Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Sanderson of Welton Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I rise in support particularly of Amendments 69B and 71. From my experience—and it is an experience that some others in this Chamber would have—kinship care arrangements are often needed as the result of an emergency situation. It is often sad, leaving the young person involved feeling particularly vulnerable. The fact that the proposed kinship carer or carers already have a relationship with that person for whom the kinship care is being considered could help them at a time when they need it, not least because the carer might be experiencing and sharing exactly the same situation. However, it should be noted that, due to the nature of kinship care, it is unlikely that the proposed kinship carer would have been seeking to take on the role. Therefore, there would not be the same lead-in time that you might have to prepare them as you would with a foster carer.

Dependent on the circumstances, there is also the potential for conflict with an original parent as well as an impact on the wider family of the kinship carer. This situation means that appropriate support might be required at speed for the proposed kinship carer and their wider family for the benefit of the young person. That support probably would not be the same as for fostering arrangements, due to the uniqueness of the situation, and that makes these amendments important.

On Amendments 104 and 146, I am sure that your Lordships will not be surprised to hear what I am about to say. It is worth noting that kinship allowance and kinship leave, while they make sense, would be an additional cost to the local authority. As my noble friend said earlier, there would need to be consideration by the Government as to how they might be funded, but I support the amendments.

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 69B, 70, 71 and 72 in this group. It is terrific that kinship care will be defined in legislation for the first time. It is a significant step, and one that we should admit is long overdue. I could never understand why kinship care was always so overlooked when it is very often the best solution to a child’s care. When I say, “best solution”, I mean that very much in the sense of the interests of the child, for one other thing that is overlooked—and underestimated—is the huge sacrifice that family members and friends make when they take on such a responsibility. While many do so willingly, the system does not exactly make it easy for them. That is why Amendment 69B, in the names of my noble friends Lord Effingham and Lady Stedman-Scott, is a sensible one in that it acknowledges the role of the whole family. I also hope that the Government will consider Amendment 70 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton.

Another significant step in this Bill is the duty for local authorities to publish a kinship local offer. However, there is an error of omission in that there is no reference anywhere to the different forms of kinship care. We know that different frameworks have different levels of financial, health and therapeutic support, depending on whether you are kinship fostering or have taken on responsibility via a special guardianship order, and whether the child you are taking on has or has not been in care previously. The only problem is that, very often, the potential kinship carers—for the reasons explained by my noble friend—do not have a clue about any of this. Why would they?

I will give some examples of what this means in practice, and this is courtesy of the very good charity, Kinship. Fiona’s grandson was taken into foster care at birth, and she was told that, unless she applied for a special guardianship order to look after him, he would stay in the care system. She said she felt pressured and pushed into this, because she did not have a clue what her options were. As she says, “I took social services at their word that this was the best for me and my grandson”. That was six years ago, and she was then 59 years old. She had to give up a well-paid career, and now survives on benefits and relies on food banks, eating only child-sized meals herself to get by. She has also struggled to get her grandson the assessments and support he needs, which would have been much easier had she been a foster carer.

Similarly, Sue, a former social worker, now 60, took care of her three granddaughters and one grandson. She was told by the local authority that she had to sort out all the court work and pay for all the solicitors’ fees to arrange the care of the children and get a special guardianship order. She and her husband were on benefits, but as guardians, they were means-tested and they received £17 per week per child. Sue, now a widow, had to complain to her local councillor, the Children’s Commissioner and the ombudsman before receiving an uplift.

Finally, Rebekah, 63, is raising her two grandchildren on benefits after the death of their mother, but what she did not realise was that she would not get any support from the local authority because the children had not been in care. She is now struggling and in debt. As she says, “Fortunately I’m resilient and resourceful, but it’s been a huge challenge. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants, with no support or guidance or anything”.

The upcoming pilot on a financial allowance will, I hope, address some of these inequities, but it seems essential that potential carers are given explicit information on any legal support available. I think we can all see from the examples given that it would have probably helped the three women I have just mentioned.

I really hope that the Government will consider Amendment 70, which is a small change but could have a big impact. Can the Minister give us any further details on the pilot, which is an incredibly good thing but obviously comes too late for this Bill?

I hope the Government will also consider Amendment 72 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, which also covers the issue raised in Amendment 71 from my noble friend Lord Effingham. As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, has said, it would simply put the kinship care offer on a par with other offers, such as for SEN and disability. I am interested in the requirement in both amendments to guarantee the involvement of children and carers in the development of kinship care offers.

