Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Meston Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I shall speak to my noble friend Lady Tyler’s Amendments 101 and 102. Without embarrassing my noble friend, I thought that was a very powerful and emotional speech. For all of us in this Chamber, one of the most important things in our lives is the love of our family, our friends and relationships with other people. Those are the very things that children in care are often missing, so we should do all we can to ensure that they have the relevant relationships that they want. My noble friend Lady Tyler rightly said that we all need people in our lives to give us love, support and positive relationships—hear, hear.

Children and young people in care indicate that it is relationships not just with professionals such as teachers and health professionals but with a range of other people who provide an important support network that they need. The quality of the relationships is much more important than the quantity. Research suggests that the presence of one stable and significant adult in the life of a young person is more important than multiple relationships.

Social care cases across the UK reference the benefits of promoting the relationships of looked-after children. Those benefits will include: contributing to children’s resilience; promoting physical and mental well-being; minimising the likelihood of forming alternative, potentially dangerous relationships; helping with therapeutic work; and enhancing the stability of placements. But there are many barriers to ensuring such stable relationships.

As a teacher, in case conferences I found time after time that—through no one’s fault but perhaps the fault of the system—one of the problems was that the social worker had moved on to another area of work. The child or young person had built up a relationship with the social worker, and the social worker, through no fault of their own, had to move on to another job, perhaps because of a shortage of social workers. That created real pressures. Changing social workers and professionals means that there is not the time to build the trust with young people that is so essential. Where young people are excluded from shaping contact plans, or where previous secure attachments have been broken through experience in care, children often struggle with trust issues with adults—something that is exacerbated by the constant changing of social workers, as I have said.

On Amendment 102, an estimated 37% of looked-after children are separated from their siblings when they are placed into care. That is 20,000 children, as referenced by the Children’s Commissioner. For older children placed into semi-independent accommodation, 93% are separated from their siblings. Once separated, very little support to maintain relationships is provided.

Lots of research by social workers and charities emphasises the importance of sibling relationships for looked-after children. Siblings provide the longest-lasting relationships, often extending through their lifetime. Contact with siblings can foster positive identity development, provide emotional support through feelings of connectivity through shared experiences, give priority to existing functional relationships and help support the emotional needs of looked-after children.

When children are going through court cases to be removed from their parents, relations of direct contact are often prohibited between certain family members. This means that siblings cannot continue their relationship. Children are rarely consulted about such decisions.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says:

“No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation”.


In talking to children in care, they express that their relationship with their siblings is essential. The weight of responsibility for maintaining relationships with siblings is often placed on the looked-after person. That should not be the case.

[Lord Meston (CB)]

I speak in support of both amendments but particularly Amendment 102 for the strong arguments which have been advanced.

At every stage of a family’s involvement with a local authority, efforts should be made to enable siblings to maintain contact with each other and not to overlook the importance of the sibling relationship. It is now much better understood that, when parents can no longer care for a child, the most important and significant relationship that child may have is with his or her siblings—a relationship which, as the noble Lord has just said, can last a lifetime.

Although local authorities and courts strive to keep siblings together, that is not always possible and they may have to be placed separately. They may have different and sometimes conflicting needs. At a practical level, larger sibling groups can be more difficult to place together. If, for whatever reason, they cannot be placed together, meaningful and workable contact arrangements are essential.

There is a report, which I think is correct, of two sisters who were placed separately five minutes apart but were not allowed to see each other. One sister had to see her sister at a distance in the same school playground playing with a foster-sister. It is a desperately sad story. I recall having to deal with a case in which the siblings were a short distance apart from each other but in different local authority areas, and considerable efforts were required to get the two local authorities to co-operate. It is for that reason that I support the amendment. Judicial encouragement is usually enough but not always, and therefore court orders may be appropriate.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Meston, has highlighted the problem of large sibling groups. I want to draw attention to a very specific group, which is bereaved children. Sometimes there are several children in a single-parent family and, when that one parent dies, often the children left behind are half-siblings—sometimes several of them. The amendment is incredibly important because those children are grieving for the parent who has died and then for the sibling or half-sibling that they are separated from.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, has reminded me of a family that I was involved with where the mum died and the father had been abusive so had no contact at all with the children, and the oldest child was a few months away from being 16. We managed, with the help of a schoolteacher and various other people, to keep those children together. Many years later, I still have some contact with them, and all the children have done well. I am convinced that, if we had not struggled to keep them housed together, then one of them in particular would probably have gone off the rails, yet they have all pursued good careers and have all done well.

