Children in the Social Care System: England

We begin with the Select Committee statement. Peter Swallow will speak on the publication of the second report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, “Human Rights of Children in the Social Care System in England”, HC 161, for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of Peter Swallow’s statement, I will call Members to put questions on the subject of the statement, and call Peter Swallow to respond to them in turn. Questions should be brief and Members may ask only one question each. I call Peter Swallow on behalf of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

Thank you, Mrs Barker; it is an honour to serve with you in the Chair. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the time for this statement, and my fellow members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights for asking me to make it. I am also grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), for his attendance. As he knows, I never miss an opportunity to raise with him the progress of my local special educational needs and disabilities school, but I am getting that in at the start of my speech so that we can focus on what we are actually here to talk about: the very important matter of children’s social care. This statement sets out the work done and recommendations made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in the report “Human Rights of Children in the Social Care System in England”. It goes without saying that the state’s ability to intervene in families to remove children where, and only where, deemed absolutely necessary for a child’s welfare in the first instance is among the gravest and most serious of its responsibilities. But the responsibility the state takes for that child and how they are cared for next, which has the capacity to shape the rest of their life, is equally as serious. No parliamentary speech can do true justice to the experiences of the care-experienced young people whom the Committee spoke to during its work on the report, in Leeds, in York and at a roundtable in Parliament. What we heard from them will stay with me for the rest of my life. I extend the sincere thanks of the Committee to every one of them for giving voice to their experience in the report, and I hope they see their voices reflected in the recommendations we have made. Many of the young people I spoke to were curious about how a Select Committee inquiry works, but sceptical of there being any hope that anything they may say could make a difference to the social care system in the UK. I hope that scepticism may prove unfounded. Given that my hon. Friend the Minister is in his place, I take it that he is willing to listen to the experiences of those young people. If I had to summarise all that the Committee heard in one sentence, it would be this: the outcomes of children in and around the care system are too often marred by challenge and difficulty, and too often end in tragedy. Children in the care system are regularly left with inadequate mental health support, despite the substantial trauma they may have faced. For some young people, that means that challenging behaviours that may be met with support and love in a family home are often handled by services including the police, which means that the care system can be a driver of criminalisation. The Committee also heard that when young people leave care, they too often face a cliff edge, and are left alone to navigate adult life without suitable support and the enduring social networks that so many of us rely on. That means that some young people fall into destructive behaviours and relationships, which can end in criminalisation, mental health difficulties or isolation. Those outcomes are troubling in and of themselves, but they can also lead to something far more tragic. The recent review into early deaths of care leavers, which was commissioned by my hon. Friend the Minister, led by Ashley John-Baptiste and Clare Chamberlain and published just after the Committee’s report, demonstrates that point exceptionally starkly. In 2025, the death rate for care leavers aged between 18 and 24 was three to four times higher than that of the general population. The report offers a window into the lives and experiences of some of those young people who died far sooner than they should have. It sets out how the services that are supposed to support them, both during and after their time in the social care system, could and should have served them better. That is why the Committee is clear that more targeted support must be made available for young people when they are in and once they have left the social care system, and that there should be greater discretion to extend that support past age cut-offs where necessary. The Government must do more to work with young people, local authorities, the police, social work professionals and others to address the root causes of the challenges too often faced by care-experienced children and adults. Throughout our evidence gathering, the Committee heard that the legal framework around children’s social care must be reformed and strengthened to deliver a reality where children and professionals understand and can advocate for their rights. One of the recommendations we received most often was also one of the simplest. Despite what I know to be the genuine commitment of this and previous Governments to the UN convention on the rights of the child, the convention remains unincorporated into domestic law in England. Bodies including the Children’s Commissioner, UNICEF and ECPAT UK all highlighted in their evidence to the Committee that the incorporation of the convention could have significant and wide-ranging impacts on children’s rights. The Committee recommends its full incorporation. All children who are in or around the social care system are vulnerable, but those who have disabilities often face extra barriers and challenges. The Committee heard that those difficulties were often exacerbated by the disjointed and piecemeal legal landscape that comprises the disabled children’s social care framework. The framework is complex and difficult to navigate for professionals, let alone families and the young people themselves. For that reason, the Committee is in agreement with the Law Commission that there should be a single and comprehensive piece of statutory guidance on disabled children’s social care law, as well as an explicit duty to assess where need is identified. The Committee also heard that the provision of support following assessment is a postcode lottery. It therefore supports the Law Commission’s recommendation to introduce national eligibility criteria to standardise support across local authorities. On top of that, the current working definition of disability in the Children Act 1989 is outdated and must be updated using the language of the Equality Act to be truly inclusive and reflective of the needs of children today. I remember many of the conversations I had on the doorstep during my general election campaign, but one in particular will stay with me forever. I knocked on the door of a woman who took a good look at me and asked whether I knew what a kinship carer was. I have to confess that at the time I did not. I say that because I suspect that I was not alone in that, despite the fact that kinship care is the most common form of alternative care for children in the UK and across the world. Since the election, I have been incredibly humbled to speak to those delivering kinship care in Bracknell Forest, and I pay tribute to the work of charities such as Kinship that work so hard to represent them. I welcome the work the Law Commission is doing on the legal reform of kinship care, including on clarifying the legal framework. The Committee is looking forward to seeing the outcome of that work. The children’s social care market is fundamentally broken, and across the country children are being placed in unsuitable and in some cases illegal and unregulated accommodation, lacking proper safeguards and scrutiny and away from the vital support networks of their family and friends. At the same time, the cost of residential accommodation is hitting local authorities’ already stretched budgets. I welcome the introduction of new powers in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 for Ofsted to issue fines for breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000 and the introduction of regional care co-operatives to drive up standards and end profiteering. The 2026 Act will also require local authorities to allow reasonable contact between children in care and their siblings. Although that is to be welcomed, our report concluded that the Government need to follow implementation closely. I could say much more about the complaints system and the rights of unaccompanied asylum seekers, all of which is included in the report, but I will just finish by again thanking the Minister, paying tribute to my colleagues on the Committee and thanking the young people who spoke to us during our inquiry.

