Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Committee (5th Day)

15:39:00

Clause 10: Accommodation of looked after children: regional co-operation arrangements

Amendment 107D

Moved by

107D: Clause 10, page 14, line 32, at end insert— “(2A) Regional co-operation arrangements must include the local integrated care board in their development, delivery and governance.”Member’s explanatory statement The amendment aims to highlight the need to include health agencies in the regional cooperation arrangements.

My Lords, I open this important group of amendments on regional care co-operatives with my Amendment 107D. We will hear later about the stresses and pressures on local authorities in relation to the cost of children’s homes. The establishment of regional care co-operatives was a key recommendation of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, carried out by the now honourable Member for Whitehaven and Workington, Josh MacAlister. I pay tribute to Mr MacAlister MP for his ground-breaking work on this review. He put a huge amount of effort into it and needs to be applauded for that. I look forward to hearing about the amendments tabled by other noble Lords, who I am sure are keen to raise important issues relating to the RCCs. My amendment is very straightforward. It seeks to clarify the role of the independent care boards—ICBs—in the RCC arrangements. In my experience as an MP for a number of years, visiting many care homes and talking to many practitioners in this field, every child in residential care will almost certainly have significant mental health needs and, very often, physical health needs as well. The Minister will be aware of the serious concerns that have been expressed by a number of organisations that the reform of ICBs will lead to changes in the funding allocations for their safeguarding role. This could compromise and undermine their effectiveness. My amendment makes it crystal clear that ICBs must be included in the “development, delivery and governance” of the RCC arrangements. The Minister, a very experienced former Cabinet Minister, will be aware of the concerns expressed by the National Network of Designated Healthcare Professionals—NNDHP—for children and NHS England regarding the health workforce’s ability to implement the relevant clauses in the Bill. In March, NHSE reported that “all current caseload reviews suggest that child safeguarding expertise is already fully committed and at full capacity”. I very much hope that the Minister will take that on board because these concerns have intensified following recent announcements. As well as the abolition of NHS England, ICBs will be required to reduce operating costs by 50%. Furthermore, all NHS providers are being asked to reduce corporate costs by the same percentage. I support that in principle, as I am sure everyone on these Benches does. We want to see an elimination of waste, more effective management, and efficiencies. I have a very simple question for the Minister. Surely safeguarding is a front-line service. It typically sits within the corporate services of most NHS provider trusts. Furthermore, the Minister will be aware that the model ICB blueprint asks ICBs to test and explore options to streamline and transfer some of their safeguarding activities away from the boards. So will these changes in accountability require secondary legislation in the future? Why, when this is such an important front-line service and competence, is it so often categorised as part of corporate services? It makes no sense to me. I raise another point. We have been talking more about local authorities, particularly county councils and putting more responsibilities into their hands. Many of us find that to be a positive move. But there is a great deal of change going on in local government at the moment. The Minister will be aware, because I mentioned this the other day in a debate, that in Norfolk, for example, there is a debate going on about local government re-organisation. There is every possibility that we will go from the current county council and eight districts to one unitary, with Norfolk County Council carrying out all the competences across the districts, or maybe to two or three unitaries across Norfolk. That is the pattern in many other counties. I suggest to the Minister that although reorganisation will make savings in the longer run and drive efficiencies and cost reductions, in the short term there will be a lot of disruption and dislocation, as well as redundancies of key staff. What measures will the Government take to make sure that these local authorities really can cope with the changes that are coming very quickly down the track, many of which are contained in the Bill? I put it to the Minister that because of these changes in the Bill, there may well be implications for staffing across the different safeguarding bodies. I very much hope that the Minister will address these concerns and reassure the Committee and the NNDHP that there will be the capacity and funding for the ICBs to be full participants in the RCCs. I beg to move.

15:45:00

My Lords, my Amendments 108 to 116 focus on the distance from home of placements for children in care, and the impact of the move to regional care co-operatives. I welcome the move to regional care arrangements of this kind, as well as the significant increase in investment in children’s social care in last week’s spending review. Put together, they offer a real opportunity to power up on the delivery and implementation of the MacAlister recommendations for children’s social care, with real improvements to the experience of and outcomes for children in care. The distance from home that some children in care have been placed in has, as many noble Lords will know, been an issue for some time. Local authorities across the country have faced increasing challenges in delivering sufficiency of places near to home in recent years, due to increasing demand, rising costs, cuts to early-intervention funding, and workforce challenges, leading to what can be seen only as a broken care market. The national issue has had a significant impact on the experiences and outcomes of children in care, who too often are moved to homes that are unable to meet all their needs or moved far away from those who matter most to them, due to a shortage of appropriate options. Between 2013 and 2024, the number of children in care living more than 20 miles from home increased by 66%, compared with a 23% increase in the overall number of children in care during the same period. In 2024, more than a fifth of all children in care and almost half of those living in residential care were living more than 20 miles from home. Research from the charity Become has highlighted that children living in private children’s homes were two and a half times more likely to be living such a distance from their community than children living in other residential care settings. We have talked before about the negative impact of being separated from communities, support networks, friends, families and schools, and what that can bring—exacerbating adversity in a whole range of different issues. The move to regional care co-operatives is, as I said, welcome, and is an opportunity for better planning. But there is a risk that without effective mitigation, the proposal to regionalise the commissioning and delivery of homes for children in care could lead to more children being moved far from their support networks in communities but within the region. I know that that is not what anyone wants. That is why I have tabled these amendments, which, taken together, would provide an important mitigation to stop children in care increasingly being moved far away from their support networks but still within the region. I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister and her team would consider these changes to provide children in care the surety that they can stay close to those with whom they have relationships and to support networks when that it is in their best interests.

My Lords, following on from that, I too wish to support those amendments directed specifically at ensuring placement of children close to home, both in this group and the next. Quite simply, state intervention in the life of a family should, if possible, make things better, not worse. Recent figures from the Department for Education show that one in 10 looked-after children experience three or more placements in a year; this is described as “high placement instability”. There is already in Section 22C of the Children Act an important requirement to accommodate children close to home. It is recognised that such proximity increases the prospects of a child being later returned home. When a child is accommodated away from home and from parents, and away from a familiar area, some parents become unable or unwilling to provide any further support and they disengage, or at least they give up on active engagement. There will remain a need for interaction between the local authority and parents. Parents retain parental responsibility and, even if they do not do so, they should be encouraged to remain involved and see themselves as able to remain involved. That is likely to be reassuring for the child and meet that child’s continuing attachment needs. However, parents and wider family members cannot be expected to maintain involvement unless the placement of the child is reasonably accessible to them. Phone and digital contact are no real substitute. I suspect the Minister might say that the obligation under Section 22C is already referred to in the Bill, but I would support the suggestion that it should be emphasised and reinforced by these amendments. I also support Amendment 117B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, which would ensure that the Bill does not detract from the duty in Section 22C(7) of the Children Act.

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 116B, 117B, 117C and 117D in this group, which are tabled in my name. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and to the noble Lords who have already spoken. I agree wholeheartedly with what has been said so far. The intention behind these amendments is to address the issues of attachment, disruption and trauma, which can ensue from housing children too far from home—noble Lords who have already spoken have addressed this. We know that we can minimise the damage and effects of being housed too far away by proximity. I have therefore tabled amendments in a probing manner to invite the Minister to reflect on whether there is some way in which these concerns, as expressed in Committee today, could be accommodated in this legislation. Amendment 116B essentially proposes a duty to collect sufficiency data. It would address the basic idea that you cannot plan what you do not measure. We know from the MacAlister review and from many other organisations which support RCCs—as, indeed I do—that there are concerns about current provision already, and that we need to make sure there is strategic visibility, so that RCCs working together know how many foster carers, residential beds and emergency places are truly needed and where investment is most urgent. In the independent review commissioned by the last Government, the now Labour MP Josh MacAlister was very clear that data should drive the planning. I urge the Government Benches to consider that viewpoint. This amendment would give legislative force to his recommendation. It would allow readily available data to be collected so that we could target spending wisely, empower the local leaders who are responsible for assigning the places and avoid waste. Amendment 117C just builds on the previous proposal requiring the RCCs to publish an annual sufficiency report. It is a basic governance issue of transparency and accountability, which would allow the local authorities, providers, Parliament and, most importantly, children and their families, to know whether the system is, in fact, working. Placement decisions, as we know because there has been a lot of coverage of it, are currently shaped by what is available at the time. Many of us in this House have concerns about supply being driven by various commercial providers. The amendment would help to reverse some of that by making the data transparent at a ready time. It would also ensure that the RCCs are open and responsive to their stakeholders, the local authorities, and to Ofsted, ensuring that young people and foster carers were accommodated rather than the commercial providers. This public report would really just amount to good governance. Amendment 117C involves the use of the sufficiency data to inform the commissioning and it follows on from the previous provisions. I have said already that I support the amendments proposed by fellow noble Lords, and these proposals invite the Government to consider in what way the best accommodation of this data collection takes place. This amendment would ensure that placement commissioning was rooted in real need, not market convenience. It would help RCCs to invest early in local provision and reduce the reliance—which worries all of us—on expensive private options, which have been driving children to be accommodated out of their local areas, with all the concerns that the noble Lord, Lord Meston, has raised in relation to that. The amendment also aligns with the ambition of all parties in this House for relational and stable care for children, rather than a race to the bottom in pricing or availability. Amendment 117D would put the focus on the outcomes for children. I emphasise this amendment because it ties in with the stated objectives of this Bill, whose title includes “Children’s Wellbeing”. It cannot be right that RCCs will be introduced without the requirement to collate data showing whether or not they are working for the very children that they are intended to provide for. It connects two critical questions: did we have enough places, and did we make a difference? As noble Lords know, the children’s care system is too often evaluated on the inputs—how many beds, how many carers—but what really matters, what is really going to make a difference, is whether those children are safe, settled and supported to thrive, hopefully in proximity to their own families or kinship that may be available to them. The amendment would allow the RCCs to link their planning with real-world results, helping the Government and local leaders to learn what works so that there can be continuous improvement. I believe the amendments are proportionate and sensible measures that meet the stated purpose of the Bill, and I beg the Government’s support.

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 117 in my name, and I thank my noble friend Lady Walmsley, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for adding their names to it. This is an important group. Many times in discussions on the Bill, and more generally, we have talked about the dangers of children being placed far away from home. That is why this is such a critical group. I strongly support everything that has been said so far and the amendments that have been tabled specifically with regard to trying to prevent children from being placed far from home when there are any other viable alternatives. The intention of my amendment is quite simple: it is to ensure that those making decisions affecting children and young people seek and take into account their wishes and feelings. I shall say a couple of words of general context. I welcome the Government’s ambition to be a child-centred Government, and I support the important steps taken in the Bill to strengthen systems that intend to do that and to keep children safe, but there is more that the Bill could do to be truly child centred. At the moment, it needs to do more to embed real consideration of children’s wishes and feelings—hence my amendment, which was discussed on an earlier occasion, about children’s wishes and feelings being respected in relation to family group decision-making. In 1991, the UK ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In so doing, we recognised that children have a distinct set of rights that uniquely value all that it means to be a child. In short, it recognises that children are expert in their own lives. As we know, in cases of abuse and neglect, giving children the opportunity to express their views is a critical factor and lever in building trust and keeping children safe.

16:00:00

Amendment 117 would require the Secretary of State to seek to ascertain the views of children with expertise of the care system when making regulations that relate to accommodation for children in care, particularly in the context of these regional care co-operatives that we are talking about. I know that many local authorities recognise the value of consulting care-experienced children and young people when making strategic decisions about local provision, and that the Government have already taken welcome steps to engage with children as they think about their future policies, but surely it cannot be right that children and young people’s voices are consigned to

“such other persons … the Secretary of State considers appropriate”.

As those most directly affected, surely children and young people should be named in the Bill. That is what this is about, and I think it is quite a modest ask. I really hope that the Government will look sympathetically on this amendment. Every child should be confident that they will be involved in decisions that affect their lives.

My Lords, at Second Reading I said that, while I welcomed the Bill, it was a cause of great sadness that the late Baroness Massey of Darwen was not there to participate. It is a cause of sadness that, had she been here, she would have had her name on this amendment rather than me, with much more power and justification behind it. At the time of her untimely death, she was working with a group of us in this House to try to find ways of having the voices of children heard more regularly in the day-to-day work of this House, particularly in some of our committees. That is work that is yet to be completed, and we must carry it on. The Josh MacAlister review showed us that, while we have a plethora of different organisations trying to look after the needs of the young people we are talking about in a variety of different ways, with an enormous amount of data about what they are and are not doing, the fact that we had to have a large-scale review to collate and understand this data—which required tremendous resources but which was carried out very effectively—and that we spent as much time understanding what it was not telling us as what it was telling us, is in itself telling. I particularly support the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Cash. In trying to improve a situation that has developed over the last 20 or 30 years, and which at the moment is causing local government across this country huge difficulties because of the statutory duties that we have heaped upon it in legislation after legislation, with the best of intent, we have a system that is not working. We have an opportunity in the Bill to learn from the lessons of trying to do the right thing but clearly going about it in the wrong way, and to do it in a much better way. I particularly took the points that, first, children should be listened to, and, secondly, that, in trying to provide the right services for these young people, we should be driven by the demands they require to make their lives better, rather than by the inadequacies of the current range of supply, which is hugely varied in both its coverage and the type of delivery, and the good or bad effect of that delivery. For all those reasons, I support this group of amendments. I implore the Government, and all of us, to learn from the lessons of the past and try to do better in the future.

My Lords, I support Amendment 117, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Tyler and others. The decision on where a child is cared for in the system is crucial to the child’s life, so we should listen to children with care experience. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, it may affect their ability to keep contact with wider family and friends, and other factors were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Meston. It will make a difference even to their ability to keep in contact with a teacher who they might trust—that can be quite important in children’s lives. It can otherwise be very disruptive to their education if they are put a long way from where they previously went to school. As we know, children with care experience usually have less of a chance to get good educational qualifications than other children, and that has an effect on their whole-life chances. As my noble friend says, it cannot be left to the Secretary of State under the title of “such other persons”. The category of those most directly affected by these regulations must be named in the Bill, and it is vital that children have the confidence that they will be heard. The slogan, “Nothing about us without us”, is very apt in this context.

Since we are forming a set for Amendment 117, I will stand up now, having attached my name to it, and will focus chiefly on that amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has stolen my starting line with her final line: nothing about us without us. I first used that phrase in a debate on rather similar amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill. I think that your Lordships’ House and the country are increasingly coming to realise that we have to listen to children far more. In this context, I will cite an interesting case from the past week, where a 14 year-old who had been tricked by his parents into going to Ghana took his parents to court. The Court of Appeal ruled that he should have the right to come back to Britain, as he wanted to do. That is an interesting court case that shows how, generally, our legal system is starting to listen more and more to children. It is important that our legislation does so and that that is in the Bill. This raises issues that I will come back to on a later group, but the basic point about the regional care co-operatives is that they will take decision-making further away from local authorities. People have been studying this, and the care review evidence group, for example, said that “care will need to be taken that these structural reforms do not dilute local accountability mechanisms”. Making sure that children are actually heard in the making of regulations is in some way a counterbalance to the risk that quite a lot of experts have identified in taking this approach.

