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Looked-after Children

That is true: there are children in care under section 20 orders, and there are a few children in respite care, too. I accept that point. Of the more than 60,000 children in care, roughly a third are voluntarily put into care under section 20 orders, but I always find it a bit of a mistake to take them into account when calculating figures on adoption targets, although admittedly we do not have those targets now. One would not expect children who are on section 20 orders because their parents cannot cope with them to be adopted. Definitions are very important, and including those under section 20 orders we take into care about 7,000 to 8,000 children a year. The figure used to be about 5,500, according to the SSDA903 return, which goes to the Department for Children, Schools and Families every year from each local authority. We have to look at what is best for the children. That is the key driver. We have international information and information from academic research to use in making comparisons, but where the Government go spectacularly wrong is in not doing proper research into what is happening. For instance, the Government's response to the Committee's report says, on page 16:""The Government believes that children should be supported to live with their parents wherever possible"." However, there is no analysis of what is being used as a reason for removing children from their parents and what is not. A small piece of research done early last year looked into some of the issues. It identified that the children of mothers who have been in care are often taken into care in part for that reason, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Somebody is in care, they then have a child, and the fact that they have been in care is used as a reason to take that child, too, into care under section 31 proceedings. In my view, that is not a very sensible thing to do in the long term. We have to look at the academic research. One paper, which examined the evacuation of British children during world war three, when large numbers of children were, in effect, voluntarily fostered, is particularly interesting.