2. What does the data tell us about births and the number of children being taken into care?
Having quantified the spend on preventing parent-baby separation in section 1, our attention turns to the impact of these services (focusing on Magu). This section explores population data on parent-baby separation in Wales and in RCT, in order to deepen our understanding of the problem.
Children in care of their local authority for more than 24 hours are legally known as a ‘Children Looked After’ (CLA). The rate of CLA in Wales is higher than any of the four nations (Table 4), although it is possible that this is due to variations in the way each nation counts children as being in care, making direct comparisons difficult (NSPCC, 2024).
Table 4: Rate of Children Looked After across the four UK nations
| England 31st March 2023 | N. Ireland 31st March 2023 | Scotland 31st July 2023 | Wales 31st March 2023 |
Rate of looked after children per 10,000 of the under-18 population | 70.5 | 87.0 | 121.3 | 116.4 |
Source: NSPCC (2024)
Over the last 20 years in Wales, there has been a gradual upward trend in the percentage of infants (defined as children under 12 months of age) coming into care, with the proportion rising from 0.49% in 2004 to 1.08% in 2024. The percentage of infants coming into care in RCT has been more volatile, with a sharp rise from 0.36% in 2004 to a peak of 2.11% in 2017, followed by a steady decline to 0.48% in 2024.
The proportion of CLA classed as infants has also been more variable in RCT. In Wales, under 1s consistently make up 4–6% of all children looked after, peaking at 6.12% in 2017; in RCT this reached 7.97% in 2017, indicating a higher relative intake of infants compared to the national trends.
In Wales in 2023, neglect and abuse were classed as the biggest reason for children receiving care and support (65%). Other reasons include family dysfunction (15%), absent parenting (3%), family in acute stress (10%), child’s disability or illness (2%), or social unacceptable behaviour (2%) (Welsh Government, 2024a).
These measures are important. Pre-care experiences can affect children long after they become looked after, and becoming looked after can impact children well into adulthood and throughout their adult lives. Because of this, increasing attention is being paid to the preventative potential of keeping infants with their birth parents. The next section seeks to explore the outcomes of entering care in more detail, to provide additional context on the impact of parent-baby separation.
Key Points
There has been a gradual increase across Wales in the percentage of infants (children under one year old) entering care over the past twenty years.
The pattern of infants entering care in RCT is volatile, with a sharp rise from 0.36% of all infants in 2004 to a peak of 2.11% in 2017, followed by a steady decline to 0.48% in 2024.
In Wales in 2023, neglect and abuse were were classed as the biggest reason for a child receiving care and support (65%).
Read the next section: What are the short, medium and long-term outcomes of infants going into care?