Baroness Tyler of Enfield:

Moved by Baroness Tyler of Enfield

95: Clause 8, page 13, line 7, at end insert—“(2A) In subsection (2), after paragraph (f) insert—“(g) financial literacy and financial support.””Member’s explanatory statementThis amendment would introduce a requirement on local authorities to publish information about the services they provide to support care leavers to develop financial literacy and to better understand their financial entitlements as part of their Local Offer for Care Leavers.

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 95 and 130 in my name, and in doing so I draw attention to my interest in the register as a member of the Financial Inclusion Commission. I think the amendments in this group are very important. They look in broad terms at the support that is available to care leavers—an issue which we all understand is incredibly important. I am supportive of pretty much all the amendments in this group, in particular Amendment 99 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which is about a national offer to care leavers and how that relates to local offers. No doubt we will come back to that.

I had the privilege of attending an all-party group meeting recently where we spoke to a large number of care leavers. I think the noble Lord, Lord Watson, was there as well. I was very impressed with the presentations that these care leavers gave. One of them made the key point that they would like to see a national offer for all care leavers to ensure consistency. I asked them to send me some more details about what exactly it would entail, because this is a critical issue.

My Amendment 95 is a bit more specific. It would require local authorities to provide more clarity on the services they provide to care leavers to help them develop their financial literacy and thus access their financial entitlements. As we have heard, young people leaving care are much more likely to leave home at an earlier age than other young people and be forced to live independently, often before they are ready. That means managing bills, a tenancy and other financial responsibilities, and juggling that with education or starting employment, often without having any financial safety net to fall back on, which so many parents provide for their children. I know it is stating the obvious, but there is no bank of mum and dad for this group of youngsters to fall back on.

Too often, care leavers are not aware of the financial entitlements and supports available to them from the local authority, such as council tax discounts, higher education bursaries or, more broadly, welfare benefits. This lack of information can lead to them facing unnecessary financial hardship or falling into rent arrears or debt. We all know that, once you start falling into debt, it is a vicious cycle and so hard to get out. All of this has a huge impact on their well-being and security. Care-experienced young people often report that they feel unequipped, unprepared and unsupported to manage the financial responsibilities that come from living independently from such a young age, primarily owing to the lack of support or opportunity to develop the skills and knowledge they need on such basic things as budgeting, money management and broader financial understanding.

That is why the amendment, which would introduce a requirement on local authorities to publish information about the services they provide to support care leavers to develop their financial literacy as part of their local offer for care leavers—we can come back later to whether that should be part of a national offer—is vital and could make such a difference to their life chances. Such a change would create more transparency for care-experienced young people about the financial support available to them and would help to address one of the main challenges they face when moving into independent living.

Amendment 130, as I said in the previous group, is basically about extending Staying Put to the age of 25. We have already had that discussion; I never quite understand some of the mysteries of grouping, so quite why we are having it in a separate group as well I do not know. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, set out the case very well. I shall just add that, as we heard in some of our earlier debates, young people leaving care often face a disproportionate risk of experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. Care-experienced young people are nine times more likely to experience homelessness than other young people, and statutory homelessness rates for care leavers have increased by over 50% in the past five years, which underlines why I think extending Staying Put to the age of 25 is so important. As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on the previous group, it involves a pretty small number of care leavers. The costs of doing this would be fairly modest and I hope, from what we have heard in the spending review yesterday and today, that some space is opening up. So, really, I am asking Ministers whether they will think again.

My Lords, I apologise for my earlier early intervention. Noble Lords know how passionate I am about early intervention and it got the better of me.

Amendments 97 and 99 are in the name of my noble friend Lord Farmer, who cannot be here today. My support for my noble friend in his amendments is grounded in a desire, which I am sure all noble Lords share, to see high national standards of support, not just pockets of excellent practice in some local authorities. Having said that, the requirement in the Children and Social Work Act 2017 for local authorities to publish their own offer for care leavers, which this would amend, is an important one. But it needs to be built on. A higher standard at a national level would not prevent innovative and exemplary councils doing even better, but it would force any that were lagging behind to improve. I suspect that those who are dedicated to their local care leavers’ cause and are working hard on the ground would welcome high national standards, as those would help them argue successfully for the enhanced leadership and financial support required to lift their offering.

Another reason why the local offer is an important part of primary legislation is that it includes services relating to relationships—a primary need for children coming into care, while they are in care and when they exit. My noble friend Lord Farmer, the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and Lord Mackay, now sadly retired, tabled an amendment to the Children and Social Work Act 2017 that was eventually accepted by the Government, which included the important word “relationships”.

