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

Debate between Carolyn Harris and Kevin Hollinrake

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Public Bill Committees

[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.

Universal Credit Roll-out

Debate between Carolyn Harris and Kevin Hollinrake

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Lady says there is mayhem. In my area, universal credit was rolled out 15 months ago, and although there are undoubtedly some problems, it is certainly not mayhem, and the measures introduced by the Government in recent weeks will fix the vast majority of the problems. So may I give the hon. Lady, and hopefully her constituents, the comfort that this will not be mayhem?

[Carolyn Harris]

I do not agree, and I can give examples from the summer when there was mayhem, even before this system came into operation.

How can Conservative Members be so oblivious to the predicament they are putting people in? [Interruption.] If they quieten down, they will be able to listen to what I have to say.

During the summer holidays I became aware of the empty shelves in my local food bank. These shelves were empty because mothers could not afford to feed their children. They were relying on the free school meals during term-time, but during the school holidays they had no choice but to visit the food banks. So I decided to do something: I set up a lunch club for local children. I anticipated that me and my team would feed around 500 children, yet we ended up feeding 6,638 over 10 days. That was the scale of the problem, and that was before universal credit.

So how on earth are my constituents going to cope at Christmas with less money coming in and an even greater demand for money going out? Should I start planning a Christmas lunch club now, and asking local companies for donations yet again, or will the Government please open their eyes, look at the situation they are creating, and put a hold on the roll-out until the fundamental flaws of this ridiculous universal credit are resolved?