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 116A, 117A and 119ZA in my name. As we have heard, the proposals to create regional care co-operatives came from the independent review into children’s social care. In principle, we support them. However, we are aware that a number of regions are already using informal co-operation agreements, so I question whether we need more legislation to make this happen. Maybe the Minister can comment on this when she sums up. The Secretary of State is taking the power to direct areas to create one of three models of co-operation, but it is important that we understand how this will work in practice, because, presumably, if areas are not adopting this approach voluntarily, there would be significant barriers and potentially good reasons for doing so. Can the Minister clarify those few points when she closes? The Local Government Association has stated its support for the narrower requirements of a regional care co-operative, as being used by the pathfinder areas —namely, on “strategic planning and placements for children with more complex needs”. However, the Bill states in proposed new Section 22J(3)(c) that regional care co-operatives will be responsible for commissioning “the provision of accommodation for children being looked after by the local authority”. There is a real worry about mission creep and confusion over responsibilities, which I have tried to address through my Amendment 119ZA, as has my noble friend Lady Cash through her Amendment 117B. Will the Minister comment on the concern expressed by organisations such as Barnardo’s that this model will squeeze out some of the smaller providers, increasing even further the dependence on independent providers in the private sector, many of whom, as we know, have a combination of very high profitability and high debts? Can the Minister confirm the start date for the pathfinders, and when there will be publicly available evidence from them, either via the evaluation or from any other data? Does the department have an idea that it can publicly share of the likely size of each of the areas? The two pilot sites, Greater Manchester and the south-east, are both very large, with about 3 million people within them. Is that the size the Government expect to be typical? Amendment 116A would remove a power equivalent to a Henry VIII power from the Bill. Clause 10(2) defines strategic accommodation functions as “(a) assessing current and future requirements for the accommodation of children being looked after by the local authority, (b) developing and publishing strategies for meeting those requirements, (c) commissioning the provision of accommodation for children being looked after by the local authority, (d) recruiting prospective local authority foster parents and supporting local authority foster parents, (e) developing, or facilitating the development of, new provision for the accommodation of children being looked after by the local authority, and (f) any other functions relating to a local authority’s duties under section 22A, 22C or 22G that are specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State”. New Section 22J(3)(f) gives the Secretary of State a power akin to a Henry VIII power to add to the above list of strategic accommodation functions by regulations. In justifying the power, the department goes on to say: “The Department has sought to achieve the right balance between confining the scope of the delegated powers through primary provisions and leaving necessary matters of detail to regulations. This is the first time the Secretary of State has sought to bring local authorities together to collaborate in the delivery of their strategic accommodation functions. Regional co-operation arrangements (known as Regional Care Co-operatives) … are currently being tested via pathfinders … in two local authority regions. When the pathfinders are evaluated, the Secretary of State may need to prescribe additional functions. There may also be a need for additional functions to be specified in the future depending on the needs of a particular area and to keep pace with the changing children’s social care placements market. The power has been limited to one which enables additional functions to be added to the list in the future. It does not enable the Secretary of State to amend or remove any of the functions already listed in the clause and so it is not a Henry VIII power”. My amendment is a probing amendment, as this feels like another example of the Government introducing legislation before they are quite ready. Why not wait until the pathfinders are evaluated to be clear what additional strategic functions might be needed? Maybe the Minister can inform the House if the department is aware of any gaps in the current strategic powers that have been identified in areas using this approach already. It would be good to understand whether the Government have in mind any particular powers that might be needed, or whether this is a belt and braces, “just in case” kind of power, without having anything particular in mind. My Amendment 117A seeks to ensure that Ofsted inspects regional care co-operatives. It is obviously important that we have an independent assessment of their effectiveness and impact and whether they are achieving the Government’s goals—and, perhaps even more importantly, the needs of children. There may be other ways of achieving this and, if so, it would be helpful to understand what those are. More specifically, my amendment aims to bring a spotlight on the use of unregistered provision. My understanding of the regional care co-operative approach is that it will anticipate and commission capacity in a more effective, and cost-effective, way. One outcome of this would be a drop in or complete removal of the use of unregistered provision, something I know local authorities are keen to see, as are noble many Lords across the House.

16:15:00

My Amendment 119ZA seeks to test the Government’s appetite for a more radical overhaul of the way children’s homes places are commissioned. I acknowledge that the drafting is almost certainly far from perfect, but I am sure the Minister will understand the spirit of my amendment. At its heart, it seeks to align the interests of children with the interests of the provider, and indeed the commissioner, which is not the case today—and that is the root of many of the problems we face. I know that an approach like this has already been adopted in at least one local authority, so I have some confidence that it can work in practice.

I will not go through every point in the list of principles, but it is worth clarifying a few of them. First, the point in proposed new paragraph (a)—

“only commission whole homes, not individual places”—

is key. If a provider knows that their revenue is secure, they can accept a lower average cost per placement because, effectively, they will always have 100% utilisation of their capacity. I apologise for talking about accommodation for children in these terms. This also gives the local authority clarity on their costs. It removes the incentive for the provider to hang on for financial reasons to a child, who might be ready to leave the home. This feels like a fundamental shift: it avoids what might be described as price-gouging when local authorities need a placement in a hurry.

My amendment also builds in clarity of responsibility regarding the placement resting with the home local authority, and it is clear about the need for children to be placed close to home when it is safe to do so. That obviously has widespread support across the House. It builds in capacity for the sadly inevitable emergency placements, and embeds provision, including speech and language and clinical psychology provision, as well as putting an onus on the provider to remain connected to children after they move on. It creates flexibility to require the provider to offer edge-of-care support as an alternative to residential provision.

Unless we can align the incentive for providers with what is best for children, and in a way that gives visibility and control back to the local authority, I fear that regional care co-operatives will not deliver on their promise. The Minister may say that this level prescription is not needed in the Bill, but if so and she agrees with these principles, can she set out how the Government plan to implement them and hold to account local authorities that do not follow this good practice?

Amendments 108 to 116, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, rightly emphasise the importance of children being placed as close as possible to their roots, relationships and communities. We know that, when this does not happen, it is more distressing for children, and it is more likely that a placement will break down and a child will go missing. This problem is particularly acute for children in London and other major cities, where property costs make creating more provision prohibitive.

Amendments 116B and 117B to 117D in the name of my noble friend Lady Cash would bring clarity and rigour to all the partners in the regional care co-operative while ensuring that it always acts in the best interests of the child, in terms of retaining important relationships in their lives. As my noble friend set out so ably, the combination of a duty to collect sufficiency data, to publish it, to use it and to have a focus on outcomes seems the minimum that we should expect in these situations.

I absolutely agree with Amendment 117 from the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, about the importance of the voice of the child—a theme I think we will return to several times on the clauses we debate today.

Finally, I absolutely support my noble friend Lord Bellingham’s Amendment 107D and the very important concerns he raised about how the restructuring of integrated care boards will impact their capacity to contribute fully to regional care co-operatives, which is so vital for their success.

My Lords, before I turn to the amendments in the first group, I want to be clear, as many noble Lords have recognised, that the measures in Clause 10, together with those that we will come to later in Clauses 12 to 18, are part of an overarching, broad-ranging strategy to fix the market for placements for looked-after children. The review conducted by my honourable friend Josh MacAlister, which several noble Lords have quite rightly referenced, and the report from the Competition and Markets Authority were explicit that the placement market is dysfunctional and that some private providers are making excessive profits from placements for our most vulnerable children. We are now taking concerted action to address this, including through measures in the Bill, but also through a wide range of non-legislative measures, to deliver a broader range of providers in the market so that local authorities have more options when finding the right place for children in their care. These must be the right homes in the right parts of the country, so that children do not have to move miles from their communities and support networks, as many noble Lords have referenced in this debate. These homes must be delivered at a sustainable cost to the taxpayer by providers no longer making excessive profits. A failure to address the dysfunction in the system has led to many of the issues that noble Lords are rightly identifying today, which they hope and expect us to respond to—not only, I suspect, in these clauses relating to regional care co-operatives but more broadly in the action that we are taking to fix that dysfunctional market. Amendments 108 to 116 in the name of my noble friend Lady Longfield seek to amend the definition of local authorities’ strategic accommodation functions as defined by this clause to ensure that it meets the current and future needs of looked-after children. This and my noble friend’s contribution exactly get to the crux of the problems we are trying to solve here. She is correct, as I have already suggested, about the issues raised by the lack of sufficiency caused by the current placement market for children. Children being too far away from home; too big cost pressures; inappropriate placements: those are all things that this provision and the other elements of our strategy are aimed at addressing. Amendment 119ZA from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, sets out the principles that local authorities that have formed a regional care co-operative, following a direction from the Secretary of State, would have to adhere to when commissioning accommodation for looked-after children. She is right that the provisions in this clause relate to the direction powers for the Secretary of State in circumstances either where local authorities have refused to take part in regional arrangements or perhaps where regional arrangements have been set up and local authorities might not have managed to be part of any of those arrangements. I certainly think it is already the case that authorities are trying to bring themselves together into regional arrangements, precisely to be able to solve some of the issues that we have outlined. The Government completely agree that there must be sufficient accommodation for all children who are looked after by their local authority and that in future this accommodation must meet their needs and provide appropriate support. It should allow them to live as close to home as possible, where that is in their interests. That is precisely the reason for trying to ensure that the market operates more effectively. But it is also the case that there are existing legal requirements on local authorities to the effect of some of the understandable calls that have been made in these amendments and by other noble Lords. Local authorities already have a general statutory duty under Section 22G of the Children Act 1989 to take such steps, as far as is reasonably practicable, to ensure that there is sufficient accommodation within their area to meet the needs of looked-after children. They are also under a duty, via Sections 22 and 22C of the same Act, to provide accommodation that meets the needs of looked-after children by ensuring it is consistent with the child’s welfare and has due consideration to the child’s age and understanding, as well as their wishes and feelings. Finally, they have a statutory duty under Section 22C(8)(a) and (9) of the 1989 Act to ensure they provide accommodation that allows children to live near their home, unless it is inconsistent with the child’s welfare or not reasonably practicable. Those duties will all remain. The problem is not that there is no legal recognition of these issues and the need for them to be taken into consideration in providing sufficient accommodation and placements for children. It is that the market has prevented local authorities being able to fulfil their statutory requirements. That is why regional care co-operatives, which in the legislation are called “regional co-operation arrangements”, will assist local authorities in meeting these duties, including by analysing what accommodation is needed for children across the region, publishing sufficiency strategies, recruiting and supporting foster parents and commissioning care places, as recommended by both the review conducted by Josh MacAlister and the report from the Competition and Markets Authority. They will support local authorities to carry out their strategic accommodation functions but, as I have suggested, these functions are not new and are already in law, including the duty to take steps, as reasonably practicable, to ensure sufficient accommodation for looked-after children. Any decision-making responsibility for where individual children are placed, however, will continue to rest with local authorities. Amendment 116A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would prevent the Secretary of State adding to a local authority’s strategic accommodation functions for regional care co-operatives. I would like to reassure the noble Baroness of the safeguards in place regarding the power to add to the list of strategic accommodation functions to be exercised through regional care co-operatives. I slightly lost track of whether she was accusing the Government of currently having a Henry VIII power within the legislation— I will go back and check.

I was aware that my remarks may not have been clear that, in the department’s own memorandum, it describes this power as being akin to a Henry VIII power.

I will certainly take advice and look carefully at that, but I assure the Committee that the appropriate committee, the name of which escapes me, has of course looked in detail at the delegated provisions within the legislation and we will be responding to the committee and covering off any issues that might be of the sort of concern that the noble Baroness raises. I hope to provide some further reassurance on that. First, the scope of regulations is limited to those local authority functions covered by specific sections of the Children Act 1989, namely Section 22A, the duty to accommodate looked-after children; Section 22C, how looked-after children should be accommodated by the local authority; and Section 22G, the duty to ensure sufficient accommodation for looked-after children.

16:30:00

The Secretary of State cannot add via regulations to strategic accommodation functions without first consulting local authorities and other appropriate persons. Further, if regulations were to be made, this would be done via the affirmative procedure, providing opportunity for further scrutiny. This is far from the fears that some might have had about an open-ended ability to be able to add to the scope, but, in these circumstances, it probably makes sense to be able—subject to the consultation and the affirmative procedure—to change those regulations in the future, not least dependent on the evaluation of the pathfinders, which I will come to a bit later.

Amendment 116B, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, would require local authorities within regional care co-operatives to assess sufficiency of placements in their area and publish and implement a plan to address this. As I explained earlier, regional care co-operatives will assist local authorities precisely by analysing future accommodation needs for looked-after children across the region, by publishing sufficiency strategies, by recruiting foster parents and by commissioning care places, as set out in this clause. I take her point about data: later, I will come to a bit more detail about what data the department is collecting and what data local authorities will be expected to collect and use to inform the regional care co-operatives.

As I said earlier, individual local authorities will retain their statutory duty to take steps to ensure there is sufficient accommodation for looked-after children within their area, so far as is reasonably practicable. There are already legal requirements for local authorities to promote co-operation with relevant partners, including health, in relation to improving children’s well-being. Further, there are also already duties on local authorities to promote contact between looked-after children and their relatives, including siblings, friends and other connected people, unless it is not reasonably practicable or consistent with their welfare.

Amendment 117, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and supported by other noble Lords, seeks to ensure that children who are or have been looked after are consulted by the Secretary of State before making regulations under this provision. I wholly understand why the noble Baroness and other noble Lords wanted to ensure that the consistent theme in this Bill, about listening to the voices of children and young people, is considered in relation to these provisions. I think we can all agree that, when young people’s perspectives are heard, decision-making is more meaningful and effective, whether that is in relation to strategic decision-making or, absolutely crucially, in relation to decisions being made about that child and where they might be placed.

This clause already requires the Secretary of State to consult with local authorities and, as the noble Baroness pointed out, the rather legal term

“such other persons … the Secretary of State considers appropriate”

before making regulations under this provision. That can include previously looked-after children. I commit to the noble Baroness that we will ensure that children’s and young people’s voices are heard as part of the consultation that will precede the making of regulations under this provision; it is a very fair expectation that that should happen.

As I have suggested, local authorities, which retain the responsibility for individual children here, must ascertain the wishes and feelings of a looked-after child before making a decision in relation to them. Of course, the challenge here is to make sure that, in ascertaining those wishes, it is not just about the very narrow options for placement—in some cases, there are practically no options for placement—that the current market has driven us to. It is about enabling a real choice for local authorities, children and young people about the range of appropriate placements that might be available for them. We are therefore confident that the views of children in care and previously looked-after children are already considered under this provision and, as I say, I will commit to ensuring that we make that a reality in the consultation.

Amendment 117A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would require Ofsted to include regional care co-operatives within local authority inspections. It is important to be clear, as I have already said at least twice, that local authorities already have legal responsibility for strategic accommodation functions for looked-after children. Regional care co-operatives will be there to bring those local authorities with their legal functions together for the purpose of providing a more strategic and strong potentially countervailing power to enable the current market dysfunction to be addressed, for the benefit of children and the sufficiency of the placements that are available to them.

But local authorities will ultimately remain accountable for those functions. That is why Ofsted already inspects local authority children’s services and these functions. As legal and practical responsibilities remain with the local authorities, we do not believe it is necessary for Ofsted to inspect regional care co-operatives separately. There is an issue here about how we make inspection as appropriate and focused as possible, without reverting to simply seeing inspection as a way to cover all the issues or all the organisations that might be delivering or assisting the delivery of functions. The Government believe that this is an appropriate and focused way to ensure that Ofsted has a view and an ability to inspect the extent to which these functions are being carried out, without duplicating that through another inspection of regional care co-operatives.

Registered provision is inspected separately by Ofsted. In line with its enforcement policy, Ofsted will issue warning letters to providers operating unlawfully and can also visit services that it believes are operating without registration. But, by its nature, unregistered provision cannot be inspected. There are other provisions in the Bill and other things that the Government are doing to help to overcome that particular issue, but there is appropriate coverage for provision by Ofsted in the Bill.

Amendment 117B, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, states that the introduction of regional care co-operatives does not affect local authorities’ duties under the Children Act 1989. I just want to reassure the noble Baroness and reiterate again that nothing in this measure alters the duties placed on local authorities in that Act. As I said earlier, the role of regional care co-operatives is about assisting local authorities by analysing future accommodation needs, publishing sufficiency strategies, recruiting and supporting foster parents and commissioning care places for looked-after children.

