25
Examination of witnesses
Josh MacAlister and Helen Waite.
Q79 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to the second meeting of the new Session and the 52nd meeting this Parliament of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As the name implies, we are made up of 12 Members, drawn equally from both Houses, and come from varied political backgrounds. We are tasked by Parliament to examine how public policy, including legislation and wider questions, impact the human rights of UK citizens.
On our web page you can see a range of recent reports and inquiries, which include thematic inquiries on transnational repression, supply chain transparency and modern slavery, and the failure to bring to justice British citizens who were involved in the genocide of Yazidis and other minorities. Our current inquiries include legislative scrutiny of the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill and thematic inquiries into the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights, and the impact of security, safety and protest on human rights. But we have also been looking at and examining the human rights of children in social care and the extent to which the human rights of children in England are protected in the social care system. Our inquiry has included on-the-ground visits to great cities such as Leeds and York and a private round-table discussion with some of the young people who have come through the system. They shared that experience with us with great candour and sensitivity, and we greatly welcomed it.
This is the fifth a final oral session of the inquiry and, to conclude our evidence, we are very pleased today to welcome the Minister for Children and Families, Josh MacAlister OBE. We will explore with him some of the issues around adequacy of accommodation, the availability of complaints mechanisms and the disappearance of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Josh MacAlister is the Labour Member of Parliament for Whitehaven and Workington and has been an MP since 4 July 2024. He was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for Children and Families, at the Department for Education on 7 September 2025. Prior to becoming a Member of Parliament, the Minister was responsible for leading an independent, ground-breaking review of children’s social care, which was published back in May 2022. We on this Committee have no doubt about the Minister’s personal commitment to his portfolio or about his knowledge of the issues we are going to be talking about today. The Minister is joined today by his colleague Helen Waite, the director of children’s social care, who is very welcome too.
To set the ball rolling. I have a general question, and after I have asked it, I will turn to my colleagues, beginning with Sir Desmond Swayne, Member of Parliament, to explore the issues in more granular detail. Minister, to what extent are human rights principles embedded in the framework applicable to children in social care, and how do you take human rights into account as you carry out your work in that area?
Josh MacAlister: Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to the committee for your interest in these really important issues. It is extremely welcome that the Joint Committee has made children in receipt of children’s social care services a focus of its interest. It all helps to bring greater attention to an area of public policy which is very often in the shadows rather than the spotlight.
To answer your question, there are a number of UN rights for children that of course the UK is a signatory to, which stand out very clearly when we are thinking about the changes we are trying to make to children’s social care. These include the right to reunification and the right to have a connection with a parent where that is safe. It gets right to the heart of some of the most difficult decisions that sit within the children’s social care system. They include the right to a sense of identity, which includes family identity, for those young people who are in care, and the right to safety and freedom from violence and neglect, which of course is one of the main drivers of the child in need and child protection system. They include the right to education for those in care or being moved around the system. We will get into all these subjects, I imagine.
When the Government introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, it was important to undertake a child rights impact assessment, which was done. That legislation, now an Act, was built on the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which I led, which itself did a child rights impact assessment of all the recommendations I made in that process. Whether it is thinking about the legislation or measures we are taking as a department—we put children’s rights right at the front of our thinking—through to the changes we are trying to make to children’s social care, which are all about enhancing and actually going beyond the basic right to have those articles protected, we want to actually go further and ensure that children are flourishing. I hope that that gives you a flavour of how we think.
Chair: That is a very good scene setter, so thank you very much, Minister. I am going to turn to Sir Desmond Swayne, and after that we will hear from our colleague, Dr Peter Swallow, about kinship care.
Q80 Sir Desmond Swayne: Minister, to what extent has your stewardship of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care shaped your understanding of the system and determined your priorities?
Josh MacAlister: It was in many ways the blueprint for what we are now doing in government, I am really proud to say. The independent review was commissioned by the previous Government. It was a manifesto commitment for the Conservatives in 2019 to undertake a care review. That then became a review of the entire children’s social care system, which at the time was an over £10 billion public system—it is now more than that—looking at every aspect, from fostering to adoption to residential care, from support for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to family courts, the child protection system and support for families that are struggling, including parents with children with disabilities, for example. So it was really quite expansive.
I had the opportunity to work with a great team of officials from the DfE. I also had the time to really deeply listen to thousands of young people who have experienced that system; to adults who themselves are care experienced; foster carers, social workers, youth workers and teachers; and to think through what some of the deeper answers might be to fixing and resetting children’s social care. The recommendations that came out of that were largely accepted by the previous Government. It is this Government who have acted on those recommendations more fully and invested the money that is needed to make the changes happen.
There is a small number of recommendations which the previous Government and this Government have not taken forward. I think that, as all members of this committee will recognise, you do not always get everything you want if you list every recommendation you might want included in something, but the spirit of the review and the lion’s share of the recommendations are now either legislation, statutory guidance or government action funded through programmes. I am immensely proud that that has been something done on a cross-party basis that is now actually starting to make a difference in the real world.
Chair: Thank you. During the inquiry, we have had a lot of new information given to some of us about kinship care. My colleague, Dr Peter Swallow, has been quite an advocate around this, as have other members of the committee, so we will ask a couple of questions on that.
Q81 Peter Swallow: Absolutely, and I just pay tribute to the kinship carers and the young people in kinship care in my constituency. As Lord Alton says, during this inquiry we have had some really strong evidence that support for kinship care needs to be strengthened, so what plans do you have for extending support for kinship carers, including financial support, legal aid, mental health support and kinship leave?
Josh MacAlister: Support for kinship care, and the role that kinship care needs to play in the children’s social care system, was a feature that had been really overlooked prior to the completion of my review. To give one example, the Department for Education had a really good and well-established large team working on adoption policy; there was not a single official working on kinship care. There was no government strategy and no government action at all on kinship care until the review and that exercise of going out and listening to children and families had concluded. Actually, to give credit to a number of Members of both Houses, they, through the APPG and other reports, tried to bring the importance of kinship care into the centre of the debate. Prior to that, it was just not being given anywhere near the attention it needed.
I am pleased to say that we now have a definition of kinship in legislation. We have a requirement for every area to have and to publish a kinship local offer, and we have appointed a kinship national ambassador to oversee and share best practice across local authorities in what they are doing. Further to that, we have, through the legislation that we have just passed, put in place the requirement for family group decision-making, which will often be in the form of family group conferences, as a requirement at the pre-proceeding stage. That means that wherever a local authority is thinking about taking a child into care, there is a requirement in the system to bring the whole family network around the table, using an evidence-based model.
