Contribution
The noble Lord may say that.
In my personal experience, there is no reason why local areas cannot put these arrangements in place. There have been circumstances with agencies in the past—I am sure this does not happen now—where police have gone into a situation of domestic violence, for example, and not even known that there were children hiding under the beds upstairs. That is the shocking result of a lack of joining up—of agencies not speaking to each other. Provisions in the Bill will go a long way to making sure that this becomes normal—a culture shift. It is normal to tell a school if one of its young people has a change of circumstances that could affect them in many different ways. I am delighted that Government Ministers are coming together, and we will await the outcome with interest.
Amendment 170 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, concerns the publication of a national capacity plan for children’s homes intended to highlight the issue of distance placements. I highlight the Government’s commitment to supporting local authorities to meet their sufficiency duty through a range of reforms that will boost system capacity and better meet the needs of children in their areas. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, and others added to the discussions on this amendment. While the amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual national capacity plan, it would also take significant local authority resource to collect, collate and submit additional information on an annual basis to inform the plan, all at a time when their resources for children’s services are rightly focused on implementing reforms to actively improve services. A range of complex contributing factors across the children’s social care system can lead to the use of distance placements, which the Government are addressing through reforms in the Bill and investment in fostering kinship care and local authority children’s homes. Paramount in these decisions is the issue of risk to the safety of the young person. Sadly, in some cases, distance is a necessary factor when considering placements.
Finally, Amendment 134B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, seeks to introduce a duty on the Secretary of State to carry out a review on the distinction in the planning regime between children’s homes and domestic dwelling-houses, and to consider whether it should be removed. I would like to reassure the noble Baroness that the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government continue to work together in this important area. In the last two years it has been clarified via a joint Written Ministerial Statement that planning should not restrict the timely delivery of children’s homes, and we have changed the National Planning Policy Framework to make it explicit that planning authorities must plan to meet the needs of looked-after children.
As we said in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, we will continue to make progress on further changes that support the delivery of children’s homes where they are needed. This includes data collection and an analysis to translate the data and work out how it needs to be used, which is often overlooked, I am sad to say. In my experience of dealing with an application for a small home in the ward I used to represent, we went out for intensive consultation with the residents living around the home. I am very pleased to say that, in the end, after some scepticism and reservation, when we went through it carefully and they met the people running the home and understood how many children would be there, it went through and was an enormous success. They came and asked how they could help to support the children in the home through their local connections. So there are reasons to be optimistic, but there is a great deal to do, which is why, as I have said before, we have this Bill before us. I thank everyone for their comments but, for the reasons I have outlined in these remarks, I hope the noble Lords will not press the amendments in their names.