My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. As I said earlier, it is part of a suite of amendments aimed at making the lives of young people in care more palatable. The idea of being told at the age of 16, 17 or 18 that you are going to be independent and that you will live in a flat, with minimal training in handling a budget and coping with the unwanted visitor referred to by my noble friend Lord Listowel who will derail your attempts to study or work, is unthinkable in relation to our own children. There is a concept that we should think of children in care or looked-after children as being our children, so we should do everything we can to ensure that they do not experience even more disadvantage.
I am not going to repeat all the statistics, research and evidence put before the Committee by my noble friend; suffice it to say that the Staying Put scheme was piloted in 11 local authorities. As he has said, the outcomes for the young people who stayed with their foster carers were significantly and substantially better than for those who were not able to do so. It gave them an opportunity to take more control over their lives and to make more successful transitions from care towards independent adulthood. The Fostering Network found that none of the pilot authorities reported significant problems with foster carer provision as a result of offering the Staying Put scheme, which I know is a concern that has been expressed by some people. While a minority did say that staying put would mean that in theory a former foster bed would no longer be available, it is often the case that foster carers plan to retire after the placement ends and would have been retiring at whatever age the young person left, whether or not it was beyond the age of 18. In addition, foster carer recruitment strategies have simply been amended to suit the new needs of the service.
I shall quote a leaving care manager who participated in the Staying Put pilot scheme. He said:
“Nowadays we do not even recruit foster carers who would not want to offer Staying Put. Indeed, because many of them now want to provide a Staying Put placement, we are keeping them happy and ensuring their future commitment to our service by allowing them to keep young people living with them. They see it as the natural and obvious thing for a professional fostering service to do and they want to play a part in that”.
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In short, it requires a slightly different approach to fostering and its role, and Staying Put should be seen as just another part of the recruitment challenge. Another leaving-care manager in a pilot authority said that it actively assisted in recruitment of foster parents. He said:
“Staying Put has made a massive difference to [our local authority]. It has created a feel good factor in children’s services. It is now a flag that we wave, and has even helped with the recruitment of foster carers because they can see that we are committed to the whole journey of a young person in care rather than taking them to 18 and then dumping them”.
I want to focus on that last phrase “dumping them” because the last thing we want is for children in care or about to be care leavers to feel that this cycle of being dumped or the state of not being wanted is being repeated right up until they are 18.
Although the economic arguments are, of course, important, we should not lose sight of the moral and compassionate arguments. It is unacceptable for an 18 year-old coming out of the care system to harbour that feeling of being dumped, of being discarded again by an uncaring system. Staying Put is one way of reassuring those young people that they have not been left without support. If it were up to me, it would probably be a little older than 21 ideally. I see this as a rare opportunity to make sure that the next generation of care leavers gets a much better start to their adult life than people have had in the past.