Reforming social care and future outlook

He's in the last chance saloon and the last few days haven't improved his prospects of survival. That is one minister's private verdict on Keir Starmer's job prospects. So can the Prime Minister escape that saloon bar or is it time to order another double whiskey? My name is Alex Thomas and this is Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. Kiss Dama has avoided a privileges committee inquiry after MPs solidly rejected an opposition party move to trigger an ethics inquiry. But fifteen Labour MPs backed the motion and many others didn't vote. It's hardly the warm-up that the government wanted ahead of next week's big local and devolved elections. And with the impact of the Iran War set to be felt for months to come, can the Prime Minister get his premiership back on track? For lessons on relationship building though and delivering the good vibes, perhaps the Prime Minister should turn to King Charles. The monarch is over in the US where he seems to be doing a good job of flattering Donald Trump while diplomatically responding to some of the president's recent tantrums. So is the special relationship special again? And then to the kind of domestic issue that makes few headlines, but arguably matters as much or more than all of the polic y Joining me throughout the podcast is IFG Senior Fellow Kath Hatton, back on the airwaves all week to explain parliamentary procedure and constitutional conundrums. Is that your happy place, Kath? I think I would like a government just to be effective. And I, you know, long for the days of the government treading uh less lightly or more lightly on my life as I was promised. Um but no, I mean obviously it keeps me in a job, so I should not complain. But yes, I do enjoy obviously the nerdery of uh uh explaining parliamentary privilege, which is why I do this job. And I'm pleased that we're joined today by James Lyons, number ten's formerctor of Dire Communications, and before that, Deputy Political Editor at both the Sunday Times and the Mirror and Director of Comms at NHS England. Thanks for joining us, James. Leave you happy to be out or missing the cut and thrust of the action. How are you feeling? I have to say, uh I have some colleagues who have also left number ten and we regularly exchange messages about what a great day it is not to be working in government. Yeah, no that feeling. Let's start with the big vote in Parliament. Where it leaves Keir Starmer and how the government can, if it can, grip the political narrative. Starting with you, James, Starmer survived Tuesday night's vote, but fifteen Labour backbenchers supporting the motion calling for Well you were talking about being in the last chance saloon earlier on, but you know that, is kind of dejarvu all over again. It does feel like we've been in this position several times. In some ways this was a kind of disappointing finale to the latest sort of season of the Peter Mandelson scandal for the Prime Minister's enemies. He's been vindicated on the main points. He wasn't told that red flags have been raised about Peter Mandelson's appointment during the vetting process. And I don't think any of the Foreign Affairs select committee hearings threw up any kind of smoking gun. So on that side of the equation, I think number ten would have been feeling relieved. But I'm sure that this morning there's a sort of growing sense of apprehension as attention turns towards the elections. And also, you know, this has just eroded yet more political capital amongst the backbenches. The reform the Tories will be seeking to kind of weaponise the vote and campaign very, very strongly against the MPs who who voted uh against the referral. Indeed, there are reports of a Labour MP being in tears in the uh tear room after the vote because they knew exactly that that is what is gonna happen to them in their seat. And of course the problem is that the Mandy show has many more seasons to run. We still have yet to see the huge drop of all of the messages between Peter Mandelson and ministers and officials while he was ambass ador. We still have an active police inquiry and we won't see the most important messages until that is concluded. And of course all of this just reminds Labour MPs and voters of the kind of bad call in appointing Peter Mandelson in the first place. And what we certainly from the in the outside world know more I don't want to get into that here. But how much was the comms team involved in that sort of decision? How does it work inside number 10 when when a big decision went that's been made? So I was actually brought in to do the strategic communications and wasn't involved in this particular appointment to my eternal gratitude. I wasn't involved in any of the discussions. Look, there are two things that the Prime Minister or two levers the Prime Minister has here to move on from this and from the election results. One is personnel and one is policy. So on personnel , you know, there is uh all sorts of speculation about reshuffle coming down the track. The important thing to remember about reshuffles is they normally cause an awful lot more problems than they solve. You make a very small number of people happy, those are the people who get promoted. The people who get sacked or demoted are furious. And of course, then there are just all those people who are passed over and feel enormously disappointed. And they can have unexpected consequ ences. I'm old enough to have been