Lords Committee calls for publication of government’s plans to help vulnerable children

The Public Services Committee in the House of Lords has called on the government to urgently publish implementation strategy to address plight of vulnerable children.

In a letter sent on the 27th October to the Minister for Schools and Childhood, Kelly Tolhurst MP, the House of Lords Public Services Committee has urged the Government to urgently make good on its commitment to publish an implementation strategy in response to the landmark MacAlister review of Children’s Social Care; and has also emphasised the significant role that early intervention must play in that response.

As well as requesting the Minister’s thoughts on early intervention, the letter raises the thorny issue of “perverse incentives” in the system of kinship care and asks for details of steps that will be taken to resolve it.

An independent review of Children’s Social Care, commissioned by the Government, and published in May 2022, found that the children’s social care system is “increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise”. The Committee’s November 2021 report, Children in crisis: the role of public services in overcoming child vulnerability, had similarly called on the Government to focus on early intervention to avoid traumatic, and expensive, crisis points for vulnerable children.

Baroness Armstrong, Chair of the Public Services Committee, said:

“We welcomed the initial, encouraging responses from the Government both to the report from our Committee and the subsequent McAlister review especially as the Government acknowledged that the recommendations made should be taken forward through an implementation strategy.

In the midst of challenging political times, making progress on early intervention for vulnerable children must be a top priority. Support to families that need it can avoid later, costly, crisis intervention. It should also be simpler, and practical, for family members to provide care to children outside of parental care (kinship care). Taking steps on these could prevent children from entering the care system.

The MacAlister review provides significant and ambitious proposals to improve outcomes for vulnerable children, and the Government must make good on their end of year deadline to provide an implementation strategy. As the McAlister review stresses ‘the time for a reset is now and there is not a moment to lose.’”