Legislation to reform children's social care has cleared its first parliamentary hurdle.
MPs approved the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill in principle yesterday (8 January 2024), following a debate in the House of Commons that saw a Conservative amendment that would have blocked the bill overwhelmingly defeated.
The bill will now be considered in detail, and likely amended, by a committee of MPs, before returning to the Commons to be further considered and voted upon, prior to consideration by the House of Lords.
With Labour's huge majority in the Commons and the Lords unlikely to hold up the legislation, the bill is likely to become law in the spring, though some measures will not be implemented until future years.
What's in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill?
- Family group decision making: councils considering making a court application for a care or supervision order would have to offer a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting to the child’s parents, to enable the child's family network to make a proposal about the child's welfare; this would not apply if the council judged it not in the child's best interests.
- Multi-agency child protection teams: safeguarding partners (councils, integrated care boards and the police) would be required to establish at least one multi-agency child protection team in their area, to support the relevant local authority deliver its child protection duties.
- Unique child identifier: a consistent identifier would be established for each child; this must be used when professionals process information about the child.
- Supporting care leavers: the bill would require each local authority to consider whether former relevant children (up to age 25) require “staying close support”, including help to find suitable accommodation, and where their welfare requires it, to offer that support.
- Regional care co-operatives: the government would be able to require two or more local authorities to co-operate in carrying out their functions around accommodating looked-after children, forming so-called regional care co-operatives.
- Deprivation of liberty: the bill provides for the authorisation of a child's deprivation of liberty in placements other than a secure children's home, to tackle the high numbers deprived of liberty outside any statutory framework currently.
- Regulating provider groups: Ofsted would gain the powers to require improvements from provider groups, responsible for multiple care settings, where there were grounds for cancelling the registration of any of their settings.
- Financial oversight regime: the bill would give the government the power to monitor the finances of significant providers of children's social care services to guard against the adverse effects of such providers failing.
- Limiting provider profits: the bill also provides for regulations to be made enabling the government to cap any profit made by a non-local authority registered children’s social care provider. The government may only make such regulations if satisfied that it is necessary to do so.
- Agency workers: the government would be able to regulate councils' use of agency workers in children's social care, for example, in relation to their pay and management.
- Children not in school: the bill would introduce registers of children not in school in each local authority area and require parents to gain local authority consent to home educate a child who is subject to a child protection enquiry, on a child protection plan or attending a special school.
'Biggest reform in a generation'
Introducing the bill, education secretary Bridget Phillipson said it was part of "the biggest reform of children's social care in a generation", though one inherited in significant part from its Conservative predecessor. As well as the measures in the bill, this includes:
- The England-wide rollout of the family help model in 2025-26. Family help involves merging targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams, designed to provide families in need with better, less stigmatising support, with a view to keeping families together.
- The trialling of financial allowances for some kinship carers in order to improve their ability to care for children.
- Rolling out regional fostering hubs to improve recruitment of foster carers and tackle existing shortages.
Prioritising keeping children with families
Phillipson said that the reforms were designed to help more children stay with their families, while improving the care system for those who could not, including by tackling provider profit levels.
"Our first priority is to keep children with their family wherever it is safe to do so, so the bill mandates all local authorities to offer family group decision making," Phillipson told MPs. "With the guidance of skilled professionals, families with children at risk of falling into care will be supported to build a plan that works for them. We are strengthening support for kinship care, so that vulnerable children can live with the people they know and trust, wherever that is possible.
"However, despite the best efforts of all involved, some children will inevitably need to enter care, so we must reform the system so that it works for them. I know that members right across this House share my outrage at the excessive and exploitative profit making that we have seen from some private providers. It is shameful, it is unacceptable, and it will end."
Conservative opposition
Shadow education secretary Laura Trott said the Conservatives was broadly supportive of the children's social care measures in the bill, though was opposed to its proposals to place academy schools under similar requirements to local authority schools.
Its defeated amendment also sought to require the establishment of a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation (CSE) by grooming gangs, an issue that has triggered a huge political row because of repeated attacks on the government over the issue by X owner Elon Musk.
Pledge to introduce mandatory reporting
While the government has not ruled out such an inquiry, it has instead announced the implementation of measures proposed by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which issued its final report in 2022. These comprise:
- Introducing mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse by those in positions of trust over children, with criminal, as well as professional, sanctions for a failure to do so.
- Creating a performance framework, with data collection requirements, for the police concerning CSA and CSE. This responds to IICSA's recommendation to introduce a core data set for the issue, to tackle what it found was a lack of reliable data, particularly in relation to CSE. The inquiry said the data set should include information on the characteristics of victims and alleged perpetrators of CSA/CSE, including age, sex and ethnicity, the factors that make children more vulnerable to abuse or exploitation and the settings in which abuse or exploitation occur.
- Legislating to make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences, a recommendation from IICSA's 2022 report on CSE by organised networks.