a political journalist when um Tony Blair accidentally abolished the post of Lord Chancellor for about forty eight hours and had to um uh do some quick corrective work. But, you know, we know that when Keir Starmer appointed his cabinet and coming into Downing Street, the main casualty there was Emily Thornbury who's been chairing the Foreign Affairs Select Committee hearings over the last week or two. And of course when he decided to res huffle the Kavanaugh in the last reset in September, the big casualty was Lucy Powell, who came back stronger than ever before after getting elected deputy leader. On policy, we've got the King's speech coming down the track on May the 13th. I think the government are looking to have a tremendous row about Europe there. So they want to kind of big up the reset as part of that and take on the Tories and reform. The risk is that that won't be universally welcomed by the electorates. Now pollsters and sophologists will tell you that you know sentiment around Brexit and Europe has shifted. But it does risk looking like Labour's telling voters in the Red War, you know, we told you all along. The good thing for the Prime Minister is Europe is a an issue that pretty much unites his own party. That's exactly why it was used as a wedge to drive between Corbyn and the me and the membership. Kath, I implied earlier there's been a lot of parliamentary shenanigans been going on. Uh the opposition has been trying to use Parliament's transparency mechanisms, humble addresses, privileges, committee. Do you think we're gonna see more of that over the coming weeks and months? I mean yes, obviously the opposition are gonna use any weapon that they've got at their disposal and you can't fault them for what they attempted to do this week. It may not be in a very deep way, but they've somewhat united a large section of the party to support the current Labour leader and Prime Minister because it's a week out from an election, because it just felt so party political, and because they do have a valid argument that you know, there is sort of real substantive inquiry going on in the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and also document release through the humble address. So the transparency is there in a different mechanism that we didn't have over party gate where there was an inquiry going on, but it was police inquiry again, but also the Sue Grey inquiry, which, you know, was all much more behind the scenes compared to to humble address and foreign affairs. Obviously Conservative Party are gonna look to punch any bruise that is coming up, but they do have to think tactically about what they want to do. If the the Labour Party sort of turns on itself, then you as an opposition can just sit back and let that happen and and look to fill the vacuum And it's worth remembering Labour obviously are expecting to have a bad night after the elections next week or you know few days, depending on how quickly the results come out. But so are the Conservatives. It's not an opposition that where they are going to start picking them up, they are also going to be on the back foot and having to explain themselves and loss a vote to reform or Lib Dem or whoever. So I mean, you know, if nothing else, they they want the focus to be on on the government, quite rightly, opposition's always do. But also for them it's a good distraction from the troubles that they are still going through. And I mean just to stick on the transparency and accountability mechanisms for a second. Like one of the things we've been saying, uh Director Hannah White wrote a piece about some of the risks involved in those and the consequences for government. Sort of so Parliament has really lent into humble addresses and requiring information provision. That is having real-world gumming up consequences inside government. Do you think Parliament should be deploying these bazookers it's got? It's really tricky, isn't it? Because obviously there's a public appetite for transparency. And as Hannah's made the point quite rightly, like it's actually extraordinary that we have this level of of transparency going on. I've never seen government documents coming out b prior to the archives to this extent in this level and uh yeah, as James was saying, we're expecting a lot more. Uh we did see it obviously in the COVID inquiry, that's probably the most recent example where we we got so much sort of raw material to be sifting through. This is a thing where you can understand why they want to apply that. So it's no criticism of that. But yeah, if we end up with more fractured politics, if we end up with you know more minority governments, then you're going to see Parliament more able to deploy this. And there is a risk if they just uh start, you know, humble addresses happen over sort of everything left, right and centre, that's that's what government is doing is responding all the time to these releases rather than getting on with with other things. I mean it's an irony, isn't it, that it was Keir Starmer who really sort of showcased how you can use a humble address when he was in opposition that is now being applied against him and you can totally understand the Conservatives wanting to do it. And you can't really say to any of them, guys, you might want to think about how this would be if you were in government . But at some point, and I think Tuesday's debate was quite useful for this of MPs thinking through okay, what is the threshold when we