Education, Children and Young People Committee 10 September 2025
There is no doubt that the provisions in the bill as they stand go some way towards addressing one of the big issues that the care review identified, which is the cliff edge that exists at various ages and stages of a young person’s life. At the moment, someone needs to be technically looked after on their 16th birthday to be eligible. If they were looked after before that, they are not eligible. That is an important thing to fix. Also—I am sure that we will come on to this and it will be a recurring theme—the implementation, resourcing and planning are absolutely critical.
On how the bill might go further, I should perhaps have said in response to the earlier question that I suspect that some people think that the bill overall and the individual parts of it are already too much and will add complexity and expectation on a system that is already creaking. However, lots of people might say that the bill does not go far enough and is not ambitious enough. I suspect that that was always going to be the case with the bill.
The Promise talks about a right to return to care. There is a sense that, if the state has been your family and you have had a corporate parent and you want to return to that care, that should be available in the same way as it is for children in any other family. The bill does not provide for that at the moment, and people would have similar concerns to those that have already been raised about the implications of that, the resourcing of it and all those things. However, the right to return to care is in the Promise and we would have liked to see it in the bill.