Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Bill (First sitting)

Carolyn Harris Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

The answer to the hon. Lady is that amendment 16 is being considered alongside amendments 21, 22, 17, 23 and 24. They are all grouped together, which is practical.

[Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. First, may I say how passionate I am, as a bereaved parent and a campaigner to get as much support as possible for bereaved parents at the darkest and most painful time of their parental lives, to see the Bill come to successful fruition?

The amendments would extend the definition of a bereaved parent to include foster parents for the purposes of taking parental leave. The latest figures from March 2016 show that there were 51,805 children and young people in foster placements, and that evidences the vast number of families that the amendments would account for. While local authorities may on paper be the legal parent of children in the care system, it is the foster parent or carer who delivers the parenting in their homes as a family. Although many foster placements are short-term interventions, a huge number of children are placed with families for much longer periods of time. Currently 47% of all independent fostering agencies households and 38% of local authority households are offering either long-term or permanent placements.

Irrespective of whether children are being fostered in the short term or the long term, foster parents and carers form very strong bonds, often in the most difficult circumstances. The strength of that bond is highlighted by the growing numbers of young people choosing to stay with their foster families after their placement has ended.

We are now seeing more and more foster carers reporting that they are having to take on paid employment to subsidise their allowances, if indeed they have any allowances to start with. They are just as much working parents as anyone else and therefore deserve the same recognition.

To finish, I will use the words of Marie, a foster carer from Leeds and former member of GMB, the union for foster carers:

“Foster carers feel too, we are not super humans and go through the same grieving process as everyone else. To provide our young people with the emotional support they deserve from us, we need to be afforded the time as every other worker is to come to terms with the loss of a loved one.”

[Kevin Hollinrake]

This is a place of debate and discussion, but there are no words that could possibly describe or give comfort when people talk of their personal experiences of losing a child. We have all heard stories in the Chamber and are humbled by them. It is important that we hear the personal experiences and tragedies to make sure that we consider the points around the legislation and to connect us to the wider world of other people who have suffered terrible experiences.

Defining a parent is without a doubt one of the toughest jobs we have here. In the world we live in, there are lots of different people who would consider themselves parents and lots of children who might define that in different ways than we might. Through the engagement we have had through Facebook and with charities on the issue, stories about all kinds of different elements that need to be properly considered have been relayed.

On Facebook, Mandy Ruston told us about her partner, not a biological parent, who, after they lost their child in a hit-and-run accident, was told by his employer to return to work in the early days after that tragedy. That is a situation that I am sure we would want to cover. Nicky Clifford talks about the child’s grandparents, who felt they suffered a double loss when Mrs Clifford’s son died. Together for Short Lives, along with Holly Simon, who contacted us on Facebook, believe that leave should be extended to legal guardians, working grandparents, aunts and uncles. The Rainbow Trust, which does such fine work providing support for families where children are diagnosed with life-threatening or terminal illnesses, felt we should extend the leave and pay to legal guardians such as foster carers, a point covered by the amendment. Unison, which represents 1.3 million trade union members, proposes the definition of a parent be set as wide as possible, including legal guardians and those with formal parenting responsibility.

I do not think we have time in this Committee to look at such matters in their totality. There is much debate and, although it is useful to consider the issues and it is very good to hear different perspectives from Committee members, I return to the point about the fragility of the Bill and the time we have to consider it in Committee and the Chamber. As my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury stated, this is a framework Bill that allows the powers to be debated and discussed properly and to go through consultation to ensure we get this right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Griffiths]

My hon. Friend is right. Facebook used to be a thing for young people—kids used to do Facebook—but now old people like me use it. Someone’s Facebook status may say “Married”, “Single” or even “It’s complicated”, and life is complicated. People’s personal arrangements are much more complicated than they have ever been before. If I tried to define some of my mates, my friends, and the complicated personal lives they lead, that would be a heck of a consultation. We have to be aware that there are a number of potential groups to extend this provision to beyond the biological parents. That is the point—more time and work is needed to identify which of those are the right groups to include.

Officials from my Department recently met their counterparts from the Department for Education, which has responsibility for adoption policy, for example. During that meeting, they discussed the different situations in which a person can have some form of parental responsibility for a child, and which of those groups of people should be considered parents for the purpose of this policy. It was clear from that meeting that there is a bewildering range of arrangements in which a person can be seen to be acting, to some extent, as a parent to a child. Thankfully, the majority of those arrangements, such as adoption, are legally recognised, and so considering such groups when thinking about eligible parents is straightforward.

However, there are arrangements in which a person is not legally responsible for the child but still has a connection with them and would benefit from time away from work if the unthinkable happened and the child died. It is important that such arrangements are properly considered when we define a bereaved parent. That is why officials from my Department are in the process of preparing a consultation—the hon. Member for Swansea East will be interested in this—to discuss how we will approach that definition. It will form part of a wider consultation on the other parts of the Bill covered by secondary legislation.

Amendments 16 and 17 require examples of groups that should be included within the definition of bereaved parents to be specified. Furthermore, amendments 21 and 22 propose specific examples that should be included, yet the examples proposed in those amendments are different from those proposed in amendments 16 and 17. That contradiction illustrates how complex defining a bereaved parent for the purpose of this Bill is. Although I understand why some of those amendments were tabled, I do not think it is right to specify types of parent at this point. My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton set out a sensible and cogent argument for taking time to consider the definition of parenting through a consultation.

Amendments 22 and 24 follow from amendments 21 and 22, and provide a similar definition of a foster parent. I said that officials from my Department recently had discussions with the Department for Education about that subject. One type of parent they discussed was foster parents. Amendments 22 and 24 include private foster parents within the wider definition of foster parents. Concerns were raised in that meeting about private foster parents and about the fact that such arrangements are often not made known to local authorities. They are private arrangements, and it is therefore difficult to identify those foster parents. It is even possible that people acting as private foster parents do not realise that that is what they are. They are just looking after somebody, and they do not realise that they are defined as a foster parent.

As I said, we need to identify qualifying parents in a straightforward way, based on clear facts, and we must provide clarity and certainty to them and to employers. Further thought is required to correctly define bereaved parents. We should make a decision only once we have given this matter the right consideration, based on evidence and representations. I do not want to rush the decision and risk making a mistake. As I think everybody recognises, there are clear time pressures in relation to the passage of this private Member’s Bill, which makes it impossible to produce the right answer at the moment. We must not allow the Bill to be derailed.

With that in mind, I hope my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury and the hon. Member for Swansea East agree that now is not the right time to try to define a bereaved parent, and that it is sensible not to press their amendments. I give them both a guarantee that the consultation will take place during the passage of this Bill, so they will have plenty of opportunity to take part in it and see what it contains. I hope that that satisfies my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury, and that she will withdraw the amendment.

[Carolyn Harris]

In the interests of the Bill, I will not press my amendment to a vote.

[Victoria Prentis]

I will withdraw my amendment, but I ask the Minister to consider carefully the complicated lives that people now lead, and to consult the relevant agencies, such as Adoption UK and fostering organisations, about the proper wording that should be included in the Bill.