Lord Watson of Invergowrie:

Moved by Lord Watson of Invergowrie

105: After Clause 9, insert the following new Clause—“Register of foster carers(1) The Secretary of State must introduce a register of local authority foster parents and independent foster parents who are—(a) currently fostering children, or(b) available to foster children.(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), “local authority foster parent” is defined in accordance with section 105 of the Children Act 1989.”Member’s explanatory statementThis amendment would introduce a register of foster carers. The intention is that having such a register, as exists for social workers, would improve the safeguarding of children, and matching and sufficiency of placements, and improve the status of foster carers.

My Lords, introducing a national register for foster carers would produce many benefits. Overall, it would enhance their status. One resulting effect would be to attract more volunteers, thus beginning to reduce the shortage of foster carers across England, which currently stands at around 5,000. That in turn would improve the matching process by which children in care are placed with foster families, and increase the portability of foster carers. All those benefits would raise the level of safeguarding of children in the care system.

Last year the Commons Education Committee inquiry into children’s social care recommended that the creation of a national register of foster carers should be considered by the then Minister for Children. The inquiry was interrupted by the general election, but the new committee has reactivated it and is still considering these issues. It has been reported that the Government are considering the merits of a national register, which would certainly be appropriate because both the Scottish and Welsh Governments are consulting on the creation of such a register. Perhaps my noble friend can clarify the current thinking on this.

A register would safeguard children by keeping a central record of foster carers who have had their approval terminated for safeguarding reasons, ensuring that they are not reapproved by another service and then able to care for another child. Currently, services cannot always know this, particularly if potential foster carers are transferring between independents and local authority services. The introduction of a register would go hand in hand with an accredited pre-approval and post-approval training framework and robust national standards of practice, improving the overall quality of care for children.

The number of children in care in England who are moved outwith their local authority area is an issue that we have heard mentioned by noble Lords in several of the debates today. It increased from 41% in 2020 to 45% last year. A register would allow services to make matches more quickly at a local level, which would ultimately reduce out-of-area placements. That could be done by the new regional care co-operatives, which we are going to debate in the seventh group today and which will lead on regional placement commissioning, for which the Bill already makes provision. With a register in place, local authority fostering services could be given access to information on the number of fostering households with vacancies for children in their local area, including those with independent fostering providers, as well as in neighbouring local authorities.

This amendment would require the Government to establish a national register for foster carers. Linked to the regional care co-operatives, that would help to better safeguard children and, as I have said, improve the status of foster carers through formal recognition of their role, allowing services to match children to foster care placements more quickly at the local level.

I hope my noble friend will acknowledge that the register would bring the beneficial outcomes that I have outlined and overall assist in making a significant dent in that shortfall of foster carers, which results in too many young people being denied the option of improving their life chances by being able to find a loving foster family to embrace and nurture them. I beg to move.

My Lords, Amendment 143 seeks to promote the idea of a national foster care strategy. I declare an interest in that a very long time ago my wife and I were registered as foster parents in the London Borough of Lambeth—nothing on the heroic scale of the Timpson family, of whom we heard earlier. It principally involved looking after the children of a single mother while she went into hospital to have her baby; somebody needed to look after her children before she was discharged. The regime in those days was much more relaxed than it is today.

Since then, the relatively informal system has evolved into a much more structured and regulated part of the child welfare system, particularly following the Children Act 1989. There is now a much stronger emphasis on the physical and psychological stability of a child, and more awareness of the risks of inappropriate placements.

I turn to the amendment. Most children grow up in their own home with two parents, one parent, or a parent and a partner, and most of the challenges that confront a family can be met within the normal support mechanism of families, friends, the local authority and heroic voluntary organisations. But at times children have to be taken into care by the local authority. In March 2024 there were 83,630 children in care in England, up from 80,000 in 2020. For those children, there is a range of options: for a very few it will be adoption, but for most it will be kinship care, fostering or children’s homes, and we had a good debate about kinship care and the role of local authorities as a constant theme.