Those conferences should generate options which will very often include wider family networks playing a role. That is why the introduction of family network support packages, which we are funding through the £2.4 billion that we are putting into the Families First programme, becomes so important. So when a family group conference or another form of family group decision-making process is called, and the aunts and the uncle and the sister are able to say, “We could step in here” and help the dad who by himself cannot look after that child, instead of the local authority facilitating the conversation and then stepping away, it can now also say, “Right, we are going to put a family network support package in place, we’ll finance it, we’ll fund it”. It will fund it, in some cases, very generously, because if the alternative is a child entering care, that is £65,000 a year for fostering or £365,000 a year for residential care. That 18 years of spending £10,000 or £20,000 to ensure that that family can properly and safely look after that child become so important.
That is the pre-proceeding part. The bit that is most challenging, and when I was doing the review actually one of the most difficult policy questions to answer, is how to get the balance right when it comes to the state’s involvement in supporting families who would step in to care for a child—because that happens all the time, that is part of the family role in society. Where that happens, because the state takes the view that the child can no longer safely live with the parent, what should the role of the state be in supporting that financially? The recommendation I made was that there should be a financial allowance equivalent to the fostering allowance that is non-means tested and does not impact on benefits, and that is what we are now rolling out through kinship zones.
It is expensive up front to deliver it. In the seven areas where we are rolling this out at the moment—and it is now nearly two months into being rolled out, with some really encouraging results already in terms of the take-up—over the course of the trial, it will cost about £250 million. So we are prioritising spending money on this to prove that it works. It will not surprise you to hear me say, as someone who made the recommendation that we should do it, that I am hopeful that it will prove to make a positive impact. We need that evidence to go to the Treasury and say, “Actually, this should be the norm in the system”. It is a long answer, but I hope it covers some of the things you asked.
Peter Swallow: It really does. On one very specific point, a lot of kinship carers tell me that one of the things that they find really frustrating is when they can see that there is excellent support, for example, for foster families—and it does not always have to be finances; sometimes it can be opportunities—that is not open to kinship families, in part because people do not always understand what kinship families are. That is something that the Government potentially have a role in and it costs very little. Is that something that you are looking at and doing any work on, to make sure that we level some of the access to some of those opportunities?
Josh MacAlister: Yes. I have had constituents come to my surgery describing their situation, not calling themselves kinship carers, because they have never heard of it, and not realising that their MP, who they are meeting, happens to also be the Children’s Minister who did a review into all this stuff. I absolutely get where you are coming from with the question, both on adoption and on the special guardianship support fund, which funds support and communities of practice around those families that are in that situation and the fostering community. There is a very strong case for local areas to open up that support to a wider group of kinship and families.
What is happening is that, through the kinship local offer and the work of the national ambassador on this, we are funding, through the charity Kinship, a number of these peer group communities across the country. I think the reason we are hearing more about this as MPs, through our constituency work, which is good, is partly because there has been a mobilisation of the community and a recognition that they are very often not having their interests met. It is right and proper that they come forward and campaign for the changes, many of which we are delivering.
Chair: Before we move on, Alex Sobel MP has a brief supplementary.
Q82 Alex Sobel: Thank you, Lord Alton. When we went on the visit to York and Leeds, in Leeds, the council provides kinship carers with a financial allowance on the same basis as foster carers. I am obviously really pleased that you are doing that through the kinship zone programme and that the Treasury provides the money. In Leeds, the local authority provides the money. It is doing that partly because of equity, as in your review, but also because it has a cost-saving effect, because those young people are not going into the system. Have you looked at creating statutory guidance for the other local 140-odd local authorities that are not Leeds, or in the programme, to raise that bar and make that case? You have the evidence from Leeds, as well as what you are now doing to expand it, so I am just wondering whether you have thought about that in the round.
Josh MacAlister: I have and the department has. I would be very attracted to the idea of issuing statutory guidance that says that areas need to offer, as a minimum, the equivalent of the fostering allowance. The issue is twofold. First, it is most definitely a new burden that we in government would be required to fund: there would be an expectation from MHCLG that we do that.
The reason it would be classified as a new burden, and this links to the second point, is that you are right, Alex, that if we are to get to a system in which we have for some time been paying a financial allowance that is equivalent to a fostering allowance, it is my belief, and I think the evidence from Leeds and elsewhere suggests this, that it is cost effective, because it changes behaviour through the flow, but this is a stock and flow challenge. If, overnight, a local area were to pay the stock of kinship carers the financial allowance without having had the benefits of the behavioural change of fewer families going down the route of becoming a connected foster carer, the cost increase could be substantial. That is why there is an issue about getting over that initial financial hump in order to get to a more affordable, more equitable system that actually has better outcomes for children who can live with their relatives. I would describe it as a financial hump problem, and the kinship zones will help us establish how much of a hump it is. When it works—I believe it will work, but there is an independent evaluation—and when we are at the other side of that, we will then be in a position to say to the Treasury, “Look, this works, it’s cost effective, let’s help every area in the country that is not already offering this to offer it”.
Chair: As you have gathered, there is quite a lot of enthusiasm around this table for these proposals, and I think also from your colleague, Helen Waite. She caught my eye and it would be very good, I think, to hear from her for a moment as well. Perhaps, Helen, you can say a bit more about kinship care and how long the trial will last.
Helen Waite: It will be three and a half years, with a full impact evaluation attached to it, and a real commitment from the department to work with those seven areas to really understand that learning journey and what is going on for those families, both stock and flow, in among the rest of the reforms that we are doing right across children’s social care.
I was just going to say as well that through the children’s social care things that we brought forward in the most recent Act, we will be requiring all local authorities to publish what their commitment is and what their expectations are on kinship. By publishing that, to answer the point just made, it will create some visibility, maybe even some competition, we hope, about what local authorities are doing for kinship carers in their area. There is huge geographical variability in those that are paying fees, providing additional support or providing access to the same things that some of their foster carers get. We hope that this will help us level up, at the same time as understanding the information that we receive through our kinship zones, to be in a position, in a couple of years or three years, when we get the information, to determine what the future looks like.
Chair: If any more information flows in that you think might be helpful to the committee in its inquiry, do follow up in writing afterwards. We are always pleased to hear from you.
I shall turn to my colleague Baroness Hamwee now, because Sally Hamwee will not mind me saying that she has had a lifelong commitment to the position of asylum-seeking children. It would be very good to hear from her on this, not least to hear something about unaccompanied children going missing in the system, because even prior to this committee’s inquiry, our former colleague on the committee, Doreen Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence, raised her concerns about this. The committee has had a lot of correspondence with Government Ministers about children going missing in the system, and I know that Baroness Hamwee wants to pursue this with you.
Q83 Baroness Hamwee: I was hoping that I might be able to ask a follow-up on the previous question, but if I need to keep us going, I will. Perhaps I can put it in writing later.
Three or four years ago, we were hearing quite a lot about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children going missing. I know that the numbers of those who went missing came down. There was concern about them being trafficked from hotels. I wonder whether you can tell us what the current position is in terms of numbers. Our papers say that about 78 are still missing. I think I had heard a number that was in the 40s, which is quite good, but do you know what the current position is and what is happening? What is being done to find those who are still missing?
