throughout the time that the child is receiving help, support and protection, including as a possible route to reunification with their birth parents or a family network where appropriate. We are clear in guidance and regulations that, where a child is returning home to their family after a period in care, local authorities should consider what help and support they will need to make reunification a success and set it out in writing. We will continue to promote the wider use of family group decision making, including by updating statutory guidance where appropriate and through best practice support. We believe that this legislation is a transformative step change that will be helpful in expanding these services for the benefit of children and families right across the country.

I turn to some of the specific questions that have been raised by Members, some of which I have addressed in my comments.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

Will the Minister give way?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I may well be coming to the hon. Member’s question, if I can pre-empt her. If not, she is welcome to intervene again.

On reunification specifically, “Working together to safeguard children 2023” was updated to ask local authorities to consider

“whether family group decision-making would support the child’s transition home from care, and the role the family network could play in supporting this.”

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

Will the Minister respond directly to the thrust of amendment 49? The Bill is shifting from a position where the consideration of family group decision making is already encouraged to a statutory requirement before starting care proceedings. Amendment 49 asks for a mirroring of that at the potential end of care proceedings. Why does the Minister feel that it is important to move to a statutory footing at the start but not the end, particularly given the statistics that I have referenced on the frequency of breakdown? Would it not be entirely consistent for the Bill to specify this—bookending both ends of the care process?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I do think I have responded to the hon. Lady’s specific request, and explained why we are mandating and putting on to a statutory footing the requirement to offer family group decision making at this crucial point before care proceedings. We obviously encourage local authorities throughout their work with children in these circumstances to take a family-first approach and to offer family conferencing. Indeed, family group decision making can be used at any stage of a child’s journey through their relationship with the local authority. However, our decision to mandate it at this crucial point is very much based on the evidence that this reduces the number of children who end up going into care proceedings, and indeed into care.

A lot of issues were raised and I will do my very best to cover them. The hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston raised private law proceedings. The Ministry of Justice offers a voucher scheme to provide a contribution of up to £500 towards the mediation costs for eligible cases, supporting people in resolving their family law disputes outside of court. Similarly to family group decision making, family mediation is a process that uses trained, independent mediators and helps families to sort arrangements out. I take on board the concerns he has raised that all children should be able to benefit from family group decision making where possible. On the impact assessment, as we said in the second evidence session on Tuesday, the Regulatory Policy Committee is considering the Bill’s impact assessments and we will publish them shortly and as soon as possible.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I know that the Minister is trying to get us the impact assessments and is completely sincere about that. Will she undertake to get them while we are still in Committee?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I believe I can, but I will check and report back in this afternoon’s sitting. I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s request.

On the issues and concerns the hon. Gentleman raised about the delays and backlogs in the family justice system, we recognise the challenges in the family court system, which is why we hope that hon. Members will support this measure so that we can give more families the opportunity to use the family group decision-making process, which could be the thing that prevents them from having to enter the court system. The Department for Education is working very closely with the Ministry of Justice with the aim of driving system improvements, reducing the issues that are preventing cases from being heard and reducing the delays. In particular, we are investing £10 million to implement and test new solutions to address those challenges in the sector. I could go on to list them, but I am conscious of time.

As I said earlier, clause 1 mandates local authorities to offer a family group decision-making meeting to all families at pre-proceedings before any application for a care or supervision order is made. That allows family networks to come together and make a plan to respond to concerns about a child, working alongside professionals. It gives parents the legal right to that family-led meeting at the critical point when they are at risk of entering care proceedings. The independent review of children’s social care reported that in too many cases, opportunities have been missed to draw on the inherent strengths of the extended family network to support children and families on the edge of care. We have robust evidence to show that involving and empowering family networks through family-led meetings can divert children from care and keep more families together.

Children are at the heart of this legislation. The clause makes sure that the offer of a family-led meeting is made only if it is in the child’s best interests. Local authorities must seek a child’s views throughout that transformative process. I hope the Committee can agree that the clause should stand part of the Bill.

Ian Sollom (Liberal Democrat, St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire)

I thank the Minister for her response. We have heard from across the Committee how much support there is for the principles of the clause. I hear what Government Members have said about the amendments not giving the relevant social workers and facilitators enough flexibility in their decision making. Nevertheless, as my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham pointed out, there is a risk that without a stronger direction to include the child in those meetings, not enough emphasis will be placed on it. Amendment 36 would insert the words “should, where appropriate”, which leaves the decision in the hands of the local authority, but gives a stronger steer that, where possible, the child needs to be included. That is something that many child-centred charities would support. We will not withdraw the amendment.

Ian Sollom (Liberal Democrat, St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire)

I will withdraw it then, sorry; I was not clear on the process. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

We are in the middle of a Division now.

Ian Sollom (Liberal Democrat, St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire)

Apologies.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

I invited the hon. Gentleman to withdraw his amendment and he said that he wished to press it, so that is why we had a Division.

As a number of people in this Committee are on a learning curve, I will just say that, if the people who tabled the other two amendments in this grouping wish to put them to the vote, that request needs to be put to the Chair now. They can then be moved formally and we can then have a Division on them. If that is not done now, those amendments will not have been moved and they will just fall. Does anybody else wish to move any of the amendments in this group?

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

Yes, Sir Christopher.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

Ellie Chowns, do you wish to press your amendment to a vote?

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

Chair, may I ask a question of the Minister?

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

No; we have finished debating this group of amendments now.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

I wish to ask the Minister if she would meet with me to discuss this matter.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

You can ask them later on some other issue—I am sure the Minister will always be willing to meet you. But do you wish to press your amendment to a vote?

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

No.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

Okay, so that does not matter.

Clause 2 - Inclusion of childcare and education agencies in safeguarding arrangements

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

By strengthening the role of education in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, clause 2 recognises the crucial role that education and childcare play in keeping children safe. It places a duty on the local authority, police and health services, as safeguarding partners, to automatically include all education settings in their arrangements, and to work together to identify and respond to the needs of children in this area.

The clause includes the breadth of education settings, such as early years, academies, alternative provision and further education. This will ensure improved communication between a safeguarding partnership and education, better information sharing and understanding of child protection thresholds, and more opportunities to influence key decisions about how safeguarding is carried out in the local area.

Multiple national reviews have found that although some arrangements have worked hard to bring schools to the table, in too many places the contribution and voice of education are missing. Education and childcare settings should have a seat around the table in decision making about safeguarding, so we are mandating consistent and effective join-up between local authority, police and health services, and schools and other education and childcare settings and providers. We know that many education and childcare settings are well involved in their local safeguarding arrangements, but the position is inconsistent nationally, which can lead to missed opportunities to protect children.

This change will improve join-up of children’s social care, police and health services with education, to better safeguard and promote the welfare of all children in local areas. It will also mean that all education and childcare settings must co-operate with safeguarding partners and ensure that those arrangements are fully understood and rigorously applied in their organisations. I hope that this clause has support from the Committee today.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

The Opposition do not have amendments to this clause, but we do have some questions. This change is generally a very good idea and we welcome it. I have sat where the Minister is sitting, so I am conscious that, even when a Minister wants to answer all the questions posed by the Opposition, it is sometimes impossible—but I hope, thinking about some of the questions in the last part of our proceedings, that she will continue to consider those and see whether she can get answers to them. I know it is utterly impossible to answer all these questions in real time.

On the Opposition Benches, we welcome the inclusion of education agencies in safeguarding arrangements. All too often, the school is the one agency that sees the child daily and has a sense of when they are in need of protection or are in danger. Our conversations with schools all underline that. We have heard that they welcome this change and that it is a good thing. Last year, schools were the largest referrer of cases, after the police, to children’s social care, and I know from friends who are teachers just how seriously they take this issue. One of my teacher friends runs a sixth form and she spends her spare time reading serious case reviews, so I know that teachers take this issue deadly seriously, and we want to help them to have as much impact as they can.

My questions relate to nurseries, particularly childminders, because this clause is about an extension to education, not just to schools. We understand that child protection meetings can take place via video conference to make them easier to attend. We would just like the Government to confirm and talk about what conversations they have had with those kinds of organisations, which are often literally one-woman bands, about how they will be able to participate, given their very limited staffing and the imperative to look after children in their care effectively.

If the childminder has to go off to some meeting and are shutting down their business for the day, do they have to ask the parents who leave their children with them to find their own childcare? How do we make it easier for these organisations, particularly in relation to really small, really vulnerable children, to take part in this process? We do not doubt that they will want to contribute; we just want some reassurance that the Department is thinking about how that will work well in practice.

The Government argue that education should not be a fourth safeguarding partner because, unlike with other safeguarding partners, there is not currently a single organisation or individual who can be a single point of accountability for organisations across the whole education sector and different types of educational institutions. I understand the Government’s argument, but there are other views. Barnardo’s says in its briefing that

“the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care recommended that the Department for Education make education the fourth statutory safeguarding partner, highlighting that the Department should ‘work with social care and school leaders to identify the best way to achieve this, ensuring that arrangements provide clarity.’

However, the new Bill falls short of this recommendation, mandating only that education providers should always be considered ‘relevant partners’. This should improve the recognition of the importance of education providers in safeguarding arrangements, but we believe that this does not go far enough to protect children at risk.

We recognise that the diverse nature of the education sector could pose a practical challenge in identifying a relevant senior colleague to represent education as a statutory partner. Education settings have a wealth of experience in working with children to keep them safe and we believe it is vital that options are explored to ensure they are able to fully participate in…the planning and delivery of local safeguarding arrangements.”

I want to hear what the Government’s response to those arguments is. As the Minister said, this is a rare legislative moment, so we want to ensure that these important contributions and questions are heard and answered.

Turning to a slightly different question, I understand that there might not be a single point of accountability—which is why this Government, like the previous Government, are not pursuing education providers as the fourth safeguarding partner—but to make this work well, a single point of contact for education might be sensible. Can the Minister confirm that, to support the successful operation of this provision, every local authority currently provides childminders in particular with a line they can call to discuss any concerns, both specific and more general? Schools generally know where to go, but is that true at the moment of nurseries and childminders?

We all agree on early engagement with people in education, rather than only talking to them when it has got to a crisis point. How do we make that easy and normal for such bodies, particularly smaller ones? What will the Government do to bring that about? I also want to ask about the families first for children pathfinder programme. The DFE says that it has been testing a strengthened role for education in local safeguarding arrangements, and as part of that it will ensure that the evidence is shared. I do not think we have that yet. Again, we are doing the experiment and getting useful evidence, but at the point of legislation it is not quite with us.

Will those learnings be shared more widely with local authorities, and might Members and peers be able to see some of that super-valuable evidence before the Bill completes its passage through Parliament? The programme is literally testing out and trying to do exactly what the Government is trying to do, so I am sure there are important learnings that we can take from that. At the moment we do not have the information to read as parliamentarians, so will the Government undertake to try to extract some of that for us and make it available before the Bill passes all the way through Parliament?

