Support for New Adoptive Parents

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Ms Ghani, for calling me to speak. It is always a pleasure to see you in the Chair.

I thank the Petitions Committee for selecting this topic for debate, particularly given the number of signatures, because we know that everyone who has petitioned will either have personal experience or know of others with personal experience of what it is to be self-employed and to adopt, and the challenges that brings.

Before I home in on the petition itself, I want to pay tribute to the families who provide safe, loving, forever families for children. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on adoption and permanence, it is a privilege to engage with the whole community involved in adoption, from young people themselves, birth parents and adoptive parents to those in health and social services, the professions working around the child and our secretariat, Adoption UK and Home for Good.

We strive to make the adoption journey one of the most supported and safe journeys around the child: one that puts a young person very much at the centre; one that ensures that funding and services are there; and one that looks at good family making and good family building, with secure foundations. We recognise that many challenges can arise. When we identify those barriers, we need services to respond and Government to use their agility to fix the challenges.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very important point about how we need to support adoptive families and children. I have been campaigning on the rather niche issue of regulating the sale of sperm online. Colleagues might be horrified to learn this is widespread in Facebook groups and on other social media. It is causing children to seek alternative means of finding out where they come from—via AncestryDNA, for example—which causes a lot of problems.

Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to look at all the services that support adopted children and their families in the long term, especially in the online and regulated space?

[Rachael Maskell]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that issue, on which she is probably more of an expert than I am. We have recognised the role of digital and the fact that many children in adoptive settings can be traced or can trace their birth parents without having support around them. We have to recognise the digital age in which children are growing up in order to keep them safe and to protect them. I am sure we will talk more about this subject.

The Minister for Children and Families, the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), is committed to building stable families and providing the care and support that young people and their parents need. He has a sizeable task. Over 80,000 children are in care. I trust that, with the imminent publication of the review by Josh MacAlister, he will simultaneously fix the gaps in the adoption journey. We welcome the commitment of £144 million for the adoption support fund and £19.5 million for the implementation of the adoption strategy over the next three years. It is a sound investment, on which we will see a return.

We need a workforce plan to support children in the care system and their families. There is a deficit in timely support for families, and the scars of trauma emerge in various expressions. Three quarters of children experience abuse or neglect prior to adoption. They need support to be in place at the right time. In our APPG’s “Strengthening Families” report published last year, we identified the importance of aiding parents in the matching process. It has been more challenging through the pandemic, but we cannot let a recovery period delay the process of family building. We are particularly concerned about black and minoritised children in the care system, as well as older children and young people who have been in care the longest. As an APPG, we have more work to do, but so do the Government.

Self-employed parents need help, too. The crucial period of bonding as a family forms is vital in forming attachments and a new rhythm in a child’s life. The self-employed need the same opportunities as other parents to dedicate time to this. Denying statutory adoption pay is nonsensical. I trust that the Minister agrees. We await the legislative response to the Taylor review. I ask that the Minister ensures that the voice of adoptive parents is not lost in that process.

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) made a powerful plea for other parental rights to emerge in such a Bill. I ask that adoptive parents do not suffer any detriment either. If we, as a society, value parenting and recognise its importance, there is no excuse for exclusion. I hope the Minister will forgive me, but I am impatient. Self-employed parents need support now. We know how hard self-employed people work to make their businesses a success.

We heard from the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) about the challenges of the pandemic and how hard people worked to make their businesses thrive. They cannot juggle work around bonding with their child. Ensuring that the right attachments are made is a full-time task. That is why we need to ensure that the self-employed get the financial underpinning to not have to worry about paying their bills, not least at a time when the cost of living is such a challenge to all families.

Adoptive parents should not have to go cap in hand to their local authority either. Special guardians, kinship carers and adoptive parents need recognition that they, even more than birth parents, need to be 100% focused on family building. There is time for the Government to carry out a consultation on the Taylor review prior to their promised employment Bill. I ask the Minister to commit to that consultation today.

The 2013 statutory guidance on adoption states in paragraph 9.38 that

“The local authority should consider making a payment of financial support equivalent to the Maternity Allowance to adoptive parents who are ineligible to receive”

statutory adoption pay. Why is it that adoptive parents continually have to chase everything, and dedicate their time to feeding into the bureaucracy and trying to get it to work for them, as opposed to the Government addressing the issue?

Statutory pay will aid the recruitment of potential adopters and will assist in the success and stability of others. We know that 3,000 children are in need of a family. A full consultation was committed to by the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), who has responsibility for parental pay and leave, during his evidence to the Petitions Committee in 2020, but we must include adoption pay, too. The Government have committed to improving adoption, so this is yet another opportunity for them to do so, and I hope the consultation will therefore be inclusive. He said,

“it is crucial to the success of an adoption placement that an adopter takes time off work to care for and bond with their child.”

That must apply to the self-employed as much as to the employed. There is no difference in the eyes of that child, or in that child’s needs.