Helen Waite: Children going missing, whether they are asylum-seeking children or any child, is obviously really serious. The expectation from the Government is that statutory safeguarding partners locally should have good plans in place to act quickly when a child goes missing and to work together to understand what the issues are for that child and what help and support need to go in for them and for the family around them. That is an absolute expectation, and again, hopefully we will see, riddled through our children’s social care reforms, that better grip to provide support and action when we need to step in and support a family, and to act if there are concerns about welfare.
In terms of the 2023 position, no unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are now held in hotels. That has now stopped, which we hope has in itself shut that risk down. That is not to say that there will not always continue to be risk, particularly to this set of children. We know that they are more vulnerable than others, because of the circumstances in which they arrive in the country and the lack of network they might have. The numbers I have is that during that period, 472 children went missing and 432 have now been located, which means that 40 have not been located.
Guidance was issued to police from the Home Office, to be shared with local networks, to ensure that we continue to look for those children and that we can surface whether they have been found, and information can be updated to provide more reassurance. Of those 40 not located, two are under 18, so the rest are now over 18. Guidance was issued as well by the National Police Chiefs’ Council in 2023, working with the Home Office and the National Crime Agency, to really zoom in on missing migrant children. That guidance was specific to that group of children, recognising their unique circumstances. We continue to work really closely with the Home Office on the national transfer scheme that is in place, run through Kent, where children arrive in the country, so that we have a sensible, appropriate allocation of children to local authorities so that that is manageable, again supported by statutory guidance issued by the Department for Education.
Baroness Hamwee: I suppose that pursuing those who have trafficked children, and no doubt are still trying to, is a question for the Home Office, so I will not ask you to discuss that. But you mentioned transfers: are you confident that there are enough safeguards in the system now, including right at the border? I understand there are concerns that children may go missing immediately to avoid being questioned and so on. Procedures are being changed, but is that something you are involved with?
Helen Waite: As I say, we work closely with the Home Office, which runs that scheme. It is consistently reviewed. We look at the data every single month and we share that with the Minister every single month, so that we can see what the numbers look like and whether we have any particular concerns. The previous updated review of the national transfer scheme happened in 2025, so there is a constant commitment to learn lessons—what can we do better, how are we looking after these children and how are we engaging with local authorities? I speak to directors of children’s services on a weekly basis, and they will also feed back to us if they think there are particular challenges.
Chair: Thank you. I will make sure that what you have said about information is passed on to Baroness Lawrence, because it is very close to her heart. I shall turn now, if I may, to Alex Sobel, who wants to pursue a point which was raised with us by the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, during some very powerful evidence to the committee’s inquiry.
Q84 Alex Sobel: Thank you, Chair. The most difficult and tragic aspect of working in children’s social care is when there are cases of death due to deliberate injury, abuse or neglect. As the chair said, in December 2024 Rachel de Souza published a report setting out that children in need—which includes those in care, on a child protection plan or a children in need plan—make up a disproportionately large percentage of all child deaths, and they are most likely to have been caused by deliberate injury, abuse or neglect. What do you think are some of the reasons for this, and how do you believe we can change that reality for those children in need?
Josh MacAlister: Helen will say a bit more about the child in need cohort specifically. Something worth sharing at the outset is that every fortnight, as the Minister for Children and Families—the other person who receives it is the Secretary of State for Education—I receive a serious incident notification report, which is a fortnightly report of all child deaths, care leaver deaths and serious incidents across England, and it is always a harrowing read. Every fortnight in that report there are themes repeating of young people who have come to deliberate harm and young babies who have died in bed with their parents. Some of these are issues that the national panel has highlighted need to be addressed through practice but also public information. Also, a large number of young people have very poor underlying health. Eligibility for child in need support can encompass young people with disabilities. I am not saying this to suggest that our expectation should be lower, but in some respects, the very fact that a child has become a child in need may be because of life-limiting illnesses, so a sensitivity to looking at the data on this does matter. That is a cohort within the reports that we get, but it is certainly not the whole story.
Helen Waite: We welcome the report from the Children’s Commissioner, as the Minister said, keeping the spotlight on the fact that these things happen and ensuring that we are learning the lessons. Again, those lessons are woven in to the reforms that we are undertaking and the measures that we have brought forward in the recent Act. We also know that, until recently, when families received support, it was often late: the money for prevention had fallen out of the system. Something that came out of the work of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and its recommendations was that we absolutely needed to rebalance the system and put our efforts, focus and—importantly—funding into the front end of the system.
We needed to really think about what family help means, making sure that it is non-stigmatising, so that people feel able to access the support and that the support that is available is multidisciplinary and multi-agency, and that the support comes to the family, rather than the family having to wander around the services and try to find what they need. In doing that, we have broadened the number of children that will receive help under what we call Section 17, child in need status, so that broadens out to a bigger group of people.
We tried, when we designed the family help services and what we call the Families First Partnership programme, to really work with local authorities to co-design those services, with health and police and other partners in their localities, so that they are accessible and understand the needs of those communities, often operating out of Best Start Family Hubs. By creating that open door, we hope that we can create engagement with communities, to be able to reach the families that might need it. That said, we know that, as well as help, we sometimes need to dive in and forensically get hold of what is going on in that family and whether there is risk to a child. Again, through the Act, we have introduced multi-agency child protection teams and a legal expectation that police and health, with education, with the local authority, will have that forensic approach to understanding what risk is in that family and whether a child is unsafe and therefore action needs to happen and happen quickly.
Chair: Thank you. Another issue that Dame Rachel raised with us was the question of illegal accommodation and the money that often flows into the pockets of those who own that illegal accommodation. Three of my colleagues have questions to you, unsurprisingly, about this: Sir Desmond Swayne; Tom Gordon, Member of Parliament; and Lord Rook. We will start with Sir Desmond.
Q85 Sir Desmond Swayne: It was £350 million last year for 700 children in illegal accommodation, some of them camping, apparently, and in Airbnb accommodation. The commissioner said to us, “If I have one message for the Government and for Ofsted, it is, ‘700 children, sort it out’”. What are you going to do?
Josh MacAlister: I have a huge amount of respect for Rachel de Souza. If it were as easy as telling people to sort it out and solve it, it would have been sorted a long time ago. I hope that we will be able to get into some of the details of this as the conversation progresses. Issues around illegal children’s homes, profiteering, the dysfunction of the residential care system, taken together, are a reflection of the system failure, having cascaded through everything from: earlier help for families not being in place; child protection decisions being made, having not fully exhausted the family network as the option; care being progressed even if there is a special guardianship order, or a relative might be able to look after the child; and not being able to find a foster home because we do not have enough. That then means we have children in residential care and a bigger residential care system than we should have in this country because of all those things then leading to a shortage of homes. The answer to that problem is not one thing. It requires a complete system reset, which is why the Government’s actions are funded with £3 billion. It is why we have passed pretty comprehensive legislation and why there is a lot of action in this space. Helen referred to the implementation plan that we published a few weeks ago, which sets out all these features together.
