My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-chair of the Local Government Association. I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, because over the past two years I have been attending two inquiries led by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children: the first into children’s social care services and the second into different thresholds for access to those services.
It has become clear from the evidence I have heard that local authority funding has been cut by 30% to 40%. Local authorities are delivering their statutory services and safeguarding children as best they can, but all the peripheral services—the family support services and the charities—are really struggling to meet the need and therefore more and more children are being taken into care. As I said earlier, Lord Justice Munby, President of the Family Court, in his statement last year highlighted that more and more children were being taken into care and the courts were finding it difficult to process the numbers of children being taken into care.
What needs to happen is what has happened to adult social care: additional funding needs to be given to local authorities so that they can meet the needs of their children and family services and we can stop taking children away from families whom, if they had had additional support early on, they could have stayed with. It is relevant to this debate because we have heard in the inquiries that it is often the poorest local authorities, with the most deprived families,
which have both the greatest demand on their services and the fewest resources to meet those needs. So in what the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, proposes I see a way of reducing deprivation and improving the wealth of those communities so that there is more resource available to local authorities to meet local need, and reducing the need of families to turn to those kinds of services. I look forward to a response from the Minister to the principles that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has just set out.