The Public Services Committee held four evidence sessions in March 2023, received written evidence as part of its inquiry and published its report ‘A response to the children’s social care implementation strategy’ on 25 May 2023. The House of Lords will debate this report on 20 September 2023.

1. Children’s social care reform strategy: ‘Stable homes, built on love’

In February 2023, the Department for Education (DfE) published ‘Stable homes, built on love: Implementation strategy and consultation’. This set out and sought views on proposals to reform children’s social care. The consultation closed on 11 May 2023 and the government has previously said it will publish a response in September 2023.

The strategy is based on six pillars:

  • family help providing the right support at the right time so that children thrive within their families
  • a decisive multi-agency child protection system
  • unlocking the potential of family networks
  • putting love, relationships and a stable home at the heart of being a child in care
  • a valued, supported and highly skilled social worker for every child who needs one
  • a system that continuously learns, improves and makes better use of evidence and data

The strategy states that a “major reset” is required to “rebalance children’s social care away from costly crisis intervention to more meaningful and effective help for families”. The reform is designed to be implemented in stages. The first phase involves an investment of £200mn over two years “addressing urgent issues facing children and families now, laying the foundations for whole system reform and setting national direction for change”. Then after two years the government intends to “refresh this strategy, scaling up the new approaches we have tested and developed, and bringing forward new legislation (subject to parliamentary time)”.

In the first phase, £45mn of the additional investment would be invested into a ‘Families first for children pathfinder programme’ in 12 local areas from September 2023. The pathfinders’ role would be to test models of family help to learn lessons before a national rollout.

As well as a new child protection lead practitioner role being created in the test areas, the government also committed to providing new multi-agency child protection standards in 2023 and amending guidance to local authorities, police and health partners to give greater clarity on their child protection responsibilities.

The first phase would also see the testing of family group decision-making and ‘Family network support packages’, including plans for children living with friends or family (‘kinship carers’). This programme would sit alongside a national kinship care strategy to be published by the end of 2023, and a £9mn investment in training and support for kinship carers.

Other measures for the next two years include:

  • a £27mn investment in recruitment and retention of foster carers
  • a programme to support improvements in the quality of leadership and management in children’s homes
  • a financial oversight regime for fostering agencies and large providers of children’s homes to increase financial transparency and reduce risk of market exit
  • pathfinding regional care cooperatives (RCCs) to plan, commission and deliver care places
  • the establishment of an expert group to review standards of care, regulations and guidance
  • a focus on retention and professional development of social workers
  • delivering a children’s social care national framework and dashboard by the end of 2023

The House of Commons Library has produced a briefing with further details on the proposals.

Two concurrent consultations were published alongside the strategy: a consultation on the proposed national framework and dashboard and a consultation on whether to set national rules on the use of agency social workers. Both consultations also closed on 11 May 2023 and at the time of writing the government was analysing feedback.

The strategy followed key reports from 2022. In May 2022, the independent review of children’s social care recommended wide-ranging reforms. The review’s final report argued that the children’s social care system was “increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise”. It concluded that “for these reasons, a radical reset is now unavoidable”. For further details, please read the Lords Library briefing on the ‘Independent review of children’s social care’ (2 December 2022), which also covers the March 2022 report from the Competition and Markets Authority on social care provision and the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report ‘Child protection in England: National review into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson’ published in May 2022.

As part of the government’s initial response to the recommendations of the three 2022 reports, it established a children’s social care national implementation board.

2. Review of the children’s social care implementation strategy

The Public Services Committee report ‘A response to the children’s social care implementation strategy’ described the government’s strategy as lacking “scale, ambition and pace”. It also said the strategy would impact “only a few areas, and then only as a pilot programme”. Though there was some agreement that “in many key areas the direction is right”, the report added there was “no guarantee of long-term reform”. The committee noted that some witnesses provided evidence that interventions and reforms already have “strong evidence demonstrating their efficacy”, so could be rolled out now rather than waiting to be rolled out after a pilot programme.

Speaking to the report’s conclusions and recommendations, the committee’s chair, Baroness Morris of Yardley, said:

The children’s care system is in crisis and while the government’s strategy is a step in the right direction, it falls short of delivering the immediate real time benefits to children and families that we need. The strategy is a golden opportunity, but it could be wasted.

Vulnerable young people are being failed by the system. There are shortages of every kind of care, and children are being placed in settings that do not work for them. This is untenable. As one young person we spoke to told us: “I am a person not a number”.

