Will the government’s social care reform give children the loving homes they deserve?

An overhaul is long overdue. A shortage of good, loving homes means that many children have a poor experience of being in care.

Many children in care have been through the toughest challenges - neglect, abuse, or being separated from a family who can't meet their needs. Every single child deserves the best possible care, whether that's to help them recover from trauma, or to meet their health and support needs.

That’s what we aim for in the homes we provide for children, across the country. And through our early-help family support services, we aim to get families the help they need before problems turn into crises.

The reform focuses on:

• Increasing access to early intervention.
• Improving the quality of care available.
• Addressing the high cost to local authorities of children’s social care. The spending on children in care has more than doubled since 2010, driven largely by the high cost of residential placements.

• Rebalance the social care system towards early intervention, which provides help and support to families before they hit crisis point.
• Increase financial scrutiny of large private providers of children’s homes. This includes aims to limit ‘profiteering’ by providers – who may charge extremely high fees to local authorities for a placement for a child.
• Give new powers to Ofsted to fine providers operating illegal, unregistered homes.
• Introduce a single ‘child identifier’ (like an NHS number) to ensure different services can share information about children who might need support. We have been calling for this as part of the Children at the Table coalition campaign.
• Expand the existing ‘Staying Close’ programme of practical and emotional support for care leavers across the country, with help provided up to the age of 21.
• Removing barriers to opportunity for children in care and care leavers through increased support across different areas of their lives.
• Local authority oversight of the home-education of children where there are child-protection concerns.
• Requiring every council to have ‘multi-agency’ child safeguarding teams, which must include education.

Our A Place to Call Home campaign has been calling for the government to take immediate action on children’s social care, with a focus on the quality of care provided, so we are pleased to see the government’s commitment to reforming the system .

It's vital that the voices of care-experienced young people are at the heart of this reform programme – and that the government is willing to listen to them about what needs to change.

We won't know if the government’s promised changes will have a real impact for families until the government announces detailed plans and funding to support early intervention.

Frontline services and councils are providing essential, life-changing support under tightening pressures. Many are at breaking point. We need a fully-functioning early-help system, so families can access the right support, at the right time, in every local authority. This is essential to improving children’s lives and empowering families to stay together safely.

We are pleased to see the focus on financial oversight and regulation of the care market. However, alongside that, we need urgent investment in not-for-profit and public sector care providers, so that they can increase the number and range of homes they provide for children. There is currently a shortage of homes for children across the country, meaning that too many children are in homes that don’t meet their needs.

We’re concerned to hear the government qualify their commitments by promising investment “when the fiscal situation allows”. Reform requires funding, otherwise we'll continue to push billions of pounds into what we know is a broken system.

Fixing the broken care system must be a political priority, and it must happen without delay. What can seem like a short time to a government is a long - and crucial - time in a child’s life.