Regional care co-operatives will have no role in deciding on placements for individual children. That duty will continue to be on local authorities, and this measure would not allow this placement duty to be given to regional care co-operatives via regulations in the future.

Amendments 117C and 117D, also tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, would require local authorities within regional care co-operatives to report various data to the Secretary of State at least quarterly, and would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual summary of that data and to share it with Ofsted and the Competition and Markets Authority. As I suggested earlier—and to reassure the noble Baroness, I hope—there are important existing requirements on local authorities to report data on looked-after children. Those will be unaffected by the legislation.

I take the noble Baroness’s point about the need to improve data collection, but the department already collects a variety of data relating to looked-after children. That includes: numbers of children looked after by local authorities; their characteristics, including gender, age and ethnicity; the reasons why they are looked after; their legal status; the type of placement that they are in; the distance they are placed from home; and their placement’s stability. On the important point about outcomes, which I agree with her about, the department also publishes data on their offending rates and health outcomes, data on missing children and why children cease to be looked after, as well as data on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Of course, we also have data about the educational achievements of children in care.

I thank the Minister for giving way. I had actually looked at all the data currently collected, and I am grateful for the summary given to the Committee just now, but the amendments are directed at understanding where these children are going and how those specific placements work out, so that need can be assessed and planning for future need can be made. They are also directed specifically at the numbers of places and the children who go into those. I appreciate that burdening any party with more data collection is never attractive, but this is about children being taken from home and placed with strangers—which, even as an adult, does not bear thinking about—and waking in the morning and coming downstairs in a strange home. I really implore the Government to give some consideration to the basic humanity of this. It has cross-party support in this House and has been supported by numerous charities and by the Labour MP Josh MacAlister’s independent review. There is a consensus. What I am not hearing—and perhaps I am missing it—is why we would not seek this data so that we can improve the outcomes for these children.

I am always willing to allow noble Lords to intervene, but I was actually coming to another paragraph in my speaking note, which I hope addresses the point that the noble Baroness makes. The Government are not suggesting that the current analysis or collection of data is sufficient. That is why we intend to improve our data on placements, as we set out in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive. This will give local authorities better information, as she suggests, to assess need and the longer-term demand for placements and to support the delivery of the functions that we are asking regional care co-operatives to carry out under Clause 10. It will also be published on GOV.UK. I do not know whether that assures the noble Baroness that the Government do have some humanity but I take her point, and that is why I was coming to the reassurance—I hope—that the Government do want to ensure that we have better data, including being able to address the issues around outcomes that she identified. That is why we will also be bringing forward a national data programme that will address the gap in national and regional data, particularly around the underlying costs of children’s social care placements, but we will continue to think about how we can improve the data that is available to us.

16:45:00

Amendment 107D, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, would require local authorities which are directed to form a regional care co-operative to include local integrated care boards in the development, delivery and governance of those arrangements. I think the noble Lord was rather more concerned, in proposing his amendment, about the ongoing role of integrated care boards with respect to safeguarding, which I will come to in a moment.

In response to the specifics of the noble Lord’s amendment, the Government understand the importance of and need to include health partners in regional co-operation arrangements to improve looked-after children’s outcomes. Regional co-operation arrangements are arrangements between local authorities to assist with discharging their existing and specific functions towards looked-after children. Local authorities, as part of those regional co-operation arrangements, must continue to adhere to their duties.

There is an existing legal requirement. Section 10 of the Children Act 2004 specifies that local authorities must make arrangements to promote co-operation with relevant partners, including local integrated care boards, to improve the well-being of children within their areas, so far as is reasonably practicable, and that will apply to regional care co-operatives when carrying out functions on behalf of local authorities. So we think it is important that ICBs, in their important role with respect to safeguarding, are included in this way.

The noble Lord raised specific questions about the reorganisation of ICBs and safeguarding. ICBs play a crucial statutory role in safeguarding children, protecting vulnerable children from harm and supporting the welfare of all children through vital strategic and expert interventions. The Children Act 2004 sets out the role of ICBs, along with the police and local authorities, as statutory safeguarding partners. These partners are under a legal duty to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children in their area through multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. The statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, provides greater clarity on the roles, responsibilities and expectations of safeguarding arrangements.

In the changes that are being proposed for integrated care boards, there are no changes to this duty, and we are currently working across government and with sector organisations to understand the impact of the proposed health reforms. We will continue to work with local areas as they transform their children’s social care system, and with our colleagues in health to ensure that children’s interests, and safeguarding in particular, are maintained during those changes.

Finally, Amendment 506C, also in the name of the noble Lord, seeks to delay the commencement of these clauses until the Secretary of State has published an evaluation of the current regional care co-operative pathfinders. He also raised a point about local government reorganisation. I can assure the noble Lord—I think he raised this in a previous question as well—that my colleagues in the MHCLG assured me that important transitional arrangements are in place during local government reorganisation to enable key functions such as these with respect to children to continue. I also point out that the whole point about regional care co-operatives is that they aim to make things easier for local authorities by pooling some of the necessary arrangements.

On the point about evaluating the regional care co-operatives, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, the department has commissioned Ecorys UK to carry out an independent evaluation of the pathfinders. This is in partnership with the University of Oxford, Research in Practice and Dr Claire Baker. We are expecting the first full draft report in June—so now. The evaluation aim is to assess implementation and delivery of the regional care co-operative pathfinders and to assess their long-term impact on improving the commissioning and placements of children and their outcomes. Regular findings will be used to ensure that future investment is targeted correctly and that policies are developed in the most effective way. Regular outputs on findings will be published on GOV.UK, including annual reports. A final report will be published at the end of the evaluation, in March 2029. There will be regular learning and dissemination of findings to key stakeholders to feed into the development of the programme.

Given the nature of that evaluation, I am not convinced that waiting until the end of what will be a lengthy evaluation will be the most appropriate way to address the issues that currently face the care market—although it is the case that in Clause 66(4) we are clear that the Bill will come into force on such day as appointed by the Secretary of State made by regulations, and Clause 66(5) allows different commencement dates for different areas or different purposes. So there are already provisions in the Bill which would permit the Secretary of State to delay implementation of this clause on regional co-operation arrangements. However, I very much hope that that will not be necessary. As all noble Lords have outlined, there are considerable reasons why we need to improve the sufficiency of placements: we need to fix a market that is broken, and we need to do that in order to ensure that the children who so desperately need appropriate and sufficient placements are able to get them. I hope that, for all those reasons, noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.

My Lords, I apologise for not being present at the beginning of the discussion of these amendments. One issue that I was worried about many years ago, and I would be surprised if it did not happen still, is the fact that once a child moves from its local authority area to a local authority somewhere else, the sending local authority completely loses contact with anything that happens to the child—even though, as I understand it, it retains a certain responsibility. I wonder whether anything can be done to make sure that each local authority—that which the child comes from and that which the child goes to—is actually in touch and discussing what happens.

As usual, my friend the noble and learned Baroness makes an important point about the application of the law in this particular case. I think, as she suggests, that legal accountability and responsibility remains with the authority placing the child, but that does not mean that, in practical terms, there should not be engagement, and I would have thought that that would have been good practice. I also think that it is important that there is clarity about where the responsibility stays. That goes for the care co-operatives as well.

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for the extremely comprehensive response that she has given the Committee; it lasted a while but she covered a lot of ground on a lot of amendments. I certainly agree with what she had to say about the wider strategy of trying to fix the current placement market and, above all, making sure that the right home is in the right place for children around the country. She certainly gave me some comfort on the role of the RCCs and the way in which they are going to be able to help local authorities and work with them and take pressure off them. I am grateful that she mentioned that there is going to be work in progress to look at the consequences of the abolition of NHS England. On the role of the ICBs, I should have been aware of Section 10 of the Children Act 2004, because I was on that Bill committee many years ago and I remember the clauses about multi-agency safeguarding and the other bodies that are involved in this process. I am very grateful to the Minister. I am sure that colleagues here will look very carefully at what she said. If need be, I for one will want to discuss this further with her and will look carefully in more detail at her reply, and maybe come back to this on Report. In the meantime, I thank her and beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 107D withdrawn.

Amendments 108 to 117 not moved.

Amendment 117ZA had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.

Amendments 117A to 117D not moved.

Clause 10 agreed.

Amendment 118

Moved by

118: After Clause 10, insert the following new Clause— “Accommodation of looked after children: restrictionsAfter section 22J of the Children Act 1989 (inserted by section 10), insert—“22K Accommodation of looked after children: restrictionsLooked after children may not be accommodated in adult homes or hostels.””

My Lords, a substantial number of teenage looked-after children are accommodated in adult homes and hostels. They should not be. I beg to move.

The noble Lord was too quick for all of us. I want to speak on the same subject as he did, that of unregistered accommodation— I have been caught unawares and have the wrong notes in front of me. I felt it was appropriate to make this point in Amendment 144, in my name, because it really is nothing short of a scandal that some of the most vulnerable children are regularly placed in illegal, unregistered children’s homes. These settings have the least amount of scrutiny, and as a result, children are at increased risk of harm. Children living in registered children’s homes benefit from the safeguards that regulation brings. Ofsted inspects registered homes at least once a year, and an independent person must visit these homes every month. They check the running of the home and assess whether children are being kept safe—as absolutely anybody would have a right to expect. But children living in unregistered children’s homes do not have these safety nets. There is also no process for assessing the quality of their care or the suitability of the adults providing that care. As my noble friend the Minister said in summing up on the last group of amendments, unregistered means no inspections. Surely this is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue. Children aged 16 to 17 in residential care are treated very differently from their slightly younger peers. In 2021, the previous Government introduced provisions through secondary legislation to prohibit unregulated accommodation for children in care aged 15 or under, but not for those aged 16 or 17. Two years later, the previous Government introduced what they deemed appropriate standards for supported accommodation for children in care and care leavers. These statutory instruments legitimised, and therefore to some extent encouraged, the increasingly shameful practice of placing children in unregulated, unsafe hostels, bed and breakfasts, shared homes, and even, in some cases, caravan parks. All those settings leave them without the support they need and leave them vulnerable to habitual criminals, drug gangs and sexual exploitation—an issue which we have heard all too much about in the last two days. The changes that followed in 2023 to supported accommodation for 16 and 17 year-olds included no requirement to provide these children in care with any care at all. It is important to remember that, legally, they are still children, up to the age of 18. How many parents would be unconcerned at their own 16 or 17 year-olds leaving home, never mind moving to such totally unsuitable accommodation? It is appropriate to ask why there should even exist such places as unregistered children’s homes. Unregistered means unregulated, and in such homes there is no requirement for qualified staff or managers to be trained, or even present in the accommodation, and, crucially, no requirement for independent monthly monitoring of the accommodation, as happens with registered homes. The latest available statistics, from March 2024, show that up to 50% of 16 and 17 year-olds who are in care in England—upwards of 800,000—were living in what might we describe as “care-less”, often bleak accommodation. I was one of many noble Lords who argued against this lack of care for 16 and 17 year-olds when the changes that I referred to were introduced in 2021. Tellingly, one of the recommendations of the MacAlister report was bringing to an end the use of unregistered homes. It has not happened. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who was the Minister responsible at the time, can say why she regarded such accommodation for 16 and 17 year-olds as appropriate.

17:00:00

Too often and for too long, our 16 and 17 year-olds in care have been left to feel abandoned. This amendment would give them the support and care they so desperately need, and that they absolutely deserve, delivering the state as their corporate parent. While the Bill introduces new enforcement powers and fines for illegal providers, these measures alone are unlikely to drive the systemic change that is urgently needed. Without a national strategy to eliminate these illegal settings, children will remain at serious risk.

This is not only a safeguarding failure but a financial and moral failure. Without a clear commitment from the Government to phase out unregistered provision, children will continue to be placed in these unsafe, inappropriate settings. Wales has already taken steps to end the use of unregistered accommodation. I suggest that there is no justification for England being left behind.

My Lords, my Amendment 119 would provide further opportunities for looked-after children, or those on the edge of care, to have access to boarding school places where appropriate. The principles of this amendment are the same as those of my Amendment 82, on children in or going into kinship care, except that the financial benefits may be stronger for non-kinship care. For example, kinship carers who care for children under special guardianship orders or child arrangement orders are not automatically entitled to the same financial support as foster carers. I do not want to repeat word for word everything I said on Amendment 82—both the Ministers present were in their places at the time—but I will give a brief summary. Noble Lords participating in this Bill know the huge task that confronts carers when taking on children who are more often than not from broken homes and carrying the emotional scars of the unhappiness that has emanated from this breakdown. This is why I am keen to give so much more oxygen to the prospect of offering boarding school places to children in or on the edge of care. I gave the example of the report carried out by the Norfolk local authority in conjunction with the DfE when I was the Minister responsible for this area. I will not repeat everything that was said, but one of the most important pieces of data was that, of the 52 children who were tracked during the three or so years over which this study was carried out, 33 came off the at-risk register. That is the most tremendous result, and I suspect there are not many other examples of particular types of care delivering such a significant improvement in the welfare of those children. There are two other advantages, one of which is financial. The costs are substantially lower than that of the foster care or care home route. Also, the educational outcomes in this study were better for the children than the national figures. This is one of those rare moments when a policy can deal with three problems at once and not cost any more money. Therefore, I am very hopeful that the Government will consider the amendment. We heard on Amendment 82 the experience of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, in Liverpool. A tremendous amount of the noble Lord’s career has been spent in education. I am very keen to bring cross-party support to this, so I was very encouraged that he was supportive.

Regarding cross-party support, I am willing to indicate support, but I want to clarify a point the noble Lord makes in his amendment about a boarding school place “in a state secondary school in their local authority area”. Can he tell us that such schools exist in every local authority area? If they do not, how would this be put into practice?

My Lords, there are around 35 state boarding schools in the country, but there are also a number of private boarding schools that are ready to provide support, which is why I mentioned the Royal SpringBoard scholarships and bursaries that are available. I completely accept the noble Lord’s point—that people need to be kept, wherever possible, near their homes—but we need flexibility. We must not make the perfect the enemy of the good. If there is a good boarding school place that is reasonably accessible to the child’s home, but more importantly to the foster carer or kinship carer, then that is what matters. But I take onboard what the noble Lord said. In her summing-up of Amendment 82, the Minister spoke about stability of setting, and she was very right. The Norfolk study showed that there was a very strong correlation between improvements in those children’s well-being and the length of tenure. The study showed that three years of continuity made a tremendous difference. I hope the Minister will consider this amendment.

My Lords, before speaking to my Amendment 129, to which the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and my noble friend Lord Storey have added their names, I first add my very strong support for Amendment 144 by the noble Lord, Lord Watson. I am sorry that I did not manage to add my name to it; it deals with such an important issue. I was shocked to read a report by the Children’s Commissioner, which said that last September, there were 775 children in unregistered homes, including children under the age of 10, children who had spent over two years in those homes and children in entirely inappropriate unregistered settings such as caravans. Staggeringly, the average cost was over £1,500 a day, with an estimated total annual cost to local authorities of over £400 million. As the Children’s Commissioner said, and I very much agree with her, the use of these homes is a national scandal. Vulnerable children are being failed. We would not allow it for our own children, and we simply should not allow it for those for whom the state is corporate parent. Therefore, I very strongly support phasing out unregistered accommodation. My Amendment 129 is closely linked to the discussion we had on the first group about children being placed far from home. It would amend “the sufficiency duty to prevent children being moved far away from home” when that is not in their best interests. We heard a lot of the arguments in the previous group, and I will pull out a few specifics. In recent years, there has been a marked and shocking rise in the number of children in care who are moved far away from their support networks and communities. Last year, more than a fifth of all children in care were living more than 20 miles away from home. That might not sound far but, frankly, that is a long way from family and local support networks. In addition, more than 3,000 children were living more than 100 miles from home—that is 4% of all children in care—and more than 800 children under the care of English local authorities were living in Scotland and Wales. Although I accept that there may be legitimate reasons why children in care are moved far from home—safeguarding, preventing them being exploited or harmed, or their being moved to wider family networks—far too often it is simply because of a lack of appropriate local options. As highlighted by the charity Become in its Gone Too Far campaign, being moved far from their family, friends and schools can have a significant and long-term adverse impact on children’s relationships, mental health, well-being, sense of identity et cetera—the sort of things we discussed in our last session on relationships. Clearly, local authorities across the country have faced a number of challenges recently—that is why we have just had the discussion about regional care co-operatives —particularly in ensuring that there are the right number and type of homes in their local area to meet the needs of children under their care. The current sufficiency duty is not fit for purpose, and there is a lack of accountability and oversight regarding the extent to which sufficiency is being fulfilled. That is the reason for tabling this important amendment, which seeks to strengthen the sufficiency duty by requiring local authorities to plan, commission and deliver provision and to take “all reasonable steps” to ensure that children in care remain living within or near to the local authority. The amendment builds on recent reforms by the Welsh Government, and we would very much benefit from taking it forward.