She added that the government’s plan had “much to recommend it” but cautioned that “unless the proposals go further and faster, the strategy will leave many children behind”.

Josh MacAlister, a former schoolteacher and founder of the social work charity Frontline, who undertook the independent review into children’s social care in 2022, gave evidence to the committee’s inquiry. He said “I genuinely think this is the right direction and that the government made some very positive announcements”. However, he added that the proposals were “not of the scale of change that will see a tipping point in the system for some time”.

The committee’s report raised concerns about funding. The independent review called for a £1.03bn investment in the first two years of the strategy and total investment of £2.6bn over four years. The strategy did not specify funding for subsequent reforms beyond the £200mn initial investment.

The committee also raised concerns that improvements for residential care were missing from the government’s strategy. It said “we consider that the strategy’s focus on stable, loving homes ignores the need for radical reform of residential homes”.

The report raised concerns about the size of the DfE’s children’s social care team, and the scale of cross-departmental cooperation needed for implementation. The committee recommended that the prime minister’s delivery unit should have responsibility for implementation and coordination and that “further review and consultation should be minimised”.

The committee also noted that references in the strategy to children and young people’s voices were “vague and ineffective”.

The committee made recommendations on kinship care:

  • Kinship care should come with close monitoring.
  • Legal definitions of ‘kinship care’ and ‘kinship carer’ should be set out in primary legislation so that children and families in informal kinship care arrangements can access support.
  • Access to legal aid should be available to all kinship carers.

Recommendations on fostering included:

  • The DfE should provide further detail on its plans to increase foster care recruitment, allowing foster caring to be accessible to working people.
  • The department should urgently set regional and national targets for foster carer recruitment and retention including targets for specialist carers.

The committee welcomed the commitment to develop an independent opt-out advocacy service. It also welcomed the focus on early intervention, but recommended more clarity about the interaction of ‘family help’ and ‘family hubs’.

On the children’s social care workforce, the committee pointed to its report ‘Fit for the future? Rethinking the public services workforce’, which detailed staffing pressures across the public sector. These concerns were echoed by witnesses for the more recent inquiry. For example, a young person with care experience told the committee “there is not enough in the strategy on recruiting additional staff to support those already performing demanding roles in difficult circumstances”. The committee broadly welcomed the creation of an early career framework, but argued that workforce interventions should be implemented faster nationally.

The committee also made recommendations on RCCs, including that evaluation of their success should:

  • consider the experiences of young people and families
  • measure how many children and young people are placed at a distance from their communities
  • review the impact on small providers
  • evaluate the number of additional placements procured

The committee raised concerns that transferring local authority responsibilities for planning, commissioning and delivering care placements to RCCs could create a “democratic deficit” or “issues in local accountability and local democratic control over decision-making”. The committee requested the government provide further information about the intended accountability regime.

3. Government response

The government welcomed the committee’s report and said it would consider it alongside other consultation responses. The committee published the government’s response on 25 July 2023.

In response to the committee’s recommendation that “all children’s care services should see some benefits soon”, the government pointed to work on the children’s social care national framework. It said it intended to publish statutory guidance by the end of this year. This would be alongside a revised version of the multi-agency statutory guidance ‘Working together to safeguard children’, which would “clarify and simplify existing requirements”.

The government also noted that the then minister for children, families and wellbeing, Claire Coutinho, wrote to all directors of children’s services on 6 March 2023 “to outline our ambitions for transformational whole-system change, whilst reiterating the responsibility of all partners in delivering reform”. The letter “encouraged local authorities to take action to review their arrangements for kinship care and multi-disciplinary workforce; assess existing opportunities for children in care and care leavers to build relationships; and ensure areas are making evidence-based decisions for commissioning”.

The government noted the committee’s emphasis on providing funds to all local authorities, but reiterated the need for evidence-based interventions to be trialled, then scaled. On future funding, the response said “towards the next spending review, we will assess the level and form of investment required to achieve meaningful and sustainable change system wide”.

The government noted examples of successful cross-departmental cooperation and stated that ministers would continue to set policy direction jointly through the child protection ministerial group and the care leavers board, which is jointly chaired by the secretaries of state for education and levelling up, housing and communities.

On children and young people’s voices, it said that the regional commissioning model would ultimately “increase the availability of care placements in the right places for children who need them” and therefore give children and young people more choice.

The government also committed to exploring and testing how family hubs will work with the family help system.