So the best way in which we can solve this issue is by expanding the right types of care options as quickly as possible for children. That is my belief. For somewhere between a third and 40% of children who are in legal children’s homes, let alone those who are in illegal children’s homes, it says on their care plan they should and could be in a foster home. They are not in those homes because we do not have enough foster homes in this country, and it is much quicker and has better outcomes to expand fostering. We have a plan to create an extra 10,000 places in the fostering system by the end of this Parliament. We are taking a lot of action on it. I am happy to talk more in answer to another question. That would very quickly—immediately—reduce the pressures that are at the residential and crisis end of the system around the use of illegal provision and residential care. The shorter-term required action is to be really clear that it is illegal, and we should not be having areas use unregistered provision. That is against the law and should not happen.
In the Act passed a few weeks ago, we have taken powers that allow Ofsted to issue unlimited fines against those organisations running illegal children’s homes. Ofsted is stepping up its enforcement action and the prosecutions that it is able to take. I am going out with Ofsted in a couple of weeks to support a fresh wave of action on that front. It is definitely something we need to do. But if I am being completely candid, this is not a problem that will be solved through taking enforcement action alone at that end of the system. I could spend my entire time as Children’s Minister doing that and I am not sure it would get to the heart of the issue, which is that we have children in care who need loving, stable homes in family-based environments. There are not enough of those. The consequence has been an expansion of largely privately funded, private equity-backed residential care, which in itself does not have the space and provision needed, and which has then created this other sub part of the industry—illegal children’s homes. The problem is the escalator that is driving all that, and that is what needs to be reversed.
Chair: You mentioned Ofsted just now, and I know that my colleague Tom Gordon MP wants to press you further on that.
Q86 Tom Gordon: In 2024-25, we saw 88 supported accommodation providers receive 50 full inspections by Ofsted. Of those, only around half were assessed as providing consistently strong services. With that in mind, what steps are the Government taking to improve the quality of service delivery and oversight for supported accommodation for young people?
Josh MacAlister: Helen can say a little about the latest figures in a moment because I believe that was a snapshot before a full cycle had been completed and the actual figures are more encouraging. But the thing to say at the top is that I am concerned that we are using supported accommodation for some young people, where what they actually need is not a pathway at 16 or 17 to independence but a package of support beyond 18 for having a community and connection around them. They need interdependent accommodation options now—whether that is things like the House Project that does amazing work or Shared Lives Plus, which borrows the shared lives adult social care model of shared living, or supported lodgings where there is a bit more independence. It is not fostering but you have the sense that you are living in and with a community and a family. I speak to far too many care-experienced young people who are almost flung into a very independent and isolating experience of a flat. It may have a concierge service as part of it but young people who have gone through all that they have gone through often need so much more than that. It is quite telling.
I have asked Ashley John-Baptiste, who is care-experienced, and Clare Chamberlain, a former director of children’s services, to do a review looking at early deaths of care leavers. It is a recurring theme that lots of those deaths, those completed suicides, happen on or around their 18th birthday. Lots of them are young people who are in flats, isolated, lonely, by themselves. I am saying all that because even if all the Ofsted reports are glowing about supported accommodation, it is not the right option for the volume of children that we currently have using supported accommodation. It is an important feature of the system. I have also met young people who say, “I am 17. I do not want the level of oversight and involvement in my life that I’ve had up until now”. There needs to be space in the care system to have some of that flexibility, but its use should be purposeful and not a pressure valve on a system that is under pressure. By all means, jump back in and then Helen has the latest data for you.
Tom Gordon: My constituency is in North Yorkshire, the largest local authority in England. How do you see the way in which Ofsted and services should be tackled differently in rural areas where it is often quite difficult to get out, and there are often different provisions in different parts of the country?
Josh MacAlister: I represent a constituency in a very rural area, in Cumbria, probably not dissimilar in landmass to North Yorkshire. There are definitely distinctive features about the distance of care placements. Young people travel longer distances anyway to get to school and things like that. But if we are not careful, sometimes the rurality can be an excuse for covering up, frankly, just the poor quality of services. Incidentally, North Yorkshire is probably one of the best-performing children’s social care systems in the country. It does a phenomenal job. Its use of residential care, just as an example, is incredibly low because leaders—director after director in North Yorkshire—have taken the values view that it is better for children to live in families. They have driven that through everything that they have done. The number of children in residential care in North Yorkshire is in the single digits. It is very low and the outcomes for children in care are much better as a result.
Chair: It is also interesting to hear about best practice, which we did during our own visits, particularly in York, where we heard some of the things that you have just said to us reinforced.
Helen Waite: There is an excellent practice both in York and North Yorkshire, and we were working closely with both—so thank you. In terms of the latest data, by April 2026, 229 full inspection reports had happened on supported accommodation and 84.7% of those are now deemed to be meeting the standards. In terms of action afterwards where the standards are required to improve, they either need to improve or they exit. Providers that are deemed to be inconsistent will be reinspected, initially within six months if they are not good enough and then within 18 months if there is action that they need to take to improve. As Minister said, that is not acceptable. Everywhere should be good or better. There is the question about whether that is the right accommodation for that particular child. But those regulations came into force in 2023 and before that, there were no inspections and no regulation. By at least having the regulations in place, we have more eyes on. We understand better what is going on in the system. Frankly, it makes directors of children’s services a bit more acutely aware of what is going on, where they are placing their children and what that oversight looks like when it comes through in an Ofsted report.
Q87 Lord Rook: Minister, in 2022, in your Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, you positioned regional care co-operatives and I quote, as “able to address the current weaknesses in the system and establish organisations able to transform the care system for the future”. Do you still believe that is the case? I would be interested to know how that will improve services but also how it will better protect children’s human rights.
Josh MacAlister: Absolutely. There are a number of features of the care market. I am reluctant to use that phrase because it should not be a market but it is in reality how it functions at the moment. There are a number of things that need to be addressed. Having contended with options for whether, at one end of the spectrum, we make this a national system governed and run essentially from Whitehall, or whether we continue with 153 separate local authorities running care, I came down on the conclusion that there needed to be a pooling together of both expertise in the creation of homes, the recruitment and support for foster carers, and the commissioning of third sector or for-profit provision where that is deemed appropriate. Specialism is in the sense that individual local authorities will often be dealing with only a relatively small number of children with specific needs that care needs to create the provision for. When you are thinking as a council three, four or five years ahead about, for example, teenage girls who may have been sexually abused and the type of residential provision they may need, the numbers you are talking about are relatively low, and it is quite risky financially for a single council to go through the process of commissioning or building and creating that type of provision. That is just one example. There will be lots of different cohorts to think about. So this idea of clustering together, agglomerating the functions and spending power of groups of local authorities to create the specialist type of care that is needed and, frankly, to leverage control back off the private market, which is very effectively playing the 153 councils against one another at the moment, is essentially the design justification for regional care co-operatives.