My Lords, I support Amendment 119 tabled by my noble friend Lord Agnew, to which I have added my name. He spoke very persuasively for it. I did read the Minister’s response to the debate last Thursday on Amendment 82, which would similarly have made it compulsory for children in kinship care to be offered such a place. I agree with her answer in pretty much all respects. She recognised the positive impact that boarding schools can have, but they should not be the default for all children living in kinship care. She cited the importance of stability in education and friendships to well-being and educational outcomes. Moving schools would, of course, be potentially highly detrimental. I ask the Minister: could she work with me and my noble friend Lord Agnew to word this legislation to remove any sense of default? My aim is simply to make this option available to all, as this is currently not the case. The arguments and evidence—for making the boarding school option available to both children in kinship care and children in local authority care—overlap significantly in these amendments. My noble friend Lady Berridge eloquently made the case for Amendment 82 when I was unable to be here, so I will not repeat it.

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendment 134B in my name and to support a number of amendments in this group. I make it clear that this is a probing amendment. I appreciate that the Government have a wider agenda in relation to planning—so it may be that this Bill is not the right vehicle—but I did want to pick up on a proposal from the Government’s policy statement Green Paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, which the Minister has already mentioned. It states that the Government will look at “options to reform the planning process to enable providers to more easily set up homes where they are most needed”. Specifically, it says that they will “consider potential legislative options or further changes to support the delivery of small children’s homes”. We know that we have seen a move away from the larger homes, with the most recent government statistics showing that homes registered within the previous year were for three places on average, and four places was the average for all active or suspended children’s homes as of March 2024. We also know—and it has been quite clearly demonstrated—that we need more capacity and that children are being placed in unsuitable accommodation. On this point, I very much support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 118, as well as Amendment 114, which attempts to deal with the problem of unregulated homes. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, have said, it is quite hard to believe that these homes exist, but exist they do. That is a capacity issue and something that, frankly, we are just going to have to do deal with. I appreciate that the Government announced investment into the children’s homes estate last week; that is, of course, welcome and a good thing. However, there are additional measures that could deal with capacity, and these relate to planning regulations. The CMA’s 2022 study, which has already been mentioned, found that one of the main barriers to opening new homes is planning permission. The study’s authors heard repeated concerns about failed planning applications, often due to local opposition, which, in its words, “appears to be based on outmoded or inaccurate assumptions about children’s homes and looked-after children”. Given that we have now moved towards smaller children’s homes, the issue is further complicated by the fact that these are the exact same type of properties that families are searching for. As a result, when providers face delays due to the planning process, even if they have been successful in getting permission, very often they can lose the property to a rival bidder for whom planning is not a consideration. Consequently, the CMA suggested that the Government should review the planning requirements and consider whether smaller children’s homes, which can accommodate fewer than a specified number of residents at any one time, should be required to go through the planning system. It believes that that could be a helpful corrective to the market by increasing the number of children’s homes being opened. My straightforward question to the Minister is: is that something the Government are still considering, as suggested by their policy statement of last year? If so, would it be possible to give any guidance as to which other legislation they think might be more suitable?

17:15:00

The CMA predicted that easing planning restrictions would lead to not only an increase in homes but a better spread of homes. On that note, I support my noble friend Lady Cash’s amendment and others that have been mentioned which would help to tackle the problem of regional inequalities and ensure that children’s placements were more evenly distributed throughout the country. To reiterate what others have said, there is a particular cruelty to taking children away from their support networks and everything and everyone familiar to them. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, said in last week’s debate, life is hard enough for these kids, and stacking the cards even further against them seems grossly unfair.

Amendment 165 seems eminently sensible and would surely help to prevent children from falling through the cracks. In fact, it is so sensible that it is one of those things that you are quite surprised to learn that it does not happen already.

I put my name to Amendment 129 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, which I am happy to do. She has made a strong case for amending the sufficiency duty or doing something similar to make it clear that moving children beyond a certain geographical distance from their normal base is deleterious to their well-being and health in every way possible. I also put my name to Amendment 144 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson. We have all heard what is going on and I think we all agree that it is unconscionable and appalling. The question, as was put very aptly by the noble Lord, is what action we are going to take to do something about it. The fact that it exists is bad enough, so we need to have a clear plan to do something about it. I will focus my remarks primarily on Amendment 165 in my name. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for putting their names to it. It is to do with temporary accommodation and the effect that being moved into temporary accommodation has on young children. This is a topic that the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation, which is headed by Dame Siobhain McDonagh, has long campaigned for. In fact, on 13 May Dame Siobhain met the Minister’s colleague Janet Daby, Minister at the Department for Education, and Rushanara Ali, Minister at the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government, specifically to explore what can be done about this issue. The issue, as the amendment’s explanatory statement says clearly, is that the new clause would establish a notification system requiring local authorities to alert schools and GPs when a child is placed in temporary accommodation. To explain why that is important, this is a direct quote from a head teacher in Lewisham about this phenomenon: “On the ground, the impact of TA on children is colossal. We only hear, by accident, only by us being nosey and being at the gate in the morning, or them being late, tired or hungry, is how we find out, then we do our best to support them”. We have a situation at the moment where there is a lot of inconsistency in what is happening when a child is moved with their family into temporary accommodation, sometimes in a very different area from where they were before, which clearly is disruptive to both education and their health. I understand that the upshot of that meeting was positive. We still need to get colleagues in the Department of Health on side because there are some complications in there being several different elements to trying to get this to work. There are three particular areas that need to be done better if this amendment is to be successful. The first is local authorities. There is a move within the LGA to acknowledge the need for councils to be compassionate councils. There is agreement that, in principle, local authorities should be doing this notification on behalf of the child, and that they should be sending the receiving authority a notification—a point that was raised by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, on the last group. That often takes place but not always, when clearly it should. The LGA has very good and clear guidance on this. However, its guidance does not mention schools or general practices specifically. Perhaps this is an area that could be looked at. The second is to do with technology. While government in all forms, including local government, can spend vast amounts of money on technology, it does not always do what you think it should be able to do. Many local authorities do not have the ability in their current systems to send notifications easily. Manchester, for example, which you would have thought of as one of the larger and more sophisticated metropolitan authorities, has to do this individually by email; there is no way of pushing a button and just getting it done. Under the previous Government, the central government ensured that the providers of technology to local government were able to change their data systems so that they always included rough sleeper assessments. Where there is a will, there is a way; this can be done. We hope that His Majesty’s Government can do something to ensure that the housing system has a notification system embedded within it to make notification much more straightforward than it currently is. The last point is to do with getting better guidance implemented. At the moment, training across schools and primary care provision is very varied, and I do not think there is necessarily an understanding, either by the schools from which the children are being moved or by the schools to which they are being moved, of the importance of having that dialogue, and the same is true of GP practices. For all those reasons, I hope that the Minister will be able to give some indication as to whether the initial impression given at the meeting with the two Ministers in May—that the Government were receptive to this—is still the case. Perhaps the Minister can update us on any talks that have happened since then.

My Lords, I support Amendments 118, 144 and 165 in particular. Dealing with perhaps the least important of the three: as a boarding school girl, I think that boarding school can often be a very sensible place to send children. I would not want to see it required for all children—that would be most unsuitable—but boarding school should be in the thoughts of those wondering where to put a child. It might be that it would be possible to keep the child with a particular member of the family if that family member did not have the child for 12 months of the year. Anyone who has been a mother or a father understands that situation. On Amendments 144 and 165, I feel particularly strongly about unregulated accommodation. Under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, there is an obligation on the local authority to promote the welfare of the child. I cannot believe that local authorities that send children to unregulated places are complying appropriately with the law. I wonder whether any local authority has ever thought about it. Unregulated accommodation—which has been set out so well already—is not, in fact, checked. If one thinks about it, the idea that 16 and 17 year-olds are not being checked as to how they are getting on—bearing in mind, as has been said, that they are still technically children and are at a very vulnerable age, particularly if they are in care—is extraordinary. The other point is that even adult accommodation seems very unsuitable. Who are they going to meet in adult accommodation? Although it may be checked, one wonders how much checking there is. I hope the Minister will listen to these particular matters very strongly.

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 170 and lend my support to the other eminently sensible amendments in this group. They all, individually, beg the question: why would we not? I implore the Government to consider these gaps, which have been so carefully thought through and proposed before the Committee today. If Committee serves any purpose, it must be to collaborate and work for the benefit of the children we are talking about. I will not rehearse the points I made on the first group today. The data point, under Amendment 170, drives at the same point. I ask the Minister to think carefully, because I had almost anticipated that her previous answer would address the data required already under the Children Act. So I carefully focused this amendment on the gaps where the data is not already required—that is to address sufficiency in care homes overall. A body of science around attachment and trauma now emphatically supports the case for providing secure and stable environments for young people—including young adults, because the brain is not fully developed until well into the 20s. This debate is very timely, in the wake of the grooming gangs story and the Casey report, which has just been published. When children have not been securely attached and have been moved into and out of care, they are at their most vulnerable. They are the most susceptible to risk, the most vulnerable to being preyed on and the most easily seduced by any kindness whatever, so the wolf in sheep’s clothing is a particularly dangerous scenario. It is time that we dispense with unregulated accommodation, and I am grateful to the noble and learned Baroness for her comments and her extensive experience of that.

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 165. In the spirit of brevity pioneered by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I also support Amendment 118 in his name and Amendment 144 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Watson of Invergowrie and Lord Russell of Liverpool. As a teacher, I can only quote the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson of Welton: they are so sensible that you are surprised they are not law already.

My Lords, I added my name to those of the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Hampton, on Amendment 165. It replicates an amendment tabled in the other place that got strong support. The background is that, sadly, more and more homeless people are being accepted under the homelessness legislation and placed in temporary accommodation. By the nature of that legislation, most of those people are families and they will have children. A child in temporary accommodation is obviously in a less advantageous position than a child coming from a stable background. So we need to do all we can to make sure that child gets access to the services that he or she is entitled to before—hopefully, not after too long—they are placed in suitable long-term accommodation. The amendment simply requires the local authority to notify the GP and the school of the child’s circumstances. As my noble friend Lady Sanderson said, this should be good practice and Manchester does it. If I were the head of a primary school, I would want to know which of my pupils were in temporary accommodation. If I were a GP, I would also want to know which of my child patients were in temporary accommodation. A GP is meant to treat the patient as well as the illness. There are real risks of a child being off-rolled by a school because the head simply did not know that they were in temporary accommodation, they had decided to stay at the same school from which they were moved and the bus just takes longer to get there. Likewise, if they are not registered with a GP, they may miss out on prescriptions and all the other universal services that they are entitled to. So this simply seeks the establishment, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said, of a formal notification protocol. After the debate—again, the noble Lord, Lord Russell, referred to this—there was a meeting with the Ministers concerned. Looking at the record of that meeting, it does not seem to me that there were any game-changers that meant that this could not happen. Yes, there are some technical issues that need addressing—perhaps some change to the technology used by local authorities so that these things are done automatically rather than manually, as is the case at the moment—but given that the title of the Bill includes the words “Children’s Wellbeing”, it seems to me that this is something the Minister could smile on and perhaps agree to, with, if necessary, changes on Report.

17:30:00

My Lords, I have attached my name to Amendment 165, but as three noble Lords have already spoken to it, I will be brief. I declare my involvement with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation. Here is one stat to feed into our debate. In the year to September 2024, 80 children who were in temporary accommodation died, and the figures from the National Child Mortality Database from 2019 to 2024 show that, for children who died, temporary accommodation was listed as a causal factor in their death in 74 cases. That obviously speaks to the GP issue. Many noble Lords—I can see quite a few in this Chamber—take part in Learn with the Lords, the House of Lords education programme. We have many new Members of the House, so I want to take this chance to commend to all the newer Members who may not know about it what a great programme it is. One of the things we are doing is taking news about the House of Lords out around the country into schools, but it is also a chance to encounter and speak to teachers and head teachers, and share with them what we are doing here in your Lordships’ House and get their reaction. I have not got permission, so I will not identify the person too clearly, but in the Midlands I was speaking to a head teacher at a school serving a very deprived area and I told her about this amendment, and she just went, “Yes!” Many people might think that surely the school will already know, but children and parents may feel that this is a cause of shame. There is no reason why they should, but none the less, the reality is that they may well feel it is a cause of shame, and go to great lengths to try to hide the fact. So it is important that the school, as well as the GP, be notified. As we have had a huge outbreak of agreement, I shall briefly express my reservations about Amendment 119, about boarding school places. Joy Schaverien, the therapist, wrote a book, whose subtitle is The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child, reflecting on the impact of boarding schools on British society. Indeed, we might all reflect on their impact on our politics, but that is a subject for another day. She identified issues of abandonment, bereavement, captivity and disassociation associated with boarding schools. I am sure that boarding schools today would say that things are different now from what it was like in the old days, but we are still talking about an institutional environment. That, by definition, is what a boarding school is. It is not a home environment. I would not say that there would never be a case where a boarding school might be an appropriate place for a child; there may be cases in which that is the best option available, given the overall circumstances. But I have trouble with the idea of offering it to all looked-after children at secondary age. I do not think that is the appropriate approach.

My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 134B, in the name of my noble friend Lady Sanderson. As she said, it seeks to build on the Government’s commitment in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive to look at options to reform the planning process to enable providers to more easily set up homes where they are most needed and to support the delivery of small children’s homes. To pick up another issue that noble Lords across the Committee have raised on this group of amendments, I should add that that paper also noted that the lack of appropriate and affordable homes in the right places for children means that we are seeing a worrying trend in the rise of the use of unregistered provision. The CMA’s 2022 report on the children’s home market outlined a number of issues with the current planning system and specifically recommended that the Government do what my noble friend suggests in her amendment, and consider “whether the distinction, for the purposes of the planning regime, between small children’s homes and domestic dwelling houses should be removed”. The CMA concluded that the easing of planning restrictions would lead to both an increase in number and a better geographical spread of children’s homes. On the basis that the Government have accepted this recommendation and say that they are considering options, I look forward to hearing from the Minister how government thinking has developed, particularly in relation to further planning reforms in this area. Can she outline where, if not in this Bill, they may be intending to take their action?

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. Having been sent to a boarding school for some years from the age of 10, it seems to me that the last place that somebody should go if they are a looked-after child, and therefore already displaced, is a boarding school. They would be shunted to one place and rejected again and shunted to another. I would be very strongly concerned that looked-after children should not be sent to a boarding school.

