Kinship Care for Babies

Ben Bradley Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) on securing the debate and on her incredible campaign and passion for this subject, particularly around the first 1,001 days. Her knowledge of this subject is second to none in this place, so it is a privilege to speak in her debate today.

I will touch on the care market in general and then on kinship care and perhaps babies, as per the title of the debate. Children’s services around the country are under massive pressure and are our biggest budget pressure from a local authority perspective. People talk about social care, and I wish I could spend the money in social care, but the staff do not exist, so the biggest budget pressure is in children’s services. Every year we battle with the overspends.

At the same time, we are also tackling what are very often poor outcomes for children in the care system. Mostly, it is best for children to be with families. There were 57,000 children in the fostering system this time last year, but fostering is also a challenge in the current climate. Covid isolation—not being able to have people come and go from one’s house—has had a huge impact on fostering and the ability to recruit and retain people in the sector. The Competition and Markets Authority’s report on the children’s care sector has said that the market is broken and in need of significant work, which further highlights just how important kinship care is and will increasingly be in the future in what is otherwise a volatile market.

Living with family or friends is often the best outcome for a child. It is also cheaper from a local authority perspective, and it is outside the market pressures that mean that fostering and adoption are so difficult. It is something we could manage much more easily if we wanted to do so, but as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire touched on, there is inconsistent support, and much less support than for fostering or adoption, even though there are additional challenges that do not exist in those areas, such as the relationship with birth parents. More often than not, we would hope, there is a reason why families cannot look after their child, which can lead to incredibly strained relationships with whoever looks after the child. I do not want to stereotype, but my right hon. Friend touched on some reasons why that might be the case, including imprisonment and substance abuse. Clearly, if granny or grandad takes on a child in such circumstances, with perhaps a mum or dad who is on drugs or an alcoholic, it can be an incredibly difficult relationship for them to manage alongside the work pressures, financial pressures and everything else that comes along with kinship care. Sometimes it just has to go in the “too difficult” box without the support that exists.

Kinship carers also get less access to free childcare, which does not happen in other parts of the care system. Almost uniquely, kinship carers do not access the 15 or 30 hours’ support in the same way as parents who adopt, which is something very simple that we could do. In Nottinghamshire, we are investing in that in our budget this year; we are putting £400,000 into a specific kinship support scheme. When we look at how we are going to balance our budget in children’s services over the coming years, it clearly has to be by having more of that kind of support—keeping kids in their own homes or in the home of a family member or friend through kinship care—and having less expensive residential care, which we know costs a fortune and where the outcomes are typically not good.

The more that we can invest up front in those proactive services to help kinship carers to cope and look after relatives, and to mitigate those financial challenges, the better off we will be in the long term, both financially and in terms of outcomes. We want to look at how we incentivise granny and grandad, or aunt and uncle, to take on that challenge and keep their family member in a loving home environment. We will invest in that in our budget this year, and I am very proud that we are doing that for the first time.

The national review of children’s care services needs to highlight the importance of kinship care and increase the simplicity of, and access to, that support. That should be tackled alongside the well-understood and discussed challenges around fostering and the wider care market, which are really challenging. From a purely financial perspective in local government, early support and intervention to help people access kinship care are much simpler and cheaper than the challenge of providing long-term residential care and, ultimately, of having to look after people throughout most of their adult lives because outcomes are often very poor.

In her example, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire highlighted cost and the lack of comparative rights, when compared to adoption and fostering. I have touched on some of those, and there has to be more that we can do to rebalance things. The private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) sounds like a fantastic start to being able to do that, and I look forward to supporting it in the House.

My right hon. Friend also focused on babies. We know that the earliest years are absolutely vital in terms of emotional connections with family, communication and language, and social skills and the ability to meet and engage with other children. Security is very important when it comes to things like that. Going in and out of different foster homes with different people, or going in and out of the care system in different ways, cannot be a good environment, particularly for babies. All the way through the system, kinship care tends to be a much more secure and long-term placement.

My right hon. Friend is right to highlight all the good work that has happened around the early years workforce and the investment in family hubs that was in the Budget last year—again, in Nottinghamshire we are very much promoting and supporting that model. All these things will boost the life chances of young people. There are many positives, but it is also clear that more could be done on kinship care, the care market and fostering.

I urge the Minister in his closing remarks, and over the coming months and years—particularly through the children’s care review—to help us support services such as the one that we are rolling out in Notts. I think that will be a fantastic start but there is much more that we could do, and I would welcome his thoughts and advice in the future about how we can boost and promote that. We should look at that support and the incentives that exist for kinship carers, to ensure that kindship care is at least comparable with fostering and adoption. It is a better outcome; it is arguably the best outcome for most children to stay with somebody whom they know, who loves them and who wants to look after them. We should support and promote that, because it is better for children, better for families and better for the taxpayer as well. It should be at the top of our list, and I am sure it is at the top of the Minister’s list.