I want to focus on fostering. The foster homes can be provided by either the local authority or an independent agency. I admire all those who run children’s homes, often dealing with children with a wide range of difficulties, but all the evidence is that fostering has the best long-term outcomes for children transitioning into adulthood. The MacAlister review makes the point well:

“Foster carers and their families are some of the most remarkable people in society. They open their hearts and their homes and share their lives with children who they may never have met before. Stories shared with the review demonstrate just how life changing fostering can be for children and foster carers themselves”.

At a time when local authority budgets are under pressure, as we heard in an earlier debate from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, fostering comes at about a quarter of the cost of a children’s home.

I make the point in passing, in the context of recent grooming scandals, that vulnerable girls in a children’s home are much more exposed to gangs hanging around the home than if those children were distributed evenly with a large range of foster parents.

But given the financial benefits and the welfare benefits of fostering, the statistics have been going the wrong way. Although there are more children in care over the past few years, there are now fewer foster carers. Local authorities and independent fostering agencies are struggling to recruit a sufficient number of carers to replace those leaving foster care. The number of mainstream fostering households continues to decline. During the last financial year, a total of 4,080 fostering households were approved, while 5,130 stopped fostering—a loss of around 1,000 households. There are all sorts of reasons for that decline. The spare rooms that traditionally became available when children left home are now occupied by older children who are unable to rent or buy a home of their own.

MacAlister identified another reason: the failure to recruit, but not because of a shortage of applications. He said that

“the review has heard from many potential carers who were discouraged because of an off-putting application experience”.

Ofsted tells us that 160,635 families came forward to express an interest in becoming a foster carer n the year ending March 2021, but just 2,165 were approved. That is an astonishing drop-out rate. Of course, we do not want vulnerable children to be exposed to risk, but many prospective foster carers drop out because of the time it takes—sometimes up to a year, by which time they may have decided to follow other opportunities.

Some of the delay is due to the local authorities. MacAlister tells us that they

“appear to be struggling to provide” the specialist support that foster carers need.

A further reason is the allowances that foster carers get. While we do not want people to foster for money, the compensation must be adequate and not leave people out of pocket. In a recent survey, some three quarters of foster carers said the cost of living had had an impact on their fostering. Then, there is the postcode lottery: some 32% of local authorities are paying under the national minimum allowance and only 26% are paying it at the NMA rate for all age bands, which results in a difference in an annual allowance rate for 11 to 15 year-olds of over £8,000.

Foster carers also reported feeling less supported and valued, experiencing high levels of burnout and poor well-being. Social worker turnover makes that worse, which has implications for the children who need them. Children are increasingly being placed away from their home community. Multiple moves are common, as well as sibling groups being separated. All these factors should be addressed by the strategy proposed in the amendment in my name and that of three other noble Lords.

I welcome much of what is in the Bill, and I welcome the Chancellor’s Spring Statement commitment of an additional £25 million for the fostering system, but there is nothing in the Bill to improve the development of foster carers and it does not implement key commitments from Stable Homes, Built on Love, published by the previous Government.

What is proposed in the amendment fills a gap in the market. A national adoption strategy was set out in July 2021, a national kinship care strategy was set out in December 2023, and a dedicated national foster care strategy as proposed in this amendment would fill the gap. It would enhance good practice, make improvements to national policy and help to understand where gaps in knowledge are and where research is needed.

I have read the policy paper Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, and I have read what is in the Bill before us. However, those are not the same as a dedicated strategy for this specific and important group of carers for some of the most vulnerable children. The continued decline in the number of foster carers over the past years suggests that a national strategy is of utmost importance. As Josh MacAlister concluded:

“There are many children living in children’s homes today who would be better suited to living in a family environment with a foster carer if we had enough foster carers in the right places, with the right parenting skills to meet the varying and complex needs of children. This will require a ‘new deal’ with foster carers”.

That is exactly what this amendment proposes.

I second the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Young. I am very interested in foster caring, largely because when I was in care as a young child, it was largely because I did not really have a family. I had a mother and a father, and I had brothers who were taken away in one direction. My parents were not very grown up; they had not really got used to the idea of having six children when they could probably afford only one.