I shall speak to several amendments—to Amendment 170, on a capacity plan, and to Amendment 134B, on planning. I declare my interest as a former Ofsted chief inspector, where I spoke repeatedly over seven years about the issues with sufficiency in many parts of the country, and the urgency of taking action to enable homes to open in the places where they were needed. I support what my noble friend Lady Evans just said, and I will not cover the same points about planning. I will say that the most acute need is partly in the most expensive areas, for obvious reasons, and partly for the children with the highest needs, for whom it is most difficult to configure, recruit, train and get a home open where we need it, when the children are there. We need planning for high needs. I stress that capacity planning should pay particular attention to the very high-needs children, whose care accounts for a startlingly large proportion of the total spend on care, and whose needs, in the main, are predictable, if not from birth then from very early in life. There is a high level of certainty of that being needed all the way through their childhood, and many of them will, sadly, also be in care homes in their adult lives. We need that focus and urgency to do everything that can be done, and to think intelligently, sufficiently far in advance, to enable homes to open so that, at the point and age at which children need them, they can move to somewhere within a reasonable distance of home. I reassure the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss, that the existence of children in unregistered accommodation is a serious concern to Ofsted. We spent a significant amount of our resources on putting pressure on those accepting placements of children to register as children’s homes, as they should. I will speak briefly on a couple of other points. I support the boarding proposal for those for whom such schools are genuinely the right place; it is a way to create stability and a strong partnership with foster parents to make something more stable and enduring—in certain cases. The principle that it should at least be considered is important. I also support Amendment 165. As others, including my noble friend Lady Sanderson have said, that seems so obvious that one cannot imagine that it is not happening everywhere already.

I support Amendment 119, in the name of my noble friend Lord Agnew, about the availability of boarding places. I do so as a former south London boy who was, rather unexpectedly, because of family circumstances, sent away to a boarding school—with, I believe, considerable financial help. Pretty much every child in care I have ever spoken to, when I have asked them, as I tend to do when I meet them, what the biggest issue facing them is, replies that it is the lack of a constant adult in their lives—the revolving door of people responsible for them. This leaves issues of lack of trust, which can stay with such children all their lives. In a boarding school, a child has a constant adult—often a housemaster or mistress. I accept that it might not be appropriate for all children, but I agree that children should be offered it. It can be a very inexpensive way in which to look after these children, although obviously that is only a secondary consideration. I have seen the benefit of this in many cases of young people who have experienced boarding, thanks to the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation. I support the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and others about unregistered settings and about children being sent away many miles from their home.

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, that all these amendments would enhance the life chances and life opportunities of looked-after children, and they should be seriously considered. In the 21st century, the words “unregistered” or “unregulated” should never enter into our dialogue or vocabulary. It is not acceptable for our schools or our children; whether it is an unregulated school or an unregulated home, it should not exist. I wish that I had signed the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and I apologise for not doing so. The noble Lord is absolutely right to call it scandalous. Noble Lords should have a look at the BBC “Panorama” programme from two or three years ago that looked at looked-after children in unregulated schools. Never mind caravans—some of them were being housed in barges. Imagine that in the winter. Unregulated provision is never inspected, and anything can go on in them. The children are not safe—we should not allow it to happen. Of course, Ofsted does not inspect them either. We owe it to our children to give them something better than that. I agree with my noble friend Lady Tyler that we cannot do that overnight, but we can make a stand and say that we are not going to have children in unregistered provision and we will phase it out. That would be a testimony to the current Government. On Amendment 129 from my noble friend Lady Tyler, to which I added my name, everything that she says almost ties in with that of the noble Lord, Lord Watson; they are very similar on what they say. I turn to Amendment 119 from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew. I think that the noble Baronesses, Lady Meacher and Lady Bennett, are looking at a stereotypical view of boarding schools. I would like to take them both to Liverpool College, which was an independent school and is now an academy, and where the local authority buys in places for looked-after children. The children get accommodation of high quality, but they also get adults who properly look after them, and they get sport and they get clubs and activities as well as outdoor pursuits. What is more, they go to the school and get fantastic results. I agree that not every boarding school would be suitable, but if it is a choice between being on a barge or in a caravan or some other dump, as some of the unregistered schools are, a boarding school would be a better prospect. I had not thought about the link between schools, GPs and looked-after children moving into a particular area. Presumably, in a digital age, when we are about to move to a new registration system, probably linked to NHS numbers, there is a real opportunity for us to be very joined up. When children move into those areas, the doctor and the school will be notified, and it can only benefit the child as well. I like the idea from the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, of a national plan to ensure that there are sufficient places for children and we are not in the same position that we are in currently. We cannot wave a magic wand and expect this to happen overnight, but all of us in this Chamber want the same thing—we want the best possible opportunities for children, including registered schools and proper provision properly inspected. As we have said time and again, we also want the children to be as close to their locality and their family and friends as possible.

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate on a range of specific amendments, all of which either seek to improve the residential care provision for children and young people or, in the case of Amendment 165, require notification if a child is placed in temporary accommodation. This group has been named the “Why wouldn’t we?” group.

17:45:00

On Amendment 165, I absolutely agree with those noble Lords who put their name to it and others who spoke on it that ensuring that the school and the GP are notified of the household including a child being placed in temporary accommodation is vital. I remember speaking when I visited a primary school up in Oldham, where there was a child in temporary accommodation who, it had been discovered, had a three-hour journey each way, with several buses to get to school, because they did not want to change the school that they were at. The description from my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham of children being at risk of being off-rolled sounded exactly like what might have happened with this child, had the school not known, because all too often buses did not run on time. Schools need to know this; they need to understand that, despite the parents’ or the child’s best efforts, they might be late, or they might be very tired in class, and to think about how they can best support them. I had thought less about the GP side of things, but the examples that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, gave were very stark reminders of just how important those links are too.

I very much look forward to the Minister’s response to the amendment, in the name of my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton, to look at the planning regulations in relation to small children’s homes. As my noble friend said, there is very little in practice to distinguish them from many family homes, and that could unblock some of their capacity and cost constraints that local authorities face today, which are a block to achieving some of the crucial aspirations that we all have for children in care.

I am also very supportive of Amendment 119 in the name of my noble friend Lord Agnew. My noble friend set out the difference in outcomes for children in care who benefited from a boarding school place. I hope that the Minister will give this amendment serious consideration. I also thought that my noble friend Lord Farmer offered a very constructive proposal and very practical way forward.

My noble friend Lady Cash, with her Amendment 170, rightly proposes that there should be a national capacity plan, and she was clear that her amendment needs to address gaps that exist in the legislation currently, with a real focus on which actions could be taken centrally, to avoid the need to place children far from home. That is something that Amendment 129 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, also addresses.

I will also be interested in the Minister’s response to my noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendment, which suggests that children should not be placed in adult homes, or hostels, for all the reasons that my noble friend resisted setting out but which we can all imagine.

I also look forward to the Minister’s reply in relation to Amendment 144 in the name of her noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie on the use of unregulated provision for 16 and 17 year-olds. The Minister will have heard the strength of feeling across the Committee on this point. Of course, underlying this is the need to create more capacity, which is why my noble friend Lady Sanderson’s amendment and that of my noble friend Lord Agnew are so important.

I close by congratulating and agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for sneaking in an amendment on Learn with the Lords, which I did not know was in the scope of the legislation, but which I put my name to.

My Lords, the amendments in this second group comprise new clauses on accommodation and capacity in children’s residential care, and seek to improve the capacity and, of course, most importantly, the quality of provision for children and young people. I really welcome this rich debate. Time constraints will be upon me, but a lot of excellent points have been made and I will try to pick out the main ones that hold the whole group together. Amendment 118, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would prevent local authorities accommodating looked-after children in homes or hostels where young people over the age of 18 also live. The placement of children under 16 in settings other than children’s homes and foster care, or other limited, regulated settings, has, as we have heard, been banned since September 2021. In April 2023, regulations were introduced for supported accommodation for 16 and 17 year-olds, setting national standards and registration requirements for providers. These regulations have been put in place to ensure that 16 and 17 year-olds can be placed in Ofsted-regulated, good-quality accommodation. If a provider is registered, local authorities can accommodate these older children in that accommodation, which may also be used for over-18s. The local authority will consider this when deciding on the suitability of the accommodation for the child. Looked-after 16 to 17 year-olds will continue to reside in foster placements or children’s homes if this best meets their needs. I will come back to that point on further amendments. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, for tabling Amendment 119 on boarding school places. I recognise that he is determined to put more oxygen into this space—this is the second time in just a few days that we have discussed this. Of course the Government want to ensure that all children are given the best possible opportunities to succeed, and we recognise how transformational boarding schools have been for some young people and can be in the future, but we do not believe, as I laid out before, that they should be the default for all looked-after children. I stress again that stable educational placements are crucial to ensuring consistency, well-being and educational outcomes in children’s lives. It is critical that we treat children individually and listen to their views on what they would like to happen. We must minimise disruption. Having said that, where a boarding school placement is in the best interests of that child, we want to ensure that we have that opportunity. I repeat that this is why the Government continue to support the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation’s broadening educational pathways programme, which provides placement matching and brokerage services to children in need and looked-after children in state boarding and independent schools. It is a discussion that I know we will continue to have, but I acknowledge the comments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Meacher, in particular, that for some young people this will not be appropriate. We have to make sure that we are honest in that assessment when we look at the best provision. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, did an honourable job in his absence on our last day in Committee. Amendment 129, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, seeks to widen local authorities’ sufficiency duty to include consideration of placements that are near to, as well as within, their area. This was spoken to by the noble Baroness and the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Russell. This theme runs throughout the amendments in this group. The amendment’s implicit support of the Government’s focus on placement sufficiency, including regional collaboration, is welcome. However, the existing duties on local authorities when providing accommodation for looked-after children already include consideration of proximity to the child’s home, so an amendment for this purpose is not deemed to be necessary. Additionally, ironically, the amendment could lead to increased use of out-of-area placements, because the duty to ensure sufficiency of placements is no longer focused on local authorities’ own areas. Of course, this would not align with local authorities’ duty to provide accommodation within their areas where this is consistent with the child’s welfare. Finally, as we heard in the previous group, the amendment is not necessary to facilitate greater collaborative partnership working or to improve local sufficiency and the Government’s reforms of regional care co-operatives. Establishing effective regional partnerships is going to be important, and of course, the aim is always to assist local authorities with their work in this area and to ensure that they keep working with individual children, reflecting their needs. I turn to Amendment 144, tabled by my noble friend Lord Watson. I have huge respect for his comments and for all the other contributions to the discussions this afternoon. We acknowledge that there are still inappropriate, unregulated placements out there and they are still being used. This is why the Government are so focused on investing in this area, and we have to make sure that we end these practices, which lead to so many unfavourable outcomes for young people. By way of trying to reassure, although we know that practice is not necessarily keeping up, placement of under-16s in formally unregulated accommodation was banned in September 2021. In 2023, regulations were introduced, as I have set out, setting national standards and registration requirements for supported accommodation, which is an option for 16 to 17 year- olds. All looked-after children under the age of 18 are now required to be in Ofsted-regulated or otherwise regulated accommodation. The majority of looked-after children continue to reside in foster placements, or children’s homes where this is the best option to meet their needs. The amendment would actually remove the opportunity for 16 to 17 year-olds to develop their independence in a safe, supportive environment, and we do not believe that that is appropriate. I base those comments on talking to young people in my local authority area who came into the care system very late in their childhood. They believe that, where the accommodation is appropriate and regulated, this is the appropriate place for them to be. We need to respect that voice coming from young people themselves. I stress that this is the basis of Clause 13: the belief that Ofsted needs additional enforcement powers and measures to help it bring this into being. Giving Ofsted the power to impose monetary penalties for breaches of the Care Standards Act, including for persons not registering their children’s social care establishment, is paramount. Registration is vital and ensures that children are safe, staff are checked and there is the right level of oversight through regular inspections. There are far too many vulnerable children living in settings where there is no oversight. Between April 2023 and March 2024, Ofsted investigated 1,000 unregistered settings, which tells us the scale of what we have to deal with. Ofsted can already prosecute people who run unregistered children’s services. However, this is a resource-intensive process and can take a very long time.

18:00:00

The changes in legislation that we are seeking will give Ofsted alternative, faster enforcement powers to tackle unregistered settings. This power also extends to new provider oversight legislation, with Ofsted being able to fine provider groups that do not comply and improve the quality in settings, when required.

We understand that some local authorities need to place a child quickly. We are very often talking about crisis situations. Too often, a crisis that seems to come to a head on a Friday afternoon leads to some very difficult decisions. We have to be clear, though, that all providers of accommodation for children should be registered with Ofsted to avoid the unfortunate circumstances that we have heard noble Lords speak to so eloquently. We are helping local authorities meet their sufficiency duty by investing over £130 million in fostering hubs, kinship care and providing additional funding for children’s homes. I hope I have given some reassurance, but we are not complacent in any way, shape or form about this vital area that we are seeking to address through the Bill.

Amendment 165 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, ably supported by the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, concerns the new notification system for when a child is placed into temporary accommodation. It is fair to say, as has been outlined, that the Government are supportive of the principles behind this amendment, and I assure the noble Lord that the Government are considering how options for a notification system can work legally and operationally. As we have heard, the responsible Ministers across the departments of MHCLG, DHSC and DfE recently met Dame Siobhain McDonagh to discuss the design of the protocol, the list of public bodies to notify and the scope of guidance. Officials are currently working through these matters in detail. I cannot be more specific about that, but I want to reassure noble Lords that this is being taken seriously.

I hope I can take it as good news that they are meeting next week with Minister Georgia Gould, so hopefully the purse strings will be loosened.

The noble Lord may say that. In my personal experience, there is no reason why local areas cannot put these arrangements in place. There have been circumstances with agencies in the past—I am sure this does not happen now—where police have gone into a situation of domestic violence, for example, and not even known that there were children hiding under the beds upstairs. That is the shocking result of a lack of joining up—of agencies not speaking to each other. Provisions in the Bill will go a long way to making sure that this becomes normal—a culture shift. It is normal to tell a school if one of its young people has a change of circumstances that could affect them in many different ways. I am delighted that Government Ministers are coming together, and we will await the outcome with interest. Amendment 170 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, concerns the publication of a national capacity plan for children’s homes intended to highlight the issue of distance placements. I highlight the Government’s commitment to supporting local authorities to meet their sufficiency duty through a range of reforms that will boost system capacity and better meet the needs of children in their areas. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, and others added to the discussions on this amendment. While the amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual national capacity plan, it would also take significant local authority resource to collect, collate and submit additional information on an annual basis to inform the plan, all at a time when their resources for children’s services are rightly focused on implementing reforms to actively improve services. A range of complex contributing factors across the children’s social care system can lead to the use of distance placements, which the Government are addressing through reforms in the Bill and investment in fostering kinship care and local authority children’s homes. Paramount in these decisions is the issue of risk to the safety of the young person. Sadly, in some cases, distance is a necessary factor when considering placements. Finally, Amendment 134B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, seeks to introduce a duty on the Secretary of State to carry out a review on the distinction in the planning regime between children’s homes and domestic dwelling-houses, and to consider whether it should be removed. I would like to reassure the noble Baroness that the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government continue to work together in this important area. In the last two years it has been clarified via a joint Written Ministerial Statement that planning should not restrict the timely delivery of children’s homes, and we have changed the National Planning Policy Framework to make it explicit that planning authorities must plan to meet the needs of looked-after children. As we said in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, we will continue to make progress on further changes that support the delivery of children’s homes where they are needed. This includes data collection and an analysis to translate the data and work out how it needs to be used, which is often overlooked, I am sad to say. In my experience of dealing with an application for a small home in the ward I used to represent, we went out for intensive consultation with the residents living around the home. I am very pleased to say that, in the end, after some scepticism and reservation, when we went through it carefully and they met the people running the home and understood how many children would be there, it went through and was an enormous success. They came and asked how they could help to support the children in the home through their local connections. So there are reasons to be optimistic, but there is a great deal to do, which is why, as I have said before, we have this Bill before us. I thank everyone for their comments but, for the reasons I have outlined in these remarks, I hope the noble Lords will not press the amendments in their names.

