The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)

I thank the noble Lords opposite for their welcome of the Government’s proposals around enduring relationships. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, is right that the independent review of children’s social care was commissioned by the last Government and led by my honourable friend Josh MacAlister, the Minister for Children and Families. In that, he called for a relentless focus on enabling care-experienced children to build lifelong relationships, creating a tribe around them as they grow up. That is the basis of the enduring relationships strategy that we have published. It is framed around our central ambition to allow every child in care to maintain the loving, supportive and trusting relationships that they need to thrive. It builds on our recent work to legislate for social care reform, to reset how the system operates and to give our partners clarity on delivery. In November 2024, the Government published Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, which laid the foundations for reform. We followed through with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which many of us spent many happy long hours discussing as it wended its way through this House—I am sure we will have a suitably chunky Bill for the noble Baroness to enjoy in this Session. This has enabled the most significant overhaul of children’s social care in a generation, and these changes are supported by over £3 billion in funding across programmes, capital investment and implementation. Most recently, on 21 May, we published our implementation plan to support local partners to deliver these reforms. This work has laid the foundations. Now, as noble Lords have recognised, we must move to the full implementation phase to bring about a real and tangible difference to children’s outcomes. A key focus of our reforms, as identified by Josh MacAlister in his review, is to help care-experienced children build long-lasting and loving relationships. Every young person needs relationships like these to form a strong sense of identity and to reach adulthood with confidence. The evidence is clear, as the noble Baroness identified, that just one stable, trusted and loving relationship can transform a child’s life. It can improve their resilience, health, education and long-term outcomes. Yet too often, the system does the opposite of facilitating the permanency that allows these relationships to grow. In our strategy, we are setting out a new focus for children’s social care. We know that many social workers, carers and professionals work extremely hard to support young people to build and sustain trusted relationships, but often this depends on individual commitment rather than reliable structures. Therefore, to deliver this, our reforms will be aligned to four key outcomes. First, children’s social work must prioritise relationships, not just as an add-on but as the core purpose of practice—the lens through which every professional judgment is made. This is at the heart of the families first partnership programme, where mandatory family group decision-making will bring children’s families and wider networks into their care decisions at an earlier stage. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, quite rightly raised the issue of kinship care. We are strengthening kinship care. Every local authority will be required to publish a local kinship offer, giving families the clarity and support they need. We have committed £126 million to pilot seven kinship zones, including family network support packages, which will tackle the barriers that can prevent families stepping in to support their kin. That work and investment will give us the basis on which to develop, as noble Lords have said, this important provision for young people. We have also strengthened local authorities’ duties to promote sibling contact for children in care, and the noble Lord is right about that. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, made a strong case for this during the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. At every point in proceedings, we must ask not only whether a child is safe but who matters to this child and how we can enable and nourish those relationships. Secondly, we must create stable homes for children in care that support long-term relationships. That is why we are investing £88 million and working in partnership with fostering hubs and the sector to reform fostering and recruit 10,000 new foster carers. That will, in response to the noble Baroness’s question, involve reviewing standards, ensuring national consistency so that the rules in place support a child’s safety rather than limit the ability of foster carers to come into the system. Far fewer children should be in residential care and only when it is the best place to meet their current needs. Creating a route back to family life should be the focus of children’s care. Too often, the right residential care is not available, leading to child placement according to what is available rather than what is needed. That is why, to improve the planning and commissioning of residential care places, we are rolling out regional care co-operatives. We will have more to say about where those co-operatives will be and what support will be available for them in the near future. Thirdly, we must support children’s transition to adulthood through supporting their long-term relationships. We are strengthening support for care-experienced young people so that they can move to independent living, supported by strong, trusted relationships. Through Staying Put and Staying Close, we are ensuring continuity of care and connection. Through strengthened corporate parenting, we are ensuring that public services step forward to support young people who have left care. Many children currently in care have already lost their most important relationships. That is why we are launching a national sprint to roll out family finding services in every local authority. Finally, as noble Lords have said, we must embed the primacy of children’s long-term relationships through accountability and inspection. Care must be judged not on placement numbers or types but on children’s experience of them. We will have more to say soon about the measures that we will use for recognising success here. We are already working with local authorities and with Foundations, the What Works Centre for children’s social care, to determine how we will measure success here. We will announce more about that soon. Long-term relationships must be the standard by which the system judges success, so we will introduce an enduring relationships measure to gauge improvement and provide accountability. That also means that we will work with Ofsted to build enduring relationships into inspection criteria. I welcome the support of noble Lords for these measures today. I look forward to working with noble Lords across the House as we make this fundamental difference to ensuring that all care-experienced children have not just the care and the safety that they need but the ability to keep, or rebuild, the enduring relationships that will be so important for their success in future life.