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I will say very little on clause 2, because the Liberal Democrats strongly support and welcome it—it is much needed. However, I echo the official Opposition’s question why education and schools are not being made the fourth statutory safeguarding partner. I know that is something that the Children’s Commissioner and the various children’s charities that were quoted are pushing for. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments on that.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

Ellie Chowns, do you wish to participate in this debate?

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

indicated dissent.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

Just to be helpful, last time you said you wanted to speak after the debate had closed. What you could have done was to participate again in the debate before it ended. It is open to anybody who is a member of the Committee to speak more than once in a debate—there is no limit on the number of times you can speak in a debate, but you cannot speak after the question has been put.

If you wanted to tell the Minister that you were dissatisfied or that you wanted to have a meeting, then the time to have done that would have been during the debate. At the end, you could have caught my eye and you would have been able to participate. I am trying to help people so that nobody feels that they are being excluded, because I know how difficult it must be for new Members who have not got the support of an established network in this place.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I thank Members for their contributions, and I appreciate the support—generally speaking—for the change. I can give the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston confidence that the impact assessments will be produced before the Committee has ended, so there will be an opportunity to study them. In response to his question, we are not making schools the fourth safeguarding partner with this measure. As the hon. Gentleman set out and appreciates, the education and childcare sector does not have a single point of accountability in the same way that a local authority, a health service or the police do. There is not currently an organisation or individual that can take on the role of a safeguarding partner.

The measure is therefore crucial to ensuring that education is consistently involved in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements across England. It places a duty on safeguarding partners to fully include and represent education at all levels of their arrangements in order to ensure that opportunities to keep children safe are not missed. It gives educational settings a clear role in safeguarding locally. It is a vital step towards consistency in local areas, and sends out the clear message that education is fundamental at all levels of safeguarding arrangements.

I appreciate the question that the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston asked about childcare settings, and about childminders in particular. We deliberately ensured that the measure includes all educational settings, covering early years, childcare and all primary and secondary schools. It spans maintained and independent schools, academies, further education institutions, colleges and alternative provision. It is important that the measure covers the breadth of education and childcare settings in a local area to ensure that opportunities to help and protect children are not missed. I appreciate that, in some childcare settings, those arrangements will be more formal and practised than in others, but it is important that we ensure that no child is left out.

Clause 3 - Multi-agency child protection teams for local authority areas

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I beg to move amendment 1, in clause 3, page 3, line 33, leave out

“the director of children’s services for”.

This amendment and Amendment 2 make minor changes relating to local authority nominations to a multi-agency child protection team.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendments 2 to 5.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

Amendments 1 to 5, in my name, relate to the nomination of individuals by safeguarding partners for multi-agency child protection teams. These important amendments ensure that primary legislation is consistent. To be consistent with the Children Act 2004, the reference to those who nominate should be to the safeguarding partners, not to specific roles. It is, after all, the safeguarding partners who are best placed to make the nomination for individuals, and have the required expertise in health, education, social work and policing. We will continue to use the statutory guidance, “Working together to safeguard children”, to provide further information on safeguarding partner roles and responsibilities, which will include nominating individuals in the multi-agency child protection teams.

These amendments ensure consistency with the Children Act and set out that safeguarding partners are responsible for nominating individuals with the relevant knowledge, experience and expertise to multi-agency child protection teams.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I have nothing to say about these amendments. I will reserve my comments for our amendment, which is in a different group. I completely understand what the Minister is doing.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I beg to move amendment 19, in clause 3, page 5, line 3, at end insert—

“16EC Report on work and impact of multi-agency child protection teams

(1) The Secretary of State must report annually on the work and impact of multi-agency child protection teams.

(2) A report under this section shall include analysis of —

(a) the membership of multi-agency child protection teams;

(b) the specific child protection activities undertaken by such teams;

(c) best practice in multi-agency work; and

(d) the impact of multi-agency child protection teams on —

(i) information sharing;

(ii) risk identification; and

(iii) joining up services between children’s social care, police, health services, education and other agencies, including the voluntary sector.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to report on the effectiveness of multi-agency child protection teams.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

With this it will be convenient to discuss clause stand part.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

Members will know that we are extremely supportive of this principle and agenda. We generally welcome the clause and think it is sensible, but we of course have questions, and we have tabled an amendment.

Members know that a huge amount of good multi-agency work is already going on to safeguard children, and it has the potential to address some of the really serious information-sharing gaps that have been so visible in pretty much every serious case review, from Victoria Climbié to the present day. Although we welcome the introduction of the multi-agency child protection teams, we have some substantive questions about them.

First, will the Minister set out her expectation for the activity of these teams? Teams can have a formal meeting, but then there is what they really do. If there is just one team in a local authority, that team may become a source of advice but not really generate new activity. I have a question about the scale of different local authorities and how many teams there will be in an area. This might seem a bit specific, but obviously there is a huge difference between Rutland, which is a single unitary authority with a population of 40,000, and Birmingham, which is also a single unitary authority. We need to ensure—I will come back to this in a second—that we can have provision for these teams to meet and work on a geography that makes sense.

The Government are building on a lot of activity that already exists, but they are slightly changing it in various ways. Will the Minister be specific about what these teams will do that is not being done today? How do they relate to, and how are they different from, existing multi-agency safeguarding hub teams? Linked to that, should we assume that they will be resourced to deal with all section 47 referrals? If they are not, it will potentially become another gatekeeping process—they would be making judgments in good faith, but not necessarily with the information to make them safely. I hope that the Minister can reassure me that the teams will be expected to do things like carrying out home visits, attending strategy meetings and having a much clearer view of health information.

There is also the crucial area of private law proceedings, where children are all too often invisible. I wonder what the expectation is for the involvement of these teams in private law cases. There are real concerns, as we heard the other day, that when CAFCASS makes a referral to the local authority in these cases, it looks like the threshold is not met because of the lack of social services and police involvement with the family in the past. Particularly in cases of domestic violence, we know that those kinds of appearances can be deceptive.

The clause makes provision for two or more local authorities to work together to deliver multi-agency child protection teams, and the explanatory notes state that that would enable police and health services to work within local authority boundaries to make the best use of their resources, which they do not always do. I can see the sense in that. To go back to our neighbours in Rutland, they come under Leicestershire and Rutland for the police and for health, and they have a lot of cross-border students in their schools. However, I want to check that the reverse is also true, and that there will be no impediment to having multiple teams within a local authority, and no sense that the police or health services with a bigger geographical footprint should not be expected to service more than one team in a large local authority. That question is about the geography.

Another question is about the timeliness of meetings, which is crucial. The best possible group of people in the world could be down to attend a meeting, but if they do not meet often enough, things will go wrong. Does the clause give the Government the power to specify in regulations how often such meetings take place? Do the Government intend to specify that kind of thing, or—maybe perfectly reasonably—not? Will they try to establish some norms around the frequency of these teams meeting? I do not have an incredibly strong view; I am just interested.

I also have some questions about the cast list, which was the subject of the last group of amendments; we went from a named person with a specific role to someone from a particular organisation. Subsection (4) lists a social worker, a police officer, a health professional and so on. Is the assumption that it will be the same person who attends each time? What happens in the absence of those people? Presumably, a person of the same category can be substituted for a period—for example, if the policeperson on the team goes off sick, someone can be substituted.

Although I am not an expert, I think that having the same cast list each time is broadly the right model. It is a much better model than one where, for example, the social worker for that case turns up once and perhaps do not go to that meeting ever again or for another year, meaning they are not in a position to join the dots. However, there is always a risk that appointing specialists within a team deskills others on the team. That sense that everybody has to stay alert and maintain professional curiosity gets a bit lost, and there is an assumption that the specialists on the team will deal with it. That is obviously not what the Government intend, but can we get some reassurance that they have thought about how to avoid that?

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

The Opposition Whip may be looking at the clock, as indeed am I. Under the rules that have been agreed, the Committee will meet again at 2 o’clock. If people wanted to have a reasonable time for lunch, normally, by convention, the Committee would adjourn at 1 o’clock and come back at 2 o’clock. That is obviously in the hands of the Committee itself—

Vicky Foxcroft (Labour, Lewisham North)

rose—

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

But I detect that Vicky Foxcroft wishes to move a motion.

Edward Leigh (Conservative, Gainsborough)

I remind the Committee that with this we are discussing clause stand part.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I have already talked about our general support for clause 3, as well as some of the issues around the geography, content and cast lists of the teams, which brings me on to funding. On Tuesday, we asked the Local Government Association about the new burdens doctrine and whether there would be clarity on funding for these new requirements. The Government do not plan to commence this clause until 2027, so will local authorities be appropriately resourced to meet these demands? In its summary of the Bill, the Department for Education says:

“Later commencement allows more time to secure funding and resources and workforces will have more time to engage and prepare for change.”

Do the Government know roughly how much extra funding will be required? As Ruth Stanier from the LGA said in her evidence to us on Tuesday,

“the new burdens doctrine must be applied in the usual way. There are a number of measures in this Bill for which additional funding will be required, for example the new multi-agency units.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 13, Q21.]

We are talking about those multi-agency units here. What are the Minister’s rough estimates of what will be required, and at roughly what point will that be agreed? Again, the DFE notes on the Bill say that it will be

“set out in regulations how the multi-agency child protection teams will carry out their day-to-day activities.”

That will be extremely specific; for example, it says:

“The new provisions will include a power for the Secretary of State to set out in regulations requirements for the practitioners who are nominated to be part of the multiagency child protection teams. This might include examples of the types of ‘minimum qualifications or experience’ that they will need, which have not been included in the legislation as this will require discussion with the relevant work forces, including police, health and education, to understand what would be relevant”.

The big question is: how much will this roughly cost, and when will the Government agree that with local government, so that we can fulfil the requirements of the new burdens doctrine?

I would like to turn to amendment 19. I have come to believe very strongly, in public services, in the importance of setting up self-improving dynamics whenever that is possible. The Japanese talk about the principle of “kaizen”, or continuous improvement, and really that is the spirit of our amendment. Everybody supports the idea of the new multi-agency meetings, and we are all supportive of the principle of trying to make that happen really well. We do not want just a meeting, or that the letter of the law is followed, but the spirit of it is. We really want to do this as well as we can, and that is what our amendment is about.

There are very different ways of making these things work, and they work in very different places already. There is lots of scope to learn from each other at the local level, and central Government have scope to learn from them all. The amendment is self-explanatory, so I will not go through it, but it is basically looking for a report on all the different aspects of the ways in which this clause plays out on the ground. I am keen to press it to a vote, and I hope it is one that the Government might accept, at least in some form.

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

It is very good to see you in the Chair, Sir Edward. I think everybody agrees with the principle of this clause, and there is undeniable valuable in having all the relevant agencies working together. I am afraid it is invariably a conclusion of reviews that, when things go badly wrong, part of the issue is that working together has not functioned as well as it could. The Bill does not invent multi-agency working—that is not a new thing—but it does write something very specific into primary legislation, and that is welcome.

