Support for Kinship Carers

Caroline Ansell Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2023 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing the debate and bringing to the attention of the House all the costs of being a kinship carer, as well as illuminating the tremendous value they represent and the real difference they make to the children they bring into their immediate family and circle. I also congratulate her on her speech. I join her in paying tribute to the new Minister, who has a strong background that touches on all the issues we may consider today, most notably performance in school, outcomes and achievement. He will also be looking to ensure that the children in our care have every opportunity to thrive.

I pay tribute to the Government for bringing forward the kinship care strategy, with the tremendous potential therein to bring the sector into a much more sustainable and fair place. They have acknowledged that historically the sector has not had the focus and recognition it deserves, merits and needs, so I really welcome the sea change that we all hope to see. I praise East Sussex County Council for the work it does in this space—indeed, its support was recognised by the kinship carers I met most recently—and I pay tribute to the council’s team as they endeavour to meet the challenges and support kinship carers across East Sussex, and Eastbourne in particular.

The hon. Lady is right to recognise that across the House there is not just increasing recognition of this kinship care but an earnest desire to see change and reform. Ultimately, this place is all about creating the environment in which this youngish generation can rise up and take their place. We are all about the business of making the world a better place, and enabling children who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot and should not stay with their parents to move to the security, love and continuity offered often by their grandparents, but also by their wider family, is surely a really important policy objective for us to try to achieve. As she said, we must ensure that finances are never the barrier, because in my estimation, if a child can remain within the love of their family, it is the very best place for them, in many instances, to recover, and then thrive.

We know that, over and above almost every other circumstance or opportunity, the support of family is defining. We know that applies to every child from every background and every socio-economic setting. It is a defining factor in physical health, mental health, educational outcomes and life chances, so every effort should be made to try to secure the wider family stepping up to welcome in children who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot and should not stay with their parents.

In that light, the urgency that the hon. Lady described is the question of the day. We are agreed that family represents the best opportunity for children, and that kinship carers have been overlooked for too long. That urgency and pace is before us, so we await the strategy and for a number of recommendations to find form. The scale of the challenge is deep and wide, with 162,000 children cared for by their kin across England and Wales. To give a measure of the scale and scope of this sector in the shadows, that is more than double the number in foster care.

As we have heard, grandparents are of course the most common kinship carers, but grandparents increasingly have to work until later in life. The tension and the pressure of working is one very real barrier and obstacle to their being able to reach out and provide a full-time home to a child. There are perhaps more children in private arrangements that are not included in the official figures, and in such cases finance and support do not find their way to them. The census has really important information, which I hope will soon come to light, to help us to understand the scale and scope of the challenge before us.

On the financial issue, one of my constituents who attended the meeting that I arranged with kinship carers told me that she fears losing her job; she cannot get the parental leave she needs to care for her granddaughter, but without her job she cannot provide for the granddaughter she wants to offer a full-time home to. That is an excruciating tension. And another constituent described the mental anguish caused by years of court battles.

In my constituency, there is a really strong support group led by Wendy Turner, who is here with us in the Public Gallery today, so in addition to recognising the hon. Member for Twickenham, the Minister, the Government and MPs from across the House, I most particularly recognise kinship carers themselves in this really important debate, because it is their stories, their testimonies, that will really and truly land the change that we all desire. I commend them for that.

[Mr Robin Walker]

I could not resist the opportunity to pay tribute to the local kinship care group in my Worcester constituency. Kinship Carers UK, which is led by Enza Smith, has campaigned hard on this issue and first drew my attention to some of the concerns. One of the issues that the group has raised is the status of kinship carers and recognition of that status, which I think is addressed in the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Twickenham. There is a concern that when kinship carers take a child they look after for NHS care, they may not be able to take decisions in the way that a parent could. They can find it very difficult to work with the health service and other public services because of the distinction between parents and kinship carers. Is it not very important that we come up with a very clear definition of kinship carers and a clear way for them to identify themselves and their relationship to their charge, so that they can access all public services effectively?

