My Lords, our Amendments 41, 42 and 45 to Clause 2 and Amendment 54 to Clause 3 aim to make the local authority offer to care leavers a firm, proactive commitment to support rather than the you-approach-us emphasis currently in the Bill. We strongly agree with the Alliance for
Children in Care and Care Leavers that the Bill does not go far enough to make a real difference to young people’s lives and that strengthening the local offer to all care leavers up to the age of 25 is a key opportunity to transform the standard of support that care leavers can expect. Our Amendments 47 and 74A deal with this important entitlement issue.
Noble Lords underlined the need to ensure the high standards of support for children in care and care leavers, as well as the best opportunities and access to the services that can help reduce the inequalities they face and set them on a positive path to the future. Amendment 41 places a statutory duty on the local authority to carry out an assessment of the services to meet care leavers’ health, well-being, education, training, job, housing and social participation needs, backed up by the duty to provide those services.
Together with other noble Lords, we stressed the need for a national minimum standard of care for the quality and extent of services which should be offered to care leavers. Amendments 41 and 43 emphasise this. The Bill currently requires local authorities simply to publish a list of the services they provide. This will not address the need for proactive support for care leavers or ensure that they have the information and advice underlined in previous amendments. What is needed is a national offer to serve both as a framework and as an undertaking about the availability of services across the country.
As part of these considerations on the importance of minimum service standards, I briefly for the record draw on the experience and findings of a recent major project, New Belongings, in which I was privileged to take part. It was a three-year project funded by the Department for Education and overseen by the Care Leavers’ Foundation. It involved both elected and staff leadership, practitioners from local authorities and care leavers. Its vision was to work with local authorities to improve outcomes for care leavers by using the care leavers’ experience and wisdom to shape and make decisions about the services that should be provided.
The project’s second phase ended in April. The finishing touches are currently being made to its final report, and it is being independently evaluated. Some 28 local authorities in England took part, covering 90% of all care leavers aged 19 to 21. They worked mostly in clusters, which was invaluable in developing local plans and in sharing and learning from each other. Key requisites and criteria from the outset were that the project had the personal and active support of the chief executive and the council leader. That was crucial. They signed up to the care leavers’ charter and undertook to work with local businesses to offer opportunities and support to care leavers.
Local authorities listening actively to care leavers through regular surveys and engagement through a care leavers’ forum was also at the heart of the project. Care leavers need to be central to decisions about services—decisions about them as individuals and about overall services to care leavers. This ability to listen, the quality of engagement with the care leavers’ forum and the real commitment of senior council leadership to corporate parenting were, together with the effectiveness
of personal advisers, the three main factors contributing to improved outcome for care leavers in the majority of the project clusters.
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As part of the project, I visited the London Borough of Lewisham and subsequently hosted a discussion group of care leavers, senior social care staff and council members from the borough in the House last week. From that type of engagement, I emphasise that you can tell the quality of engagement with the care leavers’ forum by the discussions and conversations that take place. The local authority knows its forum members, keeps in touch and respects their views and inputs. The care leavers feel involved. Care leavers’ forums and regular surveys give the structure and voice to the consultation with care leavers that is required to take place under Clause 2(6). Our Amendment 45 would require the consultation responses to be published online, reinforcing the importance of the carer’s voice and helping to ensure transparency and accountability in how the local offer is developed and agreed.
My reason for drawing the Minister’s attention to the project was the hope that he could assure me that the department is actively looking at the project and its key relevance, particularly to the early clauses of the Bill. I hope that its report will be published this month. Can he undertake, on care leavers’ forums in particular, to come back to the House with a considered view on how they can ensure that local authorities set them up and make full use of their wisdom and experience to develop care leaver services? The project was also asked by the department to define a gold standard in services for care leavers. That has now been published on the New Belongings website and I hope the Minister will look at it in considering the need for minimum standards of service.
I mentioned Lewisham but participating local authorities in the project covered, for example, other London areas, Yorkshire, the north-west, the Midlands and south-west. Key changes in practice in Trafford and Leeds featured strongly, as we would expect, but progress was reported on a wide range of services against project criteria across all 28 councils. For example, there was Bournemouth’s offer of extended support for PAs to out-of-office hours. Staffordshire’s establishment of care leaver ambassadors, using young people with recent experience of care and leaving care to mentor care leavers, was particularly effective for education mentoring. I thought that Durham’s provision for every senior manager to mentor a care leaver was very valuable; it also developed a housing protocol for each care leaver as part of its pathway plan. There was no direct financial support to LAs in this project, only practical support for project activities. The project view was very supportive of the need for national minimum standards and guidance on services to be provided by councils.
Our other amendments in this group are Amendment 47 to Clause 2 and Amendment 74A to Clause 3. They would create a clear principle that all care leavers are entitled to advice and support up to the age of 25. The case for this was well rehearsed by noble Lords at Second Reading. The extension of
support through the Bill as drafted comes with significant caveats, with the onus on the young person to contact the local authority having lost touch with services. Amendment 47 would ensure that the onus is on the corporate parent to reach out to those who may need support and ensure that they are aware of their entitlements. Post 21 is often the age when the problems for care leavers start to pile up. We do not want them to wait until crisis point or fail to get in touch because they do not want to admit that things are going wrong.
Our Amendment 74A would provide for a new Clause 3 to extend a range of duties as set out in Section 23C of the Children Act; in particular, to extend personal adviser support for care leavers up to the age of 25. Care leavers currently have the right to support from a personal adviser and pathway plan up to age 21, or 25 for those who told the local authority that they plan to return to education. The Bill extends this access up to 25 year-olds but again places the onus on the request for support coming from the young person. However, we know that the young people most in need of support often lose touch quickly with services and will not know their entitlements or where to go for help. Our amendment places a duty on councils to stay in touch with care leavers, to re-establish contact where they lose touch, to offer assistance with emergency welfare needs in certain circumstances and to appoint a PA and keep the pathway plan under regular review. This amendment is supported by my noble friend Lord Wills, who will speak on the importance of councils having adequate data on service outcomes for care leavers, and by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel.
I re-emphasise the key role and effectiveness of PAs, particularly the quality of their relationship with care leavers which underpins real change in practice. Talk to care leavers and they will stress this—and just how important the stability of PA support and better access to them is—rather than, as one care leaver said to me, just being able to “grab time with them”, as so often happens.