I find this amendment so interesting because it backs up my experience as a young boy. When our family finally reconnected in Fulham in south-west London, the place was littered with foster-children. It was very interesting. I got to know people who went to my school, and they were fostered. They were not blood brothers or sisters or related to their family. I found that so interesting because most of those children, dare I say—I do not want to appear as a classist—ended up being quite middle class. They ended up getting the education of a lot of us who passed through care. It was interesting that, in this area of Fulham, there was this great mixture of very working-class children with a bit of a middle-class aspect, yet the children who really excelled were the ones who had the all-round relationships.

I would love to see a strategy that got behind those circa 130,000 people who want to foster. I would like to see a shrinking of the numbers of local authority homes, having been in a Catholic one, which was not an awful lot different from any other kind. The idea of institutionally raising children is not good news. The idea of raising children who were separated from their loved ones—as I was—is bad news. Therefore, I suggest we follow the example from the noble Lord, Lord Young, and create a proper strategy so that we can share out the loving relationships that we need to to our children, who are in desperate need, especially at the time when their own kith and kin cannot provide them with what they really need.

My Lords, I support Amendments 134, 143 and 178. Fostering is critical to the provision of good care for all children who need it, and it is a really tough job.

In Committee so far, not very much has been said about the very large proportion of looked-after children who have significant special needs—it is more than 90% of all children in children’s homes, and it is over 70% of all looked-after children. Many of those are problems that have arisen as a result of post-birth experience, but there are quite a lot of instances where these are problems that children were born with and will be with them for life. Some children are in foster care precisely because their birth parents have not been able to cope with their significant needs, so we ask a tremendous amount of foster carers.

The measures in the amendment to improve on the current position are very welcome. But the Government could go further in some very practical ways, which is why I support my noble friend’s amendments. Room sharing is not always appropriate, but for some children it will be suitable. Similarly, foster carers need more authority to make more of the decisions and do more of the often everyday things that parents do.

I support the comments made about the need for streamlined recruitment processes and a foster care strategy that really thinks about the support services, training, respite and wider services that help foster carers to do it well, to feel that they have the capacity and that they can sustain the tremendous effort of foster caring through the whole period that any given child needs it. There is an opportunity here.

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 143 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, to which I added my name and to which the noble Lord, Lord Bird, spoke so powerfully. I thank the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers for its help on this.

As we have heard, this amendment aims to ensure that the challenges within foster care services are both recognised and addressed. With a well-defined strategy in place to oversee necessary reforms to the system, we can ensure that local authorities are no longer burdened by the unstable expense of children’s social care.

Many foster-children feel that their new home has given them a new chance, and they feel like a genuine part of the family. Foster carers overwhelmingly say that being a foster-parent has had a positive impact on their lives, as they provide love and support to vulnerable children.

Independent fostering agencies—IFAs—play a huge role in providing high-quality care for children: some 96% of IFAs are rated “Good” or “Outstanding” by Ofsted.

While the Government’s commitment to the foster care system since the general election is a positive step, it is vital that any interventions go beyond short-term fixes. This is why we need to see the introduction of a dedicated foster care strategy to provide strategic oversight to the tactical pledges made previously.

There are welcome measures outlined in the Bill to regulate and introduce oversight of independent fostering agencies. However, given that these IFAs make up a significant proportion of the sector, without a dedicated foster care strategy, which provides insight into the Government’s ambitions for the sector, this already precarious sector is unable to plan effectively for the future. Ultimately, without addressing the underlying causes of pressure in children’s social care, such efforts risk falling short of delivering lasting impact.

It is widely understood that one of the most significant drivers of cost per placement and delay in placing children in the right home is the lack of foster carers able to take children into their care. The number of households, as we have heard, willing or able to foster a child is decreasing. At the same time, the number of children in care remains at a record high. With 68% of all looked-after children in foster care, demand is outstripping homes available. A reduction in fostering households means fewer options for the placement of children. Ofsted research from 2024 found that 91% of local authorities that responded to its survey frequently had difficulty in finding suitable homes for children with complex needs.

The Government need to act now and use this opportunity in the Bill to resolve the crisis in foster care by creating and implementing a dedicated foster care strategy which focuses on improving the recruitment of foster carers, including those who wish to work for IFAs.