Amendment 19 is good and important and requires reporting back on the work and impact of multi-agency teams. What we need to focus on is actual practice. It is one thing to set out that so-and-so must talk to somebody else—no one would argue with that—but as my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston said, there is quite some variety in the way these things happen. Will there be more guidance in terms of operations to stress the importance of following process and procedure, but also recognising the centrality of professional curiosity and taking ownership of problems through to their solution?

I am keen to understand better from the Government the extent to which what the clause proposes is different from multi-agency safeguarding hubs, commonly known by their acronym, MASH. Is it the same, or is it for a subset of higher level cases? Are we drawing a distinction between safeguarding and child protection?

MASHs themselves have worked in quite different ways. I said that these things are not new—I remember that in 2012, when I was on the Education Committee, we did an inquiry in this area. We visited a couple of different MASHs and had a couple of local authorities, one from Devon and one from Leeds, at a Committee hearing. One of those authorities had a MASH; the other had actively decided not to because it felt that there were better ways of achieving some of the same aims. That highlighted the importance of what is done operationally and what is done in practice. We were frequently told about the advantages of physical colocation —simply being in the same room facing each other across the desk—but that does not guarantee that people will work as well together as they could. Relationships are incredibly important, and so is the willingness to appropriately share information, and these days that can arguably be done without colocation in ways that it could not in the past.

As far as I can make out, the clause does not adopt the principle from what we used to call the troubled families programme, which is now the supporting families programme, of having a designated key worker for each family. Can the Government say why that is, or if it is their intention that that should be the case? More generally, it would be interesting to hear how this programme works with the supporting families programme—probably still better known to many as the troubled families programme.

The creation of that programme straddled the previous change in Government: it started in pilot and research form before 2010 and came into being fully after 2010. Louise Casey is now Baroness Casey of Blackstock and still very involved in incredibly important work. Some of the work of that programme is on the key upstream stage where, sadly, we sometimes end up in child protection territory. Some of the common features identified in Baroness Casey’s report, “Listening to Troubled Families” —abuse, institutional care, violence, mental health problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and so on—are incredibly prevalent in this group.

I hope the Government can say more about how the multi-agency child protection teams and the supporting families programme would work together, particularly since that programme, which used to be in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, is coming or has come—I do not know if it already has—into the Department for Education, so there are great opportunities for good working with children’s services.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

My right hon. Friend asks a really good question, and I intervene to sharpen that further. He asks whether the new teams are displacing or replacing the MASHs. Does the Government think that the MASHs that exist now will still be running alongside these new teams, or does the one turn into the other?

On the point about continuity of knowledge, which is so important in these cases as often the same family is in trouble for a long time, is it the Government’s expectation that it would be quite normal for people who are currently on one of the MASHs to find themselves on the new teams as well, or is this a new thing? I am just trying to understand the intent.

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

I think amendment 19 has a lot of value and I hope it will be agreed.

I want to ask about resourcing. My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston has rightly asked about cash resourcing—how much there will be—and there is of course the new burdens principle to follow, but I want to ask about staff availability. It is one thing to legislate for people to do a certain thing, but if it is very difficult to hire those people, that is obviously an impediment. To what extent and, if it is possible to quantify, by how much, does this programme create a new human resource requirement? How many more person days per year are we talking about?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

It is an honour to have you in the chair today, Sir Edward. Clause 3 requires the establishment of multi-agency child protection teams in every local authority area.

I welcome the focus of amendment 19, laid in the names of the hon. Members for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston and for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, on monitoring the impact of the effectiveness of these multi-agency child protection teams and on continuous improvement, as the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston put it so well. It is essential that we know how the multi-agency teams are leading to better outcomes for children and that we share that learning right across the system.

It may be reassuring to know that safeguarding partners already have a statutory responsibility to publish annual reports on their multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. Once clause 3 comes into force, that responsibility will include reporting on the multi-agency child protection teams.

We are already funding 10 local areas to implement multi-agency child protection teams. From April, we are investing more than £500 million to roll out family help and multi-agency child protection teams nationally. The evaluation of the 10 pathfinders and the national roll-out of the families first partnership programme will inform the operational detail, including reporting, which will then be set out in regulations and updated statutory guidance.

On the question about how the teams will work, local authorities are currently not required to have a multi-agency safeguarding hub. This new duty will impose a specific form of child protection arrangement. The emerging evidence from the 10 local area pathfinders shows that where there is an effective multi-agency safeguarding hub, local areas can build on that existing multi-agency infrastructure and achieve closer multi-agency working relationships, which then creates that multi-agency child protection team.

The right hon. Member for East Hampshire asked about the supporting families programme. That has moved to the Department for Education, and the multi-agency child protection teams will be based on best practice from supporting families. Where there has been good work done in recent years, we are very much building on that and taking it to the next step, to make sure that, as far as we can possibly legislate for, no child is left behind.

The teams will bring together the right people with the right skills, so that support is formed around the child. That is also to ensure that the team can address many types of harm to children, whether that is through criminal gangs or sexual exploitation or otherwise. These new multi-agency child protection teams will build on the expertise and knowledge of local authorities and police forces to make sure that they work on a base of geography and local knowledge.

Clause 3 sets out the requirement for multi-agency protection teams to be established in local areas. We see this as a crucial step to strengthening the safety and protection of our most vulnerable children. Every child deserves to be protected from harm, but sadly, we know it does not always happen. Legislating for multi-agency child protection teams in this way will help ensure we have a more consistent approach nationally to child protection. The child safeguarding practice review panel recommended introducing multi-agency child protection units in every local authority to address the current lack of joint working across agencies that often leads to missed opportunities to protect children in a timely way.

These multi-agency child protection teams will bring together the right people with the right skills, they will share information, and they will take decisive, timely and co-ordinated action to protect children from all types of harm. We know that the police, the health service and local authorities already share those responsibilities for safeguarding, so the purpose of this clause is to place new duties on safeguarding partners and relevant agencies regarding how they operate to ensure child protection. They will nominate required members with expertise in education, policing, health and social work, and they can ask other agencies to bring their skills and expertise to work as part of that team.

The flexibility will allow the multi-agency teams to work in a tailored way and bring in expert and specialised skills and knowledge to ensure that all aspects of a child’s wellbeing can be considered. Within those roles and responsibilities, the teams will address inconsistencies and ambiguities in child protection practice, and improve joint working. It will stop children falling through the cracks.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I agree with everything the Minister is saying—it all sounds very sensible. She may be coming to this, but on this point about where MASHs already exist, do these new teams replace them? Are they likely to have similar members? What happens to the existing bodies when the new one is created?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

As I said earlier, at the moment, local authority teams are not required to have multi-agency safeguarding hubs. We will build on the work that has been done and make sure that every local authority has a child protection multi-agency team, so that no child will fall through the gaps where provision does not currently exist.

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

I hope that the Minister does not mind me intervening to ask this question, but I genuinely am not clear on it from reading the legislation and the explanatory notes. Is the multi-agency child protection team replacing or in addition to any multi-agency safeguarding hub that exists today?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

The multi-agency child protection teams will be based on those models. We have used robust evidence including the supporting families and strengthening families programmes. It very much follows the recommendations from the child safeguarding practice review panel to make sure that we have a multi-agency child protection unit in every local authority to address a lack of joint working across agencies.

We are already testing this approach with the 10 new pathfinders and working to make sure that safeguarding partners in all areas have a consistent approach nationally. Where we have seen this working well in practice, we will build on that. This clause will ensure that is delivered in every local authority and for every child.

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

For clarity, could there be a local authority in which there is both a multi-agency safeguarding hub and a multi-agency child protection team?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

This will build on the work of those teams to make sure that it is rolled out nationally and that every local authority has a multi-agency team that can deliver on those—[Interruption.] Does the right hon. Gentleman mind if I just finish answering?

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

I am really sorry. I am genuinely not trying to be difficult, but I do not quite understand. I think we all agree, and absolutely support the hon. Lady in what she says, that of course this should build on the existing best practice in a MASH and everything that has been learnt from supporting troubled families. I am trying to understand whether it will make existing MASHs—although they do not happen everywhere and work differently sometimes—a bit more consistent and give them a new name? Alternatively, is it taking whatever the MASH does—which might be looking out for safeguarding review cases for a broader group of children—perhaps at a slightly lower level, and then adding something new called a multi-agency child protection team, which will exist in parallel? Will it replace an existing MASH or become subsumed into it?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I think what the right hon. Gentleman is potentially getting at is how the multi-agency child protection teams will work alongside the MASH teams. To some extent, this is moving existing resource around. This will be in addition to the MASH teams. We recognise that it will require some additional resource, so there will be £500 million coming from April 2025 for the family first partnership programme. As the right hon. Gentleman rightly raised, we need to ensure we have good, qualified, people working in these roles, which is really important to get right. As I said, building on the good work, we are putting in additional safeguards for children through these provisions. We are making sure that, while we have the good work of MASHs happening, we can have a consistent approach to child protection on a national scale by ensuring that we have multi-agency child protection teams working together.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I have two specific questions, although there may be no answer to the first—it may be for regulations, and there may be no decision yet. If a large local authority such as Birmingham wants to have more than one of these things, can it do so? My other question —which Iaised before the break—is about substitutes. What happens if one of the nominated people is sick? The meeting obviously still needs to go ahead, so can substitutes be used?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

The hon. Gentleman is really getting into the detail of how these will work operationally and in practice. We are exploring through 10 pathfinder programmes how this will work most effectively, to ensure that no child falls through the cracks. This will be set out in greater detail to ensure that we have a consistent approach nationally. Obviously, the point is to ensure that it can be tailored to local need; indeed, different areas will ensure that they are bringing the expertise and adding to the capacity already in the system, wherever it is needed, to keep children safe. I implore members of the Committee to support the passing of this clause.

Clause 4 - Information sharing and consistent identifiers

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I beg to move amendment 20, in clause 4, page 6, line 33, at end insert—

“(4A) Where the relevant person considers that the disclosure would be more detrimental to the child than not disclosing the information, this decision must be recorded.”

This amendment requires decisions made not to disclose information to be recorded.

Edward Leigh (Conservative, Gainsborough)

With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 21, in clause 4, page 7, line 5, at end insert —

“(6A) Where information is disclosed under this section, the recipient must consider the welfare of others to whom the information may relate or involve and take steps to promote their welfare.”

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

The first thing to say about clause 4 is that we are extremely supportive of the principle of consistent identifiers. This is something we were working to deliver when I was in Government. I remember being in meetings about it when I was at the Department of Health and Social Care, discussing for example whether it would be possible to use the NHS number as the identifier. We are really keen that this happens. We have seen far too many young people fall through the cracks because of inconsistent identification, which means that problems are not connected and dots are not joined up. Government Members will not always hear me say this, but this is a very good and important idea, and one of which we are completely supportive.

