Vulnerable Children: Kinship Care

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Armstrong on securing this debate on a most important topic.

Kinship carers include every kind of relative, as well as friends who are raising children unable to live with their parents. They provide a crucial web of support for children who have often suffered in ways that most of us, I suspect, could not imagine. Yet it seems they are undervalued by the organisation that ought to be most indebted to them—the Government.

We know that 95% of children living under kinship care arrangements are not “looked after” by the local authority. Therefore, by keeping vulnerable children out of the care system, these kinship carers save the taxpayer billions of pounds each year in care costs, as noble Lords have already said. The financial cost of raising the child typically falls directly on the kinship carers themselves, yet they are treated as the poor relation in terms of parents looking after children who are not their own.

Kinship carers get less support than those who undertake straight fostering, so it may be in a local authority’s financial interest to place a child under a special guardianship order rather than to remove them from that environment and place them into a foster placement or a children’s home. As my noble friend Lady Armstrong outlined, taking on someone else’s child is much more demanding than just adding a child to your family. The Government should acknowledge this important fact.

By contrast, adoption has been the main focus for the Government recently. The Education and Adoption Bill makes provision for regional adoption agencies, which are a welcome development, and recently we heard from no less an authority than the Prime Minister that further legislation on adoption is apparently in the pipeline. The question that has to be asked is why the same attention has not been given to the 95% of children who are in other forms of care, including those who cannot live with their parents and who are being raised by kinship carers. We might also ask why the same rationale for supporting adoption—not least in terms of post-adoption support—has not been applied to kinship care. Unfortunately, the Education and Adoption Bill was drafted so tightly that the adoption provisions could not be amended in favour of kinship care—or, indeed, any other form of care.

Various noble Lords referred to the survey carried out by the charity Family Rights Group. I will not repeat the figures here, but I pay tribute to the group and to the Kinship Care Alliance for the very thorough briefing that it kindly provided.

We know that a review of special guardianship orders is under way and will report next year. It would be hugely encouraging for the estimated 130,000 families raising children in kinship care across the country—often, as we have heard, at cost to themselves and their own children —if a similar review was announced into kinship care.

My noble friend Lady Drake referred to last night’s refusal by the Government during the welfare reform Bill to exempt parents of adopted children from the two-plus children tax credits limit. That point bears repeating because it makes no sense at all. I know that the Minister will say, “It’s not my department”. Of course, as far as that Bill is concerned he is correct, but it is his responsibility. That mean-spirited decision by his colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, will impact on his department to a considerable extent. At a time when more parents are needed for all looked-after children, the cost of taking a child under a family’s wing is considerable. Parents who already have their own children will now be deterred for financial reasons from becoming involved, which means it will become even more difficult to find sufficient parents for looked-after children. For kinship care, the decision will make it even more difficult to place sibling groups.

I hope that the Minister is fully aware of the implications of the denial of exemption to parents prepared to take on the care of children from troubled backgrounds and that, as a result, he will speak to his colleague and even echo the case made so eloquently by many noble Lords in this Chamber 24 hours ago. It is not too late to have that important exemption inserted in the welfare reform Bill. The Minister would be failing in his duty of service to the Department for Education and many of the children who rely on it for their care if he does not highlight the damage that will be done to children in kinship care and others as a result of the Government’s, at least current, intransigence.

Finally, why should kinship carers be valued less highly than adoptive parents? My noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, outlined changes that they advocated to the support that could be supplied to kinship carers. I would add to that a positive step the Government could take: to extend the adoption support fund and the adoption passport to children subject to a special guardianship order. If a child is in the care system the parents looking after them are entitled to foster parent or adoptive parent payments. It is fair to ask why those should not be available to and apply to kinship carers.

Often, an older sibling or grandparent steps in to prevent a child being formally taken into care, but if they do that the support given to them is much less. In effect, they are punished financially for relieving the system of the need to look after that child, which means that both the family and the child lose out. That is surely neither logical nor fair. Typically they are the same children with the same range of needs. The legal route taken on how the child gets the care they need should not matter; it is surely first and foremost about meeting the needs of the child and properly supporting those who take on the role of carer.

I have a huge amount of admiration and respect for anyone willing to look after a child who is not their own and provide them with something they may never have known—a loving home in which the child can flourish and reach their potential. I believe that the Minister shares that view, but he needs to use the influence that comes with his office to demonstrate that kinship carers are valued as highly as any other person acting in loco parentis. I hope he will indicate that that is indeed what he intends to do.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for calling a debate on this important subject. I am sure that the whole House would agree that kinship carers, many of whom are grandparents, play a pivotal role in caring for children who cannot live with their parents. I welcome the opportunity to answer for the Government in this short debate.

First, I make it clear that the Government do not see a hierarchy between adoption, fostering, residential care or kinship care. We are interested not in favouring one type of care over another, but in what is right for each individual child. Over the last five years we have made significant strides in this regard. I am grateful for the supportive remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, my noble friend Lady Bottomley and the noble Baroness, Lady Massey.

For a majority of children, kinship care will be the first and best option. This is not just because it is what the law requires, but because we know kinship care offers children a vitally important bond of familial love and belonging. That is why we applaud kinship carers who step in, often in a crisis or emergency, to take on the care of a child, as my noble friend Lady Bottomley and the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, said. There will, of course, be many children being looked after by relatives where care proceedings are not an issue but where the primary carers are ill or in distress and cannot easily care for the child. However, the Government recognise that kinship carers take on a role that might otherwise have to be performed by the state. Kinship carers enable vulnerable children and young people to remain with their families, with people they know and trust who can provide the right commitment, security and stability they need to thrive.