[Caroline Ansell]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; he makes an excellent point. Some means of recognition is needed, not only in healthcare but in all the different arms and institutions of public services, not least in schools, because recognition enables far swifter decision making, which is surely in the best interests of the child and those caring for them. There must be a way to achieve that recognition of status, and I look forward to the Minister telling us how such an innovation could help to rationalise the whole experience of kinship care, so that we can better address the challenges.

Interestingly, one of the members of the group of kinship carers that I met talked about guidance on how to navigate the quite complex bureaucratic situation in which they found themselves: they are responsible for a child, yet are not in a decision-making role. As an example, we spoke about a guide that had been established for the Homes for Ukraine scheme, interestingly enough, in which there was a step-by-step and issue-by-issue walkthrough to help people who were bringing Ukrainians into their home, showing them how they could navigate some of the complex systems that exist and where they could find support. The point was made to me that there is no handbook for kinship carers. There was simply a call, sometimes in the middle of the night, and then sometimes there was a social worker on the doorstep at any hour of the day, saying, “Over to you.”

Regarding some of the issues around passports and access to medical records, we can surely bring some sanity to bear on the bureaucracy, which just provides another layer of challenge and adds nothing to safeguarding or child protection. When we have put a child in the care of a family member, we should most certainly empower that family member to make decisions on behalf of the child. The point that my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester made in his intervention is very well made.

While their costs are no different and their challenges certainly of similar order, unlike foster carers the vast majority of kinship carers find themselves without a minimum financial allowance to assist with the covering of expenses. The current state of financial support for kinship carers is both insufficient and marked by significant variations, not always hinging on the specific needs of the kinship families, but rather being subject to legal and geographical disparities. If we bring a new understanding to bear, surely we can create something much fairer. The current system unintentionally—perversely even—encourages kinship carers to transition into foster carers, as this is often the sole path by which they can access reliable financial and other forms of support. That does not align with the best interests of the child. The repercussions, beyond the emotional and psychological, of this lack of financial support are profound and affect both families and the state. According to the 2022 annual survey report “The Cost of Loving”, six out of 10 kinship carers reported resorting to borrowing money, taking out short-term loans, or relying on credit cards for everyday expenses in the past year.

For every 1,000 children raised in kinship families rather than placed in local authority care, the state saves £40 million and enhances the lifetime earnings of the children by £20 million, so the statistics say. I know that there are very serious pressures on children’s social care, even in my own county. A mark of this is that, just this last financial year, for the first time the cost of children’s social services outweighed the cost of adult social care. This is a very significant development: not only has that cost now overtaken that of adult social care, but its trajectory is set to escalate exponentially. We know through our work on the Education Committee that the care sector is under massive pressure, to the point where providers in the marketplace are able to charge what they will, leaving county councils competing for places. Kinship care is, in part, an answer to that very real, sustained pressure on services. Surely it merits significant investment.

Before I came to this place, my career was in education, so I know the impact that family support can have on children and young people. It was too often the very parents I needed to speak to who did not come to parents evenings. Children who have been taken from mum or dad and out of the family setting for very good reasons have experienced trauma. The fact that that is not more recognised in school is, to my mind, a burning injustice. They experience challenges with their focus and stamina, and their ability to concentrate is affected because they come from a place of trauma. It is really that clear. They need additional support as urgently as possible, because with every year of lost learning, it is exponentially harder to recover and recapture that learning.

The effects of those early years can last a lifetime if we do not rush in with more support. Schools are the strongest partners for kinship carers when it comes to rescuing these children. I am hoping the Minister, perhaps today, but ultimately as we approach the strategy, will have some encouraging words around what new provision and recognition we might see in schools, because they are important partners too.

In addition to the financial support I have spoken of—the pupil premium plus—I long to see employment leave to facilitate kinship care, particularly at the start of the placement, legal aid to take the sting out of court battles, and recognition of the work of local authorities and a just settlement, so that they can more ably meet the needs of families in their areas. I look forward to seeing progress, recognition and investment for all of those things.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers, and to follow the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell), who made some important points that I wholeheartedly support. I am also grateful to the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) for securing the debate and all the cross-party work that she does on the issue. She works incredibly hard in this area. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the time.