Our amendments are therefore tweaks to ensure the idea works as well as it can. I will also ask some questions that do not have an amendment with them, but which I hope the Government will take away and think about so that this can work as well as possible.

To start with our amendment 20, I understand the reason for the safety valve in clause 4(3); however, I am wary. In practice, how can a single agency take the decision not to share information until it knows what other information its partner agencies hold about the same case and person? Surely there needs to be a level of trust and strong information-sharing protocols to allow sharing to happen. For example, there might be concerns about a child who has delayed speech at school, but without knowing that the mother has suffered years of abuse, been to A&E and never called the police, it is difficult to judge the situation accurately. What is the Minister’s answer to that concern about the safety valve? I hope one part of the answer can be our amendment. That is what it is there for.

Where information disclosure is not carried out because of a risk of detriment, something pretty serious is obviously happening. That information itself—that there has been deliberate, conscious non-disclosure—is very important. It is information from which we can possibly learn, and we certainly do not want it to just disappear into the ether and be lost. That is totally against the spirit of what we are all trying to do here. Our suggestion is that a conscious decision not to disclose for that reason should be clearly recorded, so that there is no confusion later about what happened or whether it was a conscious choice to not disclose, or just inaction or error.

Our amendment 21 would insert a new subsection (6A), in order to encourage those involved in taking such decisions to consider not just the welfare of the person whose information is being disclosed, but

“the welfare of others to whom the information may relate or involve”.

The person whose confidential information is being shared is not necessarily the only one whose welfare is going to be affected by that sharing.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

The amendment appears to have two parts. The first is the requirement to consider the welfare of others to whom the information may relate. That seems quite reasonable; however, the requirement to take steps to promote the welfare of potentially anybody to whom the information may relate seems to me very broad.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I thank the hon. Lady for her thoughtful question. It is a very general point to say that people should take steps to think about their welfare. We are not asking people to move mountains or work miracles or anything like that—I cannot think of a clearer way of putting it. We want them not just to think about it, but to act on it, and there are two different amendments here.

I also have a question, which does not have an amendment attached to it, about proposed new section 16LB(9) of the Children Act 2004. The construction of this provision is a bit tortured. One can see, as it has been constructed, the different principles that are in play, but I would find it hard to parse if I were a frontline social worker—I find it hard to parse as an MP. I can envisage the lawyers in action trying to say two things. Some might say, “Don’t be scared of data protection legislation, share important information and look after the welfare of children”, while other lawyers would be saying, “But obviously, don’t break data protection legislation.”

So we end up with this slightly complicated sentence, which I think is trying to prioritise reassuring professionals about data protection laws, because we have seen some quite scary cases where people have been so busy complying with data protection rules that they have not used their common sense to do things that are extremely important. That point is for Ministers to ponder, rather than something we will attempt to amend now, because the world of data protection law is complex. However, the Ministers might want to look at that, and turn it around to put the onus on the principle that we have to think first about safety and not be scared off by over-enthusiastic interpretations of complex data protection law.

I also want to press the Ministers somewhat on proposed new section 16LB(7) of the 2004 Act. Once again, I understand why this safety valve is here. As I argued earlier, we must not undermine the need for speed in order to protect people. However, I wonder whether Ministers, as the Bill progresses, might decide that it would be sensible to have some way of recording when the identifier is not used because people do not know it or cannot find it in time. That might work in a similar way to our proposed amendment that would allow us to record decisions not to share information in order to learn from them. Particularly in the early years of this new, complex system, when it will be difficult to get some things right, understanding how well the system is working—or not—will be really important for improving it.

Something similar to that would also enable us to record, in each individual instance, whether an identifier not being used, as per our amendment, is an error, or whether it is a conscious decision because someone cannot find it, does not think they need to find it, or cannot find it in a timely way. We would propose an amendment today, but Ministers might want to decide, as the Bill progresses through Parliament, whether there is something to do there. I can see why they are creating the safety valve—if someone cannot find the identifier in time, they should do the right thing to keep kids safe, but recording when that is not happening is important. It would be antithetical to the spirit of what we are trying to do here if people routinely start not using it; that would take us back to square one.

I have similar questions about proposed new subsections (5) and (6). They feel like quite a big dilution of the single identifier principle. With subsection (5), for example, how is someone to know in advance if a decision to use the identifier will facilitate safeguarding, or if failing to do so will harm that? With subsection (6), how can someone judge if the sharing of information would make a child less safe unless they have a fuller picture from other safeguarding partners in the first place? It may be that there is no way to improve on this—I remember how difficult this all is from when I worked on it—but I encourage Ministers to think, as they take the Bill through Parliament, about how the system launches, how we make sure that things do not just disappear into black holes and, if the system is not fully operational for various reasons or because people are, perhaps consciously, not using it properly, how we understand that.

Finally, I have some specific information questions. I note that the Government plan to trial the use of the NHS number as the single identifier, which is something I referred to earlier. I do not have any objection to that. Can the Minister give the Committee a bit more information on those pilots? What is the timing? How many will there be? Which places will be chosen? How will we choose places?

I also have a question about how we keep information up to date. Let us take an example where a child’s record is updated by the local authority to reflect the fact that they are in a foster family, and the police note that in their files, but the child then returns to their family and the information on the police file is not updated, so they go to the family address and the child is not there. In that example, how do we make the system work in a joined-up way? How do we make sure the information is updated for everybody?

Also on information, what consideration has the Department given to children who might not have an NHS number, or indeed other numbers, for example migrant children or people who are home educated? I remember that it was always a challenge when we were thinking about this before. Specifically, up to what age will the identifier be used and will that be consistent across all agencies? Are we talking about 18 or 21-years-old for everybody? Earlier we were talking about continuing care leavers and things like that.

Finally, I must press the Minister on when this will be implemented. It is not at all an easy thing to do. It is a big undertaking, as the Minister knows. The Department for Education’s explanatory notes for the Bill say that specifying the agencies that must use the consistent identifier by regulations means that agencies will be required to use the number only once they have the appropriate systems in place to make it an effective tool in supporting children and families. Where have we got to with that? Are agencies ready to use it? Which are more ready? Which are less? If agencies are not ready, when roughly do we expect them to be?

I think we all want this thing to move as fast as possible—consistent with it being done well and being safe, of course. I am not having a go at the Minister; I appreciate that this is not an easy thing to do. However, can the Minister put some sort of timeline on what she expects to happen when, and when the consistent identifier will get rolled out, particularly given that this is something that we all agree is incredibly important?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I appreciate the spirit in which the hon. Gentleman has set out his questions. To clarify, amendment 20 would require the relevant person to record their decision to withhold information if they considered disclosing it to be more detrimental to the child than not disclosing it.

We absolutely agree that practitioners should record the reasons for their information-sharing decisions. However, that should happen irrespective of the reason for sharing or not sharing particular information. The current, non-statutory information sharing guidance for practitioners and managers issued by the Department for Education covers this point, making it clear that practitioners should keep a record of their decisions, including their rationale. Rather than legislating on this issue, it is our intention to cover it in statutory guidance, which relevant persons would be required to have regard to in relation to these matters.

I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman raised a range of other issues and questions about clause 4 more generally, and I will respond to those in the clause stand debate.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

I beg to move amendment 44, in clause 4, page 7, line 37, after “welfare” insert “or wellbeing”.

Edward Leigh (Conservative, Gainsborough)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 43, in clause 4, page 8, line 20, at end insert—

“(11A) The Secretary of State may, by regulations under subsection (10), require every designated person to use a consistent identifier in relation to all children.”

Amendment 45, in clause 4, page 8, line 23, leave out lines 23 to 26.

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Sir Edward.

For clarity—after some mix-ups this morning, for which I apologise—these are probing amendments that we are not seeking to press to a vote today. We have tabled them to get on record some responses from Ministers about how the single unique identifier will be used.

As the shadow Minister has pointed out, there is widespread agreement that clause 4 is absolutely necessary and long overdue. Failure to share information effectively has been identified, over many years, as one of the key barriers to keeping children safe, to providing joined-up support to meet their needs and to conducting research across the children’s system. Professor Jay’s report on child sexual abuse brought that, and the failure of agencies across the system to share data, into stark relief. In the Committee’s evidence session on Tuesday, the Children’s Commissioner cited the same example as Professor Jay gave me when I met her last week: teenagers in a particular area had a very high prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases and that data was not shared with relevant agencies, although it clearly should have put up a red flag.

I strongly welcome the clause and pay tribute to the Children’s Charities Coalition, which has done a lot of work and research in this space. Amendment 44, in my name, would expand the criteria that require a designated person to use the consistent identifier in the information that they process. As the Bill stands, it requires consideration of

“safeguarding or promoting the welfare of”

the child. As we have all said, those criteria are vital, but they could be interpreted as relating only to acute risk. We want to insert the word “wellbeing” into the Bill to seek to ensure that the broader needs of the child would be taken into account when considering the provision of joined-up support across the children’s system.

Will the Minister explain why the Bill limits the use of the consistent identifier only to “safeguarding” and “welfare”, and state how broadly she envisages those being defined? For instance, would sharing information about a disabled child with health and educational needs but no social care needs fall into this category? Will she also give an indicative timeline for when local services will be required to start using the consistent identifier in their systems?

Amendment 43 seeks to provide clarity where we think there may be ambiguity in the Bill, by ensuring that all babies, children and young people are assigned a consistent identifier regardless of whether they have been identified with any safeguarding or welfare concerns. I think that is the intent of the Bill, but the amendment seeks to clarify it. We know that, for years, professionals, charities and commissioners have called for this measure, and we need it across all our systems to be able to manage the interactions between the different services and to share information efficiently and securely. I would be grateful for the Minister’s confirmation on that point.

Amendment 45 would enable the use of a consistent identifier for research and commissioning purposes. The subsection that would be deleted by the amendment appears to explicitly exclude the use of anonymised cohort data for those purposes. This probing amendment questions why that use is being ruled out. I recognise that I, and many others, have always raised concerns that data sharing should be done safely and in an appropriate way.

I worked for a brief period in the organisation formerly known as NHS Digital; I used to walk around with a lapel badge that said, “Data saves lives”. Data does save lives and is so important for not only safety but research and commissioning. If data is de-identified and shared safely, we can use it for certain cohorts of children who are at risk of poor outcomes, such as children with special educational needs, looked-after children or children missing from education. It would allow commissioners and researchers to analyse such children’s needs, risk factors and outcomes across different services, and provide a much more complete picture of the needs of children and young people, identifying gaps in provision and interventions that could be used. It would also support the development of new, qualitative indicators to measure impacts. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on the Government’s rationale for the Bill’s specifically not allowing that use.