In addition, the government pointed to progress made on supporting kinship carers. It said it had invested £1mn in 2022/23 and was investing a further £1mn in 2023/24 to “establish more than 100 peer support groups”. It added it had announced a £9mn training and support package for kinship carers across England within the current spending review period, with delivery plans expected by spring 2024.

It also highlighted that from 1 May 2023, legal aid entitlements were extended to prospective guardians making applications for special guardianship orders in private family law proceedings. The department committed to “carefully consider the committee’s recommendation to define ‘kinship care’ and ‘kinship carer’ though primary legislation”, alongside other consultation responses.

On foster care, the government set out plans to invest “£27mn this spending review to deliver a fostering recruitment and retention programme”. Of the funding, £3mn was for a pathfinder programme in the North East region, and £24mn was for the wider roll out of the programme.

The government said it had also raised the national minimum allowance for foster carers by 12.43% in response to cost of living challenges. The spring budget included an increase in qualifying care relief, increasing income tax relief from £10,000 to £18,140 plus £375–450 per week for each person cared for. The government said this “represents a tax cut worth approximately £450 per year on average for foster carers”.

The government said it had also:

  • launched the national workload action group, to make recommendations to address unnecessary workload, supporting social workers to spend more direct time with children and families
  • committed to launching the child and family social worker apprenticeship employer support fund, supporting local authorities to offer up to 500 child and family social worker apprenticeships
  • set up an expert advisory group on standards of care, reviewing all legislation, regulations, and standards of care, to develop a core set of overarching standards

The government agreed that “a strong and clear accountability regime for RCCs is needed” and explained that a full range of outcomes including placement sufficiency would be measured in evaluations. The government set out its intention to provide legislative underpinning for RCCs, including providing for a clear accountability regime, when parliamentary time allowed.

4. Other responses to the government’s strategy

The Local Government Association (LGA) agreed with the strategy’s focus on wider family networks and skilled social workers, but contended that its ‘pillars’ should include a focus on properly resourcing the system. It also raised concerns about delivering family-led solutions, saying “some of our member councils have highlighted to us the challenge in continuing to deliver family group decision-making and other interventions in a context of increasing demand and long-term funding pressures”. On funding of children’s social care, the LGA stated:

LGA analysis prior to high levels of inflation indicates an existing shortfall of £1.6bn per year simply to maintain current service levels. The [independent] care review recommended an additional investment of at least £2.6bn over four years, prior to the impact of inflation, to improve the system to better meet children’s needs.

The LGA suggested that multiple factors would be key to the success of RCCs, including resourcing, IT systems, clarity on structure and roles, and the retention of knowledge and relationships currently held between councils and providers. The LGA also argued that the strategy “could have gone much further” in relation to the provision of mental health services for children in care and care leavers.

Ofsted also responded to the government’s strategy. It welcomed the focus on evidence-based early intervention and basing multi-agency family help services in local communities, but argued that the government’s plans would come with “financial challenges”. It also suggested a risk that the RCC model may lead to children being cared for “even further from their home areas”.

Children England, a membership organisation for the children and families voluntary sector, focused on children-centred decision-making in its response. In particular, ensuring that any focus on keeping children with family was not cost-driven, and that the child still received appropriate support. It also objected to funding being provided to only some areas initially, and rejected RCCs as “a long-term highly bureaucratic market restructure in a handful of areas, not the decisive intervention to move away from market approaches, everywhere, that is so urgently needed”.

On 23 May 2023, to mark the one-year anniversary of the independent review of children’s social care, the NSPCC, Action for Children, Barnardo’s, The Children’s Society and the National Children’s Bureau published economic analysis on the cost of “delayed” implementation of reforms. The analysis estimated there would be an additional cost of £1bn “caused by a lack of comprehensive early support during the two-year delay” in implementing the review’s recommendations.

5. Recent developments

The government announced in July 2023 that Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton had been chosen as the first three areas to deliver the ‘Families first for children pathfinder programme’. It said the programme would test “new ways to reform every part of the children’s social care system, helping children to stay with their families in safe and loving homes, whilst protecting vulnerable children where needed”.

Separately, seven areas (Brighton and Hove, Sunderland, Gateshead, Telford and Wrekin, Staffordshire, Hartlepool and Hammersmith and Fulham) were chosen to deliver family network pilots, with four started in July 2023, and three planned to start in spring 2024.

Local authorities can currently apply to set up regional care cooperatives.

6. Read more

Cover image by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash.