7. Will the First Minister explain what the Welsh Government's plans are to reduce the number of children in care? OAQ54606

Thank you, Siân Gwenllian, for that question. Too many children are taken away from their families in Wales. Every local authority has now submitted their plans to reduce the number of children in care, the number placed out of county, out of Wales, and those removed from parents with a learning disability.

In addition to asking local authorities to submit plans to reduce the numbers, your Government also asks them to set targets for reducing the number of children in care, and you will be aware, perhaps, that Gwynedd Council and a number of other councils have refused to comply with that requirement to set a target, seeing it as a dangerous and retrograde step. And I agree. Using arbitrary figures is not the way of tackling the increasing numbers of children in care, but, rather, we need to look at why the numbers are increasing and focus on improving outcomes for children in care. Are you willing to review your policy of setting targets?

Well, I disagree with the Member, Llywydd, because we come to targets reluctantly. It was absolutely not our first way of doing things, but we have tried—we have tried for nearly a decade all the other measures to which the Member refers. This Government has funded, repeatedly, year after year, initiatives to reduce the number of children taken into care here in Wales. We have provided money directly to local authorities, we have sponsored, through local authorities, the production of reports, such as the Cordis Bright report, that set out more than five years ago for local authorities in Wales the practical steps that they could take to reduce the number of children they take into care. We’ve funded other initiatives to do exactly the same thing, and yet, year after year after year, the number of children being taken into care in Wales goes up. It has gone up every year for 20 years. And the gap between the rate at which children are taken away from their families in Wales and that are taken away from their families across our border has widened every year as well. And Gwynedd is not immune from this. The number of children taken into care in Gwynedd has risen steadily year on year for the last four years. The rate at which Gwynedd takes children away from their families has risen year on year for the last four years. If Members here read last week the report of the rate at which children in Wales are taken away at birth from their families, they will have seen that Gwynedd does that at a faster rate than other local authorities in Wales. The idea that Gwynedd has nothing to look at and nothing to learn does not stand up to examination.

Now, our targets are simply there to focus the minds of local authorities on this problem, and 18 of the 22 local authorities in Wales have agreed to do that. So, Gwynedd is in a small minority of councils who have not come with us on this journey. The targets are absolutely not there to prevent social workers from making right decisions, but they are there to focus the minds of local authorities on one of the great public policy challenges that we have in Wales, and a problem that is getting worse, and has got worse every year for 20 years. That’s why we are doing it, and that’s why it is the right thing to do, and that’s why I’m grateful to the 18 local authorities in Wales who’ve agreed that this is the right way to tackle the problem.

And finally, question 8, Neil Hamilton.