On Amendment 97, the Bill presents an important and timely opportunity to embed relationships more deeply into councils’ arrangements to support and assist care leavers in their transition to adulthood and independent living. We should do all we can to enable care leavers to maintain, strengthen and build family and social relationships. Family group decision-making provisions in the Bill need to be built on. Having gone to all the effort to bring together families and friends who are committed to a child potentially leaving their parents’ care, we cannot allow those relationships to fall through the cracks in their care pathway.

The Family Rights Group, which forged Māori-born family group conferencing into a British model over many years by working with families and children with relevant experience, has similarly refined the lifelong links model, which started as the family finding model in Orange County, California. Lifelong links ensure that children in care have a lasting support network of relatives and others who care about them. A trained co-ordinator works with the child or young person to identify and safely reconnect with important people in their lives, such as relatives they may have lost contact with, former foster carers, teachers or sports coaches. With family group decision-making becoming standard practice, many such people will, or should, have been involved in that process. Keeping these contacts going is a sensible and straightforward next step. The lifelong links approach has demonstrated significant benefits, including more positive and healthy connections in the child’s life and better mental health, instead of isolation and depression, or worse.

Knowing that they matter as an individual to people who are not the professionals paid to look after them gives a child a much better sense of identity. The practical wisdom and guidance that family and friends give often makes the care leaver far more emotionally stable, with a knock-on effect on their ability to hold down accommodation and training or education courses. This reduces the risk of homelessness and of a child trying to make their way without a goal or purpose. Without the motivation that positive relationships provide, it can be very hard to persevere. If you do not matter to anyone, it is easy to wonder what the point of bothering is.

The lifelong links model is currently available in over 40 local authorities across the UK, with 22 receiving Department for Education funding. Lifelong links is not named in this amendment, but, given all of the investment the Government have already made in evidence-building, it should be included in regulations and guidance as an offer to all children in care and care leavers.

My Lords, I am going to be slightly unconventional and start with the last amendment in this group, Amendment 183A, in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. I think it is so important that it does not get buried in this rather large and diverse group. This amendment seeks to deliver what was, in essence, in the right reverend Prelate’s Private Member’s Bill, which we debated a few months ago, and which I spoke in favour of. It sought to ensure that the universal credit regulations are amended so that care leavers turning 18 receive the same level of universal credit as anyone receives at the age of 25.

I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, who said that these are young people who have no access to the bank of mum and dad and no cushion. We are expecting them to live on a level of universal credit that is not reflective of what other people who have more support—not necessarily, but probably—live on. This is a modest measure. As I said at Second Reading, it is a humane, constructive and practical step. Although this should not be the reason for it, it is very clear that it would end up saving the state money by ensuring people have a little more support and do not fall a very long way through the cracks, as the statistics show they very often do.

At the Second Reading of that Bill, I spoke about the wonderful scheme in Wales that has been trialling universal basic income for care leaves, set at a quite decent level. One of the interesting things was that the only condition put on those care leavers was that they had to take one session of financial education. This is where I come back to Amendment 95, from the noble Baroness Tyler, to which I have attached my name. I have heard anecdotal reports—we have not had the written reports from the UBI trials yet—that one of the offers was that care leavers could take more financial education sessions, in acknowledgement that they had a significant amount of money available to them. Virtually every person in the scheme took the extra financial education. It might seem a bit specialised to have this in an amendment, but it is such an important factor.

I point to the fact that this is a broader issue. Care leavers are obviously people who particularly need financial education, but I note that, last year, the Financial Times Christmas appeal was to raise money to give British young people financial education. That is an indictment of the failure across the whole system to educate young people. It is very clear that care leavers are people who particularly need it, deserve to get it and can hugely benefit from it.

Finally, as the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, Amendment 99 in my name calls for the publication of a national offer. It is really important to draw the line here between the national offer and a local offer. The national offer should be a foundation that no care leaver should fall below. That does not mean we might not hope that local areas might be able to do more than that, if they have the resources or the capacity, or if they acknowledge a particular issue, problem or local circumstances. The local offer will vary from the national, but it should not fall below the foundation of the national level that meets the basics that should be available to every care leaver. That is the intention of this amendment.