As an investment for the long term in the lives of all these children, the amendment is important. I hope the Government will adopt it. I cannot see that it would cost anything in financial terms, but not adopting it probably would, because of the emotional trauma to the children who are separated from the people with whom they cannot share memories and remembrances about whomever it is they are separated from.

Another issue regarding that group of children is that sometimes there is a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle or someone who can provide them with some stability but is not in a position to provide kinship care. Keeping all those links going, and enabling them to link to cousins as well, can really support them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Russell. I will speak to Amendment 145 in my name. To be honest, I am pleasantly surprised that the Public Bill Office accepted the amendments in this group as being within scope, because the Bill seems to studiously avoid adoption. A search that I carried out revealed that the word “adoption” appears only four times in the Bill’s 137 pages, and three of them are as part of other legislation that is referred to.

That is disappointing because the Bill offers an opportunity to improve outcomes for adopted children, some of whom are among the most vulnerable in society, alongside measures for children in kinship care and foster care and care leavers. That is a package, or a jigsaw, all of whose parts interact, and, frankly, I do not understand why one part is virtually absent. There is overwhelming evidence that adoptees are not currently getting the support they need to provide them with an equal chance to thrive, and that is unfortunate. As the noble Lord, Lord Russell said, it is a relatively small number in the greater scheme of things, but I still do not see why adoptive families are not given the credit they deserve for the important job that they do.

The review mentioned in my amendment would consider the adequacy and effectiveness of adoption support and highlight current gaps in the system. Every year, around 4,000 children in the UK are placed in adoptive families, and government data shows that around 80% of adopted children in England last year will have suffered abuse, neglect or violence before adoption. Before being adopted, children spend an average of 15 months in care, often moving through several foster families, and many lose everything that is familiar to them along the way because of that process. Meanwhile, adoption gives children a chance to build some stability as part of a loving, safe and nurturing home. Evidence is quite clear that outcomes are better for children who are adopted than for those who grow up in residential care. The early trauma that they suffer may well be with them for the rest of their lives, and they need the support that can be provided via adoptive families.

Currently, there is a duty under the Adoption Support Services Regulations for a local authority to provide adoption services and to provide information. Often, adoptive families point out that there is a failure to provide information about the support that is available. Individual agencies, on behalf of the local authority, typically give information on their websites about the support they offer, but it does not always work out that way in practice. The support and information vary, and it has to be said that cuts to local authority budgets over the years of Tory Governments have resulted in reduced support for adoptive families, because local authorities are simply not able to provide what they want to provide.

The Adoption Support Services Regulations require updating so that they reflect the changes that have taken place in adoption over the last two decades. They have not been updated since 2005. That includes the regionalisation of adoption agencies in England. The charity Adoption UK has produced evidence that out-of-date regulations can, and in many cases do, impact on family court proceedings, and thus potentially on the time it takes for an adoption order to be made.

The agencies themselves are not Ofsted inspected, meaning there is a lack of accountability and consistency in the system. The thematic inspection of a handful of regional adoption agencies carried out by Ofsted in late 2023 highlighted some of the challenges for those agencies and partner local authorities in achieving the services that adoptees and their families require. The noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, will be aware of that; I do not know whether she wants to contribute to this debate, but she will be aware of the outcome of those inspections.

Adoption UK’s meticulously gathered evidence has consistently shown that there are gaps in support. Its adoption barometer survey, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, referred to, reveals that the proportion of adoptive families who said they are facing severe challenges or reaching crisis point is up from 30% in 2020 to 38% in 2023.

I was going to say something about the adoption special guardianship support fund and the other amendments. I am not going to do that now, as other noble Lords have covered that perfectly adequately.

