Kids being placed far from loved ones. Accommodation routinely unsuitable, sometimes unlawful. Placements breaking down multiple times.

This is the social care world that children up and down our country have been forced to endure for so many years.

Council spending money they don’t have on placements. Large care providers raking in excessive profits. A desperate lack of provision exploited for gain.

This is the social care world that our new Labour Government is tasked with fixing. When we do, we give children the opportunities they deserve.

It doesn’t have to be this way. That was the clear diagnosis of the Competition and Markets Authority. And the prescription was equally clear from the superb independent review of children’s social care. A co-operative model could sit at the centre of bringing about the change children need.

I’m one of a handful of MPs currently considering this Labour Government’s Children’s Wellbeing and School’s bill, clause by clause. I wanted to serve on this committee because I deeply believe in the measures in this bill.

Until 3am on 5^th July I led domestic abuse, mental health, and homelessness services, embedding caseworkers into social care hubs, together focusing on keeping children safe and looked after.

I led a service to support victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation and abuse and cannot tell you how important it is to have our government speedily implementing the Jay review recommendations. And I have been a councillor for nearly ten years and deputy leader.

Keeping children safe and protected is at the heart of this bill. That means big fixes to a system at breaking point. How we find, match, build, and run foster homes and residential care for children in care radically needs to change.

The values of our co-operative movement can be at the heart of these fixes, they could provide the loving homes that children in care need. That’s why I spoke up for regional care co-operatives in the bill committee, delighted that our Labour Government will be providing for them.

Local authorities will continue to have the same duties to find appropriate place for looked-after children, including that they should live near home. Regional care co-operatives will assist local authorities to place children, making more places available locally for children who need them, filling placement gaps so that children aren’t placed faraway in homes.

The social care market is seriously broken, something very clearly recognised by Early Education Minister Stephen Morgan and School Standards Minister Catherine McKinnell as they took the bill’s measures to the committee.

Bridget Philipson and Rachel Reeves are putting money into the regional care co-operatives with the launch of two pathfinder regions, Greater Manchester and the South-East, funded to the tune of £3.46m. £5m is additionally being provided to help build on what exists in the way or create new provision.

I am particularly pleased that the pathfinders will be expected to integrate into youth justice partner models and NHS integrated care boards. In the world of care, we achieve nothing by creating new bubbles, everything is about deep integration and, ideally, people from separate teams working together in the same spaces to solve problems naturally and speedily.

These pathfinders should ensure they fully embrace the co-operative model both in values and how they are constitutionally set-up, so we ensure the obvious benefits to our government of using a co-operative model to solve these problems. The values of self-help and self-responsibility, equality and equity – they run through our Labour and co-operative movements. With regional care co-operatives set to be enshrined in statute, we can tackle the problems of excessive profiteering and ensure kids get the care they need.