Worcester MP Robin Walker has called on the government to go even further with plans to reform children’s social care.
Yesterday in the House of Commons, Robin welcomed the plans which were outlined by Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan which places family and loving relationships at its core to help reduce the need for a crisis response at a later stage.
The plan responds to recommendations made by three independent reviews by Josh MacAlister, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The findings revealed the current care system is often fragmented, siloed, and struggling to meet the needs of children and families across England.
Families will receive local early help and intervention with challenges such as addiction, domestic abuse or mental health, to help families to stay together where possible and overcome adversity. This will start in 12 local authorities and is backed by £45m to embed a best practice model that will then be shared more widely.
However, Robin has urged the government to do even more and ensure that the government uses the kinship carer strategy to ensure that they have greater legal status. Robin also called on the Minister to attend the Education Select Committee which he chairs to go into greater lengths on the financial information of the plans.
Speaking in the Chamber, Robin said:
I welcome some aspects of this, particularly the extension of the ECF to the children’s social care workforce and the trebling of bursaries for apprenticeships, which I know will be welcomed by the John Lewis Partnership; it has been making great efforts in this space and said to me only the other day that the bursary was welcome but did not go nearly far enough. I also welcome the support for kinship carers, but I urge the Secretary of State to go further on this and to use the kinship care strategy to ensure that they have greater legal status.
My Select Committee will want to look into the detail of the financial arrangements announced today, so will the Secretary of State or a Minister attend the Committee in fairly short order to go into more detail on that? In particular, our Select Committee has called previously for greater scrutiny of the finances of some children’s care homes, and after the scandal we have seen at the Hesley Group homes, it is not before time.
In response, Minister Keegan said:
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments and for the important work that he and his Committee will be doing in this area. I am sure we will be happy to work with them. I am full of admiration for kinship carers, who step up to provide a safe, stable and loving home for children who can no longer live full-time with their parents.
The care review made a series of bold and ambitious recommendations aimed at increasing the number of children who can remain within their family network. We have made a commitment to implement and explore each one of those recommendations, including, as I said, with £9 million to offer support for training in the spending review period and more than £45 million to begin implementing the family network support packages, through the Families First for Children pathfinder. So there will be more work done in this area.
ENDS
For more information, please see:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/long-term-strategy-launched-to-fix-c…
For the full transcript of the speech, please see:
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2023-02-02a.483.0&p=24862#g4…