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, for that comprehensive reply. I think the most important amendment in this group was Amendment 144. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, we should not be looking at placing children in unregulated accommodation. We are taking powers in this Bill to deal with unregulated schools—quite rightly, and I hope a great deal better than we have in the past. The idea that we are putting children into unregulated homes, or, as one of my amendments will address later, unregulated alternative provision, is really not acceptable. In Clause 30, we are giving power to the same local authorities that are making these placements to override parental judgment as to the best interests of their child. We really need to get our thinking straight in this area. Unregulated accommodation is not acceptable, particularly when we are talking about people charging at the level they are. We ought to be doing something clear about that in the Bill. I am glad that the Government say that they aim to end this practice, and that it should be done away with, but we need a stronger commitment than that. I was glad to hear the support for boarding schools. I had a miserable time at my boarding school. I would rather have been on the barge of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, frankly, such was the quality of accommodation. But I have seen the hugely transformational effect it can have when it works well, so it is very much a matter of choosing the right child for the right school. I hope my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton will pursue her campaign when it comes to the Planning Bill, because we need to be sharper than we are. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Russell, will pursue Amendment 165, which is so clearly achievable. If we are moving towards a consistent identifier for children, this is just the sort of thing that ought to be being done. My noble friend Lady Cash was told that it would be a burden on local authorities to collect the data. I hope that the Department for Education will wander down the road to their friends at the science department and look at what they are doing with AI, because that sort of function of data collection is so much quicker, cheaper and easier if you design the right systems. It ought not to be a matter of cost; it ought to be a matter of course. Lastly, I felt that that was a rather disappointing response to my amendment. I cannot see that it is ever going to be right to place a 17 year-old in an adult hostel. Children take a long time to grow up. A 17 year-old is not in a position to be with troubled 25 year-olds as their principal companions. I will look again at the Minister’s reply, but for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 118 withdrawn.

Amendments 119 and 119ZA not moved.

Clause 11: Use of accommodation for deprivation of liberty

Amendment 119A

Moved by

119A: Clause 11, page 16, line 19, after “local authority”, insert “or who has an EHCP and is in receipt of residential care” Member's explanatory statement This amendment seeks to include children with EHCPs in residential care and allow residential schools to use deprivation of liberty in specific settings for specific children rather than moving them to a residential home.

My Lords, Clause 11 epitomises both the responsibility and the privilege that we all share as lawmakers in ensuring that the law works as well as possible for children who are extraordinarily vulnerable through no fault of their own. I put on record my gratitude to the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory and the Nuffield Foundation for their expertise and meticulous work in this area, and to Homes2Inspire, the Shaw Trust and Somerset County Council for allowing me to visit a home where up to two children deprived of their liberty can live, so that I could understand these issues better. Children deprived of their liberty face severe and immediate risks from their own actions or the actions of others. They typically face six different types of restrictions and are under constant supervision, and two thirds experience restraint. The majority live on their own. Currently, under Section 25 of the Children Act 1989, children in care can be placed in registered secure accommodation. When this is not possible, local authorities can apply to the High Court for a deprivation of liberty order through their inherent jurisdiction. This often leads to crisis-driven placements in unsuitable settings, does not address the harmful effects of restraint and isolation and is clearly intended as a measure of last resort.

18:15:00

Deprivation of liberty cases through the High Court have increased dramatically, from 102 in 2017 to 1,280 in 2024. Recent data shows that applications to deprive a child of their liberty through the High Court are 10 times more common now than through secure accommodation orders. Worryingly, only 10% of children attend their hearing. Some are not even aware that the reason they are deprived of their liberty is that they have a deprivation of liberty order, and 89% of parents had no legal representation at any hearing in a deprivation of liberty order case.

We talk a lot in this House about the voice of the child, but these are children who are silent. Some two-thirds of children deprived of their liberty in July and August 2022 were still subject to a deprivation of liberty order almost six months later—so not only are they silent and silenced, but they are so for a long time.

The Bill amends Section 25 of the Children Act to provide a statutory framework allowing children to be deprived of their liberty in relevant accommodation other than a secure children’s home. The intention is that this will eventually reduce the reliance on deprivation of liberty orders through the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction, as local authorities will have an alternative option for many children. The Government suggest that this alternative accommodation could allow children to have access to placements which can provide care and treatment while depriving them of their liberty.

Of course, these children require high-quality care from a range of professionals, and need to have long-term, stable and lasting relationships in order to recover and thrive. However, there is a risk that children will not end up receiving higher quality care and treatment unless there are strong safeguards on the standard of their care. My amendment seeks to introduce those safeguards, ensuring that children are deprived of their liberty only as a last resort, and that the focus remains on their long-term outcomes. It also seeks to address the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee on the regulatory powers in this Act.

Amendments 121 and 122 in my name and that of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester would ensure that only registered children’s homes can be used as relevant accommodation, and that this is reflected in the establishment’s statement of purpose. We heard, rightly, in the last group the pressure to remove the use of unregistered children’s homes, but here we have children deprived of their liberty being placed in unregistered homes. These amendments would clarify the Government’s intention, which I applaud, to place children only in accommodation which is suited to providing them with a good standard of care.

It is crucial that these children in particular are not placed in unregistered accommodation, which we know happens all too often because of the need—or perceived need—to hold many of them on their own. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed the Government’s intention in this regard and the impact it might have on other children, with the risk that it pushes more of those children into unregistered homes.

Amendment 123 in my name seeks to establish regular oversight by the director of children’s services of children subject to a deprivation of liberty order, to avoid children being deprived of their liberty for a day longer than is necessary. As I noted in my opening remarks, about two-thirds of children are still deprived of their liberty six months after an order being issued. Amendment 123 seeks to put a bit of grit in the system to make sure that these children are not forgotten, and that there is an intentional decision to keep them deprived of their liberty.

Amendment 124, in my name and that of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, introduces additional protections for all looked-after children who are deprived of their liberty. It is modelled on existing Children Act 1989 provisions in Sections 1, 22C and 31A. The children’s homes regulations will apply, which include a set of principles of care. The Bill is an opportunity to update these principles, drawing on the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory’s principles of care, developed by experts in child and adolescent mental health and welfare to form a guiding framework for how to meet the needs of children with complex needs and circumstances. Could the Minister say what the Government’s plans are to update the principles of care in the children’s homes regulations?

The separate parts of the amendment aim to achieve the following: proposed new subsection (2A) in Amendment 124 and Amendment 120 in the name of my noble friend Lord Farmer relate to the Children (Secure Accommodations) Regulations 1991 and currently include important safeguards which apply to children being deprived of their liberty through Section 25 of the Children Act in secure accommodation. These safeguards include the requirement for the Secretary of State to authorise the placement of a child under 13—the youngest child in receipt of a deprivation of liberty order last year was seven. Maximum period orders would need to be authorised and there would be requirements for people to be appointed to review the keeping of the child for the purposes of their welfare. This amendment ensures that the 1991 regulations will apply to children deprived of their liberty through the Government’s new proposed mechanism. It ensures that the regulations will first be consulted on to update standards and requirements in line with the latest evidence and research. Given that the youngest child deprived of their liberty last year was only seven years old, it seems reasonable that the same scrutiny by the Secretary of State should apply to these children as for those held in secure accommodation, as well as the wider points in relation to the maximum period a child can be held, and the review.

In Amendment 124, proposed subsection (2B) ensures that deprivation of liberty orders are used only as a last resort. There are concerns that these orders could unintentionally make it easier for local authorities to deprive children of their liberty as they no longer have to apply to the High Court for this to be granted. Every effort should be made to avoid the use of deprivation of liberty orders whenever a child can be better supported and cared for by family and in their community.

Proposed subsection (2C) ensures that children are placed only in high-quality accommodation. This would take into account how close the accommodation is to the child’s home and the presence of other children, both of which combat isolation. The average distance from home for children subject to a deprivation of liberty order is currently 56 miles.

Proposed subsection (2D) makes it clear that the aim of orders is to enable recovery. Receiving high-quality care gives children a better chance of having a sustained improvement in their circumstances in the long term. Ensuring that local authorities prepare a recovery plan helps to prevent children being deprived of their liberty only for the purposes of short-term risk management. Again, perhaps the Minister can set out the Government’s intentions in this area and reflect on these amendments.

My Amendment 127 stresses the imperative of providing therapeutic treatment for a child subject to a deprivation of liberty order. We understand that these children might need multidisciplinary therapeutic support and not meet the standard offer from CAMHS, so giant funding agreements would be needed to ensure appropriate and timely access to therapeutic treatment and care.

Amendment 132, in my name and that of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, seeks to improve the oversight of children deprived of their liberty. This new clause expands the legal duties of the independent reviewing officer, building on Section 25B of the Children Act 1989 and Regulation 45(3) of the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010. Independent reviewing officers are required to oversee and scrutinise the care plan for the child. The aim is to ensure there is sufficient oversight that is independent of the local authority of these orders. Reporting to the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service would add a further level of scrutiny and system-wide picture of implementation. Does the Minister agree that we need robust mechanisms for oversight of these orders? If so, will she accept this amendment?

Amendment 119A in my name seeks to establish the principle that children should always be held in the least restrictive environment possible. There are children with complex learning disabilities and mental health problems who are currently in residential special schools. If residential special schools were allowed to deprive a child in their care of their liberty, it would allow them to stay in that setting, rather than being moved miles away to a secure children’s home or an assessment and treatment unit, where outcomes are much poorer. Of course, any application for a deprivation of liberty order would still need the approval of the courts and the same criteria would apply.

Amendment 119B is a probing amendment to understand the Government’s definition of

“likely to injure themselves or other persons”

and how this threshold is applied.

Amendment 120A simply clarifies the child’s right to access to education while deprived of their liberty. Can the Minister confirm this is the case and how the legislation currently addresses this? She will be aware that this is a core element of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory principles of care. If the current legislation does not include this, perhaps the Government would accept my amendment.

Finally, my Amendment 134C reflects the recommendation of the DPRRC for the extension of the powers conferred by Section 25(2) and (7) of the Children Act to relevant accommodation should be subject to the draft affirmative procedure. The department has argued that it has applied the negative resolution procedure to its extended powers to be consistent with the original legislation, but this was passed before the creation of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee.

It is worth considering that, in contrast, the regulations relating to agency social workers—which we will debate in Clause 19—are subject to the draft affirmative procedure. Surely, the issues here are more worthy of parliamentary scrutiny. These powers cover the maximum length of time a child may be deprived of their liberty, with or without the intervention of the courts. In the words of the DPRRC, this

“seems to us to be an issue which merits a high level of parliamentary scrutiny, particularly as there is nothing on the face of the primary legislation to limit the length of the periods which may be specified in the regulations”.

The powers extend to the specific types of accommodation that can be used, the descriptions of the children to whom this legislation can be applied and how it may be applied. If we were starting afresh, there is no way the Government would be recommending that these regulations be subject to the negative resolution procedure. The DPRRC wrote:

“In our view, a power to extend the descriptions of children to whom the section applies is equivalent to a Henry VIII power and therefore merits the level of parliamentary scrutiny appropriate to such a power”.

A much-overused phrase is “the most vulnerable in our society”, but children deprived of their liberty warrant that label. I beg to move the amendment standing in my name.

18:30:00

My Lords, Amendment 131, in my name, appears in this group. I will not quite say that it is a pleasure to follow the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, but it was a terribly important contribution, and I can only very much agree with what she said. The issues that she has outlined—about children as young as seven, with two-thirds continuing still at six months—are hugely disturbing. My amendment seeks to address a particular issue concerning children subject to deprivation of liberty orders and children in care in general. As I said to the Ministers when they very kindly had a briefing on the Bill, this arises from a campaign that I encountered in 2023, called Hope Instead of Handcuffs. This campaign came from a small group of people—a single operator of the provision of secure transport for children—who were calling for a ban on the automatic use of handcuffs. Yes, I did say the automatic use of handcuffs, which some privatised providers of secure transport were using on children who were subject to deprivation of liberty orders—or who, as it was described, were on the edges of care. They were being put in handcuffs to be transported. These are not children who have been accused of any crime; these are simply children—very vulnerable children, obviously—who have been subjected to something that I think any of us would find traumatic and disturbing. This reflects testimony that was given in 2021 to the inquiry of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on protecting rights in care settings. Serenity Welfare testified that, as I have just said, many providers of secure transportation services for children who were on the edge of care were using handcuffs as standard. I quote from its testimony: “The practice is unregulated and unmonitored, as there is no obligation on these providers to report any instances of handcuffing to the appropriate authority”. As a result of that campaign in 2023, I and a number of other Members of both Houses wrote to the Government inquiring what was happening. The response we got was, “We will look into it”. To the best of my knowledge, none of this has progressed since then, so I particularly wanted to put down this probing amendment to draw attention to the issue. I have not addressed just transport, because I want to know what is happening in other settings for these children as well, which is why I have included them in the amendment. This is perhaps a much more limited issue than the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was outlining, but I look forward to hearing from the Minister that the Government are planning to do something about it if, as I have no reason to doubt, it is still continuing, and to stop it.

My Lords, Amendment 126, in my name, is in this group. This amendment relates to a discreet issue for children who are under a High Court deprivation of liberty order but who are not also looked-after children under the Children Act. Approximately 96% of those children under a High Court deprivation of liberty order are also looked-after children under the Children Act, but then they end up at the High Court, as there is a shortage of Section 25 secure accommodation. Only in Section 25 accommodation under the Children Act can a looked-after child be restricted of their liberty—that currently means a secure children’s home—so they are also put under a High Court DoL so that the local authority can deprive them of their liberty in non-Section-25-type accommodation. It seems that by the move to the phrasing “relevant accommodation” the Bill will regularise in law their situation, which is that 96% of these young people are currently under that inherent jurisdiction deprivation of liberty order. However, there are currently 4% of children under a High Court deprivation of liberty order who are not also looked-after children under the Children Act. I want to thank the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane. I believe that it was his work that brought in the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, when High Court DoLS—as we would call them—began to be used as a jurisdiction. It is due only to that work that we know that, within that group, we have this little group—the 4%—who are not also looked-after children. Even an amended Section 25 of the Children Act refers only to looked-after children having their liberty being restricted in what would now be known as “relevant accommodation”. They would still be left under the High Court jurisdiction, with fewer safeguards. The whole purpose of Clause 11 is to bring from the inherent jurisdiction these children under a statutory system of protection, safeguards and reviews. This 4% of around 1,280 children last year are often children coming out of the mental health estate. They have been taken into hospital for their own protection and for treatment; then they are discharged but, for health reasons, their home is no longer suitable. In my view, they are not going to pass the threshold test under the Children Act 1989 to be a looked-after child, because the threshold test—philosophically and in practice—is about harm by the care or neglect of the adult who should be caring for them or the fact of their being out of control. Neither of those circumstances seem in most cases to apply to a young person who has gone into the mental health estate and then been discharged. While I recognise the imperfections of the current drafting of Amendment 126—for instance, it might trigger other provisions of the Children Act if we deem these children to be looked after-children—I chose that mechanism to try to bring them under the safeguards that we will have for children under Section 25 who are looked-after children, and not leave them still to be under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court. I hope that that serves to be a mechanism for the Minister to explain what the situation is for that small group of children. I imagine it was envisaged by Sir Andrew McFarlane that he would get the data through the Nuffield work, so that we would come to Parliament, legislate and take this into statute law, out of the inherent jurisdiction. It seems to me, from Amendment 126, that unless we do something for this small group of children, he is going to have to continue needing Nuffield, because there will be a need for this type of deprivation of liberty order under the inherent jurisdiction for the group of children I have just outlined.