Under the previous Government, the first two RCCs were established in the south-east and Greater Manchester combined authority areas. We are right on the cusp at the moment of selecting the next wave of RCCs and they will be, if I can use the phrase, full-fat RCCs. It has been quite a slow journey to get to where we are now. But these will be regional care co-operatives that pull together much more provision from the local authority level to the regional level and have much more proactive support from the department to succeed. It is my ambition that by the end of this year, at least half of local authorities in England will be in an RCC area, which would be a profound shift. That is what we are working towards. If we can get higher than that, that would be really welcome.
Further, it gives the Department for Education the ability to work through those mechanisms to fund and support innovation and new action, whether that is on foster carer recruitment or the allocation of capital funds to individual foster carers where they can expand their homes, creating new bedrooms or turning their garages into extra living spaces so they can take more children into their care. We will start funnelling all our efforts and energies through RCCs and the fostering hubs that sit with them, rather than what we have been doing for the past two decades, which is fairly distant transactional pots of money to local authorities here and there to fiddle around on the edges while the care system gets broken.
This is a much deeper set of changes that is going on at the moment. It does not get a huge amount of attention but bearing in mind that in most local authorities about a quarter of the spending is on children’s social care, and over half of that goes on care alone, my ambition is that most of that spending goes into RCCs in the future, so that clusters of local authorities can say, “We are spending hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Are we getting what we want from that spending?” The answer in most cases will be no. So how can they commission more smartly? How can they use contracts for future places to stimulate the creation of the third sector and charities to come forward and create really good forms of care. How can they use some of their own money to create that sort of provision as well?
Lord Rook: I welcome your resistance to using the language of the “market”, and that is a helpful response. Clearly, as this policy gets executed around the country, it will change the ecosystem. But for the foreseeable future, there will remain a market, whether we like it or not. I am interested to know what your plans are to deal with those companies that are making excessive profits caring for our children and sometimes not caring for them quite so well.
Josh MacAlister: The action that we are taking at the moment is to set up a market oversight mechanism at the Department for Education. We will look at the 40 largest providers and get much better transparency of information about the profit they are making and where money is going. Through the RCCs that already exist, we are getting much better data about who is charging what. That gives us the basis to perhaps look at what we have proposed to do as a Government in the SEND space, which would be price banding, and of course bringing forward legislation in this Session on SEND reforms.
We have also taken the power to profit-cap. That decision will be based on the information we get from the market oversight mechanism that we are setting up. But this, in a way, is a similar answer to the one I gave about the use of illegal homes. We could put all our efforts as a Government into that and trying to wrestle the bear and/or we could put our efforts into dramatically expanding fostering. This is why I keep coming back to that being such an essential part of the reforms. We have a fostering system in this country that has been in decline in terms of the number of foster carers. That is at the same time that we have seen a huge expansion of residential care, not because of some collective practice decision that that is better for children but because of the erosion of the agency and power of local authorities, and the expansion of the private sector in residential care. I find it deeply troubling. I wake up every morning as the Children’s Minister knowing that there are thousands of children in institutional residential care settings who could and should—many of them have told me they want to—be in a family-based environment.
So we have to—at pace, with moral urgency—find a way as a country of emulating even a fraction of what we did with the Homes for Ukraine scheme and expanding fostering. That means different families coming forward, including younger families, and being more human about how we think of fostering. I speak to foster carers who tell me they still cannot get permission without the sign-off of a social worker for getting their child a haircut, or for giving their child the ability to have an overnight stay with their school friends. It takes far too long to approve foster carers. The process puts loads of people off. A foster carer who was approved last month went to the final panel for the decision, and there were more than 12 people there to grill them. We have to change this, not in a technocratic way. There is a moral urgency to expand fostering, to deal with a lot of the issues that people are rightly animated about when it comes to residential care and illegal homes.
Chair: Thank you very much. That phrase about moral urgency is a takeaway phrase for all of us around the table but it returns to the point that Sir Desmond was making to you at the outset—the challenge that was given by the Children’s Commissioner. I notice you did not refer specifically to the figures that she gave us but, for the purposes of our report, Minister, are they accurate? Are we talking about around 700 children? Are we talking £350 million? It was suggested to us that one child could be literally costing thousands of pounds every week. For the purposes of the report, would you be able to give us some more information around that?
Josh MacAlister: There are two distinct but related issues here. On the numbers, we will write to you and provide the latest figures that the department considers to be accurate. Rachel de Souza and others have been right to bring greater attention to a group who are often left living in illegal settings—not exclusively, but where the costs are extremely high. These are children who are subject to a deprivation of liberty order from the courts. That number has gone up a lot in recent years. It is the highest it has ever been. This year, 1,300 children are subject to deprivation of liberty orders. I believe the average cost is £1 million per child or more. This is costing a huge amount of money. The outcomes are very poor. These are children where the courts and services have said, “We are so worried about this child and the risk they pose to themselves and the community, we do not know what to do”. Because we do not have the type of care options available, local authorities are often looking at setting up almost a pop-up home that is not registered provision, with four or five staff just to contain the child.
That is a failure of earlier intervention. It is a failure of professionals to be able to get around the family and support the parents, because often they are the ones saying, “We have been struggling with what to do with our teenager for years”. It is a failure of mental health services to step in with the intensive clinical services and support that are needed. So the department, working in partnership with the DHSC, is going to bring forward soon a new programme called Home Again, which will be specifically for this cohort of children, working with ICBs and regional care co-operatives, where we zoom in on that cohort, looking at not just the provision, the type of children’s home or fostering they might get, but who the professionals are around them and what can we do to support their birth family and provide a level of intense and long-term help that brings down that number of children on deprivation of liberty orders, gets them back home wherever possible, and avoids the kind of last-minute rush to using these pop-up homes, which should not be being used.
Chair: Thank you very much. That takes us suitably on to the next question, which is about literally the human rights of the child. Lord Murray wants to ask about that, and Baroness Chakrabarti has a question for you about adultification.
Q88 Lord Murray of Blidworth: Minister, obviously, the European Convention on Human Rights is incorporated into our domestic law by the Human Rights Act 1998. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is rather a different instrument. The UK is a state party. Clearly, it is not incorporated into any domestic statute. The Children’s Commissioner, in her October 2025 report, called The Children’s Plan: Vision for Care, which I am sure you are familiar with, suggests that “incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child would be a major step forward”. I have two questions for you. First, is that a workable suggestion? Secondly, what would the consequences be for the care system of having enforceable rights derived from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the domestic courts?
