Josh MacAlister

Josh MacAlister

Labour — Whitehaven and Workington

Speaking in the House of Commons on 4 June 2026

Debate

Children’s Social Care: Enduring Relationships Strategy

Contribution

That is a great question, because it gets to the heart of how the system behaves when it finds a parent who is perhaps struggling with a substance misuse problem, or is in a violent relationship, or has mental health needs and cannot continue to look after the child by themselves, but could be an important part of that child’s life for the foreseeable future, and when there are relatives saying, “We can help. We can be part of the solution. We do not need this child to go into the care system.” There needs to be a mechanism to fund those solutions, and that is what family network support packages do. The £2.4 billion that I referred to is available to fund those family network support packages. In the kinship zones, we are expecting much higher use of those FNSPs so that we can properly evaluate things. When I looked at the differences in the care population around the UK in the review, it was striking that the strength of civil society in Northern Ireland was one of the reasons, perhaps—this is just an idea—why communities were better able to come together around those children who might be at risk of going into care.

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