need another inquiry? Because again, these things take up resources, they distract time, and yes, they have an effect on government because people are thinking about what written record are you leaving? I mean at the heart of this story, one of the key and quite glaring things is that there doesn't seem to be an official note of the meeting and there does seem to have been a meeting, but there doesn't seem to be an official note of it You know, we don't want to see a situation where civil servants are feeling like they can't take notes of meetings because their principals are worried about well what if we have to release that because there's an inquiry or you know humble address or something like that. We government needs to sort of want to keep keeping a record of of what it is doing despite transparency. Part of the challenge for government is it's sort of these things get purchased when there's a majority in parliament, quite rightly, for them to get purchase and not when there isn't. I mean James, just briefly, I want to move on in a second, but just you know, I was on the uh I was a civil servant in the centre of government on the receiving end of Keir Starmer and Labour's uh humble addresses about Brexit. Uh interested in your take on kind of how that gums up the centre of government makes I enjoyed the suggestion there that politicians might be encouraged to look beyond the next general election. A very, very bold uh very um uh uh look, I think you know, the reason that all this information is being released is because Labour MPs decided to vote to have it all released. Uh and that was a classic case of Turkey's voting for Christmas. There were all sorts of unintended consequences that came out of the huge disclosures that came around COVID. I'm reminded of some fairly ripe remarks that Dominic Cummings made about the cabinet, for example. And on a political level, look, I'm not entirely sure that the Tories borrowing the Labour playbook on all of this and making this government look more like the last one is going to benefit the Tories. The difficulty for them is it sort of makes the the two traditionally main parties look very similar, two cheeks of the same ass, as George Galloway might say. And you know, the best issues of that are gonna be the reform Greens. Yeah, and I mean just the public attitude to politicians generally, I mean, it becomes they're all the same and it's difficult for any party then to make a sort of positive case for government and for what politics can do and so forth. So yeah, there are there are risks all round in all of it. But at the same time, you know, Parliament's gonna Parliament is indeed gonna parliament. James the other dare I suggest uh perhaps slightly bigger problem for the government is it's dealing with the consequences of the Iran war. I thought it was really interesting to see a shift in the government's communications in the last few days. Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, was saying that people will see higher energy prices, food prices and those types of issues, flight ticket prices, he said, for a good period once the conflict, even if the conflict ends quickly. Do you welcome that? Do you think that's a deliberate shift in messaging? Do you think the government could or should have been more candid earlier or is it getting the balance about right? Uh definitely and what got lost in all the mans ion stuff was actually the Prime Minister coming out and saying that summer holidays and weekly shops could be impacted by this. But look, I I think on Iran and the impacts on cost of living, we're at a kind of road runner moment. So we've gone off the cliff, our legs are spinning round, but we have yet to feel the effects of gravity. It is really difficult the messaging around this stuff because we all know uh if you say there might be shortages, but don't panic, the first thing everybody's gonna do is panic. But equally, you know, I think I was very surprised a month ago when the Prime Minister came out and said it's going to be difficult, but we are well placed to weather this. What he should have been saying is it's going to be difficult and it's gonna be difficult because of all the choices the last lot made and trying to predistribute the blame onto the last government. So yeah, I think I think the comms are are catching up. I do think I mean uh it is important that the government start talking about this, not least to make sure that the public are starting to get aware and are starting to think about things like their summer holidays and stuff. But we know we look into crises and particularly how ministers cope with crises uh and manage it in terms of the machine and stuff. Until you're in the mix of it, it's never quite real. And I think the same is true for the public. Is good. But yeah, when it starts to hit the public, it will be the government that they are blaming, and no amount of sort of pre-warning will do that. So the government, yes, it should be doing the kind of messaging it's doing at the moment, but it also needs to make sure that it is doing all of the decision-making behind the scenes that it can do. And to some extent, taking a leaf out of the Mandelson and learning the lessons from there , thinking through what are the things that could go wrong and have we done the things now that, you know, might have prevented that. So sort of starting to red team or game through, you know, what might go horribly wrong and that we need