Josh MacAlister: The view of the UK Government is that we have incorporated the rights into domestic legislation and it does not require a stand-alone Act. I know that the Scottish Government have taken a different approach to this and other jurisdictions have as well. The focus of the Government, bearing in mind how long it took both Houses to resolve and pass the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill—15 months—rightly has been on how we action and deliver the change that will realise those rights, rather than, if I may refer to it in this way, symbolically incorporate a stand-alone piece of legislation into UK law.
The issues in children’s social care, by and large, with some exceptions—I will turn to those in a moment—are not the result of an absence of advocacy rights or access to challenge in the system because rights are not being met. There are lots of examples where we have passed legislation or statutory guidance that is ignored or not acted upon by a system that is struggling to achieve its goals. The issue is that we have not designed a system, resourced and inspected it, performance managed it, however you want to describe it, that is, from the get go, designed to meet the expectations that we have as a society for these children and families. So it could be parents who are in a violent relationship in a crowded, damp home where they have a mental health problem, not having their needs met, feeling like the first action they get from the state is a knock on the door regarding a child protection concern, where they are judged. They shut down and do not tell the social worker what they are really worried about and struggling with because of fear of their child being taken into care. The escalation that then comes through that resistance in the relationship and the lack of prior support means that the child is taken into care. The backlogs we have in the family justice system mean that that family does not get its hearing in court quickly enough. When a child goes into care, the options available mean that they are living hours away from that family member who loves them but, without support, cannot look after them. That means that their rights are not being met. That young person often then leaves care as a young adult without support, having had their education disrupted, with lots of early trauma that has not been resolved.
There are opportunities in everything that I have just described to challenge and have representations made within the system. The solution to fixing the system is not through providing more opportunities to do that, more process and more checks. It is through design, fixing the system so it does not do those things in the first place.
Lord Murray of Blidworth: So your answer to the first question would be that it is not a workable solution to incorporate the UN convention?
Josh MacAlister: I do not think it is necessary. We have incorporated the articles into UK law already through the 1989 Act, the Children’s and Social Work Act, the Children Wellbeing and Schools Act and other domestic legislation. But my broader answer is that the solution to fixing the system so that it delivers on those rights is in how it is designed, funded and reformed, rather than through how we create extra functions of checks and balances within it for those rights—with two exceptions.
First, for those children who are in residential settings and in the care system who are particularly vulnerable, I am not satisfied that the package of checks and balances that we have at the moment is efficient and works in the best interests of children. We have independent reviewing officers, Regulation 44 visitors who are paid by the children’s home to come and do an inspection, and we have advocacy, although few children actually get access to that advocacy and they need to opt in to it. Across those roles, there is a strong case for a more powerful, genuinely independent advocate for those children in those settings. I made recommendations about this in my review, and the Government are looking at ways in which we can test a new approach that gives more power to the voice of children in those settings because I am worried it is not being heard loudly enough at the moment.
The second exception is the ombudsman process, which is lengthy and somewhat outdated. I have said previously that I am open to looking at that process and modernising it so that family members can have better recourse when they are not satisfied with the quality of the service that they get.
Chair: Thank you. If you are able to share more information about what you are doing at the moment on advocacy or the role of the ombudsman, before we come to publish our report, we might be able to incorporate something in it. So, by all means, if your team are able to stay in touch with the committee, we would be open to hearing more about that. Let us turn to adultification. We are going to hear from Baroness Chakrabarti and then Mr Sobel.
Q89 Baroness Chakrabarti: Minister, apologies for my lateness and I have to leave early for an important human rights Statement after Questions in the Lords Chamber. I particularly welcome the priority that you are giving to fostering, with the small caveat that during this inquiry I have heard testimony from young people about the mixed experience of fostering and some very bad experiences in fostering, which just needs to be in the mix. More generally, in 2026, with the social and economic conditions, few of us would admire a human family that cut off their child at 18 and sent them out into the world with no more support of any kind. Yet, for the children who have the state as a real or sole parent, sadly, that can be what it feels like and is. I know that there have been experiments in Wales with some payments and so on, but we have heard about this cliff edge. It is not as in the old Madness song, “Welcome to the house of fun”, but something quite different. What are the Government doing? What will the Government do to smooth that transition? Sixteen or 18 may be the ages of majority but you cannot cut off a young person from various kinds of support at 18. What will the Government do about that?
Josh MacAlister: The first response is complete agreement about your observation on fostering. When I did the review, I heard from so many young people who told me some fairly appalling stories about their experience in foster care, as well as those whose lives had been completely transformed for the better as a result of it.
Because we are so limited in the fostering options that we sometimes have, I worry that occasionally decisions are made to place a child or a couple of brothers and sisters with a carer where people are not completely sure that that is the right fit because we do not have the choice available. If we were able to get that number up to the 10,000 extra places, that would be the reality. We would have a system where we could say, “We are not so sure that this family is right to be fostering”, and the pressure would go off needing to use them time and again. So I wholly agree.
In terms of the care cliff, the experience of turning 18, we have a care system that is driven more by a desire to manage the anxiety of professionals and adults who run it than to prioritise the thing that I believe should be the obsession, which is building enduring, loving relationships around these young people. What all too often happens is that a young person enters care and the length of time they stay in care can undermine and weaken the tribe that they need in their life to flourish. That might be schoolteachers. It might be their best friend or their best friend’s mum, who they go round to have tea with on a Wednesday night. It might be their sports coach. It might be the auntie who they always saw but then they had to move out of the area. That thinning of relationships means that at the point they reach 18, they are vulnerable to so many more things, whether that is homelessness, unemployment or poor mental health. At that point, we have a system that kicks in that tries to treat the symptoms, sometimes not very well, rather than rather than tackling the underlying cause, which is that lack of love, that lack of a sense of belonging in their life.
So tomorrow the Government are publishing the Enduring Relationships programme to reset many of the features of the care system and the leaving care system to actually put this—
Baroness Chakrabarti: Will that be funded?
Josh MacAlister: It will be funded. It is part of the £3 billion that we are already investing but there will be new money announced tomorrow and over the next few months. It is about saying, if relationships really matter, we need to measure what matters. At the moment, there is no measure in the care system of whether relationships are getting stronger or weaker. We need to include that. It is about saying that if we make that measure the focus, are we supporting practitioners to do the things that are necessary to build the tribe around the young people—not the lanyard-wearing class, not the professionals, not putting more professionals around them, but professionals doing everything they can to crowd around them the loving relationships that they need? There are amazing programmes out there that are doing that. I do not want those programmes to be pilots on the edge of the system. I want them to be the mainstream focus of the system, and we will set out measures tomorrow for how we will do that.
On accommodation options, there is the particular feature of those turning 16, 17 or 18 whereby they are left to live in flats by themselves, where out of the £3,000 starter home grant that the Government give them, which is good, they have to pay for a carpet, a dishwasher, a washing machine, for white goods and are often in areas where they do not have any connections. That is not good enough. So we will be changing an existing programme called Staying Close to focus instead on interdependent forms of living and accommodation options for care leavers, rather than the default push for independence.
