Alistair Strathern

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship. Mrs Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) on securing what we all acknowledge is a really important debate. Like a lot of people in the Chamber today, one of my biggest privileges before coming to this space was serving as a corporate parent on the local authority of the place I lived at the time. Although “corporate parent” can feel like quite a stale and bureaucratic term, it is actually one of the most deeply important and human parts of a councillor’s role, making sure they are there for, championing and supporting every young person who, for whatever reason—whatever has happened to them in their life—now finds themself in their local authority’s care. There is nothing more moving or devastating than to speak to some of those young people, to see their inspiring resilience in the face of traumas that lots of people here never have to even contemplate happening to themselves, and to know the very real ways in which the current system is continuing to let them down and fail them. We know that kinship placements, strong supportive fostering placements and adoptive placements are strongly associated with the best outcomes for young people in care, providing the best support for them to make the best start in life and later to thrive, but far too often the system is not set up to facilitate that. Young people often end up—at great cost to all of us and our local authorities—in unproductive and sometimes deeply cold private placements.