to make sure we've got answers for whether we were doing things thinking about it or not. Because it's a crisis you can see coming and that isn't always true. So if you can see it coming, can you start to try and do the right things to prepare for the crisis? Because when it hits it's you know, i everything feels like it's coming at you from every direction. Just to violently a agree there. If we run out of beer during the World Cup, there are no comms that will uh will get you out of that hole. And there will be a very nasty hangover for the government. Let's turn our attention now across the Atlantic. And to King Charles' visit to Washington, we've seen jokes, even slightly funny ones from the King, a gift of a submarine bell for Donald Trump, and a lot of love for the special relationship. But what difference does this all make? Kath, the soft power of the monarchy seems to have survived a change of monarch. It does. Um I mean, yeah, if you look at Charles's reign thus far overall, he's um seems to be getting very good press. Seems to be ticking the the boxes despite incredible things, you know, we've been talking about one aspect of the Epstein fallout. Obviously uh the king has been at the heart of another uh involving his brother Andrew. So despite all of that, yes, the monarchy seems as robust as ever in terms of you know British public life and the media's treatment of it, and seems to be doing, you know, the job that state visits are supposed to do of going out there and creating sort of warm feelings and opening diplomatic channels and and so forth. Whether it has any lasting effect on the Trump presidency, I mean basically no. You know, it could be w hours after King Charles' plane leaves that Trump says something 'cause that stuff just is not predictable. But you know, the warm feeling will still remain and you know be something a lever that government can It will bounce off Trump. I did wonder whether the actual audience was Congress and the sort of everybody around him and that has more of an effect. But James, I I saw you quoted um pointing out the King sort of he laid on the charm but he didn't hold back. What do you make of this uh Well just to continue the beer theme, I think you know the royal family are in some ways the kind of Heineken of international relations. They refresh the past that other diplomats cannot reach. And of course the king is one of the few people in the world, and I do mean few, who, you know, Donald Trump would see as an equal. So he is able to wrap up these kind of difficult messages in the sort of pageantry that Donald Trump loves. And we saw him talking about the importance of the uh UK US relationship, uh supporting Ukraine, remaining in NATO. He even, you know, dropped in the fact that he's king of Canada. Obviously , Trump has been laying claim to that country. And actually I thought the boldest part was when he was citing Magna Carta as a kind of you know check on the executive. And it's interesting that at a time when there's a kind of no king 's movement in the US, you saw an actual king delivering some of those uh similar messages. One of the things that UK government's had to do through all of this, uh the focus I totally agree with Kath, the the King has done what he's done. The focus is going to turn back onto government-to-government relationships and and Keir Starmer. But Starmer's had praise for how he's kind of calibrated this relationship. And I'm wondering, I mean, I don't know if you're one of the architects of it, but the sort of not react to everything that Trump says I was sort of doing the cr the strategic calms, the kind of more long term planning stuff rather than dealing with the day to day stuff. But obviously you still get sucked in and you're still very much glued to to what's going on. I mean generally you have to cross your fingers, keep calm and and carry on. I mean I remember when Keir Star mer went to Washington and and and met the president in the Oval Office. We actually ordered in pizza and had a big screen in the cabinet room to um watch events unfold. And of course when we did the trade deal with the US, the whole plan was that the Primus to go to Jagula Land Rover where thousands of jobs had been saved by the agreement around kind of tariffs on on on all of this stuff. But the president decided he wanted a live call with care . And that had to be kind of jacked up by my colleagues on the spot. So it's always a kind of seat of your pants moment. By the way, that's obviously the same day I think that Peter Mamelson was holding Donald Trump 's hand in the overall office. But yeah, there was a deliberate strategy to not react to every kind of utterance or or uh truth, as I think he calls it, on his own social media platform. Kath J,ames mentioned uh Canada there. Um standing up to Donald Trump is serving one tech technocratic uh Prime Minister quite well. Should Starmer be kind of firming up his messaging off the back of this? He clearly has done in recent we Yeah, I mean it's so different. You know, the border that Canada and and the US share, you know, so closely intertwined countries and it has been a huge shock to the system and it it f I mean it is you know, it's existential for Canada if if the US is starting to talk about how they'd very much like you to be part of their country. So it is a a different thing, but I do think the the speech that Mark Carney gave a few months ago and even Macron , you know, some of the comments he've