I agree completely, because it’s not about the lack of opportunities, it’s the inability to be able to seize those opportunities that I think is at the heart of what we’re talking about today. We heard from Mark Isherwood, of course, that we are awash with research and reports and there’s another report being launched by the children’s commissioner today. If the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 is to mean anything, it has to succeed at breaking down silos and silo thinking about how, in this case, we take responsibility together for corporate parenting. I think it’s about far more than just Government departments; otherwise, all this research and all these reports won’t lead to fundamentally life-changing results for young people in care, and the access to the opportunity that Joyce was just talking about.

In the last Assembly, the Children, Young People and Education Committee conducted an in-depth inquiry with a later follow-up inquiry into adoption. In the course of both those inquiries, we heard from adoptive parents who adopted in ignorance of issues affecting their child at the time of adoption, or who did not receive support to deal with behaviours that manifested themselves as the children grew older. And one of the points I would really like to press home today is the fact that some formerly looked-after children don’t cease to have high needs just because they’ve been adopted. The scars of abuse and neglect, parental incapacity or absence or extreme family dysfunction don’t heal just because a child has found a new family to love and nurture them. So, in examining how cross-departmental corporate parenting can be better in today’s debate, we must remember the challenges facing adoptive families too, because the act of transferring parental responsibility must not mean washing our hands of those children. For every step we take to improve the value we place on foster parents and the essential place that they have in raising looked-after children, so we should do the same for adoptive parents. Llyr was absolutely right to talk about looked-after children and adopted children in the same breath.

However good our foster parents are, as David Melding said, many looked-after children will go through a series of placements, reinforcing the lack of stability and incomplete attachment that led to the state stepping in to protect many of them in the first place. There’s one particular type of separation that I want to speak on today, because it lends itself to targeted support but is complicated by the devolution settlement, and that is the children affected by an imprisonment of a parent.

Not all children with a parent in prison go into care; there are about two and a half times as many children with a parent in jail as there are children in care, and not all children in care have parents in prison, of course. In fact, in families where the father goes to jail, the overwhelming majority of children stay with the family at home with the mother. However, when it’s the mother who goes to jail, only 5 per cent of children stay at home with the father. The majority are looked after by kinship carers—grandparents mainly, but other family members as well—and this informal care, as with adoption, is not consistently recognised as an arrangement that requires active support by Government. Just because a child is not being formally corporately parented doesn’t mean that they are immune from the same development and emotional behaviour issues that arise from separation and lack of continuity and security as looked-after children do.

Now is an appropriate time to applaud organisations like Friends and Families of Prisoners and Barnardo’s, as well as the excellent work done in Parc prison to maintain strong family bonds between, in these cases, fathers and their children. But it’s an opportune time to remember too that while children generally stay at home with mum when dad is in jail, when mum is in jail 12 per cent of those children go into care. Jailing mothers not only creates a greater call on unsupported kinship care, but it brings more children into the care system. We know that a greater number of care leavers become offenders than their peers. We know that a greater number of children of prisoners become offenders than their peers. These children are doubly at risk of going into prison themselves, and I hope that any moves towards improving corporate parenting takes this particular cohort of children into particular consideration. Thank you.