Too many children being placed in care, Welsh Minister

More needs to be done to repair families instead of rescuing children and putting them into care, Health and Social Services Minister Mark Drakeford has said at a looked after children conference.

Addressing the conference in Powys yesterday, the Minister said the system needs to be rebalanced so the focus of professionals’ energies – and the resources needed to support children – is maximised to keep families together.

Mr Drakeford said he wished to see a reduction in the patterns of intervention in the lives of children so more young people cared for outside Wales can be brought back closer to home.

Mark Drakeford said: “In Wales, I believe we take too many children into the care of public authorities. We do so at an accelerating rate, and at a rate which increasingly diverges from that to be found just across our border.

“We do so for the best of motives – a sense of welfare optimism, that this is the way in which we secure a better future for the children removed. Yet we also know that the evidence for that is weak and that evidence to the contrary – health outcomes, educational enhancement, ability to build secure and lasting relationships – is very well established.

“And as an unintended – but highly predictable – consequence of this way of doing things, we have progressively robbed our chances of doing things differently; our local authority budgets are scrambled up in responding to children brought into the looked after system and the cupboard is increasingly bare to try to put in services which help families to survive through very difficult and challenging times in their lives.

“I am not, of course, suggesting that children should always be left with families, come what may. There will always be circumstances where rescue is preferable to repair.

“My argument is that the system has to be rebalanced so we focus our energies, and the resources needed to support that effort, on maximising the ability of families to go on caring for their own children.

“We use the time, the energy and the resource that will have been freed up in doing so to keep families together; to shift the time from dealing with the consequences of failure and to invest in preventative services which hold the promise of long-term success.

“I don’t suggest that it will be easy. We are embarked here on reversing a trend that has taken hold for more than a quarter of a century. But the task is quite certainly not beyond us and the prize is absolutely substantial for children and families in Wales.

“We need to provide a significant new sense of drive and determination to reverse and then reduce the number of looked after children in Wales and to renew our commitment to working with families to keep them on track and doing what we know the vast majority wish to do – and to go on looking after, and providing a successful future for their children.”

From April 2016, a new legislative framework will be introduced in Wales which is closely aligned with the policy direction Mr Drakeford outlined.  

The Welsh Government will consult on the second tranche of draft regulations to come from the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 in May. These include part 6 of the Act, which is concerned with looked after and accommodated children and replaces part 3 of the Children’s Act 1989.

The Act will support local authorities and practitioners to re-engineer services for children and families, building on the success of those already in place – such as Flying Start and the Integrated Family Support Services.