Adoption and Kinship Placements

Josh Newbury Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. I thank the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) for enabling us to speak on this subject. I declare an interest as an adoptive parent and foster carer. That experience has shown me the transformative effects that adoption can have and the immense challenges faced by many children who are looked after and care experienced.

When we talk about Government support, let us be clear that we are talking about lifelines, not luxuries. Around 3,000 children in England are placed in adoptive families every year, and 80% of them will have suffered from abuse, neglect or violence, so it is no wonder that they often need specialist support to help them and their families to heal, and to live with the scars that will never fully fade.

I will not speak at length about the adoption and special guardianship support fund, as many hon. Members are raising it in their speeches, but I will say that to limit its reach is to effectively clip the wings of the young people and families it supports, as well as those of the incredibly skilled and compassionate professionals who work with them. I highlight the fact that the Minister is among that group. She draws on a wealth of experience from her career as a social worker, and I know how deeply she cares about adopters and kinship and foster carers. If she faced no financial constraints, I know that the money would be out of the door tomorrow, to support every family to the fullest.

Yesterday, I met Adoption UK, which stressed to me not only the importance of the ASGSF but of the need to ensure that all healthcare and education professionals are aware of the impact of early-childhood trauma and care experience, so that affected children and young people can receive targeted support and advocacy services.

In advance of an Adjournment debate led last month by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon), I spoke to the social worker who supports my husband and I with what we hope will be the adoption of our second child. She had lots of thoughts on the subject, and I would like to mention some that I could not raise in that debate. She highlighted the need for improved holistic support in schools, enabled by integrated working among schools and healthcare professionals such as occupational therapists, so that there is continuity of support; closer working between psychologists and adoption teams, because access to support within teams could reduce the need for families to apply to the ASGSF; and higher levels of short-term funding to allow for weekly therapeutic support, which is currently very difficult to obtain through the ASGSF.

Although I do not have enough time to say as much as I would like about kinship care, I will say that too few families receive financial or therapeutic support, but they still face the practical and emotional challenges. The route closest to my heart, which my husband and I took, is fostering to adopt, which gives the benefits of early permanence, but without a cast-iron guarantee that the placement will end in adoption. I hope we will have the opportunity to debate that more in the future.

My point is that whatever the route into permanence, children’s needs are no different. What is different is the consistency and quality of the support they receive. When we ask families to step up for vulnerable children—and they do, day in and day out—the least we can do is make sure that we step up for them.