It would be remiss of me not to welcome the new Children’s Minister to his post. I hope that he enjoys his time in the Department for Education, dealing with some important issues. Today it is kinship care, but there is also the wider issue of how we improve children’s services across England, because in too many parts of our country, children’s services are not just underperforming but letting children down. I hope that the Government take a close look at those local authorities that could and should be doing better for our children and young people.

I wanted to speak in this debate because not only am I the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on kinship care, but, as many Members know, my wife Allison and I are kinship carers to our grandson Lyle. We never planned on becoming kinship carers, but life can be unpredictable. Sadly, Lyle’s mum and dad were unable to care for him, and social services knocked on our door. We did not think twice—of course we would take him in; of course we would care for him. It was, and it is, one of the best decisions that I—that both of us—have ever made, probably apart from getting married, as otherwise the rest would not have happened.

We love Lyle to pieces. He is a little ball of energy and joy. He is four now, and has just started primary school. He is kind, caring, incredibly funny and just the right level of mischievous. That is why being a kinship carer is such a strange conundrum: on the one hand, you are given this gift, whom you love more than anything in the world. Every Thursday evening I race home from this place back to Manchester, because spending time with Lyle is the thing above all else that I look forward to.

[Caroline Ansell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, because in my contribution I focused on the issues, challenges, setbacks and disasters, but I should also say that all the kinship carers I met spoke about love. That is how the conversations started: they spoke about their motivation to reach out and to protect the child, and how they would do anything and everything in their power to look after them.

[Andrew Gwynne]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I can speak from experience. Mondays and Fridays have now got even better for me because I get to take Lyle to the local primary school. He is loving his time there, especially now he has worked out that he gets fed—last week was the first week he was there all the time, and it came as a revelation to him that they fed him at lunchtime.

On the other hand, as we have heard in the previous two contributions, kinship care is also exceptionally hard. Kinship carers are essentially picked up and dropped into a legal and emotional labyrinth, with precious little support from anyone. Like many carers, Allison and I had to go through the family courts to obtain a special guardianship order, which gives us parental responsibilities so that we can make active decisions about Lyle’s upbringing and about precisely the things the hon. Member for Eastbourne mentioned—healthcare, school and passports. We have parental rights and can make those decisions for Lyle. We had to undergo hours and hours of assessment—really intrusive police assessment of not just me and Allison, but my children and my friends. It is a gruelling system that demands an extraordinary amount from all those involved.

There are also wider family implications. Children are raised in kinship care for a variety of complex reasons, including parental mental health problems, substance misuse or illness. A kinship carer often has to manage a sensitive family situation while fiercely protecting the health and wellbeing of the child they are caring for. They are given absolutely no formal emotional support. It is only thanks to organisations such as Kinship and the Family Rights Group that Allison and I have been able to speak with other kinship carers, build support networks and access advice. It is amazing, because you find that you are not alone and that virtually every other person in the system has, to a lesser or greater extent, gone through the things you are going through, which you think are incredibly traumatic and a massive upheaval.

Then there are the financial implications. Allison and I have spent thousands of pounds in legal fees since we became kinship carers, and we continue to do so. There is always the threat of being taken back to court umpteen times. That puts a carer under such stress, trauma and emotional and financial pressure while they are trying to care for and protect their loved one. Allison and I are lucky because we are in a financial position to be able to pay these fees, but over the years I have found myself asking pretty basic questions: What if we did not have that money? What if I lost my job? What if I did not have a platform? What then?

The answers to those questions are as depressing as they are concerning. Last year, the APPG on kinship care found that 38% of kinship carers surveyed had received no legal advice about their rights and options in relation to their kinship child. Where carers had received legal advice, just 16% had received part or full payment through legal aid. Of the kinship carers who ended up in court, almost a third had to represent themselves. Some 53% of carers have made personal contributions of above £1,000, with 9% accruing costs of £10,000 or more. To be frank, the system treats kinship carers as an afterthought. They are a convenient solution in a time of crisis, and then they are left to drift in a buckling system that does not seem to recognise their existence, let alone the love they have for the children they care for.