All those things and more, taken together, put a clear objective at the centre of the care system, which exists to strengthen loving, enduring relationships. That is its purpose as a public service. At the moment, I cannot tell you that that is what we are doing. In fact, I believe it is not. In many cases, it is getting in the way of those relationships. So I am excited about this. It feels like we have reached a point as a country of real clarity on what we need care to do. It will not be an overnight change, but I accept entirely the premise of your question, the problem that you have described, and it is very important that at a fundamental level we change what care does so that it shifts those outcomes.
Chair: That was a very helpful reply. Thank you.
Q90 Alex Sobel: When we visited the care leavers’ hub at Archway in Leeds, there was a session where Lord Murray met two care-experienced young women who said basically that care should be a protected characteristic, and Lord Murray said that being in care was not immutable. Then they asked what immutable was and Lord Murray explained. One of them wants to be a barrister, so maybe she will arrive here some day as well. She said, “It is immutable to me. I cannot change the fact that I am care-experienced”. I know that Ministers do not always like to be quoted back things that they said in previous lives but in your review you said that “to tackle the stigma and discrimination many care leavers face in their day to day lives, the UK should be the first country in the world to recognise the care experience as a legally protected characteristic in equalities legislation”. So do you agree with those young women in Leeds—and yourself—and will the Government legislate to make care a protected characteristic?
Josh MacAlister: This is the problem, is it not, when you write lots of thoughts down on paper? We are all, in this room, grown-up enough to recognise the situation which is that that is, of course, my view. I am a member of the Government and being part of a team means you have to work as part of the team to get things done and get collective agreement. The Government’s view is that we are taking a whole range of action that achieves similar outcomes to the recommendation made by the MacAlister review but that is not the action we are taking at this moment in time to achieve those ends. I recognise that. I said at the beginning that the review made in the order of 80-plus recommendations, the biggest one being that we needed a £2.6 billion reset of the system over a five-year reform programme, with the money going in over four years. We are actually delivering a £3 billion reset of the children’s social care system over a three-year reform programme that we are now in the midst of. I am immensely proud that the Government, this Labour Government, are doing so much to make so many of those recommendations come good.
There are a number of recommendations I made in there that do not have the collective agreement of the Government. But we have been able to secure collective agreement on the extension of corporate parenting responsibilities beyond local authorities. That means that the NHS will become a corporate parent for children in care. It will have to think about them differently. It will not be able to continue saying, like lots of services do, “Well, we cannot treat this group differently because if we did that for them, we’d have to do it for everybody else”. No, these are children in the care of the state. You treat your own children differently and so you should, and we should, as a state, treat these children differently and give them lots of privileged access to things that many other children get access to. I hope in that answer I have not created some uncomfortable headline for myself.
Baroness Chakrabarti: They are sexier headlines, forgive me, Minister.
Chair: It was a very candid reply and it would be a sad day when we could not write anything down on paper because some day someone might quote it back. I would like to go to Mr Afzal Khan to talk about children who have been criminalised within the system.
Q91 Afzal Khan: Minister, in November 2025, the Government announced a review on the national protocol for reducing the unnecessary criminalisation of looked-after children and care leavers. Can you share any updates about their review and how it might tackle the criminalisation of children in care and care leavers?
Helen Waite: I will say a little about that. The existing protocols have been in place since 2018. The Deputy Prime Minister announced earlier this year that he wanted to review that protocol; importantly, to make sure that it also covered care leavers as well as care. The current protocol is only care. We know from the statistics that if you are a care lever, you are 10 times more likely to end up in prison. So it is an important and positive step that that protocol will be broadened out. The current review is working with all the people who currently operate within the protocol locally—youth offending teams, HMTCS, the Crown Prosecution Service, et cetera—with the intention that they should be building on what they are already doing. That protocol is in place to determine what action is taken locally to ensure that children are not unnecessarily brought into the criminal justice system. It is also important to say that that is there because we do not want children inappropriately to be brought in because they do not have the advocacy or support around them that other children have.
It is right that we do that, but I would also say that the numbers of children in care who have been brought into the justice system has declined over the last couple of years. We are seeing a downward trend, so some of the action from that protocol potentially is already taking effect, and the fact that the protocol will go even further is, we hope, a positive. The review is happening through the Ministry of Justice, so not our department, but the information we have is that it will report later this year.
Afzal Khan: On the issue of criminalisation, Minister, is 10 years old not far too young for the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales when you compare it with Scotland, where it is 12? The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommends 14.
Josh MacAlister: This is a policy area for the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office, but the Government’s position is that that is appropriate and that we are able to make good judgments in the criminal justice system about the cognitive ability and vulnerability of younger children.
Afzal Khan: Even with the disparity between Scotland and England and Wales?
Josh MacAlister: Yes, different ages are taken across jurisdictions across Europe, not just in the UK.
Q92 Chair: You all know that this is quite a controversial debate in both our Houses at the moment as well, so we will continue to watch that space. I shall move us on, if I may, to the position of children with disabilities inside the social care system. After that, we will turn to Mr Tom Gordon again, who is going to ask about the mechanisms that are in place for complaints.
This week, I received representations from the organisation Contact, the charity for families with disabled children, and it repeated the criticism made in the Law Commission’s report on disabled children’s social care, which said that provision is outdated, fragmented and discriminatory. Minister, in the Government’s interim response to the Law Commission’s report, you said, “The Government remains firmly committed to creating a simpler, more consistent and more effective framework for disabled children’s social care”. That is obviously something I strongly welcome. Can you tell us more about what that would actually mean in practice, and how the family help programme alone, which is not, of course, statutory, can protect children’s human rights?
Josh MacAlister: Well, much of family help is statutory. It covers Section 17 child in need support, which is a statutory requirement. We are looking at ways to extend Section 17 support to cover targeted early help.
Chair: What is not statutory in this?
Josh MacAlister: Targeted early help is not statutory at the moment. The requirement to offer early help services is a statutory requirement, but the form it takes is often fairly loose. Members will all be aware that the funding for that kind of support has gone down significantly in the last 14 years. The changes that we are making to family help through the Families First programme will make it easier for parents of children with disabilities to get support in a number of ways.
One of the experiences that I heard during the review, and that the organisation you quoted and those that contributed to the Government’s recent SEND reforms have repeated time and again, is that when they interact with children’s social care for the support they want for their families, it often feels as though the response they actually get is a child protection one. They feel they are being judged and assessed as to whether they are competent, rather than responding to the fact that, as a family that is not causing significant harm to their children, they have a child who has some extra needs and they need some extra support. What should be forthcoming is a non-stigmatising, very helpful and skilled team that is able to get around the family and help. That is often not the case, because money has flowed out of that part of the system and into residential care, largely—we spoke about that earlier.
