Bishop calls for change to children’s care in UK
THE Bishop of Newcastle has called on the Government to improve the UK care system after figures released last week showed the North East had the highest proportion of looked-after children.
Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley was speaking in a House of Lords debate on the increase in the number of children being committed into the care of the local authorities which was launched by Lord Laming, a former senior social worker who grew up in the North East and was made a crossbench peer in 1998.
The debate came just a few days after a report by Health Equity North and the Child of the North All-Party Parliamentary Group found that in the North East, one in every 88 children is in care compared to one in 140 across England.
Bishop Helen-Ann highlighted the Child of the North report and said that “deep-rooted issues of poverty are a major factor in the alarming statistics behind which are the lives of real people.”
She added that the high numbers of children in care often led to high costs for local councils through the use of private care home providers, when money would be better spent on programmes to keep children out of the care system in the first place.
She said: “I finish by quoting the words of a care leaver featured in the Child of the North APPG’s report: ‘The point of being in care is to be cared for’. I question whether our current system can truly deliver this and urge the Government to consider a vision for long-term, sustainable solutions to this chronic situation.”
Earlier in the debate, Lord Laming had criticised the high number of children in care in the UK, and said many were being let down after their care was outsourced to private companies, many of whom have faced criticism.
For the Government, Baroness Barran said that the rise in the number of children going into care had been driven by the number of asylum-seeking children entering the system and children spending more time in care. And she insisted that the Government was investing in early intervention to help families.