My Lords, briefly, I lend my support to Amendment 143, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, to which I have added my name. This amendment, on the need for a foster care strategy, was, if I may say so, powerfully brought to life by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and I thank him for that. The noble Lord, Lord Young, put it very well when he talked about the gap that exists, saying that we had strategies for other aspects of children’s social care but not for fostering. It is a gap that it would be useful to fill, in the same way that the amendment I brought last time suggested a strategy for neglect.

As we have heard, urgent action is needed to address the recruitment and retention crisis in foster care. Nationwide, it has been calculated that we have a shortfall of some 6,000 foster carers across the UK, with 5,000 more needed in England. Certainly, more foster carers are continuing to leave than are joining up. Various surveys have shown that the three key reasons for this have been inadequate financial remuneration, lack of support from their fostering service and a lack of respect for their role. I think that last one is really sad. I did notice in the 2024 State of the Nations’ Foster Care report that the number of foster carers who said they would recommend fostering to others has decreased. Indeed, fewer than half of foster carers said that they would recommend fostering to others who may be considering it. It is for those reasons that we need a national strategy to lay out how fostering will be more sustainable in the long term, not least to meet the needs of some of the children who the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, was talking about.

I also support Amendment 105, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which would be an important part of raising the whole status of fostering.

My Lords, the context for my Amendments 134 and 178 is, as we have heard in this short debate, that we face a very severe shortage of foster carers. As other noble Lords have said, this Bill feels like a huge missed opportunity to try to address this problem. Honestly, I do not really understand why the Government have not chosen to do more to address it—but perhaps the amendments in this group will offer the way.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, mentioned that there is currently a shortage of 5,000 foster carers in England; that is 33 foster carers per local authority. It just does not feel like an insuperable problem to find 33 homes across the country in each local authority—though, absolutely rightly, my noble friend Lady Spielman spoke of the very high prevalence of complex needs in children who go into foster care.

This speaks to the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham and others about a strategy, which would also address the recommendation in the MacAlister review that we need more flexible models of fostering. As we have heard, of just over 160,000 families who expressed an interest in becoming foster carers in 2020-21, only just over 2,000 were approved—a conversion rate of 1.3%. I understand that many applicants apply to multiple agencies and so get counted twice. There may be timing issues for potential carers, and there are structural challenges, including pay and the need for training, and difficulties in the application process, as we have heard. This is the most significant area for the roughly 83,000 children in care. Over 56,000 of them are in foster care, half of them with independent agencies and half in local authority foster care. That is a very big and important number, and it feels fundamental to address it.

It sits at the heart of what we might call the children’s homes problem of cost and profits, which we will debate in subsequent groups. If we had more foster carers, the pressure would come off children’s homes, prices would adjust and we would be in a much better situation, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, put so convincingly, because the wraparound of foster care—the fact that there is a family and relationships—leads to vastly better outcomes for the child. For all those reasons, this is an important group, and I hope that Amendment 143 is one that the Minister takes very seriously.

My amendments are much simpler. Amendment 134 would give more flexibility to allow young children over the age of three to share a room. My intention is that this would apply to primary-aged children, although re-reading my amendment I think that my drafting skills have come through yet again. Having talked to directors of children’s services in London and other areas with high housing costs, I know that the number of potential foster carers with several spare rooms is very limited. I am aware that some organisations in the sector see this as a safeguarding risk, but I argue that we are already trusting the foster carer to care for a very vulnerable child. Within that, we should trust their judgment about the sleeping arrangements of the children in their home. Sadly, safeguarding risks are not confined to what happens in a child’s bedroom. This amendment could potentially add several hundred more places, at little or no cost, in areas with the greatest pressure to place children locally, and would avoid children being placed very far from home—as we have heard about several times today—their roots and their communities.

This is not the only way to expand capacity. Another would be to invest in initiatives such as the Greater Manchester Room Makers scheme and roll it out more widely. It provides funding for foster carers to renovate existing rooms or build extensions to allow them to care for more children.

My Amendment 178 seeks to clarify the delegated authority that foster carers have for the children in their care. This was tabled in the other place by the honourable Member for North Herefordshire and received a positive response from the Minister. I seek further confirmation from the Minister here that the Government still intend to consult on this point. Perhaps she could update the House on the likely timeline for the consultation and for the secondary legislation to be amended.

