Lord Storey (LD)

I shall speak to my noble friend Lady Tyler’s Amendments 101 and 102. Without embarrassing my noble friend, I thought that was a very powerful and emotional speech. For all of us in this Chamber, one of the most important things in our lives is the love of our family, our friends and relationships with other people. Those are the very things that children in care are often missing, so we should do all we can to ensure that they have the relevant relationships that they want. My noble friend Lady Tyler rightly said that we all need people in our lives to give us love, support and positive relationships—hear, hear. Children and young people in care indicate that it is relationships not just with professionals such as teachers and health professionals but with a range of other people who provide an important support network that they need. The quality of the relationships is much more important than the quantity. Research suggests that the presence of one stable and significant adult in the life of a young person is more important than multiple relationships. Social care cases across the UK reference the benefits of promoting the relationships of looked-after children. Those benefits will include: contributing to children’s resilience; promoting physical and mental well-being; minimising the likelihood of forming alternative, potentially dangerous relationships; helping with therapeutic work; and enhancing the stability of placements. But there are many barriers to ensuring such stable relationships. As a teacher, in case conferences I found time after time that—through no one’s fault but perhaps the fault of the system—one of the problems was that the social worker had moved on to another area of work. The child or young person had built up a relationship with the social worker, and the social worker, through no fault of their own, had to move on to another job, perhaps because of a shortage of social workers. That created real pressures. Changing social workers and professionals means that there is not the time to build the trust with young people that is so essential. Where young people are excluded from shaping contact plans, or where previous secure attachments have been broken through experience in care, children often struggle with trust issues with adults—something that is exacerbated by the constant changing of social workers, as I have said. On Amendment 102, an estimated 37% of looked-after children are separated from their siblings when they are placed into care. That is 20,000 children, as referenced by the Children’s Commissioner. For older children placed into semi-independent accommodation, 93% are separated from their siblings. Once separated, very little support to maintain relationships is provided. Lots of research by social workers and charities emphasises the importance of sibling relationships for looked-after children. Siblings provide the longest-lasting relationships, often extending through their lifetime. Contact with siblings can foster positive identity development, provide emotional support through feelings of connectivity through shared experiences, give priority to existing functional relationships and help support the emotional needs of looked-after children. When children are going through court cases to be removed from their parents, relations of direct contact are often prohibited between certain family members. This means that siblings cannot continue their relationship. Children are rarely consulted about such decisions. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says: “No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation”. In talking to children in care, they express that their relationship with their siblings is essential. The weight of responsibility for maintaining relationships with siblings is often placed on the looked-after person. That should not be the case.