Adoptive Parents: Financial Support

Andrew Western Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Andrew Western)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) on securing this important debate. I thank all who have taken part in the discussion for their thoughtful and incisive comments.

As the hon. Lady said, I recently received a written question from her about this issue, and I commend her for her continued support and campaigning in this crucial area. Becoming an adoptive parent is, of course, rewarding, but it is without doubt challenging too. It is admirable when anybody steps up to that role, let alone those who do so while in work. The Government do not underestimate the life-changing difference that adoptive parents up and down the country make every single day.

Breaking down barriers to opportunity is one of this Government’s key missions for the country. That is why we are committed to doing everything we can to ensure employed parents can balance their work and home lives. Our plan to make work pay will ensure there is more flexibility and support for working families, and our reforms to get Britain working include transforming employment support so that people with specific barriers to work, such as parents, receive personalised help to overcome the particular hurdles they face. That not only supports our No. 1 mission—to drive growth in every corner of the country—but creates a cycle of opportunity. People cannot fulfil their potential if they are struggling to afford life’s essentials, but good work brings security and dignity. That is why good work will always be the foundation of our approach to tackling poverty and supporting families.

Children cannot fulfil their potential if they grow up in poverty in any familial setting, and we cannot fulfil our potential as a country if the next generation is held back. That is why we have already started the urgent work needed to get the child poverty taskforce up and running. It is working to publish a comprehensive and ambitious child poverty strategy that will consider all children across the United Kingdom, whether in care, adopted or living with birth parents.

It is worth reiterating that maternity payments such as statutory maternity pay and maternity allowance are intended to protect the health and wellbeing of women and their babies, rather than to assist with the costs associated with a new child. I appreciate that the hon. Lady is specifically raising the issue of adoptive parents. When a family welcomes a new child into their world, it is only right that they have the time to bond—a point that the hon. Lady made eloquently in introducing the debate, and that all hon. Members reiterated.

It was genuinely important to hear about Kirsty’s experience of thinking about adopting a second child—an “assistant train driver”. She is one of the many people who are having to make very difficult choices. I have constituents in a similar position, and it is incredibly important that we hear such testimony when considering these issues.

The hon. Lady also highlighted that there is no guarantee on the means-tested local authority payments, as was reiterated by the shadow Minister, and that many councils do not have policies for that, before going on to set out that adoption saves the economy £4.2 billion a year. She, like myself, is a former senior local authority leader in Manchester. Having been deputy leader of Stockport council, she knows not only of the benefits of adoption for education and health, but of the many pressures within the local authority care system and the fact that secure, permanent placements are the best thing for the child. That support is priceless, and I think we are all agreed on that today.

The hon. Lady went on to say that new adoptive parents need to take time off to enable a child to settle in their new home. I absolutely agree. There are many complex needs that adoptive parents may face in settling their new child in, and balancing that with their employment needs, whether they are self-employed or in mainstream employment, poses many issues. I agree that improvements need to be made to the parental system. If she will bear with me, I will make a specific promise to her on how we can best move this forward.

The hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann) also highlighted his local government experience. It is important to draw that out because we have all been corporate parents. We understand the importance of the role played both by the care system and by foster carers, kinship carers, and especially adoptive parents making a decision to permanently offer a home, love and support to a young person. He set out some of the specific challenges faced in Northern Ireland, for which I am grateful. He is right to highlight the spiralling statistics for children in care. As I just mentioned, it is critical to anybody with local government experience that sustainability and feasibility of adoption for all is imperative. I am very much aware of the points coming out in this debate, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution.

The hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), the spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, asked a specific question on the adoption support fund. He is, as ever, entirely right to raise this very reasonable question because current funding is, I think, only set until April 2025. If I may, I will write to the Department for Education directly and share the response I receive. I do not want to speak on behalf of another Department today, in case the information I provide turns out to be inaccurate, but I will follow up with the hon. Gentleman directly on that.

The hon. Gentleman also rightly set out the challenge of addressing the stereotypical perception of adoption as receiving a babe in arms. More often than not, people could be opening up their home and family to older children, those with very complex needs, or those who have experienced significant trauma. That requires time off too. Time off is required not just for a newborn child who needs a parent with them for obvious reasons throughout the day, but potentially for an older child’s significant, complex needs. The hon. Gentleman’s point reflects the real-world circumstances that many adoptive parents face.

The shadow Minister set out many of the advances that have been made over the past 14 years in this space, and I fully acknowledge those; but that prompts the question how, despite those advances, we have ended up in this position. I accept that we moved forward by introducing, as he said, automatic pupil premium allocation, the adoption support fund, adoption leave and so on. The challenge we face is how we can collectively encourage people to come forward as adopters, kinship carers and foster carers. As a Government, we have a responsibility to make that process as easy as possible. When we look at the outcomes of children who grow up in what one might consider traditional care settings—that is, a children’s home—versus the outcomes of children who grow up in a more traditional family unit, whether adoptive or foster care, or with birth parents, the statistics are stark. If we look at the number of care leavers in the prison system, for instance, or the level of qualifications, some of the figures are incredibly concerning. The shadow Minister’s point was very well made.

Turning back to my substantive comments, we want to ensure that parental leave is supporting all working families as well as possible, so the Government have committed to a review of the parental leave system and work is already under way on planning for that review.

Enabling parents to take time off work not only allows for bonding time but ensures that they are able to give a child the care that they need. In the case of adoption, that ability to connect and care, as we have just discussed, is essential in terms of securing the permanence of any adoption placement. For all those reasons, employed adoptive parents have broadly the same rights and protections as birth parents, in that statutory adoption leave is a day one right, but of course there is the anomaly that we are speaking about today.

I therefore want to give the hon. Member for Hazel Grove a clear assurance that I will write in to that parental leave review and make sure that what we have discussed today is fed into that process, because whatever our views on the rights and wrongs of this, I think that we can all accept that there is a gap, and that we all want as many people as possible to be able to come forward as carers. The anomaly is potentially a barrier to that for some people, not least because we have that means-tested, not especially well advertised, not-brilliant-levels-of-uptake current system, which I think we would all want looked at.

In the meantime, where adopters do not qualify for that statutory payment they have the local authority option, but I would like to highlight some of the wider support, as the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for East Wiltshire, did in his contribution. There is not only advice, information and counselling, but means-tested support. Potentially, on top of that, there is support for new parents—any new parents—in terms of potential eligibility for universal credit, child benefit, and the Sure Start maternity grant, all of which can help all families with the cost of raising children, especially those in need of extra support.

I think I will leave it there, Ms Furness, with just a final thank you to the hon. Member for Hazel Grove for calling this debate. We recognise the contributions of self-employed people, who are a key part of our economy, and we appreciate the valuable difference that adopters make. Therefore, it is only right that we have taken the time today —I am pleased to have had the chance—to consider how we support the remarkable people who take on both roles at the same time.

I reiterate that I will write to the Department for Business and Trade about the issues that have been raised in this debate, and about how the debate can feed into the review that I mentioned earlier, because it is crucial that we accept that there is an anomaly in the system. I will, obviously, send the hon. the hon. Member for Hazel Grove a copy of my correspondence.