Thinking more broadly, and returning to Amendment 143, it would help the House if the Minister could share other ideas the Government are working on to improve recruitment and retention. I spoke recently to the organisation Now Foster, which is developing “weekenders”—that might not be the right term—which offer regular weekend placements for children who might be either in kinship or foster care, giving much needed rest and space to both parties, and a consistency and stability for the child or young person that can extend beyond the age of 18. Crucially, it also gives foster carers a chance for a more modest but still substantial commitment, rather than taking in a child full time with everything that entails. This idea—again, this came up in the MacAlister review—of having different options and different models of fostering is long overdue for more work.

My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham talked about the importance of a support network for foster carers. I visited an amazing group of foster carers—some brand new and about to receive their first child, some who had been fostering for over 20 years—who are part of an employee co-operative, Capstone Foster Care, in Peasedown St John in Somerset. Again and again they spoke eloquently about the impact of that network on their ability to foster and to offer love and care to very vulnerable children.

They also talked—this ties in with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson—about the need for a really positive recruitment campaign. Most people hear about fostering only when there is a case of severe neglect or worse. But across the House we have heard examples of many noble Lords who have either been foster carers or who recognise the extraordinary and life-changing work that foster carers do. We need that message to get outside this Chamber and out to people who might consider this and see it as a respected and important profession. We need more innovation in this area to unlock the potential in our communities to provide this kind of support for children who need it, and to improve retention.

My Lords, this has been a well-informed debate on the amendments in group 5 concerning foster care, particularly informed by those who have had personal experience. The noble Lord, Lord Young, gave his experience of being a foster carer and I agree that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, made a very important contribution on what it feels like to be a child in the system and the lifelong impacts that has.

I think there has been a consensus once again that foster carers offer crucial support to some of the most vulnerable children in our society. They provide love, stability and compassion to children and young people when they need it most. We very much share the concerns raised in this House about the falling numbers of fostering households—a fall of 9% since 2020—and the effect this has on children. Perhaps it was the late night I had had, but I felt marginally grumpy about the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that because there is not more about fostering in this legislation, somehow or another that means that this Government are not committed to righting the decline we have seen over recent years. Therefore, I will take the opportunity to spell out exactly what the Government have been doing. There is a tendency in this House, which is understandable because we are legislators, to think that things happen only if they are put into legislation. I hope I can demonstrate that there is plenty happening on fostering due to the actions of and investment put in by this Government.

We are prioritising fostering in our reform of children’s social care, as evidenced by the Chancellor’s recent announcement of an additional £25 million investment in foster care over two years, beginning in 2026-27. That is additional to the £15 million we are investing in fostering during this financial year. This will bring benefits to thousands of fostered children.

Part of that spending will be on regional recruitment hubs. The noble Lord, Lord Young, and others were right to say that the process of recruitment, and even the understanding of what it might mean to be a foster carer and what the opportunities are, is part of the reason why we do not find sufficient people showing an interest, and do not convert sufficient people who have shown an interest into foster carers. So, access to regional recruitment hubs is an important part of what the additional investment will be spent on.

We are already doing other things to support councils to recruit and retain foster carers, investing in those regional recruitment hubs and also communication campaigns across over 60% of councils. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that this is an area where it feels like thinking about innovative models will be important in helping us to achieve our objectives. That is why our investment includes an expansion of the Mockingbird family model, which is an innovative evidence-based approach that groups six to 10 families around a hub home carer and, in doing so, therefore provides peer support, respite and training. An independent evaluation found that Mockingbird substantially improved retention, with participating households 82% less likely to deregister than non-participating households.