Studies consistently show that kinship care, where possible, is in the best interests of the child. It certainly is for Lyle, and it is for hundreds of thousands of children across the country. Research from the parliamentary taskforce on kinship care shows that behavioural, educational and emotional outcomes for children in kinship care are, on the whole, better than for children living with unrelated foster carers. Kinship care allows children to develop a strong sense of their own identity and a feeling of belonging that comes from the stability of living within their wider network of family and friends. Kinship care placements are 2.6 times more likely to be permanent than unrelated foster care arrangements. It is essential that we embrace the opportunities that kinship care offers and that we make it easier for families who want to be kinship carers to do so.

It is estimated that around 100,000 children will be in care by 2032, and we must prioritise things such as kinship care if we want to avoid that reality. However, without even a legal, inclusive definition of kinship care in legislation, there is a long way to go. I am glad the Government have committed to publishing a national kinship care strategy by the end of the year. I sincerely hope Ministers will listen to the voices of kinship carers and organisations such as the Family Rights Group and Kinship and develop a system that gives kinship carers not only the support they need but the recognition they deserve.

I get uncharacteristically nervous when this subject is debated in Parliament. It sometimes feels a bit too exposing and personal to speak publicly about it. The reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of kinship carers in the same position as Allison and me. We owe it to them to get this right. Above all, we owe it to the children being cared for—children such as Lyle, who deserve all the love, care and stability the world can give. Kinship care makes that possible, so let’s make it happen.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing the debate and on the work she does to raise the profile of kinship carers and the issues they face. We have had a high level of consensus in the debate. I welcome the kinship carers to the Gallery today. It is great to have them with us.

I also welcome the Minister to his place. I looked back at our previous debate on this topic about a year ago and I noted that I was welcoming the Minister’s predecessor’s predecessor, so I wish him luck as he hangs on to the revolving door that seems to be the Department for Education. I have no doubt that he will bring commitment to his role, and particularly to this topic, as we think about the needs of kinship carers.

I am grateful to all hon. Members who have contributed to this debate. The hon. Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) spoke of the pressures on grandparents and older kinship carers, who not only have to bear the costs of looking after children, but are required to expend all that energy in a role that they were perhaps not expecting to perform later in their lives. I was glad to hear her acknowledge the pressures in her area, the pressures on children’s social care more widely, and the grotesque profiteering by private providers of children’s homes and foster placements. I hope the Minister was listening to a colleague on his own side of the House speaking about those pressures, which affect the children’s social care system across the whole country. The pressures bear down on families, which results in increasing numbers of children having to enter the care system.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) and thank him for all the work he does through the APPG on kinship care, of which I was a member until I took up my current role. It is not easy to speak about one’s own personal circumstances It is not easy to speak about one’s own personal circumstances, but he speaks so movingly about his role as a kinship carer for his grandson, Lyle. In doing so, he gives voice to kinship carers across the country, and he is a powerful and important advocate. As I have said before in this Chamber, Lyle is a very lucky little boy to have such fantastic grandparents as my hon. Friend and his wife.

I pay tribute to kinship carers across the country who step in to look after a child when a family member or friend is unable to do so, and to the Family Rights Group, the charity Kinship and the Kinship Care Alliance, which work to support kinship carers and to advocate on their behalf. Stepping in to care for a child when a close friend or family member cannot is an extraordinary and very special thing to do. Yet most kinship carers I have met do not describe it as a choice; they love the children in their care and stepping in to care for them when there was a need to do so was a natural consequence of that love. They would not have thought of doing anything else. It is always humbling to meet kinship carers and hear their stories. The unconditional love for the children they look after and the joy and pride they receive from being able to play a part in their lives is always clear to see—but so are the challenges.