My Lords, I will speak briefly to the excellent and compelling amendments in this group. In particular, I support Amendments 96 and 107A, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, will remember that I spoke at Second Reading of her commendable Private Member’s Bill on mental health professionals, which I think was about 18 months ago. I raised the particular issue of children with complex needs—specifically children mainly in mainstream schooling who are diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome. For a number of years in the other place, I supported Tourettes Action in its research, profile-raising and fundraising. For full transparency, my brother is a professor of cognitive neuropsychology, specialising in human movement studies, which includes Tourette’s.

I do not wish to detain your Lordships’ House in discussing Tourette’s, but I want to make the point that one of the key issues that affects children who have Tourette’s is a lack of collaboration and consistency across schooling, primary care and hospital settings. In other words, often children behave badly in school and are excluded because they are not diagnosed with Tourette’s and do not get the clinical care that they need. That work between the two parts of the state is not happening, and there is a similar issue for children with complex needs in the care system.

Again, all these amendments are excellent, but the specific advantage of my noble friend’s amendments is that they would impose an imperative on the education sector, and specifically the health sector—primary care, hospitals and other clinical settings—to focus on those children leaving care with specific and very important pressing needs.

There are a wide variety of issues that affect young people in that situation, including housing—the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham have focused on those issues—but the advantage of these two amendments is that they would put a focus on primary care in the Bill. Yes, young people are worried about education, skills, training and housing, but probably the most important thing is their health.

On that basis, putting this in the Bill would be a positive move that would encourage different social care agencies and the people who write the statements for those children and young people, such as teachers and so on, to start thinking about what their healthcare pathway will be in addition to other pathways, such as housing, education and skills. For that reason, I support these amendments. I hope that the Minister will look kindly upon all the amendments, but those two in particular.

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 100 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, which would insert a new clause aimed at giving all care leavers up to the age of 25 priority status in homelessness legislation. To that extent, it is a subsection of the much broader debate about how we look after care leavers.

The amendment would end a current anomaly in the law, whereby care leavers up to the age of 21 are entitled to priority under the homelessness legislation, if they present as homeless to their local authority, but not those between the age of 21 and 25. It is supported by a range of charities, not least Barnardo’s.

All young people need a safe and stable home in which to start their adult life—and, if you do not have that, it is difficult to access education, employment and health services. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, care leavers are more likely to be homeless than non-care leavers. Research by the charity Become shows that they are nine times more likely to become homeless, and that threat does not stop at the age of 21. Again as we heard from the noble Baroness, the numbers of young care leavers presenting as homeless has gone up by 50%.

We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, earlier that non-care leavers are staying at home much longer; the average age at which they leave is now 24, up from 21 a decade ago. Over the years, the legislation has been gradually catching up with that trend, beginning I think with the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, which recognised that the state or local authorities need to support children beyond the age of 18. Again as we heard earlier, care leavers do not have the same safety net of family to fall back on.

There is a lot in the Bill which I welcome to support care leavers, in particular a recent amendment disapplying intentionality for care leavers, meaning that local authorities, when they have a corporate parenting duty, no longer view care-experienced people under 25 as being intentionally homeless. But the Bill needs to go a little bit further. Under the current legislation, all young care leavers under the age of 21 who present as homeless are deemed to be in priority need, which means that local authorities have an obligation to accommodate them. However, there is no such automatic protection for care leavers between the ages of 21 and 25. Under the current homelessness legislation, they are required to prove that they are vulnerable—something that is not defined in legislation. This means that they have go around getting letters from their GP, for which they may have to pay, and getting other letters from psychiatric services, to prove that they are vulnerable and their corporate parent is under an obligation to support them.

There is also a problem with children who are placed out of area. They are not apparently automatically eligible for the usual care support in the local authority in which they are now living, even if they have been living there for many years, whereas local care leavers have that entitlement. That seems to be an anomaly that the Minister might like to comment on.

Finally, the amendment would bring the homelessness legislation into line with the Children and Social Work Act 2017, which obliges local authorities to continue to provide support up to the age of 25. It will not be a panacea for all the problems facing care leavers, but it will be an important step towards ensuring that, when the worst happens, help is available for a young person who may have few other places they can turn to for help. So I encourage the Government to accept the amendment.

My Lords, I support two amendments in this group, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, Amendment 99, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, Amendment 100, both of which I have put my name to.

With more than 80,000 children in care, the highest figure on record, this Bill represents an opportunity to strengthen support for all care leavers. One in three care leavers becomes homeless in the first two years after leaving care. Many become drug users and end up with a criminal record.