made. Those different world leaders probably are calibrating each other, they're what they're doing against each other. Starmer's definitely been stronger in recent years. I think the real changing moment was the criticism of the British military or the d you know, the disparaging, we should say, of the British military. And again, something that Palace were keen to brief in advance that Charles would be emphasising his own military roots, 'cause that w he would have felt that person ally. Um and I think Yeah, I think that did well and also serving in himself. I think that really did change things of like okay this has gone too far. And then obviously there was the decision about not getting as closely involved with the Iran strikes. So there's already been that shift and I think it's created space for you can do that, you can push back, and it's not necessarily going to completely destroy everything, the channels are still open, and that Trump probably understands in some weird way that other people are gonna do back to him what he does to them. But it still goes back to that fundamental thing of, you know, he will turn it up to eleven if, you know, you pick a bad point with him on a bad day. So it's always risky and they'll probably always be thinking about that. But I do think there's probably room, yeah, for Starmer to push back much more in the future 'cause they've created that space for themselves. And Kath, just a little aside, as we're talking we've been talking about the monarchy and we're talking today on the day that um Parliament parodes. Oh yeah. Today is a big day, possibly a bad day for one particular part of the aristocracy. Uh just remind us about that. Yes, uh Hereditary Peers, it's their final day because Parliament is being prosecuted. And Hereditary Peers, the Hereditary Peers bill has passed, uh has received royal assent and so the ninety-two hereditary peers who still sat in the House of Lords will not, although some of them are staying on because part of the deal to get it through was that the Conservatives would get quite a few of their hereditary peers to stay on. There was a couple So a few of them are staying as life peers. But yes, that particular aspect of our constitution is no more. James, a proud achievement of a Labour government? Well it doesn't quite go as far as many of the Labour Party would like. On Kath's point, it's not just Carney in uh Canada. Uh Albo in Australia also won a general election by effectively associat ing his opponent with Trump and running against the pair of them. And everyone in Downing Street is, I think, you know, pretty conscious of that from the Primus to Down. Now, clearly Trump is shouldn't be around by the time of the next gener al election here in the UK. Um but you could very much see them potentially running against kind of JD Vance. Uh and certainly the messaging has flyed up and I think I would agree with Kathle like the moment that things changed was when President Trump maligned the uh extraordinary bravery um and courage of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, so many of whom died. James, while you're here, I did want to ask you about one thing where we had a we had a bit of a disagreement with uh the comms team in number 10 when uh when you were there, which was about the uh guidance that number 10 put out about civil servants speaking at events when there were QA sessions or where sectoral stakeholders in the media might be present. We've been quite critical of of that and the kind of chilling effect it has on this podcast and in things we've written. But I wanted to get I wanted to get your take on it really, what the thinking was behind it, what the context was uh around it. So really interested in your thoughts on that. Detail now, but I think the view was that senior civil servants should be bound by the same rules as politicians because uh their words can be just as consequential. I mean the thing that we uh uh the thing that we were particularly concerned about, it was sort of talking to sectoral stakeholders under the under the radar and so on, and perhaps the guidance went a little bit too far. But I mean it's in it's interesting that that's your that's your gonna take. as we've just seen from our latest man in Washington, there's no such thing as under the radar. Now to a new IFG report, part of our flagship performance tracker series and funded by the Nuffield Foundation. It takes a look at the state of the children's social care market, a problem which has been long in existence and has only been getting worse. Its author, IFG researcher Amber Della, joins us now. Hi Amber. Hi Alex. Before we get to the numbers, can you just explain what we mean by children and social care and what people mean when they talk about a market for it? Yes. So children's social care is a whole host of local authoresity servic for children and young people who need extra support. And at the most acute end of that support are children in care, and that's the group that this report focuses on. They are children who are the responsibility or in the care of their local authority and they live in settings like foster care or residential care, so children's homes. There's around 80,000 of these children across England. And market is a bit of an odd word to use in this context because we're talking about children's homes, but it refers to how children in care are matched with their new settings or their new placements, their new homes. It