In response, the minister confirmed that results of consultations on the adoption and special guardianship support fund would be shared shortly. Regarding fostering hubs, he explained they are being rolled out strategically to ensure equitable coverage and address shortages in foster homes.

The minister detailed plans to enhance placement stability by strengthening family networks through partnerships like Families First Partnership and expanding regional care co-operatives to cover more areas by year-end. This aims at reducing unnecessary moves that can disrupt education and family connections.

The minister explained that a new performance measure would assess the strength of relationships built by children in care and leaving care systems. He indicated these metrics would inform future inspection criteria to ensure accountability.

I thank the hon. Member for the spirit in which he shared his remarks and the questions that he put to me... In terms of improving matching, regional care co-operatives will play an important role in the future system in enabling us to get a much better sense, looking ahead at the years to come, of the actual sufficiency required for children in their areas.

I thank my hon. Friend, the Chair of the Education Committee, not just for those remarks, but for the Committee’s work over the last few years in keeping a focus on these issues... The geography of RCCs will be large. In some areas, they will have the footprint of a mayoral combined authority or multiple mayoral combined authorities, but there will be a specific target for creating homes that keep children in close proximity to their existing communities.

I thank the hon. Member for her questions and, again, for the spirit in which she has made her contribution. I also thank her for her leadership on this issue—she has spent a lot of time in this place raising many of these points time and again. She is right to highlight the work of the noble Baroness Tyler in the other place, and I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields; both of them have highlighted the importance of brothers and sisters in the care system. The most important relationships can often be relationships with siblings.

The Government have prioritised this issue, with £2.4 billion of funding for the Families First programme over the next three years to get some up-front spending into the system and achieve the rebalancing that is needed. For a smaller number of local authorities, the scale of the care population and the legacy of the erosion of services makes that a challenging transition. I am committed, alongside MHCLG Ministers, to taking representations from local areas and—where we can—to going further in resourcing the changes that are required.

I am blushing, Madam Deputy Speaker—the right hon. Member is very generous. There are politicians on all sides of this House who come to this place with a good cause and dedicate huge amounts of time, often behind the camera and unseen, to making real and lasting change happen.

I thank my hon. Friend for her question, and I am delighted to extend my congratulations to Councillor Ali and the whole team at Luton, which is one of the pathfinder local authorities for the Families First programme and the changes we are trying to make. As a result of that programme, local authorities are focusing more on earlier and intensive support for families, which is keeping more families safely together.

I thank the right hon. Member for his question, and for giving me the job of doing the independent review of children’s social care in the first place; I would like to think he made a good decision, but time will tell. The problem is that at the moment, the provision of support with kinship care is very uneven across the country, and it is quite hard to tell the variation in the rates of support that are offered from place to place.

Blackpool faces some real challenges, and I thank all the practitioners on the ground and the council for contending a situation where they have some of the highest rates of children in care. Blackpool is also a destination for distance placements... This process looks back through the whole history of that child’s experience with important adults, and then gets those people back into the young person’s life.

I welcome it when councils create local offers, which includes the example that my hon. Friend mentions of council tax exemptions or discounts... If we can get that bit right and make that the focus above all else, everything else will become easier, and the outcomes for this important community will get better.

My hon. Friend and neighbour is right to highlight the leadership of Councillor Emma Williamson, who is herself care-experienced... It is about having that flexibility through family finances that many of us benefit from but take for granted.

That is a great question, because it gets to the heart of how the system behaves when it finds a parent who is perhaps struggling with a substance misuse problem... There needs to be a mechanism to fund those solutions, and that is what family network support packages do. The £2.4 billion that I referred to is available to fund those family network support packages.

I thank my hon. Friend for her questions... We are announcing today that the Family Finding programme will be extended and taken further, and the aim is to have it rolled out across the whole of England within the next two years... On deprivation of liberty orders, we will look really closely at the Supreme Court judgment earlier this week, but we do not expect that it will have any material impact on the Home Again programme that we are looking to roll out this summer.

I thank my hon. Friend for getting Harlow into his question. It is a really good question to end on, because I want young people in care, care leavers and care-experienced people in this country to know that we are now working towards a common goal that is supported across the House. We will ensure that they get people in their lives who love them—not lanyard-wearing professionals, who are important, but their own tribe. We need to get that right as a country, and I absolutely believe we can, because all the examples I have shared, and all the things in the strategy, are already happening across England. It is a case of spreading and mainstreaming them. If we can do that, it will completely transform outcomes—for example, for young people not in education, employment or training. It will improve mental health and bring down the number of young care-experienced people who complete suicide, and it will mean that we are lucky enough as a country to have these brilliant young people celebrated and achieving.