Lord Bird
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Family: Protective Effect
Lord Bird Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
More than 150,000 children live in kinship care, so the noble Baroness raises an incredibly important point. The Government recognise the need to support kinship carers more, and we have made early progress. We have invested £2 million to develop 100 kinship peer support groups for kinship carers; this summer, we set up the first dedicated policy team in the department focused on kinship care; and obviously, we will be responding to Josh MacAlister’s recommendations on that point.
Lord Bird (CB)
Will the Government be looking at the full costs of knocking £50 billion out of the social economy when we move into this period of austerity? Removing £50 billion could well cause hundreds of billions of pounds-worth of damage, especially to our families.
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble Lord raises a much broader point. Bringing it back to the review, the Government are very excited about and look forward to the second stage of the Children’s Commissioner’s review on the protective effect that families can offer.