Part of 4. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:27 pm on 6 July 2022.
Thank you, Gareth Davies, for that question. I'd just like to correct him, I didn't say we had a good rate of children in care. I think he must have misheard that. I said we had a good rate of listening to children. We've got a good record of listening to children. And in fact, the Welsh Government has been working very hard over the last three years to try to bring down the number of children who are in care, because we absolutely recognise that we've got too many children in care in Wales. And as the First Minister answered to Andrew R.T. Davies in First Minister's questions yesterday, one of the ways we want to tackle these issues is by reducing the number of children who are in care, because we feel that, by giving more help for children who are on the edge of care, helping the children and their families, we can keep a lot of children out of care, and that, I think, is one of our main aims—to keep children out of care. And we've had this reduction strategy over the last three years, and during the last year, the rate has now started to drop, so we are on the right trajectory, but we have got a long way to go. So, I certainly don't think that we've got a good record on the number of children in care.
In terms of the review, as I said in response to Jane Dodds, there is a child practice review that will be happening now, and that will be reporting in the autumn. We will have to see what is the result of that child practice review, whether there are any wider issues that need to be taken up across Wales, and also we're waiting for the CIW report of services in Bridgend. So, we're waiting to see what those two results are. We do have a plan for transformation of children's services. We have committed money to it. We are working at it and we think it's really important that we go ahead and take action on those, and we're certainly going to look very carefully at the result of these reviews.