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee and other hon. Members involved for their recommendations. Some of the stories that the hon. Gentleman referred to in setting the scene are indeed harrowing and incredibly worrying, and yet transparent and physical change can be made. Things can get better. My question to the Chair of the Select Committee is this. The protection of children is incredibly important. Will the Select Committee, and ultimately the Minister, share their findings and recommendations with us back home in the Northern Ireland Assembly, where this is a devolved matter, so that we can also implement the necessary changes?

The hon. Member has done me the great honour of promoting me: I am not, in fact, the Chair of the Select Committee. That is my noble Friend Lord Alton in the other place, because we are a Joint Committee of both Houses. Nevertheless, I will pass on the hon. Gentleman’s request, and I am sure that the Committee can send a copy of the report to all relevant persons in Northern Ireland. I thank him for his interest.

I thank my hon. Friend for that introduction to the Select Committee’s work. I have a particular concern, having met with the National Association of Child Contact Centres this week, about the ability of children in social care to continue to have supervised and appropriate contact with wider family members, particularly in the context of wanting children to see more of their siblings, which everyone would absolutely welcome. My concern is that contact centres have been closing at a huge rate. Is that something that we have tracking information on? Could we look at perhaps using family hubs as locations to resolve that issue?

My hon. Friend makes a really good point. As I said, I welcome the amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which gives some assurance to those at risk of family separation through the care system. However, the proof of the pudding will be in the implementation. As my hon. Friend highlights, there are real practical barriers to that. I hope that the Minister has heard her point and will make sure that it is addressed as we seek to implement that law, which is now rightly on the statute book.

I listened with great interest to my hon. Friend’s report on the Committee’s inquiry. Will he join me in urging the Minister to look more widely at the issue of looked-after children who spend the vast majority of their lives on in-patient wards in paediatric hospitals? A small number of children have spent the majority of their lives living on in-patient wards because they are ill. If they had a traditional nuclear family, they would be at home and cared for by their parents or carers, but because they are looked-after children, it is far too difficult to find suitable placements for them due to their medical needs. That represents a fundamental lack of care for some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Will my hon. Friend support my call for that to be looked at in greater depth?

My hon. Friend gives me the opportunity to reference another report that the Human Rights Committee undertook, as pre-legislative scrutiny of the Mental Health Act 2025. We very much looked at this issue, and particularly the issue of vulnerable young people being placed on adult mental health wards, and urged changes at that point. It is absolutely the case that vulnerable people who are care-experienced and are also facing mental health crises face a double vulnerability, which heightens the duty of the state to those individuals even further. Some of the measures we have suggested to reform the rights of disabled children can absolutely play a part in that. I will also highlight something that I did not get a chance to mention. There are recommendations in the report to strengthen the complaints system, including by making sure that there is no wrong door when a care-experienced young people is making a complaint and that they all have an opt-out right to a legal advocate. That would go some way to making sure that children, particularly those facing a mental health crisis, have an advocate in the way that is also envisaged in the Mental Health Act 2025. I hope that if the Government listen to some of the recommendations in the report, we can go some way to addressing the very real concerns that my hon. Friend has raised.

In my constituency, the care-experienced young people who live in Fulham benefit from the fact that the council recognises care-experienced as a protected characteristic. That means that council housing teams and schools and recruitment processes inside Hammersmith and Fulham have to actively check that their decisions do not disadvantage care leavers. They have to track outcomes, and care leavers have the right to recourse. Currently, this only happens if decent councils such as Hammersmith and Fulham choose to do so. Is there an argument for pressing the Government to make care-experienced a protected characteristic in law?

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point; it gives me another opportunity to place on the record again my thanks to everyone who hosted us in Leeds and York, where we saw some fantastic work being done to support care-experienced young people. I know that that is replicated in councils across the country, including, may I say, in Bracknell Forest, whose children’s social care services were recently rated outstanding by Ofsted—I got the local plug in there. I pay tribute to all those working tirelessly to support children in the social care system. The shortcomings I have highlighted today in no way take away from the many people who have dedicated their working careers to supporting the most vulnerable in our society. My hon. Friend makes a very interesting point. Making care-experienced a protected characteristic in law is something that we explored as part of the inquiry. The responses that we received on that point were mixed. Some felt that that would be singling care-experienced children out in some way, when in reality what they were hoping and asking for was to be treated no differently from anyone else, so that as they enter adult life, they can leave behind the fact that they are care-experienced and go forward with their lives. Others felt that the proposal would be beneficial. The evidence was mixed. If I remember correctly, I think we settled in the report on not having that as a recommendation—I will correct the record if I am wrong, but I think that was our decision. It was something we considered, though, because it is something that is raised, and it is interesting to hear that it has worked well in my hon. Friend’s local area. That shows that sometimes these solutions should be locally based.