Some of the most affected care-experienced children are those from diverse backgrounds, who suffer double discrimination. Research by Barnardo’s found that nearly one in 10 black children in care has received a custodial sentence by the time they turn 18. When many finally leave care, they find themselves in prison or with a criminal record, which makes it difficult to find a home or employment, or develop a secure, happy life and any hope of a prosperous existence. They find themselves being part of a gang, which becomes a family substitute but leads to even more disaster.

As the Minister said in reference to the earlier group of amendments, there is an urgent need to improve understanding across agencies and departments of the needs of children in care and care-experienced young people, as well as providing training on how to better address these needs. For example, the Department for Education could extend corporate parenting principles to all bodies involved with care-experienced young people.

As we have heard, many young people can depend on their parents to support them long after they leave school or university, both financially and with a roof over their head. But support for care leavers across the country is piecemeal—a postcode lottery. Ashley John-Baptiste’s book, Looked After: A Childhood in Care, which I highly recommend, illustrates graphically just how difficult it is for young people to navigate their life after leaving care without support, especially if they want to go to university. It is potluck and almost an impossible task. Therefore, we should be doing more to ensure that care leavers are supported into adulthood, which I why I support Amendment 99 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

Through Amendment 100, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, seeks to increase protection for care leavers facing homelessness. I welcome this amendment and fully support it. We need to support care leavers and give them the opportunity to forge a happy, secure and hopeful life. It is our duty to do this and I hope that the Minister will agree with me and other Peers, and support these amendments.

My Lords, on Amendment 100, from the noble Lord, Lord Young, I will offer a bit of Big Issue news. We did a survey in the early part of this century in which we surveyed 150 to 200 Big Issue vendors. Some 80% of them had been through the care system; most of them had been in care for a period of at least 10 years. I wrote an article about this which upset a lot of people, because I said that, in order to produce a Big Issue vendor, you had to spend over £1 million. To me, that is one of most frightening things: how expensive it is to keep people poor.

It costs £70,000 to keep somebody in foster care, but it costs almost £200,000 to keep somebody in care. We need to look at this problem. In spite of all the moral outrage, we need to look at this as a bit of fiscal bad news. We have to start shifting our resources towards moving children into foster care as much as possible. I am going to talk about this later, but I wanted to give noble Lords the news that Big Issue vendors are very, very expensive.

My Lords, Amendment 98 in this group asks the same question I asked in the two previous groups: can we get local authorities to publicise what they are doing each year, to give them a benchmark to improve on each year?

My Lords, this group ranges quite widely but there is a common theme: the things that are going wrong which ideally should not be. The question is, how do you get a handle on all of this?

There is a certain symmetry with the amendment of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, asking for a review into the disparities that care leavers are facing, which is fairly all-embracing. I suspect that quite a lot of that information is already available thanks to the MacAlister review. The right reverend Prelate’s amendment suggests that it could take up to two years—I would hope and expect it to be done a great deal quicker.

That lends itself very neatly to Amendment 99, to which I have added my name, which would define a national offer for care leavers. Therefore, one could use one amendment to try to embrace and pull together the issues where the disparities are; then, under Amendment 99, pull it together into a much clearer exposition of what needs to happen for it to work and what the standards are. As other noble Lords have said, clearly there is—and should be—room for local variation according to local needs and expertise, etcetera. This seems a sensible way to proceed.

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 95 in the name of my noble friend Lady Tyler, and to Amendment 130. We have heard that 67% of care leavers are anxious about money, according to the study by the charity Money Ready. Given that the second Oral Question today was on financial education post-16, it seems appropriate to talk about this in considering this amendment.

Some 80% of care leavers want more help managing their finances. Rent eviction and homelessness are the consequences of poor financial literacy. In 2024, a report from the Become charity revealed that 4,300 young care leavers aged between 18 and 20 end up homeless. This represents an increase of 54% in the last five years. The Staying Put charity has helped, but most still leave care on or before their 18th birthday.

In contrast, 55% of female and 59% of male 20 year-olds still live at home, and 47% of men and 29% of women still live at home at the age of 25. Most young people move out when they feel ready, when they have the financial capacity and literacy to live away from home. In contrast, care leavers need to be ready to leave home at a much younger age and do so usually with very tight financial budgets. There is no home to go back to if the money runs out.

It is easy for care leavers to miss out on financial education to help prevent issues that come up with independent living for the first time. Not only is there little information about financial management; the avenues available for reaching support to apply for grants and loans mean that many struggle to access these resources.