is a market. Local authorities purchase those placements from a variety of different providers, private organisations, voluntary organisations, etc. When I read it, I mean the thing that came out particularly was just how you sort of calmly and systematically laid out all the problems that exist in this sector, how dysfunctional the market is, and how that has led to sort of a rolling crisis in the in the sector. I mean give us the headline numbers and the and the and the facts about Yeah, so I think that the simplest way to explain the root of all of these problems is that there are just not enough placements of the right type in the right places to meet children's needs. And that is because of systemic issues with the way that the market is set up. It's not kind of a coincidence that that is the case. I think it's easiest to understand what that means if you look at the consequences of that on the children who are in those settings and on the local authorities themselves. So the first main practical effect is that too many children are living in unsuitable placements that don't meet their needs. So for example, many are in residential care settings in children's homes when they would be better placed in family based settings like foster care. Um, and we've seen that increase over time. Equally we see lots of children placed in unregistered settings, so that's settings that lack offstead oversight and those are illegal. But you know, in those settings they have absolutely no guarantee that minimum standards of care are being met. So the first one is yeah, unfortunately too many children are in unsuitable placements. The second one is about care quality varying massively across the country, and this comes back a bit to what we were saying about there not being enough placements in the right places in the country. So provision and particularly children's homes tend to be clustered where housing and the labour market is cheapest. And that's purely because it reduces operational costs for the providers who are running those settings. And so if a child comes from an area where housing prices are higher or where wages are higher, they are much more likely to just be sent far away to live in care. It separates them from their support networks, it disrupts their education, and we see now about a fifth of child ren in care being placed at more than 20 miles away from where they've originally come from. And the final practical effect, which we'll go into, is the system just being financially unsustainable, which is something that DFE itself is recog nised. Children's social care is an increasing cost pressure on local authorities, it's putting lots at risk of insolvency. And the cost of care has nearly doubled in real terms since two thousand nine-ten . Some of that is because the numbers of children in care have risen, but also we've seen care just become increasingly expensive. So we've been relying on more expensive residential care placements. The average placement in a children's home now costs £400,000 a year, which is nearly two-thirds more in real terms than it cost in 2016-17 . Equally private provision and rising and rising levels of private provision may be behind that increase in expense of care. We've seen profiteering among some private providers. Kind of at the heart of this issue is the fact that local authorities are competing with each other for these placements because of their scarcity. Yeah, some of the numbers and the costs are just sort of extraordinary really and then the needs of the child are the thing that's being lost inside the system. So uh you know as you as you imply there's all sorts of has gone wrong here kind of incrementally over time. But to its credit this, government has been sort of trying to start to, or at least kind of develop some plans to get to grips with this neglected sector. What what are they trying to do? So yeah, so they've announced reforms at the end of twenty twenty four. Most of the reforms have come from a review, an independent review done in twenty twenty two, which was led by Josh McAllister, who since became a Labour. Whatever happened to him, yeah. Yeah, and is now actually the minister in charge of pushing these reforms through. So understand ably very shaped by what was written in that review. I think those reforms generally have been very well received by the sector. They set out a clear and ambitious vision for reform. Um they're backed by relatively generous funding, two to three billion pounds, depending on how you cut it, and especially in comparison to other sectors, namely adult social care, where we've seen kind of a lack of action almost entirely from the government. There's lots to be very grateful for in these reforms. I think the thing that stands out for us is the focus on prevention, which is something we talk about a lot. The government is trying to make sure that children are kept in the lowest tiers of care possible without jeopardizing their welfare. And another thing they're trying to do to kind of shape demand for the care market, or for care placements, sorry, is looking at multi-agency support. So trying to bring public services together around the child rather than , you know, viewing the child as needing to access all of these different services entirely separately and on their own. And that's important because much of the demand we see, or much of the increase in demand that we've seen in recent years for care services have come from