Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 140, in my name, and I thank my noble friend Lord Storey for adding his. It would extend the scope of Clause 14 to cover independent providers of supported accommodation. This is a really important group of amendments: the whole area of financial oversight and profit caps is incredibly important, and I suspect we are not all going to have exactly the same views on it. To put things into context, I welcome the raft of measures in the Bill to strengthen regulation and oversight of the care system, particularly the new provider oversight measures, Ofsted’s new power to fine providers of unregistered children’s homes, the financial oversight mechanism, and the profit cap. I firmly believe that these measures are welcome steps in the right direction in addressing some of the structural problems facing the care system and the sort of issues we have talked about so often in this Chamber: excessively high profit levels and rising care costs, at a time when local authorities are under huge financial pressure; the power imbalance between local authority commissioners and the largest private providers; the risk of sudden market exits due to high debt burdens from private equity-backed providers; and the growth in unregistered children’s homes, which we have already rightly focused on. That is a pretty toxic mix, and we really have to take the opportunity the Bill provides to do something about it. That is the big picture, but turning briefly to my amendment, as we have already heard, in the last six years there has been a very significant rise in the number of children in care aged 16 and 17 who are living in supported accommodation. It is important to be clear what we mean by supported accommodation. It is for young people, 16 and 17 year-olds, who may have already started to make some sort of transition to more independent living but who still require a fair degree of support. Many supported accommodation settings, such as children’s homes and foster homes, are run by private companies, many of which are very large. Local authorities currently have no way of knowing the debt level being carried by these large private companies and whether there is any risk of the company or provider failing financially—which, of course, could have drastic implications for the children living in these settings. So, given the significant and growing number of children living in supported accommodation, it is important that the new financial oversight measures in Clause 14 are extended to independent providers of supported accommodation as well as providers of children’s homes and fostering agencies. My amendment would achieve this, and in so doing would provide a consistent approach across the different care settings and a safeguard for local authorities, so they can identify and mitigate the risk of providers suddenly closing multiple supported accommodation settings. Finally, nine times out of 10, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and I agree on pretty much everything. We often support each other’s amendments and speak in the same debates, but I do not quite share her position on removing the profit motive altogether from children’s social care. Far more needs to be done to regulate it, but there is a place for the private sector in the children’s social care market; it just has to be properly regulated.