Because of the nature of the job market and house prices, 47% of men and 29% of women still live at home at the age of 25. The cost of living is keeping people at home; care leavers should have this support too. The expansion of the Staying Put scheme is supported by charities, and evidence from the charity Become shows that this would be a core way of mitigating against homelessness among care leavers.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said that this was a wide-ranging group. As I was thinking about it, I thought that what pulls it together is that it is a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. A lot of the amendments in it are the basic planks at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid; one of those planks is of course healthcare.

My Amendments 96 and 107A try to address some of the evidence, which noble Lords will be well aware of, that shows that care leavers face much more negative physical and mental health outcomes than their peers. These disparities stem from the trauma they have suffered, adverse childhood experiences and, sadly, in some cases, the inability of their carers to meet their healthcare needs.

In the general population, children and young people visit specialist clinics more frequently than adults, if they need them, and their growth and development necessitate regular adjustments to medication and treatments. In young adulthood, health needs typically stabilise. We expect adults to manage their own healthcare, work with GPs and other medical systems, and self-manage long-term health conditions. Parents in supportive family settings will guide their children, and maybe even grandchildren, through this transition, but care leavers do not have that support. They often struggle to recognise that they need help, they do not know how to seek it, and it can often be very difficult to navigate complex healthcare systems. As a result, care-experienced people have a very poor uptake of physical and mental health support but very great physical and mental health needs. These clear and practical points were raised with me by the National Network of Designated Healthcare Professionals, to which I am extremely grateful for its briefing and advice, and for the time it has taken talking me through these issues.

My Amendment 96 would require local areas to set out clearly the transition arrangements for health and primary care for care leavers. It does not feel like it should be too much to expect this to be available. As importantly, my Amendment 107A would automatically schedule an extended GP appointment for care leavers who wish to use it; that is the simplest way to bridge this gap and empower them to talk about their health needs, and understand what local services are available to them and how to access them easily. Through this, they would receive support in navigating health systems—from booking appointments and requesting repeat prescriptions, to recognising when they need help. It seems a very small ask, and I hope the Minister will say yes.

There is a coherence to the other amendments in this group. They are the planks that all of us all too easily take for granted, such as having confidence in and transparency about how money works, as the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, so ably argued. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, cited the interesting example of the appetite for financial education of care leavers who are part of the universal basic income pilot.

I put the case for health and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, put the case for Staying Put—it was such a good idea that we have had it twice—and possibly the national offer. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham highlighted very simple human requests about how the housing system works for care leavers. The idea that a young person aged between 21 and 25 who has been through the care system has to yet again prove they are vulnerable is frankly shocking. I hope the Minister can say something encouraging about that.

We have a combination of the specific elements that would make a difference to care leavers’ lives: the reporting data that my noble friend Lord Lucas raised; the financial aspects highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Bird; and, crucially, as I mentioned on an earlier group, the importance of relationships, ably explained by my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott on behalf of my noble friend Lord Farmer. I remember listening to the honourable Member for Whitehaven and Workington talking about this issue, and I think he said that every child is one or two relationships away from success or failure. Actually, in the example given by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, of children going into gangs, they are seeking relationships. We would all do the same if we had no choice, but we want strong, positive relationships such as lifelong links has been proven to create, so I very much hope that, when the noble Baroness comes to sum up, she will come with good news.

My Lords, I like the description of the hierarchy of needs and I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I jump around a bit as well in my summing up. It has been a very rich set of contributions to an incredibly important part of the work that has been undertaken in bringing the Bill before your Lordships.

The first four amendments in this group seek to amend Clause 8, which will require local authorities to publish information on the support available to care leavers as they transition to independent living as part of their local offer for care leavers, set out in Section 2 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017. The remaining amendments seek to extend support for care leavers to address the poor outcomes they experience across so many aspects of their lives. Improving support for care leavers is something the Government are committed to doing through the measures in this Bill on Staying Close, local offer, corporate parenting and other programmes such as the care leaver covenant, and also by other initiatives that seek to work across government.

The fact that the Government have set up the care leaver ministerial board, chaired by Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson and for MHCLG Angela Rayner, shows absolutely top-level commitment to bringing all the relevant departments together so that they can most properly address the issues that have been raised here. It is probably beyond our ability through this Bill to address all the very important issues that have been raised and spoken to so eloquently from across the Committee.

Of course, the basic principle is that we want to ensure that young people are leaving care with stable homes, access to health services and support to build lifelong loving relationships, engaged in education, employment and training. In response to the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, that is exactly the reason this board has been set up: to bring everything together to address the complex needs of the young people we are addressing.

