Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]

That is something we will have to consider, and that was a problem with the amendment because not all authorities that provide children's services also have housing services under their jurisdiction. We must take into account that there are unitary authorities who do both, but in many cases housing is provided by district authorities and children's services by the larger metropolitans. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham suggested it might be a probing amendment, so I hope I might have said enough for him to feel able to withdraw it. I now want to respond to new clause 26, which proposes a new support service for kinship carers and goes much further than can be justified. It would give a blank cheque to kinship carers, requiring local authorities to provide financial support to arrangements where the local authority may have had no prior involvement with the child or his family, and even if the local authority considered the placement to be unsuitable or had concerns about the carer's capacity to care for the child. Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 already places a general duty on local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need in their area by providing a range and level of services appropriate to those children's needs. If it is consistent with their duty to safeguard and promote the child's welfare, the local authority must provide services to promote the upbringing of the child by his family. Family and friends carers must be considered for services under section 17 where the child is a child in need—in other words, their health or development is at risk—in exactly the same way that parents should be considered for services. Clause 9 replaces section 23 of the 1989 Act with proposed new section 22C. It requires the local authority to consider placements in the following order of priority: first, the parent; secondly, the preference must be given to placement with a relative, friend or other person connected with the child who is a local authority foster parent. I can assure the House that our care planning regulations will continue the current emergency provision allowing temporary approvals pending full assessment of the relative's suitability to foster. We expect more relative carers to receive financial and other support from local authorities under section 17, where that is needed, but we must be very careful not to undermine our policies on early intervention by offering greater support to those caring for a relative's child than to parents who are struggling to care for their own child. At all costs, we must not introduce perverse incentives for parents to renege on their responsibilities to children, or for families to collude in alternative care arrangements because there is a perceived financial benefit. Family and friends carers are entitled to a range of other financial supports and benefits such as child benefit and child tax credit, both of which are unaffected by any payments made under section 17, on broadly the same terms as parents. As the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole noted, we are already seeking through clause 24 of this Bill to amend section 17(6) of the 1989 Act, which restricts the making of financial payments to ““exceptional circumstances””. The amendment will give local authorities a wider discretion and enable them to provide financial support on a longer-term basis, where they are satisfied that doing so would safeguard and promote the child's welfare. Equally, however, we are concerned to ensure that local authorities do not have perverse incentives to rely on family and friends to avoid responsibility where a child's needs are such that they should be met through the provision of care and accommodation. As hon. Members know, it is our policy that children should not cease to be looked after simply because they have been placed in the extended family. Clause9 of the Bill addresses that issue. However, we all agree that more must be done to increase the involvement of family and friends in caring for children who cannot live with their parents, and that one of the keys to achieving this goal is to improve the services and support for family and friends carers. That is why we have committed to developing a new framework for family and friends carers in order to address the current lack of local policy frameworks on this most important issue, the unacceptable variations in levels of support and services between authorities, and the need for transparency and equity in relation to services and support for these carers. The framework will be issued as part of the revised Children Act 1989 statutory guidance, under section 7 of the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970. New clause 26 is intended to ensure that local authorities consider the needs of family and friends carers as well as the needs of the children whom they care for, which of course we support. However, we do not consider that the proposed amendment is a necessary or appropriate way to drive forward improvements, for the reasons I have given. We now come to the three amendments—amendment No. 18, and new clauses 24 and 28—that relate to care leavers. In different ways, they are all intended to ensure that these young people get the support that they need. I shall deal first with amendment No. 18, which has to do with relevant children. In future, there will be a presumption that children will continue to be looked after up to the age of 18 and that there will rarely be good reasons for a local authority to cease looking after a child before he or she turns 18. Therefore, it is Government policy that relevant children will become a residual category of children. We shall set out explicitly in the new single set of care planning regulations that a local authority cannot move a looked-after child to independent living arrangements without first conducting a statutory review of the care plan and that, where such a move take places, it does not automatically result in the child leaving care. That is an entirely separate decision that must also be reviewed. The role of the independent reviewing officer in each case will be to challenge local decisions to ensure that the social worker has made a proper assessment and that any decision promotes the welfare of the child. The IRO, for example, will want to be satisfied that the accommodation is genuinely suitable, and we will use statutory guidance to set out our expectation that the social worker and child should visit the proposed accommodation before the decision is made. That will stop the current poor practice in local authorities that means that a child is placed in independent living arrangements without review and/or is automatically deemed to have left care at the same time. That poor practice is a misunderstanding of the current legislative framework. Clause 9 of the Bill, regulation-making powers and the revised Children Act statutory guidance, give us a review mechanism to correct that. So, in future, there may still be a small number of cases where a review of the young person's case endorses the social worker's assessment that that young person's welfare would be promoted by the young person leaving care because he or she is ready and wants to take on the challenge of living more independently. In such cases, current legislation requires a pathway plan to be developed, following an assessment of need, and a personal adviser to be appointed to oversee the implementation of the plan before the child ceases to be looked after. The pathway plan must be reviewed at least once every six months, and more often if the personal adviser or child requests it. While we cannot accept amendment No. 18, as the independent reviewing officer has no statutory functions in relation to relevant children, we will set out in statutory guidance that the child should be offered an independent person to oversee the review. That could be their former IRO, or it could be an opportunity for the young person to conduct the review themselves with the support of an advocate—perhaps the independent advocate mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood. We will include in regulations a requirement that relevant children should be regularly visited where they are living by their personal adviser to enable identification—