Josh MacAlister

I thank the right hon. Member for his question, and for giving me the job of doing the independent review of children’s social care in the first place; I would like to think he made a good decision, but time will tell. The problem is that at the moment, the provision of support with kinship care is very uneven across the country, and it is quite hard to tell the variation in the rates of support that are offered from place to place. The same is true for allowances and fees for foster carers, so there is something to be done about transparency in the existing system. However, the kinship zones programme, which includes the allowance pilot—it has been supported by colleagues in the Treasury to ensure that it does not impact on universal credit, and it is genuinely non-means-tested—means that we will have a good-quality impact evaluation to assess in seven different areas what impact that has overall on the flow of families. Sometimes that flow is rightly away from the fostering system—which puts children into care even though they are living with relatives—and keeps them in the right place, which is with the people who already love them, supported through an SGO or a kinship child arrangement order. I am hopeful of the findings from that evaluation. If they are positive, I will be doing everything I can to ensure that it gets support across Government.