I assure noble Lords that we are funding a number of family-finding, befriending and mentoring programmes. These help looked-after children and care leavers to identify and connect with important people in their lives and create safe, stable, loving relationships. The family-finding, befriending and mentoring programme is being evaluated, and this will help to inform decisions about the future of the programme. From personal experience, the school that two of my grandchildren go to works on the restorative practice model. If noble Lords have not come across it before, I suggest having a look at how it works and how young people can learn at the youngest age how to form relationships and how to express their needs in a coherent and structured way, which can then inform all the complex issues that they will reach going through their lives.

Amendment 95 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, Amendment 96 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 97 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, probe whether there are sufficient requirements on local authorities to publish information about the services they offer to care leavers in relation to financial literacy and entitlements, health support and maintaining and strengthening family and social relationships respectively. My noble friend Lady Smith had an OQ on financial literacy earlier today. I am not sure whether noble Members were in the House to hear it, but from personal experience I can say that it is so often the first ask when young people, particularly those on the edge of leaving care, are asked what would make a difference to their lives: financial readiness, awareness and education. To emphasise the point, we also have the curriculum review taking place, which will report in the autumn. I understand that these matters will be picked up for recommendations in that review.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, for bringing to life the lifelong learning links work in such an eloquent way, linking to family group decision-making and all those other areas that we have discussed. Providing information on the support available to care leavers in all these areas is important. For those leaving care without family support around them, financial literacy support can be fundamental to setting young people up to succeed and not to fail when they set off on the path towards independence.

I do not feel that the amendments are necessary. Eligible care leavers are required to have a pathway plan prepared for them before they leave care. This should include an assessment of their individual needs across eight domains, including financial needs, capability, health and development, and family and social relationships. The fact that many of them do not feel that this has affected them adequately needs to be picked up by everyone involved in this. To help achieve this, we are funding 47 family-finding, befriending and mentoring programmes across 44 local authorities. We need to assess their impact, making sure that the Staying Close duties impact on their welfare right up to the age of 25, including for those in a Staying Put arrangement.

There are provisions in the Bill to improve data sharing. This is another vexed issue that we all face. How do we get all the relevant areas to share the data that they lovingly collect and put it to good use, to inform their decisions to change how they work if it is not delivering? I believe the single unique identifier proposal will improve looked-after children and care leavers’ access to health services by better enabling relevant information to be shared between agencies in a timely manner. I hope the measures will also have a profound impact on safeguarding matters, with the unique identifiers staying with them for their lives.

Measures to introduce corporate parenting responsibilities for government departments and key public bodies, including health services, will help ensure those bodies consider the needs, circumstances and common barriers of looked-after children and care leavers when they provide their services. We are talking about health in its widest sense, so the Department of Health but also the local bodies: the ICBs, NHS trusts, and others. We have to be mindful of who actually commissions GP services through their contracts. In addition, the existing statutory guidance for local authorities on publishing their local offer for care leavers already stipulates that the local offer should include details of the support that the local authority provides in relation to finances, health and well-being, and relationships.

Amendment 98 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, again seeks to explore the transparency of local authorities’ performance in relation to their local offers for care leavers. Clause 8 will require local authorities to publish the arrangements they have in place to support and assist care leavers in their transition to adulthood as part of their local offer for care leavers. This provision will improve transparency, making information available so that care leavers can understand what support is available to them and access the support they need.

Amendment 99 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, seeks to introduce a national offer for care leavers. Again, I emphasise that it is the local side of this that will deliver for these young people. We need to bear in mind that we are delivering bespoke packages at a local level, so reflecting the local partners on the ground and the work they do is really important.

Care leavers’ legal entitlements are set out in the Children Act 1989, with accompanying statutory guidance. This sets out the support that all local authorities must provide to care leavers, irrespective of where they live. In addition, local authorities may provide further discretionary support following consultation with care leavers on their local offer, meaning that local authorities can take account of the views of care leavers rather than it being one size fits all. As I mentioned in the previous group, the Department for Education has recently launched a nationally accessible website that clearly sets out support expectations, including support provided by central government: for example, picking up on the transitional theme, the £3,000 bursary available to certain care leavers who start an apprenticeship. The youth guarantee and the trailblazers are being delivered through that programme.