My Lords, what the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, has just said is entirely sensible, and, if I may, I add my voice to it. I did not know about this group of children. It seems wrong in principle that they should not be treated in exactly the same way as all other children in this particularly vulnerable group. As the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, pointed out, they are quite obviously the most vulnerable of all the children. I declare my interest as patron of the Atkinson unit in Exeter, which is secure accommodation. What I am really standing up for on this is not only to understand and support in principle what the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is saying but to express some concerns. I will just take, as an example, Amendment 120. If this child under the age of 13—and that is a very sad circumstance to have a child under 13—is under an order of the court, the Secretary of State would not be able to deal with it further than suggesting that the court order should be reversed. It is important that, when looking at these amendments, one has to bear in mind that it appears that deprivation of liberty may be able to be made without the introduction of the court. In so far as the court is concerned, I remind the Committee, as a former lawyer and judge, that neither the Home Office, the Department for Education nor any other government department can actually change the law of England other than through the parliamentary process. I have no doubt at all that the Minister knows that perfectly well, but it seems to me we have to be a little careful about the extent of the suggested use of these amendments. I entirely understand what is intended, and it is entirely laudable, but we just need to be very careful as regards in what circumstances and whether there will be a court order. My recollection is that, in the past, Section 25 orders were also made in the family proceedings court. Not a word has been said about that now, and it may be that that does not happen any longer, but certainly there continue to be orders under the inherent jurisdiction, so I just make that warning to your Lordships.

My Lords, noble Lords often say in this Chamber that it is a pleasure to follow whichever noble Lord or noble Baroness. I cannot say it is a pleasure to follow the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, because, given the depth and detail of what she says and the experience she brings as a former judge—and she always speaks without a note—it is not a pleasure but humbling to be given the role of speaking in her wake, as it were. She is, as ever, extremely impressive and adds so much to our debates. I want to speak to Amendment 506B in my name, on the use of accommodation for deprivation of liberty. When a child is in a secure setting, there is a robust framework for reviewing the suitability of arrangements for deprivation of liberty, including through the appointment of independent persons. Where deprivation of liberty orders are used in other accommodation arrangements, the same safeguards may simply not be there. So there need to be additional safeguards, including, as recommended by the Children’s Commissioner, a record in the looked-after child census, including the type of setting and the length of and reasons for restrictions placed. Also, wherever possible, independent advocacy should be provided for all children where a deprivation of liberty order is being considered or is in place. Clause 11 provides a statutory framework for children to be deprived of their liberty in accommodation other than a secure children’s home through amending Section 25 of the Children Act 1989. The intention is for there to be parity with secure children’s homes in terms of access to legal aid. But the current position for parents and anyone with parental responsibility in these cases is that they are entitled only to means-tested legal aid. Such means tests are very restrictive; research by the Law Society has demonstrated that even those living in poverty can fail the financial eligibility test for legal aid. Many parents are therefore left to navigate these complex legal proceedings on their own. The result of these court hearings is significant for children because it could lead to a child being put into a placement that is many miles away from their home environment and their local network of support—mirroring the arguments that we heard in the last group of amendments. Additionally, deprivation of liberty orders are increasingly being used to place children in unregistered accommodation —I will not go there again—due to the lack of secure children’s home places. According to figures published by the Family Court Statistics Quarterly, there were 1,280 applications to the High Court for deprivation of liberty orders for children in 2024, of which 132 were for children 12 years of age and under. That total figure represents a 120% increase since 2020-21 figures, which themselves reflected a fourfold increase since 2017-18—again, according to the Law Society. By way of comparison, there were 261 applications for secure accommodation for children in 2024. The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, mentioned the Nuffield Foundation; the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory found that almost 90% of parents and carers were not legally represented at any hearings in applications made under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction for deprivation of liberty orders. For an event of such importance to those families involved, that is surely a worryingly high figure and is just unacceptable. It is surely a basic human right for no child to be deprived of their liberty, particularly into an unregistered placement, without their parents having access to legal advice and representation. There should always be access to non-means tested legal aid for parents and carers in these cases, and Amendment 506B would provide for that.

My Lords, I speak as someone who has had to make these orders, and in doing so I recognise that these amendments are of great importance, shining light on the deprivation of liberty jurisdiction which has persisted in England and Wales for perhaps too long. In an article in the Observer just a year ago, there was trenchant criticism from the former President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby. He wrote: “When a system is routinely locking up vulnerable children in highly inappropriate settings because they are too difficult to look after, something is clearly going very, very wrong”. He described this as a “moral failure – by the state and by society”. As has been explained, the existing statutory provision for secure accommodation orders made under Section 25 of the Children Act now covers only a few of those with complex needs and those requiring accommodation because they have to be protected from exploitation or present a risk to others. That is because “secure accommodation” is a term which describes only registered children’s homes specifically approved by the Secretary of State, of which, as we have heard, there are only a limited and increasingly insufficient number available. With the severe shortage of places and the rising need for accommodation for those whose welfare requires some restriction of liberty, that need has had to be met by applications to the High Court for authorisation under the court’s inherent jurisdiction. As places cannot be found in suitable registered homes which are Section 25 compliant, the High Court then has to consider whether an unregistered placement is in the child’s best interests. All too often, the local authority, the child’s guardian in the proceedings and the court have to struggle when considering what is available. The court is faced usually with a short-term crisis, planned for in the short term, and limited services available, and is battling to keep the child safe. In doing so, one is usually presented with only one unsatisfactory option. As the MacAlister report put it, “Courts do not take such decisions lightly. Deprivation of liberty orders are often made following a nationwide search for homes, and often after the child has experienced multiple home breakdowns … the harrowing circumstances set out in these High Court judgements are a window into the dysfunction of the care system”. In practice, if a DoLS is justified, the court has to look at the distance from home, the adequacy of education provision, if any, the adequacy of staffing and the nature and level of any workable restrictions required. I take one slight issue with something the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said. In my experience, children do participate, at least in some hearings. They sometimes attend in person, but, as we all know, they are often placed far too far away—certainly from the court dealing with it—and sometimes they attend remotely. In my experience, one hears children who are depressed, agitated, traumatised and often very worried. In those circumstances, the court is looking not for what is best but for what is available and what is least worst, trying to keep that child safe. The shortage of provision and the resultant use of deprivation of liberty authorisations have been known about for a long time and have been the subject of strong criticism from the higher judiciary, which has seen what was meant to be only a last resort become the norm, described by the Supreme Court as an “imperfect stopgap”. The judiciary has felt dismayed that its concerns appeared to be unheeded by Governments and Parliament. It has also been concerned that the courts were having to do what the state really should have been doing without recourse to the court in most cases. The scale of the problem has been repeatedly highlighted by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, whose excellent work has been referred to during this debate, but also by others, including the BBC and responsible journalists elsewhere. I recognise that Clause 11 creates a new statutory regime and the concept of relevant accommodation, extending the places in which children can be confined. Much of what I have heard from Ministers on the Government Front Bench today has been very reassuring, and a recognition that the Government are getting to grips. Of course, it remains to be seen whether what can be achieved will be a sufficient response to the difficulties created by these orders, and to the independent review’s call for more flexible and innovative types of provision of care for children. I support the amendments to improve what the Bill intends to achieve, in particular Amendment 124, which would require it to be stated that a deprivation of liberty has to be a last resort. Amendments 120A and 127 expressly provide for education and for therapy. Amendment 123 provides for regular reviews—not by the court, which is what happens at the moment, but by the authorities responsible for that deprivation of liberty. There is much to be said also for Amendment 132 on the involvement of the independent reviewing officer. I will also support Amendment 506B, providing for the availability of legal aid. I questioned what in reality Amendment 122 would achieve, simply because we are where we are because of the severe shortage of registered children’s homes, of which there were 29 in 2002 and there are now only 13, which has, of course, forced reliance on unregistered placements that are often expensive. I think the answer to my question is that the expectation is that there will be improved registration of homes and an extension of the availability of homes to address what the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, called the underlying need to increase capacity. Finally, in respect of government Amendment 128, I ask what this will all mean for cross-border placements. There are awful stories of children from Devon and Cornwall having to be placed in Scotland.

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Meston, whose wisdom and experience of the court processes in this area are, I am sure, very valuable to the Committee. I will speak to Amendment 133 in my name. I have also added my name to that of my noble friend Lady Barran on Amendment 120. Amendment 133 states: “Information required to be published by a local authority includes information about the authority’s arrangements for enabling children subject to deprivation of liberty orders to maintain, strengthen and build family and social relationships”. This Bill picks up much of the intent of Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, but one of its key emphases, the importance of relationships, could feature more prominently throughout. Josh’s review drew on an experts by experience board informing his recommendations: young people and adults who had been through the care system. They said in the foreword that this review was their chance “to reshape the system by placing relationships front and centre”. I was on the design group on that review, and this emphasis came through again and again in evidence—hence the first paragraph of the report, which states: “What we need is a system that … puts lifelong loving relationships at the heart of the care system”. It calls for a reset that “starts with recognising that it is loving relationships that hold the solutions for children and families overcoming adversity”. On an earlier group of amendments focusing on care leavers, my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott said we need to make sure that the loving, committed relationships that come to the fore in the family group decision-making process do not fall through the cracks in a child’s care pathway as they walk along it. If the local authority intentionally helps a child or young person to maintain them from day one, these relationships will not only be there when the child leaves but have the potential to transform the whole experience of being in care. My noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott talks very effectively about the lifelong links model imported from California and thoroughly adapted and tested by the Department for Education for British children, families and friends. Lifelong links ensures that children have a lasting support network of relatives and others who care about them throughout their time in the care system. In my work with the Ministry of Justice, I have recommended it for children in the youth custody and wider youth justice system, with whom children deprived of their liberty are an overlapping cohort. We can underestimate the strength of the pull towards blood connections. Without the corporate parent’s gentle hand on the tiller in this area, many young people in or leaving care go looking on the internet and social media for family members, and not all of them will be beneficial relationships. While I would like lifelong links to be included in regulations and guidance as an offer to all children in care, care leavers and those deprived of their liberty, as the Minister said, this programme is being evaluated. Whatever its future, local authorities should be required to be intentional and systematic about relationships. Children in care, especially when they are in trouble in care, desperately need to feel that they belong somewhere. Mark Riddell MBE, the Government’s national adviser for care leavers—at least, I think he still is; he certainly has been for some time—tells how his turnaround moment came when he was about 14 years old in the Scottish care system and had just trashed the children’s home where he lived after several failed placements. He had been called to the manager’s office, so he packed his black bag, expecting to be moved on again. The first thing the manager said to him was, “What’s that bag for?”. Mark said, “It’s all my stuff; you’re going to kick me out”. The manager told him, “We can sort out the damage, but you’re not leaving: this is your home”. Knowing that he belonged somewhere and that people were committed to him, regardless of his behaviour, finally settled him down, and he is now a voice for government. Young people deprived of their liberty need a profound sense of belonging. Relationships with dedicated and compassionate staff are essential, but they also need to know that they have not been abandoned by their families, friends and other trusted adults. They belong in a relational web. We must not let this be torn apart by the already very traumatic experience of being deprived of their liberty.

My Lords, I will make a couple of points and ask a question. Like others, I have found this both a very humbling and a very disturbing group, which, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Meston, has shone a light on a little-understood area and highlighted some disturbing details. It is an area that I now realise I knew far too little about and that has not received anything like the transparency that it should. The two points I want to make are on Amendment 127 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about placing a duty on local authorities to provide therapeutic treatment for children who are subject to a deprivation of liberty order. It reminds me of all the detailed scrutiny that I and other noble Lords gave to the Mental Health Bill during its passage in the first few months of the year. One of the things that was particularly in my mind was that that Bill included four core principles for making decisions about detaining people under the Mental Health Act, and one of those was that it would be of “therapeutic benefit”. I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, who told us that for quite a few of the children who would be subject to these deprivation of liberty orders, it would be because of their severe mental health problems. It struck me that there are parallels between the two Bills; and in the same way that we have said in the Mental Health Bill that detention must be of therapeutic benefit, Amendment 127, which is about providing therapeutic treatment for children subject to a deprivation of liberty order, is particularly important.

19:00:00

My final point relates to Amendment 132. It is very sensible to expand the legal duties of the independent reviewing officer for the reasons that we have heard. An independent reviewing officer is important, but it is not quite the same as having advocacy. Another key feature, certainly, of the Mental Health Bill that we toiled under for many a long evening was ensuring, particularly for 16 to 18 year-olds who were detained under the Act or involved in an offence in some way, that they all had access to some form of advocacy on their behalf. Can the Minister say what the current arrangement is or what plans the Government have to ensure that this small but terribly, deeply vulnerable group of children actually has the advocacy they need.

My Lords, I have added my name to a number of the amendments in this group; I could probably have added it to all of them. Like other noble Lords, I am very grateful for the work of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, which has been quoted several times. I am ignoring all the careful facts and figures I had prepared for this evening, because most of them have already been given by other noble Lords, and it is a principle here that we do not repeat what has already been said. Rather, I would like to speak to the broad principles and the moral case, and to be brief. I have been struck by the number of parallels with another situation of last resort that I have worked with for many decades now, and that is families who are made homeless. Homelessness should be rare, short and unrepeated and so should a deprivation order for a child. It should not be something that happens very often; it should only ever happen the once; and it should be for the shortest possible time. A number of the amendments in this group, particularly those I have signed up to, would help to ensure that that is the case. When I have been dealing with services for those who have been made homeless, what matters is the quality of service that is provided. I have tabled some amendments to the Renters’ Rights Bill that are around that. Some of these amendments in this group would ensure that children who are deprived of their liberty have a good solid provision of services for them. Finally, when I have been dealing with homelessness, I have heard too many stories where families are trekking across multiple local authority boundaries to get to a school. It is important, as some amendments in this group would tease out, that if we must deprive a child of their liberty, we should do it as close to where they live as possible and as close to where they belong. I will echo the words of one other noble Lord to finish with. I was really struck and impressed by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, reminding us about love, relationships and belonging. It is these big-picture issues that matter. They must be the foundation stones on which we build services for some of our most deprived and vulnerable children in our society.

My Lords, I realise that, quite often, we are very privileged in this House that, when there is a Bill, we get showered with briefings from all sorts of organisations. Of course, we read them, and then we say, “Oh my goodness, I did not understand this. I did not know about that”. Then, when we come to debate in the Chamber, we get real expertise, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Meston, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who bring that added understanding and information. In fact, I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who mentioned Learn with the Lords, and when I do a Learn with the Lords session, and they ask, “Why are you in the Lords?”, I say it is because we have got real people who are experts in the field, and when you listen to them, you say, “Wow”. That is not just in this debate. When I looked at the briefing from the Nuffield Foundation, I was just absolutely shocked. It was not something in my understanding or that I particularly knew about. I do not want to repeat the figures—the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester said we should not repeat things—but when you read the briefing, perhaps they do need to be repeated because they are quite shocking. The number of children being deprived of their liberty through the High Court is rising and rising—102 in 2017, and in 2024 it had gone up by 1,100%. These were meant to be last-resort measures, but there were 10 times as many applications to deprive children of their liberty to the High Court as there were applications for secure accommodation orders between July 2022 and March 2023. We have talked a lot about the voice of the child. It has sort of been a mantra of this part of the Bill, and yet only 10% of children were present at hearings considering their case. So where was the voice of the child? The other figure which quite alarmed me was that 89% of parents or carers were not represented at hearings. Of course, these children are not only the most vulnerable children but also, in most cases, very difficult children to manage and to support. You need highly trained and professional people to be able to do that. Sadly, those numbers of people are not always available. The final part of this briefing, I noticed, said that costs are escalating—not that costs are everything—but outcomes are not improving. You would think if costs were going up, the outcomes would be improving. Finally, I want to deal with one point that was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, because it quite surprised me. She talked about children in handcuffs. The reason I was surprised about that was that I remember that, during the coalition period, one of our MPs sent a letter around saying, “If we have achieved anything, it is to stop the use of handcuffs on children”. I was quite shocked to hear that, and I went to ask my noble friend Lady Tyler if I had got this wrong and she said she thought I was right. I do not know where this is happening, and we need to find out. I really look forward to the Minister’s response on this. I added my name to Amendment 132, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, on expanding the legal duties of the independent review officer.

