Vulnerable Children: Kinship Care

Lord Storey Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

Perhaps I, too, may start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for initiating the debate, the Kinship Care Alliance for providing briefing by my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield, and indeed the House of Lords Library. I said at Question Time earlier today that it is vital that every child is in a loving and stable family or environment. We have made huge progress over the past few years and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, we should congratulate the Government on what has been achieved. However, we heard during the Question on adoption about the fall in the number of children being adopted, and we saw from DfE figures for up to March of this year that some 6,000 children have gone missing from care. We still have quite a lot of work to do and we need to understand why these things happen. We need to understand the impact that family courts can have on local authorities and how they respond to adoption. So there is always work that needs to be done.

We know that kinship children have often been maltreated so they have greater challenges for us to deal with, yet they have better outcomes, as we heard, than those who are looked-after children. The noble Baronesses, Lady Armstrong and Lady Massey, have already mentioned the figures—200,000 children raised by kinship carers across the UK and 49% of carers had to give up work permanently to do so.

I shall preface my remarks by saying that it is important that children do not just drift into kinship care that might be wholly unsuitable for them. In my professional life, I know of children who have been brought up by a family relative who at best is well-meaning but unsuitable, and at worst a real danger to that child. I agree with the Kinship Care Alliance that the wider family should be explored as the first port of call for a child entering care, taking into account the child’s wishes and feelings, and also placing a duty on local authorities to ensure that potential places are explored and assessed for suitability before a child becomes looked after.

There is a long history in the UK of children being cared for by relatives and friends when their parents, for whatever reason, are unable to care for the children themselves. Research and knowledge about kinship care is mostly limited to formal kinship care—commonly meaning placements that are made by child welfare agencies where carers have been approved as kinship foster carers. Much less is known about children who live informally with kin where the arrangements are made outside the responsibility of the child welfare agencies. There is considerable concern, since many more children are likely to live in informal arrangements than formal ones.

The policy on kinship care is developing in the UK but perhaps not in a joined-up way. In 2007, for example, the Scottish Government published a strategy for children living in kinship and foster care. Similarly, the Welsh Government agreed that grandparents and other kinship carers should be included in the delivery of parenting programmes in Wales. In Northern Ireland, minimum kinship standards which were introduced in 2012, specifying the requirements which health and social care trusts have to meet when placing looked-after children in kinship care arrangements, and clarifying the level of service that children and families can expect to receive. These relate only to looked-after children in kinship care.

While the rate of change in our four UK countries is variable, it is important to note that the message from children and kinship carers in each country was the same. For all the carers the greatest difficulty was lack of financial support. This added to their burden and made all aspects of their lives much more difficult. The way in which we deal with kinship care and how it has developed is fragmented and piecemeal. We have a complex and wholly unjust situation. Providing kinship care must be a crucial service to the community—a society caring for its own—but it sometimes pushes carers into poverty. Chance dictates whether kinship carers are supported financially or otherwise. As a result, whether kinship carers receive help financially or in kind is not related to the children’s needs or to the financial situation of the carer. Do we not need to ensure that assistance is related to need?

If we look at other countries, for example, we can learn a lot. In Spain, an allowance is paid to carers on the basis that they have enough money to bring up the child or children in care. This would be a much more equitable way of providing financial support than exists at present and would enable more relatives and friends to take on this role. It would also help in the overall problem. At present, there is considerable variation in whether allowances are paid when private law orders are made. The current discretionary system for providing financial allowances to private law orders needs to be completely overhauled and support for flexible working might enable kinship carers of working age to retain their jobs when children come to live with them. Change is needed to replace the current unjust arrangements for kinship care. We should move towards a national kinship allowance to cover the costs of bringing up the children. We need to support flexible working in the hope that it will enable more kinship carers of working age to retain their jobs when children come to live with them

A duty should be placed on local authorities to conduct a children’s need assessment. Would it not be good if we had a cultural shift in attitude for the major contribution of informal and formal kinship care as a good option for children? We know that kinship carers are under huge pressures and yet, despite taking on a huge burden from the state by looking after children who would otherwise end up in the care system, kinship carers and the children they look after are still an overlooked group who experience high levels of poverty with little or no statutory support.