Amendment 100 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, seeks to extend automatic priority to all care leavers up to the age of 25. This is a fundamental and critical area. Care leavers repeatedly bring up their experience of homelessness and poor housing. Priority needs status identifies households whose circumstances make them significantly more vulnerable than others if they become homeless. I do not think I need to reassure the noble Lord that the provisions within the homelessness legislation already ensure that all care leavers up to the age of 21 have priority need. This is also the case for care leavers aged 21 to 24, as he quite rightly pointed out, who are vulnerable due to their time in care. I suggest, perhaps, that this is one of the areas that the responsible Secretary of State could pick up through the new corporate parenting requirements that will come as a result of the Bill to ensure they have a very practical way of looking at some of the issues.

It is fundamental that we address the issue of how we better support young care leavers accessing social housing. As a result of recognising that, the Prime Minister announced on 24 September last year our ambition to do so. One of the important steps forward in this area is to remove the local connection barriers for care leavers, which is fundamental to enabling them to stay within the areas where they have been cared for but might not have family roots. That will ensure that local authorities will not be able to apply the local connection test to any care leaver aged under 25 who is eligible as a relevant child or former relevant child.

We are aware that we need to do more work on this and, as a result, MHCLG’s dedicated team of youth homelessness advisers engage regularly with local authorities to help support them in delivering their statutory duties. The application of priority need for care leavers has, surprisingly, not been raised by local authorities—including by their children’s services and leaving care teams—as an area of local concern. This might change, perhaps, as more awareness is put out there, but we need to make it clear that the issue of vulnerability is there at the ages of 21 to 24. As the noble Lord suggests, making the definition of vulnerability clearer is a fundamental way of assisting those young people when they pass the age of 21.

On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, about the cost of failure in family breakdowns, I emphasise that, as well as better outcomes for young people, the cost element of local authorities taking young people into care is one of the driving forces in making sure that the full range of kinship opportunities is offered to young people so that they can be cared for within their families with, as I said, better outcomes against all those awful indicators we have heard about throughout the debate. The money that is saved by those local authorities should be able to be reinvested in early help, early intervention, family group conferencing and preventing the problems developing in the first place.

Amendment 106 from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester seeks to highlight the disparities between care leaver outcomes and those of their peers in the general population. I wholeheartedly agree with him that care leavers experience deep disparities across all aspects of their lives. We have heard examples today. Care leavers are, for example, three times more likely than their peers to be not in education, employment or training, as we have heard; nine times more likely to experience homelessness; nearly three times more likely to report that they are struggling financially; and, most distressingly, four to five times more likely to attempt suicide.

That is why, as I have said, the care leaver ministerial board, which is chaired at such a high level, has been established to highlight these disparities and identify the cross-governmental action that will be taken to improve support and hold Ministers to account to deliver these actions. These disparities are also why the Bill introduces the wider corporate parenting responsibilities, not just for government departments but right out into all the agencies and partners we work with at a local level.

Amendment 107A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is a probing amendment that seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to have regard to the needs of care leavers when negotiating general practice contracts in the future. I have something to add to her list, which is the timing of appointments. Why are appointments so often held at times when it is very difficult for young people with family support to get to them, never mind if they are on their own? That is my personal observation.

The Government have committed in the Bill to introduce the duties, as I have said repeatedly, through responding to the issues that have been raised in this group of amendments, and the well-being of looked-after children and care leavers needs to be at the centre of the work that is done. As I have said, as well as the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, NHS trusts, NHS England and integrated care boards will also be required to take up their responsibilities as corporate parents. Of course, it will need intensive work to develop the statutory guidance that will help everyone to meet their corporate parenting responsibilities. I can therefore confirm to the noble Baroness that the Bill will help ensure that decisions taken by public bodies take the specific needs and vulnerabilities of care leavers into account.

Turning again to Staying Put—

Before the noble Baroness moves on, I am not clear about something. The specific recommendation from the National Network of Designated Healthcare Professionals is to have this extended GP appointment. The noble Baroness has now amended my amendment to make sure that it is at a convenient time. I just was not clear whether she said it would take time to produce the statutory guidance that will underpin all the corporate parenting responsibilities. However, as regards putting something—I am going to get the terminology wrong, so forgive me—into the kind of agreement with general practitioners, so that part of their contract is to offer this extended appointment as children young people leave local authority care, I was not clear whether the noble Baroness thought that was a realistic option, with the tweak of it being at a convenient time.

I thank the noble Baroness for picking me up on that commitment. This is quite a detailed ask, but it is absolutely realistic that this is a new departure going forward and there will need to be consultation and everyone coming together to make sure that the statutory guidance is deliverable and works. However, I am happy to write to the noble Baroness with more specific detail on that area as we move forward.

