Josh MacAlister

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I thank all Members for their contributions to this important debate. Particular thanks go to my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I acknowledge the Select Committee’s inquiry and important work, on which I will say more in a moment. The report highlights a system under pressure, with rising demand, rising costs and inconsistent experiences, which requires urgent reform. Too many children are experiencing childhood without the essential components of connection and love, which should be the central obsession of the care system, but too often are not. As chair of the independent review of children’s social care in 2022, I called for a radical reset. Today, as Minister for Children and Families, I am determined to deliver it. I will respond to Members’ contributions before I respond to aspects of the Committee’s report. I join my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank) in congratulating the young people and organisations that have championed additional rights for care-experienced young people. I encourage people to get behind the Labour candidate in the Scottish parliamentary elections, who has so successfully championed those causes. I also acknowledge Terry Galloway’s work across the UK to champion and secure additional rights for care-experienced young people. I will continue to engage with Terry. I do not really have a choice, as Terry makes sure I engage with him—as does Chris Wild. I will follow with keen interest the development of local authorities adopting care experience as a protected characteristic. My hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) has direct experience of the care system. Indeed, one of the strengths of this Parliament is that we have so many parliamentarians who have a foot in some aspect of the care system as well as in the nation’s Parliament. Ahead of National Care Leavers Month in November, we are focused on ensuring that the Government celebrate role models for care-experienced young people. My hon. Friend is one of those role models. I am sure many care-experienced young people will look at what he does here in the UK Parliament and consider what they can go on to achieve themselves. I was struck by the clarity of Atlas, Mac, George and Ethan when I met them earlier this week. I thank my hon. Friend for bringing them into my office. They cut through a lot of the noise I hear as a Minister. Having had hundreds of conversations with care-experienced people over the years, I was again reminded of just what it is that we need to get on and deliver. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) for sharing his own experience, and I strongly associate myself with his remarks, particularly on the need for changes in the fostering and adoption system. I will come back to that later. I welcome the cross-party nature of this debate. I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine), and I will return to aspects of adoption support and the ASGSF, as she raised some important points. I also thank the Conservative spokesperson, the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), for the spirit in which he approaches this issue. I recognise the importance of the connection between the overall children’s social care system and how essential it is that we strengthen the country’s child protection arrangements. A major part of that is tackling harms outside of the home, child abuse, child sexual abuse, group-based violence and the rape gangs he mentioned. We need to recognise much more than we have in our debates in this Parliament that some of the underlying vulnerabilities of young girls stem from failings in our care system. I see far too many instances of young people who, when something has gone wrong, are sent to live in an institutional setting far away from people who know them and what their face looks like. Because of the vulnerable position that the care system puts them in, they are far too often left prey to violent and appalling criminals. We need to root that out at source. The Government’s overall response is the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is landmark legislation that we tabled within weeks of coming into government. There will be £2 billion of investment over this spending review period, with hundreds of millions being put into the Families First Partnership programme, which is all about building a multidisciplinary family help system. We are now shifting gear—and this responds directly to a point made by the Chair of the Select Committee—away from pathfinders and tests to whole-system programmes of change that take in the entire country. I am grateful to the Committee for its work, carefully considered recommendations and the in-depth evidence it took, particularly from those with direct experience. I will move briefly through the areas covered by the Committee’s recommendations. First, regarding the need for early intervention and intensive support, I reassure hon. Members that, at their centre, our reforms are about creating multidisciplinary family help teams in every corner of England. These will be staffed not simply by social workers working in a high-assessment, high-referral, paper-based, bureaucratic administration, which is the description that many social workers have of the current orthodoxy. This is about moving towards multidisciplinary, locally based, low-stigma and well-evidenced support for families when they need it, with a focus not only on child protection but on the vast majority of families who are not posing significant harm to their children but simply need support and help. To reassure Members, I should say that that is not being taken forward solely by the Department for Education, but is a cross-Government endeavour. In a couple of weeks, I will be taking other Ministers and senior officials from the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care to see one of the most successful examples of multidisciplinary family help teams and multi-agency child protection teams. I am meeting ministerial colleagues at the Ministry for Communities, Housing and Local Government next week to have explicit conversations about how we grip the money we are putting into family help reforms, so that we can get effective change through the system. This is not simply about handing money out to local authorities and expecting change to happen; it is about managing a nationwide programme of reform, with investment alongside it, and holding each other to account to deliver the change that families urgently need. Secondly, on foster care, I made the point—not as a Member of Parliament, but as someone who chaired the review, giving evidence to Select Committees in this place—that, within a year, we were able as a country to do a remarkable thing in creating 100,000 homes for Ukrainian families from a standing start. If we could do that, why was it not possible for us to do better than approving only 1,800 foster carers last year? That number is not even large enough to replace those who are retiring and leaving the vocation of fostering. I reassure members of the Committee and Members of this House that we will invest tens of millions of pounds very soon in major changes to the fostering system. Regional care co-operatives and fostering hubs will sit at the heart of those changes. I will come forward soon with a comprehensive set of measures to ensure that we boost the numbers of foster carers and the types of foster care that children need. It is a personal priority for me as the Children and Families Minister. On multi-agency child protection, the Government are taking forward bold structural changes to create multi-agency child protection teams in every local authority across the country, by fusing together different professionals from across the safeguarding partnerships so that, within one team, they can share the information they need and take joint expert action. The Government will put in place more guidance and extra support for the practitioners in those teams, because identifying significant harm, doing that with accuracy, taking action with pace once harm has been identified, and then holding other agencies to account for results is often what is missing in serious incidents where things go wrong. Included in that will be a sharp focus on harms outside the home—I make that point because the Chair of the Select Committee emphasised it. During the review, I saw too many times that agencies were coming together in lots of meetings and describing the same concerns, but were not taking action. Parents themselves were sometimes the ones crying out for help when their children were at risk outside the home. Our child protection framework has to work in keeping children safe from harms where those harms are not based on the family network. I will also be setting out details of a consultation on the child protection authority very soon, which will support some of these efforts.