To support retention, we will reform delegated authority and processes for handling allegations against foster carers. The Chancellor’s additional £25 million in funding for fostering will help us go further and faster. The spending review also set aside capital investment for innovative, sector-designed programmes to create more fostering placements by, for example, renovating and extending foster care homes in the way the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, mentioned with respect to Manchester. This will help to provide more placements for children in foster care. We intend to set out more detail on this, as well as our broader plans for fostering, in due course. We also, of course, benefit from research carried out by a wide range of stakeholders, including members of our fostering advisory board.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, raised the point about financial recompense for foster carers being one of the reasons why they leave foster care. There is a national minimum allowance for foster carers. Beyond that, councils and fostering agencies have the flexibility to pay fees for foster carers that reflect their experience, skills and development or to provide extra support for children with more complex needs. Many fostering service providers supplement that with local offers such as council tax deductions or discounts for local child-friendly attractions and services. Fostering service providers often also provide extra money for taking children on holiday or to celebrate a birthday or religious festival. We believe that it is for fostering service providers to set their own payment structures for those additional things in accordance with local needs and budget needs. These things are happening and are very helpful in addressing some of the issues noble Lords have raised with respect to recompense.

Specifically on Amendment 143 regarding a foster care strategy, just as we quite often turn to legislation to demonstrate action, we understand the need sometimes to turn to a strategy to demonstrate the significance that the Government place on an issue and to ensure that a wide-ranging set of actions is being taken. I hope that, in outlining the action that is already being taken, I can provide some reassurance about the emphasis that the Government are already placing on—

I just wanted to remind us of a little bit of history. Napoleon said that a battle plan strategy was the most useless thing on earth but that you were lost without it.

That is good, because I was about to say—although I think he called it a battle plan, not a battle strategy—that the Government will set out our plans for foster care in due course, bringing together the range of activities that is already happening and taking on board the need to go further in the way that noble Lords have rightly pushed us to today.

Amendment 105, introduced by my noble friend Lord Watson, is on the introduction of a national foster care register. As he outlined, fostering services currently maintain local registers of foster carers alongside records relating to prospective foster carers. A national foster care register would insert central government into the systems and processes of foster care oversight, which are currently deployed locally. But as he said, and as I think my honourable friend in the other place outlined in Committee there, we are considering the possible benefits and costs of a national register of foster carers as part of our wider reforms.

There are a range of proposals for such a register. It will require some careful consideration. Specifically, I am sure we all recognise the need to ensure that a national foster care register would also meet local needs and avoid unforeseen negative consequences, and that it would overcome some of the risks surrounding the security of sensitive data, as well as imposing additional bureaucracy on the sector. But we want to engage with fostering stakeholders on this issue to determine next steps, and we can see some of the advantages of the national register that my noble friend outlined.

Amendment 134, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is on the sharing of bedrooms for foster children to enable foster carers to look after more children in their home. She identified that one of the pushes for this comes back to one of the fundamental issues that we will discuss on upcoming clauses and which lies very much at the heart of the Government’s reforms: the insufficiency of high-quality places, fostering or otherwise, for the children who need them. I completely understand the belief that changing standards in this way might enable us to increase capacity.

I have already identified that the Government will invest money, for example, in allowing extensions and other ways that foster carers might alter their homes to provide more space and capacity for children. But it is also the case that our national minimum standards already allow foster children aged three or over to share a bedroom, subject to conditions being met, which are in place to safeguard and protect children. That means that fostered children, such as siblings, can share a bedroom where it is in the best interests of the child, provided that each child has their own area of the room.

We can update those national minimum standards at any time. We do not require a change to Section 23 of the Care Standards Act, as suggested in this amendment, to do so. The language in this amendment would change the tone of the national minimum standards. I am not averse to the point that is being made here; we just need to be careful about the balance that we are setting. It would shift the default position to present room sharing both as appropriate and, in fact, standard practice, rather than the current tone, where room sharing should be considered where it is not possible for each child to have their own room.

I think we all agree that children in foster care deserve to be treated as a good parent would treat their own children and to have the opportunity for as full an experience of family life and childhood as possible. I know that there are many good parents who will have children who share bedrooms, especially at a younger age, but I also know that for many children, fostered or otherwise, and for many parents, the gold standard would for them to have their own room. If we add to that the fact that children often enter foster care after experiencing neglect or abuse, including sexual abuse, and may have a greater need for their own personal space and for privacy, we can see the need to be careful about shifting the position to promoting sharing.