I have one final comment on the use of the single unique identifier: it will work only if there is investment in the systems so that they are able to share that data. I know from talking to my own local authority about the barriers to sharing information. Sometimes there is an unwillingness among agencies to share information, but sometimes it is just that the systems cannot talk to each other. We now have the technology to be able to do that. In order to implement it and use the single unique identifier to the best effect, we have to provide the agencies with the means to share information for the safety, welfare and wellbeing of our children and young people.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I appreciate the spirit in which the probing amendments have been proposed. Amendment 43 would provide the Secretary of State with the power to make regulations, providing that each designated person must attach a consistent identifier to the records of every child without being limited by a particular purpose. I absolutely share the desire of the hon. Member for Twickenham to ensure that as many children as possible are able to benefit from a consistent identifier. We are very conscious of the need to ensure that the identifier has complete coverage, from birth to 18.

On timelines, I appreciate the urgency with which Members wish to see the consistent identifier come into play. Obviously, it is not yet legislated for—we very much hope it will be. But we are piloting the use of the NHS number, which is assigned to all UK-born children at birth or, for children born outside the UK, when contacting the NHS, so we deem it to be universal. The exact services, systems and data shares that store and move the number will have to be developed during the piloting. Regulations will stipulate the agencies that must use the number when recording and sharing information for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. I will give a little more information about the timeline of the pilot and intentions on implementation when I move the clause stand part, because I am conscious that the Opposition spokesperson also raised those concerns.

I turn to amendment 44, which seeks to amend the scope of the duty by including a reference to promoting the wellbeing of children. The legislation will enable statutory guidance to be issued, which relevant agencies must then have regard to. That will outline the type of information that may be relevant to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, including information that relates to their wellbeing, so that practitioners are able to more easily apply the legislation in practice. The legislation has very much been framed to co-exist with other child social care legislation, so “welfare” would cover the wellbeing of the child.

Amendment 45 seeks to remove the stipulation that a consistent identifier must be used when it is likely to facilitate safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children directly. I appreciate the hon. Member’s concern that it limits the use of a consistent identifier, in particular for research purposes; I know that stakeholders have been calling for that. The measures make provision for the Secretary of State to specify which agencies must use the consistent identifier. When it is introduced, it is intended that it could still be used for research purposes if that is authorised in accordance with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act.

We have purposely prioritised linking use of the consistent identifier with safeguarding and welfare functions, and will be testing the benefits and implementation of that through our pilot. If additional benefits are realised, we can obviously explore the provisions further. For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that the hon. Lady will be happy to withdraw her amendment.

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

To improve the safeguarding and welfare of children and to stop families and children from falling through the cracks of public services, clause 4 seeks to address long-standing issues that hinder information sharing.

Current legislation permits information sharing to safeguard and protect the wellbeing of children, but user research has identified that practitioners often feel confident only where there are serious child protection concerns. As a result, information is often held by different agencies, and practitioners are left unaware of crucial data that could provide evidence for the whole picture of a child’s wellbeing, health and safety. That gap in knowledge can make it difficult for professionals to support families, and make it harder for families to be aware of their entitlements and to access the support that they need.

The clause gives professionals a clear legal basis to request and share information with other relevant professionals for the purposes of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of a child. It also enables the Secretary of State, by regulations, to specify a consistent identifier for children. Agencies specified in regulations will be required to use the number when recording or sharing information about a child for the purposes of safeguarding or the promotion of welfare. The measures aim to ensure that practitioners share relevant information confidently and consistently.

As I mentioned, the Department will pilot the implementation of the consistent identifier and introduce it nationally at a later point. We will test its ability to facilitate the linking of data across datasets. The changes made by the clause aim to ensure that information about a child and their family is shared effectively and that risk is correctly identified and understood.

In response to the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, I should say that information sharing is a two-way duty. The duty, along with the consistent identifier, will help to bring together multiple pieces of information so that practitioners can make informed decisions. As I said, it is standard practice to record decision making, regardless of whether information is shared, and we will ensure that that is covered in the guidance.

We are committed to implementing the consistent identifier as soon as possible, but we recognise that it has to be delivered proportionately and where it will have an impact. Before mandating its use by certain agencies, we need to explore information governance, privacy, technology choices, and the associated costs of its implementation and use. We are committed to starting pilot activity from April 2025, subject to the passage of the Bill, and will provide further timings once the pilot findings are known.

In response to the hon. Member for Twickenham, I should say that a disabled child would likely be considered a child in need, and so would benefit from the information-sharing duty and a single unique identifier. We need to ensure that systems can talk together, and that is why we are piloting: so that we can see the full cost of the measure and how it can be put in place so that it is as effective as possible in supporting children.

On the basis of today’s debate, the reassurances and the significant difference that the measure will make to the safeguarding of children, I commend the clause to the Committee.

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

I rise in support of the clause, for all the compelling reasons that the Minister gave in her rationale. We talked earlier about the value of multi-agency working, and the sharing of information is fundamental to that. As she outlined, there have been too many cases in which the heart of the problem was the lack of a way of identifying that two agencies were talking about the same child. The unique identifier will help to address that. These are never things that we are likely to disagree about on party political lines.

However, the clause raises some big questions, which I hope the Minister will take in the spirit in which I mean them. The first may sound like a semantic question, but I think it is important. It relates to the phrase “Duty to share” on page 6, line 19. The word “share” can mean different things, and its common English usage has probably changed somewhat over the past 20 years or so. “Share” used commonly to mean something held in common between two parties, but more recently—this has a lot to do with social media and the internet—it has come to mean “pass something on to a wider group”. Those are different things. I think that we are using the word “share” in the title of the proposed new section more in the sense of disclosure than of holding in common, but I would be grateful for some clarification. Although it is a semantic question, this will be primary legislation created by Parliament and precision is therefore important.

What is the link or overlap with mandatory reporting? Is what we are talking about today exactly the same as mandatory reporting or something different? The existing statutory guidance on safeguarding says:

“Anyone who has concerns about a child’s welfare should consider whether a referral needs to be made to Children’s Social Care and should do so immediately if there is a concern that the child is suffering significant harm or is likely to do so.”

It is not a legislative requirement, therefore, to report abuse, but there is the expectation that people who work with children will do so, unless there are truly exceptional circumstances. Of course, people in particular roles also have additional codes of conduct set by their professional regulatory body.

The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse of 2022 put forward the mandatory duty—which, to be clear, I support—and in 2023 the previous Government committed to introduce a mandatory duty to report sexual abuse for those working or volunteering with children, although the Criminal Justice Bill then fell with the Dissolution of Parliament before the election. Historically, people have identified problems with the concept of a mandatory duty to report sexual abuse—the same principle applies more generally to neglect and other forms of child abuse—and it has not only been people in government; for a very long time one leading children’s charity had a stance against mandatory reporting, citing the possible effect on the relationship between a child and a trusted adult and on the child’s willingness to open up to that adult, given what doing so might trigger. I am sure that the Government have been through the issue in a great deal of detail, as it is a serious and difficult area, so I wonder whether the Minister might say a little more on that point.

The matter of the practicalities of sharing information takes us back to the semantic question. It is stated in lines 24 and 25 on page 6 of the Bill that the proposed new section applies where a person

“considers that the information is relevant to safeguarding or promoting the welfare of the child.”

There is a question about whether we are talking about disclosing a particular piece of information that is directly and specifically relevant to an individual child—an incident, or an observation made by a social worker or teacher with eyes on that child—or whether we are talking about data more generally. For example, do we mean that if there is a particular indicator in a dataset that is relevant to the question of safeguarding for all children in the local authority area, then the entire dataset should be shared with other agencies?

Assuming it is the former, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston has already said, lines 11 to 15 on page 7 suggest that there could be a difficulty in terms of the balance. That part of the text states:

“A duty under this section to disclose information does not operate to require or authorise a disclosure of information which would contravene the data protection legislation”,

but we all know that often when people say, “Such and such wasn’t shared with another agency”, the reason given is data protection. I do not necessarily have the answer to how the Government should do this, but to the extent that it is possible, it would be helpful if they could create some clarity so that that balance could be understood.

My hon. Friend also referred to lines 31-33 on page 6, which mention that

“the duty imposed by subsection (2) does not apply if the relevant person considers that the disclosure would be more detrimental to the child than not disclosing the information.”

That is very difficult for any individual. From the point of view of being inside one agency—in this case a school—making a judgment without knowing what the police or social workers may know is very difficult. But it is helpful that the provision gives the legal basis.

This also raises the question of what the threshold is. We talk about a child being at risk, and obviously there are degrees of that. We also know how, sadly and sometimes tragically, these things can quickly escalate. It is not totally clear and probably never can be, on the face of a Bill or in an Act of Parliament, at exactly what stage a child might deteriorate and at what point the duty kicks in. These are questions the Government will have to go back to.

Being able to share information, in whichever of the two senses, is to a large extent dependent on there being a unique identifier. I support this idea, which builds on work that was already under way before July last year, but there are some big issues that the Government—not just the DFE, as it goes beyond its boundaries—have to think about.

We have talked previously about using the national insurance number for other applications, on the grounds that every adult has one, but it turns out that the database of national insurance numbers is not quite as perfect as everybody assumes. The national health service number was not designed for the purpose we are discussing, so what stress-testing of the system have the Government done? Historically, and until recently, most NHS records were paper-based. That creates a set of governance issues that is very different from the ones we have with databases today.

The hon. Member for Twickenham asked an important question about the extent to which data would be available for anonymised cohort analysis. There are currently conversations in other parts of Government about the use of NHS datasets, en masse, to empower artificial intelligence; my God, with this cohort of children that raises some very important—but not conclusive, because there are arguments both ways—discussions about morality and so on.

Will the database reside inside the NHS system? Or is there going to be something new that uses the NHS number? If it is something new, there will be big budgetary requirements—it would be a very large new IT project with very demanding security requirements. There is also the question of how to interface with the police national computer or other security-related databases.

It is largely possible to guarantee that the same NHS number does not go to two different individuals, but I am not 100% sure it is possible to guarantee that the same individual does not get two different NHS numbers at different times, because there are different points at which someone may receive an NHS number. At birth is, of course, when it ordinarily happens, but it can happen on immigration or at the moment of first treatment. In the case of first treatment, getting an NHS number will not be high in the minds of families, and of course the NHS will not refuse to treat somebody in those circumstances, but there could be issues there. Particularly if a child was born abroad, moved here, re-emigrated and then remigrated, we can imagine circumstances in which the same child could have two different numbers.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not expect the Minister to come up with answers to all these questions now. The point I am making is that they are big questions and the Government will have to come back again and again on some of the implications.

