Following a difficult childhood, Chereece was placed into care as a teenager. Rather than this being the start of a new, more stable life, she found herself swept into a dysfunctional care system which moved her miles away from her home.
At one point, Chereece was relocated eight times in one year, living out of a bin bag across the North of England and Wales. Needless to say, moving around so much greatly damaged her ability to trust, her relationships and her education. Recalling this period of her life, Chereece told Channel 4, she felt “like an animal. Like, a piece of rubbish”.
Local authorities have a legal obligation to make sure children in care find new homes within their local community. While there are sometimes good reasons a child might be sent further away from home, increasingly, vulnerable young people like Chereece are shipped off elsewhere in the country simply due to a lack of local capacity, with little oversight or accountability.
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In 2023, over a fifth of children in care in England were living more than 20 miles from home. That’s 17,000 children, a shocking number which has increased by 62% in the last decade. The average distance a child was moved from their home was 17.3 miles. The furthest, a jaw dropping 502 miles. These are young lives being separated from their community, their brothers and sisters, friends and teachers, with all the associated damage to their relationships and education.
Local councils, whose responsibility this is, are on their knees after 14 years of Tory vandalism; central government has cut £15bn from council budgets between 2010 and 2020. And, as the Local Government Association puts it: “As record numbers of children have needed to come into the care of local councils in recent years, this puts a real strain on the availability of local, high-quality provision in some areas”.
A system not fit for purpose
The consequence, quite simply, is a care system not fit for purpose. Systemic pressures, a lack of appropriate homes and full transparency about local statistics means these vulnerable young people are falling through the cracks.
This Labour government is fixing the country after 14 years of Tory damage, and getting local councils working again is high on its agenda. This takes time. But, to make sure children in care are not being displaced from their community, and local authorities are meeting their legal obligation, we need greater transparency now.
My private members bill represents a modest but important step forward in tackling this national scandal.
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It would introduce a legal requirement for local authorities and the Department of Education to collect and publish data about the extent to which they are finding local placements for children in care: how many children in care are living in placements that don’t meet their needs or are more than 20 miles from home due to a lack of appropriate local placements.
Local authorities would also have to develop and publish sufficiency plans, setting out what steps they are taking to meet their requirements to find local homes for children in care, under the Children Act 1989.
With my bill, young people like Chereece would never be lost in a dysfunctional system again.
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