We know, through voluntary sector research, that children benefit from living with their extended family and that placement stability is a factor in children’s later achievement. Children in placements with relatives are likely to be more stable than ones in unrelated fostering or residential care. In particular, research indicates that children in these arrangements have fewer emotional and behaviour problems and achieve more academically. As the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, said, an analysis carried out by researchers at the universities of Oxford and Bristol and published only last week found that, among the cohort of looked-after children who were eligible for GCSEs in 2013, children in kinship care had higher GCSE point scores on average than children in other types of care. That is why, through the discretionary housing fund and through funding the advice line provided by the Family Rights Group, we are trying to help kinship carers to safeguard children’s futures by keeping them within the wider family and community.

I welcome the chance, through this debate, to consider the support available to kinship carers and what we are doing to improve this. We know they need better information and support. That is why, during the previous Parliament, we issued family and friends care statutory guidance for local authorities. This makes clear that every council should publish a family and friends care policy, setting out how it will support the needs of children living with kinship carers, whether or not they are looked after. In particular, we made a commitment to increase the number of local authorities that have published their policies for supporting family and friend carers. Following national sector learning days organised by the DfE with local authorities, 83% of English local authorities have now published a policy, compared with 42% in 2012. We intend to write again to councils on this issue.

We recognise that kinship carers are not always accessing the support they should have. Although most authorities have policies in place, we now have to focus on the quality of the support they offer to family and friends carers. To this end, the department has been funding the voluntary sector organisation Grandparents Plus to develop models of best practice in early help and to identify how to overcome the barriers to providing good, well-structured services and early support for kinship carers. Also, we have seen the use of special guardianship orders increase year on year since their inception in 2005. Special guardians are mainly family members, often grandparents, who provide loving, permanent homes for children. This has largely been a positive development and we welcome it. My department has recently completed a review of special guardianship. Evidence from this suggests that special guardianships are, in the main, positive relationships which protect children’s welfare and improve their outcomes into adulthood. We are currently considering the results of the review, including looking at how we might improve appropriate support to special guardians.

We have been working closely with the key voluntary sector organisations, the Family Rights Group and the Kinship Care Alliance. In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, I can say that we plan to publish the report of the review before Christmas. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, referred to the important work done by the Family Rights Group, and we are providing financial support to it for its work with kinship carers through, for instance, its helpline and promoting the use of family group conferences. My department has been funding them for more than seven years. That clearly demonstrates our commitment to the valuable work that they do for kinship carers.

We are currently reviewing our grant payments to voluntary and community-based organisations beyond the end of this financial year in the light of the spending review. We will have more information on this in the new year. In the mean time, I express my thanks to the Family Rights Group for its support to families and emphasise that the Government recognise the important work that it does.

The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, mentioned the concept of a presumption of kinship care. The law already states that children should be looked after by their families wherever possible. She also mentioned mental health. Improving access to CAMHS for vulnerable children is a priority of this Government. We have committed £1.4 billion to improve mental health services for children and young people over the next five years and we are working closely with the DoH and NHS England. The transformation to services we expect is set out in the Future in Mind report, which makes suggestions about what more can be done to improve access, develop better partnership working with parents and carers and provide the right support for children who have suffered trauma.

Many family members make great sacrifices in order to care for children. Local authorities have a legal duty to support children who leave care under other legal orders, and carers should discuss any needs with their local authorities. Children who have left care for a friends and family placement underpinned by a special guardianship or relevant child arrangement order have access to priority school admissions, pupil premium and free early education for two year-olds.

In relation to support for adopters and whether this should be extended, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, the Adoption Support Fund has been set up to address the serious gaps in specialist services for adopted children. It is still in its infancy. If it proves successful, we will look to apply the learning in other areas. We are considering how to improve support for special guardianship as part of the special guardianship review, which, as I said, will be published before Christmas. However, given the wide range of needs and circumstances of family carers, it would be inappropriate as well as complex to provide a national allowance which is both equitable and simple to administer. Children placed in a kinship care arrangement by a local authority are looked-after children, in which case their carer must be approved as a foster carer. In these circumstances, kinship carers must receive the same support as all other foster carers, including financial support. However, the majority of kinship carers will be caring for children who are not looked after. Relatives caring for a child in these circumstances are entitled to support such as child benefit and other benefits available to parents, subject to the usual eligibility criteria. It would be difficult to require local authorities to provide a dedicated support service solely for relative carers, as most of the services required will be the same as those needed by other families.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, mentioned that our recent focus had been on adoption; our recent focus has indeed been on improving one area in relation to it. As we have mentioned in other debates, we have done a great deal of work over the last five years on improving the provision for all children in care. The Children and Families Act was a substantial piece of legislation which has substantially improved the fostering arrangements and introduced early placements. Long-term foster care has been recognised as a distinct placement. We have invested £100 million in Pupil Premium Plus. We have virtual school heads and we are currently conducting a review of children’s homes.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

The Minister mentioned other pieces of legislation that have recently gone on to the statute book. I do not expect him to comment specifically on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, but I wonder if he and his department are considering the impact of the decision not to exempt adoptive parents from the two-plus children tax credit limit, because there will undoubtedly be an effect on his department, and indeed on the ability of the number of adopters and kinship carers to be extended in the future.

[Lord Nash]

Noble Lords will be aware that this was discussed last night. I know that my noble friend Lord Freud will have listened carefully to those arguments and will be considering the response. I will discuss it with him.

Finally, I know that the House recognises the crucial role that working grandparents play in providing childcare and supporting working families, as my noble friend Lady Bottomley mentioned. That is why we have announced plans to extend the current system of shared parental pay and leave to cover working grandparents, thereby providing much greater choice for families trying to balance childcare and work. We will bring forward legislation to enable the change to be implemented by 2018.

I am sure the whole House agrees that kinship carers —grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings and friends—fulfil a vital role in the care system and deserve the continued support of the Government. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate.