Children in care should have a choice of where and with whom they live, Josh MacAlister has said.
The minister for children and families admitted that the objective was "alien" to the current care system and said it would require "lots of excess foster carers", in a speech to a fringe event at this week's Labour Party Conference.
He described the low level of foster care recruitment and the rapid growth in the children's home sector as "outrageous" and called for providers owned by private equity firms or foreign government's investment funds to be pushed out of the sector.
In an address setting out his stall for the role, three weeks after his appointment, MacAlister said it should be the "obsession" of the care system to ensure young people had "lifelong loving relationships". This echoes a key theme of his 2021-22 Independent Review of Children's Social Care, which forms the basis of the current reforms to children's social care.
The former Frontline chief executive also called for a significant increase in the use of family network support plans, providing extended families with the resources to help them look after children safely, as an alternative to them going into care.
New minister calls for children to be given placement choice
MacAlister made the comments at a conference fringe event organised by the charity Family Rights Group (FRG) earlier this week.
His call for children in care to be given a choice over where and with whom they live comes in the wake of years of concern about the insufficiency of suitable placements, leading to young people being sent far from home or otherwise accommodated in unsuitable settings that they would never have chosen.
He told the event: "This sounds so alien to the care system, but I want there to be choice for every child who comes into care over who they live with and where they live - not, there's one available placement that we're rushing around to find you on a Friday night."
'Lots of excess foster carers needed'
MacAlister said that meant having "lots of excess foster carers in the care system", some of whom would never look after a child, with others just looking after one child during their fostering career and then potentially supporting the family should they be reunified.
The number of mainstream - non-kinship - approved foster care households in England declined by 10% from 2021-24, to 33,745, with the number of approved places shrinking by 8%, to 70,465, over that time.
Barely half (51.2%) of children in care were in mainstream foster placements as of March 2024, down from 58% in 2019, with their number falling from 45,310 to 42,730 over the past five years, despite the overall growth in the care population during this time.
The falls reflect increasing challenges in recruiting carers, with there being 3,785 households who were newly approved during 2023-24 and still registered as of 31 March 2024, a similar number to the previous year but 18% down on that recorded in 2019-20.
Low level of foster care recruitment 'outrageous'
The government is spending £15m this year to complete the rollout of regional fostering recruitment hubs, designed to make the process of becoming a foster carer easier, with £25m committed from 2026-28 to recruit an additional 400 fostering households.
MacAlister's first visit after taking up his ministerial post was to one of the fostering recruitment hubs, Foster4, which covers Cheshire and Merseyside, and following the trip he said that the DfE would shortly be announcing more action on foster care recruitment and that it was a "top priority" for him.
At the FRG event, he said current levels of foster care recruitment were "outrageous", contrasting the declining number of approved households with the 15% rise, to 4,009, in the number of registered children's homes, in the year to March 2025.
Since 2020, there has been a 66% rise in the number of mainstream children's homes - excluding secure homes and dual registered residential special schools - and a 42% growth in the number of places registered in them. Meanwhile, the number of children placed in children's homes rose from 7,100 to 8,640, from 2020-24.
"So we are running a system that is seeing, every morning, more children waking up in an institutional children's home setting," MacAlister told the FRG fringe meeting. "That is outrageous. And it's because we are failing to find the foster homes and other types of care to look after these children."
Ambition to 'push out' private equity and sovereign wealth funds
He also said he wanted to "push out" of the sector private equity firms - which buy up providers using high levels of debt, which must then be serviced through their profits - and investment funds owned by foreign states (so-called sovereign wealth funds).
"They look at our care system that's broken and say, 'that's the best place for in the world for my money to get a return', which should not be happening."
A 2023 analysis of the largest 20 children’s home and fostering providers by Revolution Consulting found that six had owners based outside the UK, and ten had private equity involvement.
In its 2022 report on the children’s social care, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) warned that debt levels carried by private equity-backed companies increased the risks of providers failing, harming children, for whom councils would then have to find placements at short-notice.
To tackle this, the government plans to create a financial oversight regime for the providers whose failure would create the greater risk to children's care provision. At the same time, ministers are also legislating for the power to cap provider profits should other measures fail to reduce what it has described as "profiteering" by some sector organisations.
'Lifelong, loving relationships should be care system's obsession'
MacAlister said he wanted the promotion of "lifelong, loving relationships" for children and young people to be the "obsession" of the care system, driving the practice of looked-after children's and leaving care teams.
The minister restated a key recommendation from his care review, that no young person should leave care without at least two loving relationships.
He said that while it was important for local authorities to ensure young care leavers had housing in place, exemptions from council tax and educational opportunities, there were "second order" issues compared to whether they had "a group of people who can give them a sense of belonging and identity and self-worth".
"That should be the main thing that everybody is asking about [in relation to the care system]," he added.
Schemes to promote this include FRG's Lifelong Links scheme, under which a practitioner works with a young person to identify important people in their lives and then co-ordinates a family group conference to develop a plan to promote lifelong relationships for them.
Positive early evidence for befriending schemes
An initial evaluation of these, published last week, found that there had been an increase in the number of connections and relationships young people had with important people to them, compared with the time before the schemes started, and that they reported positive outcomes in relation to connectedness, identity and wellbeing.
However, researchers said the benefits could not necessarily be attributed to the programmes and that further evaluations would seek to provide further evidence of their impact.
DfE to develop measure of care system's impact on relationships
The report, by research company Ecorys and children's charity Coram, suggested the DfE commit funding to similar schemes for multiple years to avoid the disruption of short-term funding for care experienced children and young people.
MacAlister told the fringe event he was committed to developing a way of measuring the care system's impact on young people's relationships.
"It won't be easy, but there are examples from around the world of this set of measures being used and I want to see that come into our system."
Aside from improvements to the care system, MacAlister also stressed his commitment to reducing the numbers of children going into care by improving support for families and kinship carers.
Preventing children from going into care
This is one of the key aims of the DfE's Families First Partnership (FFP) programme, which started this year and through which councils are expected to set up multidisciplinary family help services and roll out the use of family group decision making (FGDM) meetings.
The former are designed to provide families with multiple and complex needs with early, non-stigmatising and relationship-based support from a consistent lead practitioner and a wider team, to help them keep their children with them, where safe to do so.
FGDM meetings involve wider family networks coming together to develop plans to promote the safeguarding and welfare of children in contact with targeted early help or social care. While the DfE wants to see these used at all stages of families' involvement, councils will be under a duty to offer these to families at the pre-proceedings stage, to enable them to come up with alternatives to children going into care.
'Shifting hundreds of millions from care system to family support'
Guidance on the FFP programme states that, where a plan has been agreed with a family following an FGDM meeting, councils and their partners should "commit to providing the support contained in the plan to the family network".
In his speech to the conference fringe event, MacAlister said he wanted to see "much more work done to make greater use" of such family network support plans, on the basis that investing in them would prevent much greater costs to councils further down the line.
"In the care review, we calculated we could probably shift hundreds of millions of pounds out of the care system and into those family network plans."
He gave the example of a woman being given financial and other types of support, including family therapy, to look after her grandchild, enabling the child to retain contact, safely, with their mother.
"We actually spend £10,000, £20,000 a year for 18 years of childhood supporting that, as an alternative to spending £50,000 or £60,000, and potentially more in residential care, by that child relying on the care system."
The FFP programme, under which councils and their partners must also set up multi-agency child protection teams, is backed by £541.5m government funding this year, with a further at least £523.5m earmarked for each of the next three years.