Once we have a database of every child in the country, there are a lot of other things we could do with it, some of which could be very useful. Elsewhere, for example, we are debating online safety and age verification to try to protect children from material they should not see. This kind of identifying term could be used for that purpose. There might be some benefits to that but boy does it also throw up a lot of questions in a country where, historically, we have not had a single list of every child in the country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston alluded to this question. If someone had an NHS number—a unique identifying number—when they were born, they would still have it when they were 12, 17 or 18, so what is the implication for adults of the existence of the database? This is not the place to have that debate, but although there could be some great advantages, there could also be disadvantages. There will certainly be privacy questions. This country has had a debate about identity cards multiple times, and it has ended up being incredibly complex.

The big question is what the unique identifier can be used for as an index term to interface with and therefore link to other databases. For child protection purposes, if that cannot be done, it is not worth that much—they have to be able to be linked all together. That raises some difficult questions for children, and potentially for adults if the numbers stay with people as they turn 18.

Ultimately, some of this governance stuff covers not only the Department for Education but the Department of Health and Social Care and the Cabinet Office. I would love to know, even at this stage, about the involvement the Information Commissioner’s Office and its future involvement.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I have already asked most of my questions, but I want to add some simple ones to those. First, I may have missed this in the conversation, but is the intent that the system will be for people up to the age of 18? Secondly, what are the Government’s initial thoughts about people who do not have NHS numbers?

Thirdly, I wish to sharpen and bring out the point I was making in my questions about all the different get-outs from the system. The case of Victoria Climbié is the ultimate example: she had eight different identifiers with her name spelled differently every single time. The worry is that the system needs not to have too many holes in it—although it needs some, otherwise everything would grind to a halt.

At the bottom of page 7 of the Bill, proposed new section 16LB(5) of the Children Act 2004 says:

“Subsection (4) applies only so far as the designated person considers that the inclusion of the consistent identifier is likely to facilitate the exercise…of a function…that relates to safeguarding”.

That is one out. Proposed new subsection (6) says:

“Subsection (4) does not apply if the designated person considers that”

it would be “detrimental” to include it, which is another out—and perfectly sensible in a way. Proposed new subsection (7) says that the person does not need to comply if they do not know the consistent identifier and it would slow things down. So there are quite a lot of outs.

We will not press our amendment to a vote, and the Minister is right to say that the statutory guidance requires a record of why decisions have been made at the local level, but I am sure that the Department and officials would want to set things up in such a way that a national report can be built out of that data, to figure out what is going on at a local level.

Finally, let me explain what I was going on about with the complexity of parsing proposed new subsection (9), which says:

“A duty under this section does not operate to require or authorise the processing of information which would contravene the data protection legislation (but the duty must be taken into account in determining whether the processing would contravene that legislation).”

That is quite a complicated sentence that I find difficult. I would be supportive of Ministers if they want to give frontline professionals more legal protection so that they think, “I don’t need to worry about data protection first—I need to worry about the safety of children first.”

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I totally accept that Members’ comments have all been made with a view to making sure that the legislation can be as effective as it needs to be, and that we all share the desire to ensure that it serves to safeguard children.

The right hon. Member for East Hampshire asked whether the information-sharing duty is the same as mandatory reporting. The duty in the clause and the mandatory reporting are intended to address different problems. The information-sharing duty underpins how existing multi-agency partners, along with schools and early years providers, can share—I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman’s philosophical reflection on the word “share”—and request information among themselves so that they can build a full picture of a child. They can then use that to assess risk and put in place appropriate support and intervention.

The mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse is due to be introduced in Home Office legislation. It will impose a duty on professionals to report instances of child sexual abuse, and will also impose criminal sanctions on those who prevent others from reporting abuse. The duty in the clause and mandatory reporting have different purposes and different legislative frameworks.

The right hon. Member for East Hampshire asked about the terminology and the meaning of the word “share”. In this context, the sharing of information covers the exchange of knowledge, data or insights with others, and it can happen in a number of ways.

On the specific question of whether information about an individual child or dataset is relevant, we intend the duty to be about supporting individual children day to day, to ensure their safeguarding and to make sure that they and their families get the support they need.

The right hon. Gentleman thoughtfully raised a range of important questions and kindly acknowledged that I would not be able to respond to them all in this debate. We will take them away and work them through, and that will feed into how we pilot this idea and test the system so that we get this right, as he rightly highlighted.

The single unique identifier in the NHS system will apply to children up to the age of 18. The right hon. Gentleman asked what would happen to a child without an NHS number; that will have to be considered as part of the pilot, which is why we are undertaking one. This is an important change. We do not underestimate the challenges of delivering it, but we are determined that it will make the difference to children and to safeguarding.

Clause 5 - Information: children in kinship care and their carers

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

I beg to move amendment 38, in clause 5, page 9, line 20, at end insert—

“(e) financial support;

(f) legal support;

(g) family group decision making.”

Edward Leigh (Conservative, Gainsborough)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 22, in clause 5, page 9, line 37, at end insert—

“(8) In fulfilling its duties under subsection (7) a local authority must annually consult and collect feedback from children in kinship care and their carers about its kinship local offer.

(9) Feedback received under subsection (8) must be published annually.”

This amendment would require local authorities to consult children and carers when assessing their kinship care offer.

Amendment 39, in clause 5, page 9, line 38, at end insert—

“(8) A local authority must from time to time publish—

(a) comments about its kinship local offer received from or on behalf of children, kinship carers and others with lived experience of aspects of kinship care;

(b) the authority’s response to those comments, including details of any action the authority intends to take.

(9) Comments published under subsection (8)(a) must be published in a form that does not enable the person who made them to be identified.

(10) The Secretary of State may, by regulations, make further provision about—

(a) the information to be included in an authority’s kinship local offer;

(b) how an authority’s kinship local offer is to be published;

(c) the parties who are to be involved and consulted by an authority in developing, preparing and reviewing its kinship local offer;

(d) how an authority is to involve children, kinship carers and others with lived experience of aspects of kinship care in the development, preparation and review of its local kinship offer; and

(e) the publication of comments on the kinship local offer, and the local authority’s response, under subsection (8)(b), including circumstances in which comments are not required to be published.”

Clause stand part.

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

I strongly welcome clause 5. I am delighted that we are finally putting a definition of kinship in statute and that we are requiring all local authorities to publish their kinship offer. That is long overdue and an absolute testament to the tireless campaigning of many groups—not least the Family Rights Group—the kinship carer community and young people. The Minister may remember that in 2022 I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill that sought to put a definition of kinship into law. It also had a number of other provisions, which we will come to in the new clauses later in Committee.

Amendment 38 seeks to add to the list of services that local authorities must publish and offer to assist children and their kinship carers. It would add financial support, legal support and family group decision making to the list of items that should be included in the local offer.

Ministers are aware that kinship carers turn their lives upside down to take children in, even though their own financial situation may be unstable. Around half of kinship carers are grandparents who rely on their pension savings. We know that financial support is variable throughout the country, which is why I will seek to address that variability through a new clause to ensure parity of allowances across the country. As that is not included in the Bill—I suspect Ministers will not accept my new clause because of Treasury constraints—at the very least it should include information on whatever financial support is available in the local offer.

We are concerned about the omission from the list of information about legal support and family group decision making. Those categories already appear in statutory guidance but are not mentioned in clause 5. We have considered clause 1, on family group decision making, so I am not sure why it was left off the list. I look forward to the Minister’s comments as to why it was.

The child welfare and justice system is extremely complex. Early specialist advice, including legal advice, has a crucial role to play in helping families to navigate the system, understand their rights and responsibilities, and avert children from going into care. Having had many a meeting with kinship carers, one of the things I hear time and again—apart from comments about financial support, leave and all those other things that would make their lives easier—is, “I just didn’t know what my rights were. The local authority was telling me one thing, and I had no information to push back.” Sometimes local authorities seek to make kinship carers do things they may not necessarily want to, and they do not necessarily lay out all the options. Legal advice is so important, but it is also very expensive.

The all-party parliamentary group on kinship care carried out a legal aid inquiry, which found that many families do not have access to legal advice to make informed decisions about their kinship arrangements. That has lasting consequences for their entitlement to support, and for who can make key decisions about the child. Of the kinship carers surveyed, 82% felt they did not know enough about their legal options to make an informed decision about the best options for their kinship child. I implore the Minister to accept the amendment and include that information in the Bill as part of the local offer.

Amendment 39, which is similar to the official Opposition’s amendment 22, seeks to ensure the involvement of children, kinship carers and others in the development of kinship local offers. It also seeks to ensure there is transparency, with the publication of comments on those offers and of the feedback that local authorities receive from children, kinship carers and others with lived experience. They are best placed to comment on how things could work better, and we believe that making sure there is transparency with that feedback is important.

At the moment, we think there are low expectations in the Bill for the involvement of those who are involved in kinship care. That contrasts with the special educational needs and disability local offer, for example, which was established in section 30 of the Children and Families Act 2014. Amendment 39 is consistent with that legislation on special educational needs and disability. It would also give the Secretary of State explicit powers to set out in regulations how the offer should be published, when it should be reviewed, and how children and families are involved in developing it.

On clause 5 more broadly, although I have not tabled an amendment on this, it would be advantageous if the Minister clarified on the parliamentary record the definition of “other person connected”. The Bill defines kinship care as when

“the child lives with a relative, friend or other person connected with the child for all or part of the time”.

The term “relative” in the Bill has the meaning given in section 105 of the Children Act 1989, namely someone who is

“a grandparent, brother, sister, uncle or aunt (whether of the full blood or half blood or by marriage or civil partnership) or step-parent;”.

That omits extended family members, including cousins.

Given that kinship care arrangements are particularly prevalent among a number of ethnic minority communities, where culturally it is much more normal for extended families to live together, cousins may well be involved in the arrangements. I understand that the Department has confirmed that such wider family members are intended to be captured by the phrase “other person connected”, but nowhere in the Bill is the term defined. Nor has there been any indication as yet that regulations or statutory guidance will make plain who falls within the scope of that phrase. Clarity is important for families and practitioners. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that and on the other issues raised in the amendments.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

I rise to speak to clause 5 and amendment 22. The previous Government were promoting kinship care and there is no great disagreement about it; in fact, there is great agreement, including with the hon. Member for Twickenham. I pay tribute to her work on the issue, and she is right that her amendment 39 is similar to our amendment 22.

Creating a duty for a local authority to publish a local kinship care offer seems sensible to provide clarity and to ensure that kinship families are aware of what support is available. The statutory guidance on kinship care, which exists already, states that every local authority must publish information about the services they offer in their area to children in kinship care and their approach towards meeting the needs of those children. That has been there since 2011, but too many still have no up-to-date offer, so we are supportive of clause 5.

This is an example of the current Government building on the direction of travel under the previous Government. The kinship care strategy we published in December 2023 set out a definition of kinship care that has been used in the updated statutory guidance on kinship care published by this Government in October.

One important reason for having something that is public and visible to everyone is that when many people hear mention of kinship care they think of uncles, aunts and grannies, but of course a lot of kinship carers are not related to the child. Some 140,000 children live in kinship care, but a further 24,000 live with kinship carers to whom they are not related, such as family friends.