Amendment 130, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, seeks to extend the provision of Staying Put to age 25. We have discussed this at great length and I am no clearer as to why this is in this group of amendments rather than one of the others. So, without repeating the arguments, I will just say that the rationale is that we cannot commit off the top of our heads to effecting fostering arrangements without recognising that there will be a knock-on impact of change on the whole area of the foster care market, as it were. Any changes in this area are sensitive and have to be taken in the round.

However, the most important thing that we have to address is that too many young people who have come through the route into independent living from residential care, for example—who often, as I said earlier, have the most complex needs—will be a priority area in terms of addressing the support that they do not have because they have not entered the foster care route. So, we are keeping an eye on all of this through the introduction of statutory Staying Close duties, making sure that all former relevant children under the age of 25, including those who are still in a Staying Put arrangement, as well as those who have left it, will be provided with Staying Close support where their welfare requires it.

Amendment 153, in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, would require public bodies, when carrying out equality assessments, to consider the needs of people who are or have been in local authority care. We know that looked-after children and care leavers face stigma and discrimination and we are determined to tackle this. There has been effective and passionate campaigning, with many local authorities taking positive action as a result.

Amendment 183A, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, seeks to enable care leavers to claim the higher over-25 rate of universal credit. Although he is not in his place, his amendment is an opportunity to revisit this: I was at the Dispatch Box at Second Reading of his PMB on this subject. Just to emphasise what we have already said, the Government recognise the considerable challenges that care leavers face and remain committed to supporting them. However, we do not believe that this amendment is necessary.

The Government have recently announced the first sustained increase to the universal credit standard allowance, and, while under-25s receive a slightly lower rate, additional elements are available, including for housing costs, to help them to live independently, and towards their living costs. They may also be eligible for universal credit elements, including for children, childcare costs and disability. Under-35s who are single and renting in the private rented sector and claim either housing benefit or universal credit can receive help towards their rental costs via the shared accommodation rate of the local housing allowance. Single care leavers under 25 may qualify for the one-bedroom local housing allowance. Discretionary housing payments administered by local authorities can be paid to those entitled to housing benefit or the housing element of universal credit.

The Government have extended the household support fund by a further year, from 1 April 2025 until 31 March 2026. I would emphasise the work that the DWP is doing in this area: its objective to help care leavers into long-term employment is the key to supporting their independent living. This is why we are focusing on providing access to the right skills and opportunities for sustained employment and career progression. Therefore, with all of those considerations, I kindly ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.

My Lords, that was a really disappointing response to Amendment 98. We started with a response to Amendment 78 which was excellent, a continuing annual dialogue by someone who was really involved in what is going on. When we get to this amendment, I am not offered a review at all, it is just the menu: no content of what has been done, how it has been done and what the excitements and disappointments of the year have been. I very much hope that the noble Baroness, when she reviews this day and looks in general, will say, “Actually, my first answer was the better one”, and that that sort of relationship between a local authority and its duties and the public produces a much better response than just a local authority setting out what its offer is and making no comment whatever on how its performance has been, and offering no interaction to the public in general as to how that is going on. I will talk to my noble friend on the Front Bench about coming back to this on Report. It was a more general look at how local authorities should relate to their public about what has happened this year and what they hope to do next year.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her comprehensive response. She used a word that I also thought of: it has been a very rich debate; it has been very wide ranging, with real passion, expertise and knowledge of the subject matter.

We all agree there is a strong moral imperative that we do all we possibly can to support care leavers as they make their transition into independent lives. I welcome and recognise the number of measures in the Bill that do that, but the whole tenor of this debate is that there is scope for strengthening. So many specific planks have been identified: health, housing, financial education, family relationships, et cetera. There is much to reflect on.

I was encouraged to hear that there is such a top-level, cross-government board looking at this, including Cabinet Ministers. That is really positive. Could this debate be drawn to its attention, so that it can see what we have said and the suggestions we have made? On the offer that should be available to all care leavers, it was helpful to have the distinction between some sort of national offer that is, essentially, the minimum standard that should be available everywhere and the local offer, where it is actually delivered. That will vary, but there is a set of standards below which it really should not fall. That is something we could think about further.

Rather than getting back into other issues or any disappointment about responses, I have a suggestion: would it be possible for interested Lords who have spoken in this debate to have a meeting with the Minister before Report, so that we could look together at where it is realistic to do the strengthening, which came across very strongly in this debate? On that basis, I withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 95 withdrawn.

Amendments 96 to 98 not moved.

Clause 8 agreed.

Amendment 99 not moved.

Clause 9 agreed.

Amendment 100 not moved.