children falling through the gaps elsewh ere. So, you know, children who haven't been able to access mental health support have ended up on the door of children's social care services because that's kind of the last resort for them. So that's what the government's doing on shaping demand very broadly. And then on shaping supply, they've released a fostering plan to boost foster carer numbers so we can see fewer children needing to go into institutional settings when they could be taken care of in family-based settings. And there's also market management measures that they're introducing to try and cut down on that profiteering we spoke about earlier, potentially even introducing profit caps on some of the private providers. So there's a plan, there's somebody sort of accountable for delivering it, but that it's by no means a done deal. What more do you think? You know, we've got to have recommendations to get more. It wouldn't be a good report without that way. Do you think the government should be pushing further on this? Yes, so exactly. I think we think that they've got the right vision, but it's all about turning that theory into practice. And I think that there are some system wide barriers to delivering prevention and that kind of integrated multi agency support side, which the government hasn't yet properly reckoned with. Prevention and multi-agency support are things that we have long seen and and parts of the government has long seen as important. You know, health and police already have duties over children in care and yet they've not materialized and that's because there are some kind of system wide changes that need to take place in government. Thanks. And Kath, I mean really interesting and pretty rare that someone writes a report about a kind of chronic wicked problem like this and then becomes a minister and gets a chance to implement that. You know, interested in your kind of reflections on on that. This can only be a good thing, I guess, can't it? Yeah, I mean you do get cases of that in the past. Obviously you, know, this government has brought in some genuine experts in the field to be ministers in their area, including Peter Hendy on transport. And James Timpson, obviously on prisons. And they're not the only ones to have done so others have in the past. I mean it's worth saying like there is always in any government a lot of work going on underneath the sort of surface that isn't necessarily making, you know, the top headlines, whatever, which is good policy making that any governments would want to be happening. And it often doesn't get focused on. There's uh so much more policy making going on across uh governments, all different parts of government that you know most of the national headlines don't really talk about. It's certainly though a theme for this government that they feel somewhat hard done by that, you know, the good news stories don't get out there compared to all of the bad news stories. We've just spent most of the podcast obviously it talking about Mandelson. And you know, talking with James Lyons, who was in charge of strategic comms, which in theory was to be getting these messages out about, you know, the other uh sort of policy making they're doing. But I d I you know, it's difficult to sort of work out why that happens. Uh it mean it's partly obviously everyone's focused on the drama of the moment. But I think it's also partly just because a lot of these issues when you get into the policy making, as you say, it it starts to become about the complex wicked problem that they are and all the different issues and so forth, and there's a lot of experts out there on them, but it doesn't create that sort of simple political narrative that perhaps drives our news media in the same way. And yeah, you know, it's a truism of government that everyone focuses on the failures and don't really focus on the success. Obviously, you know, as Amber's pointing out, this one still has a lot of work to go and there is still more that could be done beyond what the government have decided. Yeah, and just no, I mean not to be too depressive about it, but just to kind of pick up on that point about the failures. This you know, this is a this has been a chronic failure. Uh I was you know, I remember this being an issue ten, fifteen years ago in government and it's kind of been building and building and building. And to that point about bandwidth or prioritization, uh why don't things like this get more attention sooner, I suppose. I mean it's harder to say. Obviously uh you know, sometimes it's about the the people involved making sort of the case for their policy area when you're talking about children, they're not going to be the ones leading the campaigns. There will be lots of charities out there who have been banging their heads against the walls talking about these issues. And lots of uh you know, politicians, ministers, I'm sure almost every MP has cases in their area uh that this policy relates to. So I don't know, it's something really interesting, sort of almost deeply psychological, in why we talk about some themes and issues more than others, but it's it's really good that Amber's done the work to be able to sort of bring this to light and to, you know, to be able to to make sure that we've got some sort of good data understanding our discussion about it. Also just to add on to that, like this is, as you say, something that the government has long realized was a problem. Even in two