Without effective support services, adopted children are at a higher risk of returning to the care system, with a lack of ongoing support leading to placements too often breaking down. The impact of such breakdowns on the cost to the Treasury is fairly obvious. I do not think it is right that adoption should be pushed to the margins in this way, when adoptive families play such a vital role. I come back to the point I started on: it is a bit of a mystery to me why adoption is not much more prominent in this Bill.

The review that I am advocating in this amendment would consider whether the services provided by the adoption agencies and the existing regulations and guidance covering adoption are fit for purpose. I do not expect this review to be in the Bill, but I would like to think that my noble friend will consider carrying it out as an initiative of the department. As I think everyone accepts, there are gaps in the provision that need to be filled.

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, briefly, I support what the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Watson, have said, on the basis of my experience as an adoption judge.

First, in respect of what the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said about the variability—as it has now emerged—of regional adoption agencies, I suggest that that is something the Government should be reviewing carefully. Secondly, I want to emphasise the point he made about the sheer awfulness of disrupted and failed adoptions, particularly in cases where so many hopes have been pinned on the adoption and so much trouble has apparently been made in preparing the child and the adopters.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to add my name to Amendment 107 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I commend him and his colleagues in the other place, particularly the honourable Member for Twickenham, on their concerted efforts to bring attention to this important fund, which provides support to about 20,000 very vulnerable children who have suffered great trauma. The anecdote that the noble Lord gave of the family he met brought this issue to life very vividly. I also thank other noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate, all of whom have brought great experience, and in particular the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for his remarks, his expertise and the work of the APPG that he co-chairs.

I will not go into detail on the rather unusual set of announcements that the Government made about the fund, first on 1 April and then very shortly afterwards on 22 April, when it was announced that the fair access limit, or funding per child, would, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, explained, be cut from £5,000 to £3,000 per child per year, and that the £2,500 limit for specialist assessment—which, as I understand it, was in addition to the £5,000—had been abolished. The remaining fund now has to cover both the assessment, judged by the department, I assume, to cost up to £2,500 per child, and the therapy. If we give the department the benefit of the doubt and say that the assessment cost around £1,500, then, being very generous, that leaves about six sessions of funded therapy per year, which for these children is simply insufficient. I am not suggesting that those are the real numbers; they are just my back-of-the-envelope estimates to give the Committee a sense of what is happening here.

Hence the importance of this amendment, which focuses on the per-child funding level and seeks to bring some clarity to the amounts needed. In her Written Ministerial Statement, the Minister said that the ASGF—that is a new acronym for me—

“will still enable those eligible to access a significant package of therapeutic support, tailored to meet their individual needs”.

Can the Minister give the Committee some examples of what the department considers to be a significant package of therapeutic support that could be funded from £3,000, including the assessments?

The issue of therapeutic support is, of course, broader than just this fund. On my visit to Capstone Foster Care, I learned of the difficulty of receiving funding for therapeutic work and the bureaucracy involved in retaining it. This feels so short-sighted as local authorities search for a sound placement—defined in the sector, as I understand it, as a standard placement that does not have additional therapeutic support funding attached to it—which then, perhaps predictably, breaks down and potentially needs to be substituted with a placement in a children’s home at many times the cost.

This is at a time when we hear that funding from integrated care boards for safeguarding work will be cut by around 50% and that the threshold for health involvement is simply too high to be useful. The cuts to the fund will result in a loss of adopters and special guardians, who find—as we heard very powerfully from noble Lords who spoke earlier—that without this support they simply cannot take on these responsibilities. The very late announcement has led to a backlog and will require almost half of applicants to reapply, as their original application does not meet the new threshold.

I wondered what estimate or cost-benefit analysis—and I appreciate that the human cost is far more important than the financial one—the department has done on the savings from the cuts to the fund set against the cost of potential breakdowns. If the Minister does not have those figures with her, perhaps she could write to me with them. As other noble Lords have said, this decision feels like an error, and I hope that the Minister will urge her ministerial colleagues to accept these amendments.