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 119 to 124 very briefly. We have touched on some very important points, and there is something that still needs to be crystallised. As others have said, these are some of the most troubled children in the system. They are also the ones whose care is probably the most expensive of all. Such specialised arrangements have to be made. We have touched on the tensions here between local authorities, the health service and the justice system. One of the reasons for the increase in the number of orders is the reduction in the number of justice secure beds and also tier 4 mental health beds. We have this terrible lacuna around children whom the health system deems to have, for example, untreatable personality disorders but who very clearly need to be looked after somewhere where both they and others can be kept safe and to have everything that we can do to improve their lives and to help make life work for them on a permanent basis in a healthy, humane way. This is an enormous challenge. I would very much like to hear the Minister explain how the health functions of government are also going to be tied into making the deprivation of liberty scheme work.

My Lords, as others have said during the course of this important debate, Clause 11 is about provision for some of the most vulnerable children in the country and the importance of ensuring that adequate support and necessary safeguards are available to them. The measures in Clause 11 brought forward by the Government seek to bring more children, who would otherwise be deprived of their liberty under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court, into a statutory scheme where they will benefit from enhanced safeguards and protections. I will say more in response to specific amendments about those enhanced safeguards and protections. The clause provides a statutory framework to authorise the deprivation of liberty of looked-after children in provision other than a secure children’s home where there are not enough places, and which cannot meet the needs of all this cohort. Noble Lords will be aware of the pressing need to ensure that these children are provided with sufficient suitable placements to meet their various needs, including in Scotland. This brings me to government Amendments 125 and 128, which will allow local authorities and others in Scotland to seek authorisation in Scottish courts to deprive children of their liberty in relevant accommodation in England. As noble Lords will be aware, relevant accommodation will have the primary purpose of care and treatment and will also be capable of being used to deprive a child of his or her liberty if required in connection with the provision of care and treatment. We are also making a consequential change to amend the language from “restrict” to “deprive”, to ensure consistency with existing amendments to Section 25 of the Children Act 1989 provided by Clause 11. These amendments will ensure that Scottish local authorities can access all forms of accommodation to enable a child to be deprived of their liberty in a placement that best meets their needs. Amendment 119A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, addresses important issues around how best to support and protect another vulnerable group of children by seeking to allow children who have an education, health and care plan and who are in residential schools to be deprived of liberty in those settings under this legislation. The primary purpose of a residential school is to educate the children living there. Each child’s EHCP will have specified requirements to meet the child’s educational needs. In contrast, Section 25 is a specific legal route for placing looked-after children in specific accommodation where there is a need to avoid absconding or injury to the child or another person, often due to complex trauma. Clause 11 will not require any child to move from a residential school that is meeting the child’s needs. Where deprivation of liberty is required for a child living in a residential school, mechanisms other than Section 25 can be considered. For older children, that might include an application to the Court of Protection. Amendment 119B seeks to remove “injure” from the clause but, as the noble Baroness spells out, is probing what is meant by the terms within the criteria under Section 25 of the Children Act. I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify that “injure” in this context has a wide meaning, including physical, mental or emotional injury. The criterion for an order under Section 25 is long-standing and has been well tested by the courts. I confirm for the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, that Section 25 orders are issued by the family courts. I am confident, given the long-standing and well-tested procedures for Section 25, that it will continue to ensure that children can be deprived of their liberty to keep them safe where appropriate and necessary. Amendment 120A seeks to ensure access to education for children in the new relevant accommodation outlined in Clause 11. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that access to education for our most vulnerable children is of the utmost importance to ensure that they can thrive and get on well in life. That is why there is substantial existing legislation in this regard, setting out the legal duties on local authorities to promote children’s educational attainment and include educational needs within care plans, as well as regulatory requirements for children’s homes to meet children’s educational needs. The intention behind “relevant accommodation”, which will be registered children’s homes, is to focus on ensuring that the child obtains the relevant treatment, which may involve depriving them of their liberty, but where they may also be able to have, for example, continued access to the community, including for education. It is also more likely to provide the closeness to the community and to their homes which several noble Lords have rightly said is an important right and need of children that must be continued.

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Amendments 121 and 122 seek to ensure that all relevant accommodation providers are registered with Ofsted as children’s homes and for this to be reflected in their statement of purpose. This is of paramount importance, although these amendments will not be necessary to ensure it. Persons carrying on relevant accommodation will be required to register with Ofsted, as they will be providing care and accommodation and meeting the definition of a children’s home in Section 1 of the Care Standards Act 2000. It is already a requirement for someone who is carrying on a children’s home to be registered.

Amendments 120, 123 and 124 raise important issues regarding the approvals process for children under the age of 13, review points for orders made under this section, and provide a number of specific additional safeguards for children subject to orders made under Section 25, in secure or relevant accommodation. There is, I agree, a need for clear safeguards to ensure that children are deprived of their liberty only where it is necessary. That is why the Secretary of State already has powers to make regulations in relation to secure accommodation. Those same powers will be available to the Secretary of State for relevant accommodation. In those powers, we will set out maximum periods for which a deprivation of liberty can be authorised and make it clear that Secretary of State approval will be required where a child is under 13, as is already the case in secure accommodation, given their additional vulnerability.

It is practical to make the requirements that these amendments seek, not within primary legislation but within regulations. However, I place on record our commitment to ensuring equivalent levels of protection in these regulations. We will be learning from research that is already under way and engaging with the sector in the development of regulations and guidance to ensure that they are expert-informed and meet the needs of children. As secure children’s homes and relevant accommodation are different forms of provision, we will consider what is best required for each type of accommodation.

Deprivation of liberty must be a method of last resort, used where required to keep children safe. This is an accepted principle in the courts, so setting this out in primary legislation would be disproportionate. It is of paramount importance that any restrictions placed on a child are appropriate and are applied for no longer than is necessary, with robust plans to ensure that children are not stuck in the cycle of crisis. In relation to children’s recovery plans, there are a number of existing duties on local authorities, including the duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of any child looked after by them, and for placement decisions to be informed by a care plan, including a therapeutic model of care.

We are conducting a test-and-learn project this year in the south-east regional care co-operative to understand how the use of an assessment-of-need tool and a multidisciplinary team can assist with care and treatment planning for children for their placement journeys, with the aim of providing placement stability or repatriation home if appropriate.

Amendment 127 seeks to place a legal duty on local authorities to provide therapeutic treatment for children placed in secure accommodation—that is, a secure children’s home. There are a number of existing legal duties and requirements on local authorities in relation to appropriate care provision. These include ensuring that looked-after children have access to necessary physical and mental health care, including therapeutic treatment, where appropriate. I note the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, about the availability of appropriate provision. In addition, NHS England has statutory responsibility for the commissioning of health services or facilities for children in secure accommodation. The duty means that children in secure settings can access high-quality healthcare services.

Amendment 132 would require an independent reviewing officer to refer a child’s case to Cafcass when a local authority does not implement a recovery plan for a child deprived of their liberty under Section 25. All looked-after children must have an independent reviewing officer to make sure that decisions are made in their best interest and care plans are followed effectively. IROs already have a statutory power to refer to Cafcass where they feel it is necessary.

Amendment 126 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, seeks to ensure that all children who are deprived of their liberty under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court become looked after as a result. Local authorities must take positive action when a child is demonstrating that they are at risk, including at risk of requiring a deprivation of liberty. This may include putting in place a child protection plan or applying for a care order where concerns are substantiated.

As the noble Baroness said, Nuffield research found that 96.6% of children on a deprivation of liberty order under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court were already in care at the time of the application. Where the child is not in care, they may have significant disabilities that mean a deprivation of liberty order is needed to keep them safe. In those cases, seeking to consider these children looked after may not be needed or appropriate. Furthermore, the Children Act 1989 is clear that the court’s inherent jurisdiction should not be exercised if the same result can be achieved through existing statutory frameworks. Deeming a child looked after due to a deprivation of liberty order being made under the inherent jurisdiction would bypass existing legal frameworks that enable a child to become looked after. However, I am not wholly sure that I have fully addressed the detail of the points made by the noble Baroness in her contribution, and I will therefore look again at what she said and undertake to write to her.

I thank the Minister. Can she simply confirm in the letter that the position may be that we are left with a residual group of children who will still need the inherent jurisdiction? It might be that the legislation just does not reach quite far enough at the moment.

I will clarify that in the letter. On Amendment 131 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on the important matter of the use of restraint on children in care and subject to deprivation of liberty orders, it is vital that children are safe and that restraint is used only where appropriate, including when they are moving between settings and services. We take these concerns very seriously. We will consider guidance on restraint in due course. However, the question about children being handcuffed remains, and I will endeavour to get more detail about that and to come back to the noble Baroness. Providers, in conjunction with placing authorities, are under an obligation to use the minimum appropriate restriction to keep a child safe.

I may be a little too soon, but I wonder whether the Government are minded to ensure that there is, as my amendment would provide, some kind of reporting mechanism to keep track of things. There may be cases where that is necessary. Surely this is something there should be an annual report on so that we can see the direction of travel and whether there is a problem that needs to be tackled.

Noble Lords are very premature today. I was coming not quite to that but to something that I hope will be satisfactory in relation to that reporting mechanism. Ofsted, as the independent regulator of children’s homes, manages incidents of restraint on a case-by-case basis under its inspection framework. The children’s homes regulations place a requirement on homes to record any incidents of restraint and on the registered person to inform Ofsted of any incident in relation to a child that they consider to be serious. We think that Ofsted inspectors are best placed to scrutinise individual incidents of restraint and the circumstances around them and to ensure that care providers are minimising its use. We are not clear that a yearly report to Parliament aggregating that data would add anything in this case, although it would create an additional burden and risk distraction from this important work. It would, in fact, probably be significantly less effective in safeguarding children and recording the incidents than the Ofsted approach currently being used. Amendment 133 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, seeks to promote family and other social relationships for children subject to deprivation of liberty orders by publishing local authority plans to support children in that regard. As mentioned in respect of earlier amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, I reiterate the Government’s agreement that, wherever possible, it is vital for a child’s welfare to have positive family and social relationships. Given that the Children Act 1989 and the supporting guidance already seek to ensure that family and other relationships for looked-after children are promoted while keeping children safe, and that this forms part of Ofsted’s inspections of local authorities, I am not sure it is appropriate or necessary to increase the burden on local authorities by mandating them to publish that information. I recognise the points made by the noble Lord, or it may have been somebody else speaking on his behalf, about the effectiveness of the lifelong links programme. I think we referenced that previously, and I can see the enormous benefit that can come from it. Amendment 134C tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks to ensure the affirmative procedure for regulations made under Section 25 of the Children Act 1989. I agree with the noble Baroness that it is important to ensure that regulations on this matter are subject to the correct scrutiny. She referred to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s report in which this was raised. We are grateful to the committee for its scrutiny. We are carefully considering its recommendations and will respond in due course. Amendment 506B in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson seeks to delay commencement of Clause 11 until regulations are made to ensure that non-means-tested legal aid is available in relation to applications to deprive a child of their liberty under Section 25 of the Children Act 1989. I assure my noble friend that where an application is made to deprive a child of their liberty as a result of any measure the Bill brings forward, those children will be eligible for state-funded legal aid representation using the same criteria that currently apply to all children subject to orders under Section 25. This means that children will be able to access legal aid without needing to satisfy means testing. I hope that noble Lords think I have provided nearly all the detail requested in these amendments. On that basis, I commend the government amendments to the Committee and hope that noble Lords feel able not to press theirs.

This may be a rather silly question, but in my experience of the Atkinson secure accommodation unit, every child needs at least two carers. There are even children who need three. I wonder how a children’s residential care home will manage a child deprived of liberty. It will be an extreme case and the child will be unbelievably difficult to look after.

Nevertheless, we believe that it is possible. On the definition of relevant accommodation, we believe that it is possible to find those sorts of homes—sometimes supported by the use of technology to help maintain security for children, and certainly needing a certain level of staffing, as the noble and learned Baroness said—and that, for many children, it is preferable to live in that type of accommodation as opposed to the alternative, which has been to be deprived of their liberty under the inherent jurisdiction of the courts. Actually, some of that type of accommodation may well be more suitable for things such as maintaining contact, having education and being closer to the community.

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My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this important debate. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Storey: the House of Lords was at its best with the expertise that was shared generously by your Lordships. I also thank the Minister for her comprehensive response. I believe she addressed —or is going to come back on—the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, regarding the use of handcuffs, as well as the specific gaps in relation to children who are not looked after, which was raised by my noble friend Lady Berridge. I think she also gave a very positive response to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in relation to his amendments. So it is so far, so good. In relation to my amendments, there were some genuinely positive and helpful responses. In relation to Amendments 119A and 119B, there was a category of response. I understand—the Minister is obviously telling the truth—that these duties already exist, whether it be in relation to children receiving education or therapeutic support, or, indeed, that they are in registered accommodation; but the Minister knows as well as I do that that is not working in real life. It may be that the problem is a difficult one to solve, but it still needs to be solved. These children are not typically getting an education; although I would agree with her that, if they are nearer their community, they have a better chance of doing so. We know that these children have frequently been in unregistered accommodation and that, as I said in my remarks, they often do not meet the criteria for CAMHS to provide therapeutic support. I also felt something distinctly promising about her tone in relation to my Amendment 134C, so I live in hope. There are two amendments that I want to touch on briefly. In the case of Amendment 124, I believe the Minister said that she agreed on the need for clear safeguards, and that the same powers would be available to the Secretary of State as exist today for children in secure accommodation, but those powers will be set out in regulations. That was the bit where, if I have understood correctly, I stopped feeling comfortable because, obviously, regulations can be reversed, and I cannot see why you would not want the same safeguards for these children on the face of legislation as for those in secure accommodation. But I will read what she said and, if I have misunderstood, she is welcome to intervene on me. Similarly, in relation to my Amendment 132 regarding the independent reviewing officer, the Minister said that those powers already exist, but my amendment would explicitly extend and strengthen those powers. I would be grateful if she could perhaps reflect on that in her comments in relation to Amendment 132. We need proper scrutiny and oversight, we need proper therapy and care for these children, and they need to be in the right accommodation. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 119A withdrawn.

Amendments 119B to 124 not moved.

Amendment 125

Moved by

125: Clause 11, page 17, line 12, at end insert— “(6A) In subsection (5A), for “restrict the child’s” substitute “deprive the child of their”.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment ensures consistency with the terminology in section 25 of the Children Act 1989 as amended by clause 11.

Amendment 125 agreed.

Amendments 126 and 127 not moved.

Amendment 128

Moved by

128: Clause 11, page 17, line 24, leave out subsection (9) and insert— “(9) In section 93 of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 (interpretation)—(a) in the definition of “secure accommodation”, omit paragraph (b);(b) after that definition insert—““secure accommodation” , in relation to England, means secure accommodation within the meaning of section 25 of the Children Act 1989 or relevant accommodation within the meaning of that section;”.(10) In section 202(1) of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011 (asp 1) (interpretation)—(a) in the definition of “secure accommodation”, omit paragraph (b);(b) after that definition insert—““secure accommodation” , in relation to England, means secure accommodation within the meaning of section 25 of the Children Act 1989 or relevant accommodation within the meaning of that section,”.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment ensures that the clause 11 amendments to section 25 of the Children Act 1989, to allow local authorities in England and Wales to seek authorisation for the deprivation of liberty of children in accommodation provided for care and treatment in England, extend to local authorities in Scotland.

Amendment 128 agreed.

Clause 11 (as amended) agreed.

Amendments 129 to 134 not moved.

House resumed. Committee to begin again not before 8.15 pm.