The response to it is manifold. We are funding every area in the country with the Families First Partnership programme. That is £2.4 billion over the next three years, starting fully everywhere, in full funding, from the financial year that we are now in. That is to bolster family help services so that areas can hire the multidisciplinary teams, the practitioners they need to get around families and help them. Alongside that, we are making a structural change to the system which means that child protection decisions are made by a separate part of the service that works in partnership with family help, which is where multi-agency child protection teams come in. They need to have the most experienced practitioners who are able to appropriately focus the child protection system on areas where there is a risk of significant harm.
That set of changes will mean that for most families, 80% to 90% of whom should never be anywhere near the child protection system because they are not causing significant harm to their children, the response that they get will feel non-stigmatising and genuinely helpful. Where there are concerns about significant harm, the people making the decision about whether it meets the threshold will be the most experienced, and will judiciously use the powers in the Children Act to determine that. There is a lot more to say about this, but I think those two changes—the resources that we are putting into family help and the clarity that we are bringing to where the child protection net should fall—should make a big difference, and this comes across in our initial response to the Law Commission report.
Helen Waite: I add that the full response will come later this year, so that is in hand. I will also say something about the £2.4 billion that we are putting into the Families First programme. In advance of securing that full amount of money, we ran some pathfinders, initially with three local authorities and then with seven, and in doing that, we went on a journey of co-design. We really got alongside those local authorities and their partners to think about what the needs of the families in their area were. How were they travelling through the system? How was the support from health being fully integrated and co-ordinated by a family help practitioner, so that that practitioner can build a relationship with a family to really understand the needs of every family member and bring the support in around them?
What we saw is that there is obviously a huge amount of crossover between those families ordinarily accessing family help and families with a child with a disability. Through working with directors of children’s services in those 10 pathfinder areas, first, we required them to engage with children and families on that co-design journey, absolutely bringing to the table their voices as to what services they wanted, what difficulties they found with existing services, and to really think about whether there was any differences between those families who had a SEND child or a SEND need in their family. We have seen some absolutely fantastic practice. I have been to visit Wolverhampton a few times and it stands out for me as really being thoughtful about the needs of families with disabilities, how they travel through that system and how need may increase and decrease over time, but the services stay with them and ebb and flow as needed.
Chair: That is really helpful. In fact, best practice, as I said earlier, is one of the things the committee is very keen on looking at: we are not here just to criticise. If you could share with us more information about Wolverhampton, that is something we might include in our report. Perhaps we could have that in writing afterwards. Thank you.
All of us who either are or have been Members of Parliament in the House of Commons have had people come along to us who are bewildered, who have complaints about the system and who are passed from pillar to post. I think all of us at times have been very frustrated by the failure to respond adequately, and I know that Tom Gordon wants to pursue this point.
Q93 Tom Gordon: Absolutely: I would be surprised if anyone here has not had people come forward with complaints, seeking their help. When I was a local councillor previously, it was one of the things that people would often come to me with as well. With the best will in the world, sometimes things do go wrong. Obviously, there is the statutory complaints process, and local authorities will often have their own complaints processes for anything that does not fall under that statutory process, and people failing those processes can then take things to the likes of the ombudsman. Are you satisfied with the current complaints mechanisms? Are they effective to handle the issues that arise in the children’s social care system? If not, are there any planned reforms to make it easier, or simplify it, when it comes to the availability of remedies?
Josh MacAlister: The department met the LGSCO in March to start a conversation about whether the process can be improved. I am keen to progress that conversation and see some changes to that process because, as a constituency MP, I see many of those issues, as you have referenced. I think one of the cultural problems we have had for some time is that families are actually quite powerless in the children’s social care system.
I am keen that, particularly through family help changes, we find ways, through incentives and inspection, to make the voice of families more powerful. It is my view that children’s social care should be operating in a way that families respond to by saying, “That is a good-quality service. I needed help and I got it. I am grateful and I would recommend it to somebody”. We have had the view for some time that children’s social care is one of those services where people are just not going to like it, because it includes a child protection function that intervenes, very understandably, when families do not want services involved. I do not think we need to accept that, and I think the 80% to 90% of families where the support is consent-based should be getting a good experience. Through the national dashboard, the data that we collect in the department, we should be finding ways to get feedback at a system level from families—is the service they are getting of good quality? Are they satisfied? Did the help help?—and work back from that as an answer.
Even in child protection, I would expect the response from child protection services to be clear, humane and respectful, even when having very challenging and difficult conversations about significant harm. Like with some of the other answers I have given, we could put a lot of effort into improving the complaints process—we should do that, and you mentioned the ombudsman process in particular—but I also want the incentive in the system to be stronger, so you are judged as to whether you are a good service based on whether or not parents say you have helped.
Chair: Thank you very much. Of course, one thing people can do is complain to their individual Member of Parliament about instances, or to Select Committees such as this. We are going to take the opportunity, if we may, Minister, before we release you, to ask you one other question, which is not part of our inquiry but is part of our work, and indeed was part of the work that our predecessor Joint Committee on Human Rights first undertook. It concerns the position of children in forced adoption. Recently, we have been in touch with the Education Select Committee and have written a joint letter on behalf of both committees asking whether an apology is ever going to be made by government. This is not a criticism of this Government; it is something that has been around all Governments for a very long time. A lot of us have read the book by Karen Constantine, which you will know. My colleague, Dr Swallow, wants to pursue this point with you.
Q94 Peter Swallow: Minister, you will be aware that I also have the privilege of sitting on the Education Select Committee, and of course you gave evidence to us on this matter, following some really powerful testimonies from those who have experienced the trauma of forced adoption, both birth mothers and adult adoptees. The point that they all powerfully made was that an apology is badly needed and needed quickly. I know you will be sensitive to the reasons for that. As Lord Alton has said, that was building on work that the JCHR previously undertook. The question is very simple: the Government have not yet issued an apology and have not worked with survivors to develop and issue that apology. Why not?
Josh MacAlister: The case for an apology is very powerful. The state apologising is a moment, and it requires both the person in the position of authority to give it—which is not me, as I think I said to the Education Select Committee—and it also requires work to be undertaken with those survivors to ensure that the apology captures the nature of the harm that was done and communicates sensitively and fully the impact that it had on very many people. It is something that is being actively considered by the Government and it is my expectation that you will all know the outcome of that process very soon.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed. That is a very helpful reply. It falls to me now simply to thank you and Helen Waite for coming here today and for sharing your expertise with us. It is not always the case that committees such as this have a Minister who literally knows his subject inside-out and speaks with conviction and with enthusiasm and reminds us of the moral urgency, which was the phrase that you used, in making sure that we actually put some of these words into action. I hope that our committee report, when it is published, will be helpful to you in building on the things that you started in 2022 and which we see you now carrying out as a Minister of the Crown. Thank you very much indeed, Minister MacAlister, for being with us today. With those words, I now formally bring this session to a close. Order, order.
