My Lords, on both previous Committee days and at Second Reading, there has been a reference to the importance of early intervention and prevention strategies. Amendment 99B adds a clause that draws attention to the fact that early intervention and prevention is a better outcome for the child and may be as cost-effective as well.
The thrust of this whole Bill is to improve outcomes for care leavers because, currently, however good the foster or residential care, these children do not, on average, do nearly as well as they might otherwise. The Government’s troubled families programme has demonstrated that a collaborative approach from government and local authorities in a well-defined, focused way, can turn lives around, and prevent children from going into care. As set out in the Queen’s Speech, the programme is now being expanded to work with up to a further 400,000 families in the years ahead, targeting a wider range of families with a wider range of problems—including debt, drug and alcohol addiction, mental and physical health problems—and children under the age of five.
Unfortunately, the Government have halved the cost benefit to local authorities in this phase of the programme. For example, in Leeds, the city council’s families first programme—a much more positive way of naming it—focuses particularly on families with youngsters classed as children in need by social services. Many of the 1,300 families identified so far have come via reports of domestic violence. Police already refer any household where they find children are resident, when they are called to an alleged incident, to social work teams. These families typify those in which children are often taken into the care system. We know that once children are taken into the care system, the outcomes for them are not particularly promising. There is also a significant cost to the public purse. While there is a huge range, the National Audit Office figures from 2014 for the average cost of maintaining a child in foster care is about £500 a week. In residential care—again with a very wide range—the average cost is about £2,500 per week.
This month, the Government published the document, Putting Children First—Delivering our Vision for Excellent Children’s Social Care. Paragraph 139 states:
“The Troubled Families Programme is undoubtedly one programme already adding to our understanding of what works to support complex families to secure better life chances for themselves and for their children, to avoid the need for children’s social care to get involved, and to break the cycle of disadvantage, in particular through getting parents into work. The Programme continues to be a key plank of the government’s life chances agenda, and will increase its focus on improving parenting, family stability and ensuring pre-school children within the Troubled Families cohort are meeting child development milestones.
All that we have heard so far, and indeed what is set out in the Government’s own strategy, suggests that what we ought to be doing is putting much more emphasis on early intervention and prevention. It would be helpful to have in the Bill a reference to that in order to ensure that the focus of those who have to put it into effect look first at early intervention and prevention strategies rather than focusing on improving the lives of children who have been taken into the care system. That would be in line with what the Government’s intentions seem to be, according to the document from
which I have just quoted. From what I have read in government sources, focusing on intervention and prevention can result in a much better future for a child and represents a cost saving for the local authority, hence the purpose of this amendment. I beg to move.
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