The Minister will be aware of the concerns expressed by kinship carers and the organisations that represent them, such as the Family Rights Group, that the definition of kinship care in this clause of the Bill—on pages 9 and 10, in proposed new section 22I of the Children Act 1989—risks providing less clarity and potentially greater confusion for children, families, practitioners and agencies. They argue that it does not adequately address the different types of kinship care arrangements, while the expectations for councils to involve families in shaping or promoting the local offer are minimal. What is the Minister’s response to that, and what does she plan to do about it?

The Family Rights Group also made a specific point about something that should be amended in the Bill, stating:

“The Bill includes a list of categories of services available in the authority’s area that the kinship local offer should include. We are very concerned by the omission of legal support and family group decision making from this list. These categories already appear in statutory guidance but not…the Bill.”

The Family Rights Group proposed an amendment to remedy that, which we tabled. Will the Government at least consider taking it up?

The Family Rights Group made another point:

“We are concerned that the Bill sets low expectations regarding the involvement of children, kinship carers and others in the development of kinship local offers, as well as in respect of publication and transparency. This is in contrast to the SEN and disability local offer…established in section 30 of the 2014 Children and Families Act. That legislation gives the Secretary of State the power to set out in regulations how the offer should be published, when it should be reviewed, and”—

this is the key bit—

“how children and families are involved in developing it.”

That takes us to our amendment 22. Again, as with previous ones we have tabled, our amendment seeks to set in train a self-improving system by collecting feedback from children in kinship care. We have heard several times during our sittings about the importance of the voice of the child and the voices of those who provide care; this is a way of ensuring that we hear them. We are proposing a light-touch process in the amendment: keeping a record of feedback. That helps to protect from the loss of knowledge when personnel inevitably change, so we can still have that feedback and knowledge. It also provides a resource for learning and performance improvement at the local level. By publishing it, as we suggest in the amendment, we allow for better public discussion and for learning at the national level.

That is the purpose of our amendment. We have no great disagreement about the spirit of this clause—quite the opposite, in fact—and we hope that the Minister will adopt or in some way implement the ideas in our amendment.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I rise to speak to the amendments and to clause 5 stand part.

On amendment 38, which the hon. Member for Twickenham tabled, I appreciate her engagement and great interest in the kinship local offer, and I will explain how we see it working. We expect that local authorities would include information on legal support when setting out their general approach to supporting children living in kinship care and to kinship carers under the newly inserted section 22H(1)(a) to the Children Act 1989, as set out in clause 5. To be clear, the listed categories of information about services have been kept very broad by design, in order to cover as many different kinds of services as possible. That means that local authorities could reasonably be expected to provide information about legal support under one of the categories that we have included.

Clause 1 already sets out the requirement to offer family group decision making at pre-proceedings and new section 22H(1)(b) to the 1989 Act will require local authorities to publish information about financial support that may be available to children living in kinship care and their carers. Therefore, I would like to reassure Members that the list of categories of information about services in the Bill is deliberately not exhaustive. It also remains our intention that further detail about what we expect to be included in the kinship local offer will be made in statutory guidance, so we will take on board the points made in this debate. We believe that amending clause 5 as has been suggested would not achieve that effect. We believe that we have the measures in place that will deliver what the hon. Lady is looking for, so we kindly ask her to withdraw her amendment.

On amendments 22 and 39, tabled by the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston and the hon. Member for Twickenham respectively, I appreciate the concern that exists about consulting children and carers on the kinship local offer and making sure that their feedback is collected. The children’s social care national framework and the existing kinship care statutory guidance make it clear that children’s wishes and feelings should be taken into account whenever adults try to solve problems and make decisions about them, and local authorities are legally obliged to adhere to article 12 of the UN convention on the rights of the child, which makes it very clear that the child has the right to express their views, their feelings and their wishes in all matters affecting them and to have their views considered and taken seriously.

The kinship care statutory guidance also sets the expectation that local authorities should consult children, kinship carers and parents as appropriate in drawing up their kinship local offers, and set out how the kinship local offer has been informed by their views, to ensure transparency.

New section 22H(7) to the 1989 Act states:

“A local authority must review and update its kinship local offer from time to time”,

to give opportunities for the views and opinions of children living in kinship care and their carers to be taken into account. However, since the intention of clause 5 is to ensure that local authorities publish information about what their kinship local offer includes, what is published should be a clear reflection of the services available, and consultation on the publication would be of limited value.

We cannot be more specific about how kinship local offers are published, because that would potentially limit the accessibility of the information. For example, requiring online publication would potentially limit access to the information among those who do not have access to that technology. For that reason, new section 22H(6) of the 1989 Act already puts an obligation on local authorities to:

“take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that children”

and kinship carers

“receive the information relevant to them.”

Consequently, we do not believe that the amendments are required, as there are sufficient safeguards within clause 5 and other legal frameworks, and because the local authority will be best placed to determine what information should be published. More prescription in legislation might hinder local authorities as they design and publish their local offer in a flexible way that reaches people and makes the maximum impact.

I will respond to the question raised by the hon. Member for Twickenham and to some extent by the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston about some lack of clarity on the definitions of a connected person. To be clear, that is because they are defined in the Children Act 1989. The term “relative” is deliberately not defined in the Bill, because the measures on the kinship local offer are not freestanding: they form part of the 1989 Act. Although section 105 of that Act defines relatives, new section 22I(1)(a) under clause 5 includes

“a relative, friend or other person connected with the child”,

so it is broad enough to cover every type of person. Although cousins are not specifically defined as a relative, they would fall within the category of another person connected with the child. I hope that has answered all the questions raised by hon. Members, and I urge them to support this clause.

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

The Family Rights Group raised a specific point. It would effectively like to add another item to the list on page 9, line 17 of the Bill, which currently states that the list of support services should include

“health…relationships…education and training…accommodation”.

The Family Rights Group would like to add legal support to that list. Will the Minister go away and have a look at that?

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I appreciate the request; I have dealt with that in my response, in that we feel that we have included broad headings that are clearly not exhaustive and leave room for local authorities to publish the whole range of services that they feel will support kinship carers. Fundamentally, we know that having a good kinship care offer is in the best interests of a local authority, because it is the one supporting the children who it knows need that care, but I will certainly take away the hon. Gentleman’s specific consideration.

Catherine Atkinson (Labour, Derby North)

I fully agree that the list in subsection (2) is clearly not an exhaustive list, and many local authorities, as a matter of good practice, will set out the variety of services available to children who live in kinship care and to kinship carers. However, I also invite the Minister to consider the guidance already available and any other means of encouraging local authorities to publish their approach in relation to legal support and ensure that these provisions remain under review.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. Her point is noted.

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

I thank the Minister for her response on the point about legal support, which is in amendment 38 along with financial support and family group decision making. I intended to push the amendment to a vote, but, given her assurances that this will be in statutory guidance, I am happy to withdraw the amendment and not push it to a vote.

On her point about connected persons, we need some clarity. As she says, the term “relative” is in the Children Act 1989, but it does not cover cousins. Practitioners on the ground and families would like clarity for those other arrangements. Whether or not that is in guidance, it needs to be spelled out further. Nevertheless, based on the assurances the Minister has given, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Clause 6 - Promoting educational achievement

Neil O'Brien (Conservative, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)

We have not tabled an amendment to clause 6, as this is another area where the Government are building on the direction of travel set under the last Government. The role of the virtual school head was already extended on a non-statutory basis from September 2021 to include strategic oversight of the educational outcomes of children with a social worker in a local authority’s area; through this Bill, it is now being extended again to champion the education of children, including children in kinship care.

Educational outcomes for children in need and children in care are still far too low, despite the efforts of successive Governments over the last 40 years to improve them. About one in five children in need and looked-after children achieve grade 4 and above in English and Maths GCSEs, compared with 65% of all children. That is a huge gap.

As the Minister knows, local authorities have an existing duty to monitor child in need or section 17 plans, which I believe is about twice a year. Will the Minister clarify whether the Bill gives us an opportunity to escalate that monitoring? Does it extend to children in kinship care, where a child is falling behind or where their attendance drops sharply? Have the Government considered extending priority school admissions for children in kinship care and making them eligible for pupil premium plus?

I have a question about how a single person can discharge this duty in any local authority, let alone a large one—thinking of dried Birmingham, Kent, Leeds or somewhere like that. What is the Government’s expectation of what the person responsible for delivering this work will be able to do?

Damian Hinds (Conservative, East Hampshire)

The clause extends the role in legislation of virtual school heads to children in need, previously looked-after children and children in kinship care. The virtual school and virtual school heads concepts are not new. The concept was first piloted in 2006 in Liverpool. It was the Children and Families Act 2014, which we both remember well, Sir Edward, that required all local authorities to administer pupil premium plus.

The Oxford University report on the virtual school heads concept noted that there had been improvements in outcomes at key stage 2 and key stage 4 for looked-after children and a marked decrease in permanent exclusions. However, as the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, rightly said, there is still a yawning gap in attainment and all manner of life outcomes for this group of children.

Previously, looked-after children were added to the virtual school head cohort in 2018. There was a pilot to include children in need in 2021. From 2023-24 onwards, pupil premium plus was extended to age 16-plus. Once again, this is a policy area where there is no difference between us; the current Government’s work builds on previous Governments’ work, and we welcome that. We also note the successes of the virtual school heads concept.

My question is about the danger of dilution. In terms of orders of magnitude, there are 80,000 or 85,000 children in care—looked-after children, but there are 400,000 children in need, so that is a big increase in number. I note that paragraph 4 of proposed section 23ZZA(4) of the 1989 ACT introduced by clause 6 puts a strategic duty on to virtual school heads; it is not about individual children. The bigger number of children there is, with that dilution effect, there is a risk that some of the benefits of the virtual school heads program reduce. We can counter that, to a degree, by upping the resource. My real question is therefore about what resource will be behind this measure, to make sure that the maximum effect can be felt from virtual school heads.

As we talked about earlier on multi-agency working, it is actual practice that matters. People have been working in different ways, and we can learn from what works in different places, but what work will there be to propagate the best and most effective practice between places across the country?

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

I very much welcome clause 6 and the extension of the virtual school head oversight role to children in kinship care. However, I was perplexed to see that the category of children this clause applies to is a subcategory of the definition we have just looked at in the previous clause.

I am not quite sure why virtual school heads are not available to all children in kinship care, but only to those subject to a special guardianship or child arrangement order, as set out in proposed new section 23ZZZA(4)(d), on page 11, lines 29 to 35. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that. Having just passed a definition of kinship care, it seems that we are immediately undermining it by extending provision of educational support only to a subset of the group that we have just agreed qualify as children in kinship care.

