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Young People in Care

One of the countries that we have looked at is the United States. That is where the idea of functional family therapy comes from, in which there is serious concentration on conciliation; people are given an intensive three months to tackle the problems. That is a specific idea from the US. There is a lot of best practice in local authorities around the country. I went to a centre on Meliot road in Lewisham last week with my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families, where we saw an initiative that has been under way for the past 20 years. It is on a very small scale because of the size of the centre’s accommodation, but it works very well, as it concentrates on the interventions that can be made to prevent children from slipping into care in the first place. A large part of the Green Paper is about how best practice, both on this issue and others, can be adopted by local authorities around the country.