Children's social care reforms: Stable homes, built on love

In 2019 the Conservatives made a manifesto pledge to review the children's social care system and make sure that children in care receive the love and support most of us take for granted.

  • Every child deserves to have the best protection possible and every effort must be made to protect any repetition of the kind of horrific abuse seen in the heart-breaking cases of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.
  • That is why the Conservatives have announced our new ambitious reforms to children’s social care, getting families the early help they need, integrating our child protection system, supporting foster and kinship carers, supporting care leavers, and hiring more social workers.
  • Our strategy will strengthen protections for children, ensuring every child can grow up in a safe and loving environment, giving them the very best start in life.
Our strategy will do this by:
    • Investing £200 million into children’s social care by 2024-5. We have committed to invest £200 million into children’s social care including £45million to trial models of early Family Help and multiagency child protection work in 12 different local areas and £30 million on family finding, befriending and mentoring programmes to find and maintain loving relationships. 
    • The largest investment in foster carers and kinship carers in recent history. Children should have the option to stay with their extended family, or loving foster parents. That is why we are investing £9 million into kinship care training and £25 million into foster carer recruitment and retention, as well as providing an above-inflation increase to the foster carer national minimum allowance boosting it by 12.4 per cent.
    • Boosting social worker recruitment and taking steps to recruit up to 500 more child and family social worker apprentices, giving social services the resources that they need. As part of our work to ensure social services are properly resourced we are boosting social worker recruitment and exploring ways to support the recruitment of up to an additional 500 child and family social worker apprentices nationally. 
    • Introducing new oversight of the finances of children’s homes. We will stop private providers making high profits off the backs of the most vulnerable children in society by introducing a new system to create transparency and drive out cases of price gouging in children’s care.
    • Improving opportunities for care leavers. We are increasing the Care Leaver’s grant from £2,000 to £3,000 and tripling the Care Leaver’s apprenticeship bursaries to £3,000.


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