We see the same with allowances in the roll-out of the pilot; again, it is very much a subset, and I think that undermines the value of having just agreed in law a definition of children in kinship care. We know that there are higher levels of special educational needs among children in kinship care compared with the wider population. It is really important that the group of children eligible for this support is drawn as widely as possible. I also very much welcome the shadow Minister’s comment that he would like to see pupil premium plus and priority admissions extended to children in kinship care. I hope that means he will support new clause 28 and 29, when we get to them towards the end of Committee.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

I, too, welcome the extension of the role of virtual school heads outlined in this provision. I would like to ask the Minister whether she has, or will consider, the opportunity in clause 6 to consider children who have been recently bereaved or are facing bereavement, particularly of a parent or sibling, as a group that has particular educational support needs. That is a surprisingly large group of people. Best estimates are that one in 29 children of school age have lost either a parent or a sibling, and there is clear evidence that those bereavements have impacts on educational achievement, as measured by GCSE results. Would the Minister consider the opportunity to use the Bill to improve support specifically for bereaved pupils? I would welcome the Minister’s comments.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

As we have discussed, clause 6 places a statutory duty on all local authorities in England to promote the educational achievement of children with a social worker living in their area. It also places a statutory duty on all local authorities in England to promote the educational achievement of children who are subject to formal kinship orders in their area, regardless of whether they have spent time in local authority care.

Children with a social worker, as hon. Members have recognised, often face significant barriers to achieving their potential in education due to experiences of instability, abuse and neglect, or indeed bereavement, as the hon. Member for North Herefordshire mentioned. Similarly, while children in kinship care benefit from familial care, they can encounter challenges stemming from trauma, disrupted school or limited access to educational resources, which can impact their educational outcomes. Placing a statutory duty on local authorities to promote the educational achievement of these children acknowledges their specific vulnerabilities and barriers to attainment, and ensures that resources and support are available to meet their educational needs.

Clause 6 places a duty on local authorities to appoint an officer to ensure that these duties are properly discharged. In practice, the officer is known as a virtual school head and currently discharges these duties on a non-statutory basis. Virtual school heads will be the lead officers responsible for overseeing the educational progress of children in care and previously in care, and it includes children who have left care because they were made the subject of a special guardianship or a child arrangement order. Extending the remit of virtual school heads on a statutory basis to include children with a social worker and those in kinship care will give them the same legal footing as looked-after and previously looked-after children.

This clause places a duty on local authorities to take appropriate steps to support the educational achievement of these children, which could include: raising awareness of the barriers and challenges that they face in their education; taking steps to improve their educational attendance and engagement; and providing support for schools to help them overcome these challenges. Clause 6 also extends the definition of a “relevant child” to include children under special guardianship orders and child arrangement orders. I appreciate the question asked by the hon. Member for Twickenham on the extent of that definition. It is specific to the legal guardianship orders and child arrangement orders, and I appreciate the issue that she has raised.

I will come on to a number of questions that have been asked, and I appreciate that Members have raised points of consideration on clause 6 to ensure we maximise the opportunity it presents. The ongoing evaluation of non-statutory extension of the virtual school head has shown that these extended duties do have positive impacts for children with a social worker. Virtual school heads have reported improved school attendance and decreases in suspensions and permanent exclusions. We expect the extension of this role, now put on a statutory footing, to improve outcomes for some of the most vulnerable children.

We know that virtual school heads have already been carrying out these duties, but we are fully committed to ensuring that they have sufficient resources to meet their statutory duties. We have provided £7.6 million of funding this year to ensure they are resourced to meet their statutory duties towards previously looked-after children, but we will continue to review resourcing alongside the impacts of the extended role to make sure that virtual school heads have the resources to meet their duties and serve the children they are there to support.

We will issue updated statutory guidance to give local authorities a framework to support the outcomes of all children they have a duty towards. Local authorities will be held to account for the discharge of these duties through Ofsted inspections of local authority children’s services. That answers the question from the right hon. Member for East Hampshire. I will answer the question from the hon. Member for Twickenham shortly.

In response to the question from the hon. Member for North Herefordshire about bereavement, she is absolutely right to identify that many children in kinship care arrangements may well be there as a result of a family bereavement. Indeed, I have had constituents come to me in that situation, so I appreciate the challenge. We could have a very long debate on the best way of supporting children who have experienced bereavement, and I absolutely take on board her concerns. There is a whole range of work undergoing, from the relationships, health and sex education national curriculum to resources for mental health support in school, which we hope will bring supportive benefit to all children within the school system.

I will take away the specific request she made as we undertake an independent review of the curriculum to ensure that it not only provides a broad and solid foundation to children, but equips them through the RHSE and personal, social, health and economic education curriculums to process challenges, and ensures we have support in the right place. It may be that it could be provided through a school setting, or it may be that it should be provided elsewhere.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

I fully appreciate what the Minister is saying regarding the way that the curriculum and so forth can be shaped to offer more support to children, a large number of whom will face some form of bereavement at some point. The point I would particularly like the Minister to take away and consider is how the network of support around the school can support children facing bereavement, particularly of a very close relative.

That is both in terms of the opportunity for grief education for teachers, and the opportunity for somebody in the local authority to look at that subset of children with the same level of attention, given that, as a group, they are particularly subject to the challenges that this clause of the Bill is specifically about—hence the point about virtual school head responsibility in this area.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

The hon. Lady raises an important issue. I fear we are getting into quite broad territory here, which may well be considered not in order when discussing the role of the virtual school head, but I absolutely take the point on board. The virtual school head comes with a range of responsibilities to support the educational attainment of children who come under that authority. Included within that is the responsibility to ensure that the measures taken do support children in dealing with a whole range of challenging experiences that may have resulted in them being within their remit. I take on board the hon. Lady’s particular concerns.

I will respond to the hon. Member for Twickenham on the statutory duties on the local authority to promote the educational achievement of children who live in kinship care, regardless of whether they have spent time in local authority care. That is how the entitlement is worded. Virtual school heads will have a duty to provide information and advice, on request, to kinship carers with special guardianship or child arrangement orders, regardless of whether their child was in care. That is how the legislation has been framed. Obviously they are legal arrangements that have been made with the local authority, which brings them under the direction, supervision and responsibility of the virtual school head. I appreciate that the hon. Lady has concerns about that, and they have been noted. With that, I commend the clause to the Committee.

Clause 7 - Provision of advice and other support

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

I beg to move amendment 12, in clause 7, page 11, line 38, after “support” insert “and staying put support”.

This amendment would include staying put support in the support provided by local authorities under this section and extend the provision of Staying Put for young people to the age of 25.

Edward Leigh (Conservative, Gainsborough)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 13, in clause 7, page 12, line 7, after “support” insert “or staying put support”.

See Amendment 12.

Amendment 14, in clause 7, page 12, line 10, after “support” insert “or staying put support”.

See Amendment 12.

Amendment 15, in clause 7, page 12, line 11, after “support” insert “or staying put support”.

See Amendment 12.

Amendment 16, in clause 7, page 12, line 14, after first “support” insert “and staying put support”.

See Amendment 12.

Amendment 17, in clause 7, page 12, line 22, at end insert—

“(5) ‘Staying put’ has the meaning given by section 23CZA(2) of the Children’s Act 1989.”

See Amendment 12.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

I am pleased to move amendment 12 to clause 7, on extending Staying Put for children in foster care to the age of 25. This group of amendments seeks to address the potential two-tier system that the Bill will create by extending provisions for Staying Close but not Staying Put.

Many care leavers face a cliff edge in care at the age of 18. Staying Put is a scheme that has been introduced to enable young people in foster care to stay with their foster carers until the age of 21 to support them into adulthood, whereas Staying Close is for young people in residential care. In the UK, it is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to reach independence at the age of 21. In fact, the Office for National Statistics published a report last year showing that the average age at which young people move out of the family home is 24. The independent review on children’s social care recognised the disparity between young people in care and their non-care experienced peers, and it recommended that both Staying Close and Staying Put be extended to the age of 23.

It appears that the Bill has responded to that recommendation by putting in place provision to extend Staying Close to age 25, but it does not do the same for those in Staying Put arrangements. I tabled this probing amendment to ask the Minister to explain the justification for that disparity and for the effective creation of a two-tier system for young people in those situations.

Evaluations of Staying Put have found that it significantly reduces the risk of homelessness for care leavers. The care review found that it would contribute towards savings of £84 million over five years, mostly due to reduced homelessness. Of course, the financial savings are not the primary motivation; it is about what is best for young people and ensuring that they have the best possible opportunity to successfully transition into adulthood. Foster carers and young people consistently report that the extension of Staying Put would result in better outcomes for young people, providing them with the choice—not insistence—to remain in the family environment.

In the words of a foster carer who recently spoke to the Fostering Network:

“The increase in the age for staying put would be of amazing benefit to care leavers. At the age of 21 many young people who have had the opportunity to go to university are just obtaining their qualification and then have to face negotiating their next huge step, the job market, and to find that they are possibly homeless due to leaving their placement. This is a catastrophic step backwards.”

I warmly urge the Minister to consider ensuring that there is parity in the Staying Close and Staying Put schemes, given that foster care and a family environment have the best long-term outcomes for young people in care transitioning into adulthood.

Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Twickenham)

I wish to speak briefly in support of the amendments. I was talking to the director of children’s services for the London borough of Richmond upon Thames earlier this week, and he told me that we use Staying Put quite a lot in a borough like Richmond, where housing costs are astronomically high and social housing is barely available. We all know that there is a housing crisis across the country, but it is particularly acute in London. Extending this provision would allow young people who are already in care, where there is a strong family relationship, to stay with those family connections. I appreciate that there is a cost attached to this, but actually for many local authorities it is cheaper than trying to find housing for these young people, who will almost always struggle to find housing on their own. I urge the Minister to seriously consider the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for North Herefordshire.

Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

On amendment 12, tabled by the hon. Member for North Herefordshire, and the comments by the hon. Member for Twickenham, I recognise the case that has been made, but we want to prioritise the young people, often with the most complex needs, who are leaving residential or similar care placements at 18. The existing Staying Put duty requires local authorities to monitor and support Staying Put arrangements, where former children stay with their former foster parent after leaving care. The duty lasts until the young person reaches the age of 21. This allows them to leave stable and secure homes when they are ready and helps them to enter adult life with the same opportunities and life prospects as their peers.

We remain committed to the Staying Put programme, but it is essential that we prioritise filling the gaps in current support, in particular for young people, often with the most complex needs, who are leaving residential or similar care placements at 18. That is why we have prioritised the introduction of statutory Staying Close duties. Former relevant children, as defined by the Bill, under the age of 25, including those Staying Put or who have left the Staying Put arrangement, will be eligible for Staying Close support. Any eligible young person up to the age of 25 will be able to access the wraparound practical and emotional support package provided as part of the Staying Close duty.

To be clear, we are aware of the financial pressures for young people, carers and families and local authorities at the moment. We are committed to further reforms to children’s social care in future spending reviews to make sure that every child, irrespective of their background, has the best start in life.

Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire)

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Written evidence reported to the House