thousand and seven it released a paper that had not exactly the same and I think this government's done a really good job, but a pretty similar suite of aims in its white paper to to resolve these issues in children's social care. And yet, you know, here we are twenty years later, and not much has has changed. In fact things have have gotten worse. So I think that there is something there about the fact that the solutions to these problems often require involvement beyond the department who is responsible for children's social care. And I think that's what we're trying to get into a little bit in our recommendations is about you know what system wide, government wide changes actually need to happen for this to not be the case in another twenty years we're looking at, you know, the same thing happening. And sustained interest from a minister. Yeah. Um you know it, it it is it's a huge gods when you get a minister who is so deeply committed to an issue that they want to stay the course uh seeing that policy through because the churn that you get in the political sphere then often Yeah, and to the last government's credit, they were the ones who commissioned the review that has provided the foundations to quite a lot of what this government is doing. But Amber sort of last question and uh you know returning to the the man of the moment and pick up on Kath's point about the importance of individuals staying kind of engaged on this. We have the minister, the author of the uh report uh the review, Josh McAllister speaking at the IFG uh soon. What will you be looking for from him? Yes, um good chance to plug the event. It's happening on the twelfth of May. Um we're hoping to kind of talk to him about what the government could be doing a little differently. So the report contains ten recommendations, which is far too many to go through in detail on the podcast, but just a small taste of some of the things that we've spoken about earlier. So on prevention, what's really key across all of government is actually, and it sounds so simple, but getting a definition of what prevention actually means. And I think something that's quite concerning at the moment with the government's reforms is that it's included child protection in its definition of prevention for children's social care. And that's actually something that we view to be on one of the the most acute parts of children's social care. And the risk without doing that is that we we see all of the time that this preventative spending can get consumed very easily by that more firefighting side, immediate demand, urgent care placements required for children, you know, a local authority will be there on a Friday night and will need to find a home for a child. Um and without that kind of careful specification of what prevention actually means, it's very easy for it to just get sucked up. Um secondly on the, prevention side, actually having the data to be able to do preventative work. So, first of all, understanding the workforce delivering these services, we don't really have the data at the moment to understand what capacity they have, even though the government wants to put more emphasis on their role in the system. But more fundamentally, just having the data to actually understand the demand. We don't at the moment really understand underlying need for plac ements, where a child would best be placed, all we know is where they end up being placed. But in order to be able to make sure that your you know local care market can sufficiently accommodate this child, you need to know what's best for them. That's it on prevention. I think just briefly on the integration multiagency side of things. It's kind of what I've said before about making sure that the public services have the incentives and the funding to allow them to better coordinate their support. If we go back to the example on mental health, services there have very little reason financi ally to keep a child in their care, to keep a child supported by them, when they could essentially push this child off onto children's social care themselves. And so much of prevention is about benefits that don't necessarily accrue to your service. But you need to do the spending yourself. So, you know, practically there, what we're kind of asking for is just less siloed funding arrangements. And we've got a lot of detailed research from my colleague Stuart, who can go into kind of the more technical details on that. But essentially trying to set up structures where public services are designed more around children. Brilliant. Thanks. Really specific points about children's social care market there, but universalisable ones as well around the use of data and how important that is to inform policy, clarity of definition s and funding frameworks and uh incentives as well. So congratulations on an excellent report. And that's the end of this week's inside briefing. Thank you to Kath, Amber and to James Lyons. You can read Amber's great new paper at the IFG website, as well as our take on the Privileges Committee vote and its consequences. While you're there, be sure to bookmark our local and devolved elections page. There's lots of great content, including pre- and post-polling day events. That's all heading your way, so read up on that, sign up to the events and join us because those elections could be very important indeed. For now though, Kia Starmer carries on, but the last chance alone is no place to be drinking. See you next week