Working with the Grenfell community, the victims of child sexual abuse and infected blood over the years, it has become clear that local and national government is just not always very good at meaningful engagement. I once asked a civil servant what engagement they had had with regard to a specific policy, and I was explicitly told that there had purposely been no direct communication because it was incredibly important to keep a distance between those developing the policy and those who would be affected by it.

Things have improved since then but probably not as much as they should have done, and so I genuinely believe that embedding engagement into legislation, where appropriate, is the only way that we will drive the necessary culture change. We should not forget that a really important benefit of that engagement is that it builds empathy into the system. Too often, empathy is an afterthought—such as when certain television dramas might evoke a public outcry—when really it should be there as a given.

So, while explicitly involving children and families in the development of kinship care offers may seem a small matter, I really do believe it would have a far-reaching effect in helping to make the state work better for the people who need it.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 69B to 72, and I declare my interests as a governor of Coram and as a trustee of the Foundling Museum, both of which organisations do a huge amount of work with children involved in these amendments.

We do not realise how lucky we are with kinship care. The figures speak for themselves. When you compare the fact that we have 153,000 children being kept in kinship care with the numbers officially in the care system, which is approaching dangerously near 100,000, and the relatively small number of children who are fortunate enough to be adopted, we are incredibly lucky to have kinship care.

A lot of the history of kinship care as it has evolved and grown has been really about taking it for granted and assuming that is what families or extended families do—and, to a large extent, being inordinately grateful that they are there to take these children on and feeling that one probably needs to devote slightly less time and attention to helping those kinship carers do the best they possibly can by comparison with, let us say, children who are conventionally going through the care system. That is clearly a major imbalance.

A particular sentence jumped out at me from the briefing that the organisation Kinship provided in preparation for this stage:

“Given the long and troubling history of poor compliance with kinship statutory guidance, it is imperative that government does not simply take the approach that these matters can be attended to in guidance alone”—


tempting as that is.

With 153,000 currently in kinship care, we have in theory an enormous amount of data to identify where it is being done well and where it is being done less well. So I did a bit of interrogation of the artificial intelligence tool that we are provided with here, courtesy of Microsoft, and an example that jumps out several times when I interrogated it, as a local authority or city council that has best practice in this area, is the city of Portsmouth. I have no idea whether people knew that, or to what extent the department or the Bill team have looked in detail at what it is that Portsmouth is doing that is clearly shooting the lights out compared with a lot of other cities or local authorities. But it is possible to identify what is being done well now, to learn from that and to try to see the best way to put that either into legislation or into guidance so that we are not effectively reinventing the wheel. This is happening at such a large scale that there must be incredibly rich qualitative and quantitative data that we can learn from. I just hope that during the course of the Bill we can drill down, look at that in more detail, try to identify some of those elements of best practice and perhaps bring that back to the discussion on Report.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly to Amendments 73, 74, 75, 76 and 76A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to which I have added my name. I am in that dangerous position where I am between your Lordships and supper, so I am going to keep it very short, given that I spoke at length about kinship care in the last group. These are extraordinarily sensible amendments that would speed things up and make it easier for kinship carers to be kinship carers. I heartily approve.

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, I will also speak incredibly briefly to the amendments in this group. Obviously, we need protections in place, but I think that across the Chamber we are all agreed that we want to make kinship care a viable option for as many people as possible. These amendments help to do just that by removing some of the hurdles and hoops, and I am very much in support of them.

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I do not want to join the competition for brevity, but I will do my best. There is now consensus that preference should, if possible, be given to the placement of children with relatives or those who have some pre-existing connection with the child and are able to offer commitment to care. Kinship carers, like foster carers, are a precious resource, and therefore I support these amendments.

However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Law Commission has recently undertaken a review of the law concerning kinship care, with a view to improving its efficiency and simplicity. That has become necessary because of the great range and variety of situations in which kinship care can arise and might be required—from the temporary and informal arrangement to the longer-term or permanent that can involve foster care, special guardianship or other forms of order.

It has been suggested by some that, rather than have a scattered legislative and regulatory regime, kinship care should now have a separate and distinct regime. That is something that may emerge from the Law Commission. That is not to say that improvements cannot be made to the present piecemeal structures, and that is why I support these amendments. They will make procedures easier for kinship carers or potential kinship carers, without inappropriately cutting corners.