Over half of kinship carers give up work to look after the children in their care. Some 75% of kinship carers experience severe financial hardship. The children have often gone through significantly adverse experiences such as bereavement, abuse or neglect. Looking after children in those circumstances requires support and access to professional help. Kinship carers themselves may also have suffered trauma: the loss of their own child, supporting their child on a journey of addiction, or other challenges that have led to a grandchild, niece or nephew being in their care in the first place. They are sometimes left to manage complex contact arrangements with birth parents. While kinship carers may be in suitable housing, in areas where there is a crisis in the availability of genuinely affordable housing, many will not be, and taking on kinship care may result in overcrowding in a family home that had previously been big enough to meet the family’s needs.

I have met kinship carers who are using their savings to care for children. I remember one grandmother in particular who was so committed to her grandson continuing to play football—it was the one thing he loved that helped with the trauma he had experienced—that she was dipping into her pension lump sum to pay for it, and to meet other costs as well. Support for kinship carers is inconsistent across the country. I recall another kinship carer who had taken on the care of her friend’s children. Contact arrangements with her friend were really fraught, but her local authority told her that because the arrangement was private, they had no role to play and could not support that process. These issues are widespread across the country. Some 180,000 families are in the same situation: they have stepped in to care for the children of a family member or close friend, but they find that enormous personal sacrifice and considerable extra cost are involved, often with little meaningful support.

In thinking about the needs of kinship carers, we must also look at why the number of children who cannot be cared for by their birth families is increasing. We cannot escape the Government’s record on this matter: the Family Rights Group has highlighted the erosion in early help and support for vulnerable families; more than 1,300 Sure Start centres have closed since 2010; and the National Children’s Bureau estimates that Government funding available to councils for children’s services fell by 24% between 2010 and 2020. The pandemic is likely to have made it even harder for councils to offer early intervention services for families. I have certainly been told by local authorities across the country that early help and support that was available more than a decade ago has all but disappeared in many places. The failure of the Government to ensure that early help is always available to the most vulnerable families, wherever in the country they live, has a direct bearing on the extent to which families are able to overcome challenges and avoid a crisis in which it becomes unsafe or impossible for children to remain with their parents.

[Caroline Ansell]

I too am most concerned about support for vulnerable families, particularly to help families stay together. I have some experience of Sure Start centres, and they are focused on those first few, very important, years. The family hub model, which the Government have brought in, looks to extend support from the early years of nought to five all the way through to 18. I know many parents struggle particularly in the teenage years, rather than with tinies. Does the hon. Lady recognise the work of family hubs, and does she have experience with them?

[Helen Hayes]

Certainly, the hon. Lady is right to say that the challenges facing children and young people have changed over the last decade, particularly those facing teenagers and the need for help and support. I absolutely recognise that point, but I would say to the hon. Lady that we had Sure Start centres in every community up and down the country at a very local level. In many places, they have all but disappeared. So far, the family hubs model funds a family hub in only half of all local authority areas, which does not meet the scale of the challenge. If Sure Start centres had been protected and allowed to evolve to meet the changing needs of families and children, we would be in an altogether different position than the one that affects far too many families up and down the country. We have never been committed to an entirely static model of delivery, but the infrastructure of Sure Start centres is a very grave and serious loss, in all those areas where they have not been protected and have closed.

Kinship carers are an essential part of the way in which our society looks after children. They deliver outcomes for children which are as good as, and often better than, foster care or children’s homes, for a fraction of the cost. The Government have been failing children and families for 12 long years. The focus on kinship care in the independent review of children’s social care was very welcome, with a large degree of consensus around many of its recommendations. We are still, however, seeing only piecemeal measures from the Government. It is vitally important that the kinship care strategy is published by the end of the year, as the Government have promised. I hope that the Minister will say more today to confirm that is the case, and that he might also comment on whether that strategy will be cross-departmental, looking at all the areas where kinship carers need support and where it is not being provided.

Kinship carers have waited too long to be fully recognised as a vital part of children’s social care. Their love has not been valued sufficiently. If we are successful in winning a majority in the House of Commons at the next general election, Labour in Government will put children and their families at the heart of everything we do, as we did before. We will support the vital work of kinship carers—support which is so long overdue.