We recognise that room sharing in foster care may be suitable, as I have said, particularly for siblings, and we think it is right that flexibilities are already in place, but we are reluctant to suggest that room sharing should be promoted as standard practice. Importantly, we have seen no evidence from children and young people themselves to suggest that they want room sharing to become standard practice in foster care.

The Minister mentioned that the Government are putting funding into extensions and so forth. Will she write with details of how many additional places that funding is expected to secure? I do not mean precisely, but just to give a sense.

Yes, I am happy to do that. Of course, that is just one part of the sufficiency work that the Government are doing and that other elements of the Bill aim to make progress on, but I will write specifically on that project.

Amendment 178 on delegated authority for foster carers, which is also tabled by the noble Lady Baroness, Lady Barran, would give foster carers more autonomy and flexibility. All foster carers should have delegated authority in relation to day-to-day parenting of the child in their care, such as routine decisions about health, hygiene, education and leisure activities. That is so that they can support the child in having a normal upbringing, full of the experiences and opportunities that any other child would have. Under the current system of delegated authority, if something is not listed on the child’s placement plan then the foster carer does not have delegated authority and they must check with their social worker before decisions can be made. Foster carers can only take decisions that are in line with the child’s agreed placement plan and the law governing parental responsibility. This amendment would change that current system of delegated authority.

I have considerable sympathy with the idea that if we are asking people to take on the crucial role of caring for children on a day-to-day basis and making them part of their families then they also need the authority to be able to do that in the rounded way that any parent would expect to have. That is why we have begun conversations with foster carers and fostering services about proposed changes to ensure that all foster carers should have delegated authority by default in relation to the day-to-day parenting of the child in their care. We think that reforming this policy area would benefit from a period of consultation with stakeholders to ensure that any change to delegated authority best reflects the interests of all parties but, following a consultation, we are committed to implementing necessary amendments to secondary legislation. We do not believe that we would need changes to primary legislation in order to do that. Delegated authority is outlined in the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010. I hope that provides some assurance to the noble Baroness that, in that area, we very much see the case being made and want to make progress.

With all the assurances and further information that I provided, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.

I thank my noble friend the Minister for that comprehensive response and I thank noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. One thing that has always struck me about your Lordships’ House is the vast experience, on all sides, that often emerges in debates. On this group this evening, we have had two further examples of personal experience from the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and the noble Lord, Lord Young. Such experience always informs the debate and gives it a depth and breadth that, certainly when I have been in other legislatures, has not always been the case, and it is very valuable.

I heard what my noble friend said in her response about the proposal for a national foster care strategy. One of the strong points of Amendment 143 from the noble Lord, Lord Young—which would have had my name attached to it, incidentally, had it not already had three names when I went to add mine—is subsection (2), from memory, which refers to how we can improve the quality of foster care. That seems self-evident and I am sure the Government are doing it anyway, or trying to do it anyway, but it seems to me that it is important that, however well we are doing, we are not doing well enough, given the figures that have been quoted, not least the number of foster carers coming forward and the high rejection rate, to which the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred, which is astounding—I had not heard that before. There must be some reason for that, which we could surely turn around to get to the 5,000 shortfall, if that is what we have across the country.

On the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, about what Napoleon said about the need for a strategy, whatever the Government are doing on this and in the broader children’s social care field, it is important that there is a strategy, whether or not it is written down. I do not know whether Napoleon had strategies throughout his lengthy career—which mostly went pretty well until it ended at what I might say is a London mainline railway station—but I still think it is important to have a strategy underpinning what we are doing.

I have gone on long enough. On my amendment proposing a register of foster carers, I was very encouraged by what my noble friend said—although she did chuck a couple of pebbles into the pond by saying there could be an increase in bureaucracy. There has to be an effective bureaucracy, because we are not bringing enough foster carers into the system; I do not necessarily think that is bureaucracy, because there has to be whatever it takes to ensure that we enrol more people.

As far as national versus local is concerned, I think that the two sit very neatly together: we would have a national strategy, and locally you would make sure that you draw in the people in the areas where they are most needed. I do not see them as mutually exclusive. I am encouraged by what my noble friend said, and I look forward to developments in the near future. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 105 withdrawn.

Amendment 106 not moved.