Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Melanie Onn and Lisa Nandy

Thursday 17th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)]

5. What recent assessment her Department has made of the impact of youth services on levels of antisocial behaviour in Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes constituency.

[The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Lisa Nandy)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for all her work to support young people in her constituency over many years. It is a source of national shame that youth funding decreased by 73% under the last Government—one of the deepest cuts made to any of our public services—and that there was no real strategy for a generation of young people. This Government are determined to get a grip on this issue to ensure that young people in towns such as Grimsby have the opportunities that they deserve.

[Melanie Onn]

I thank the Secretary of State for her answer. A shining example of youth services and their positive impact is the Haven Centre in Osborne Street in my constituency, where a dedicated team offer diversionary activities through sports and crafts and give essential mentoring and support. Since opening, the Haven has played an important role in reducing antisocial behaviour, with reported incidents down by 35% in the town centre over the last year. Will the Secretary of State join me in commending the staff at the Haven and all the youth providers across Grimsby and Cleethorpes, and recognise the vital role that they play in providing safety for young people and giving them access to new skills and facilities that they otherwise would not have?

Childcare for Fostered Children

Debate between Melanie Onn and Lisa Nandy

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that point. As my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George) pointed out, we need to think about the impact not just on the foster child, but on the other children in the family. When the Earl of Listowel, a great champion for children, raised the issue in the other place, the then Minister Lord Nash said:

“The local authority must provide a fostering allowance which covers the full cost of caring for the child. For this reason, foster carers are not eligible for additional support through tax-free childcare or child tax credits for children who have been placed with them.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 1 July 2015; Vol. 762, c. 2124.]

The Government are right that foster carers are eligible for a national minimum fostering allowance that covers food, transport, clothing, toiletries and other items such as furniture. However, having been among those who lobbied the last Labour Government for the introduction of that allowance, I can tell the Government that it does not contain any element that covers childcare.

In any case, as The Fostering Network points out, around one council in seven pays a rate that is below the national minimum. Its report, “State of the Nation’s Foster Care 2016”, found that the proportion of foster carers who believe that their allowance is sufficient to cover the costs of fostering has halved in recent years. It told me that

“when we asked this question two years ago 80 per cent of respondents felt their allowances did cover the costs of fostering. In 2016 this figure has fallen sharply to only 42 per cent.”

That starkly illustrates the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Thelma Walker).

The situation for “family and friends” carers, particularly grandparents, is very stark. Hardship is a real issue for many families. One family in my constituency recently faced a heartbreaking choice when their sister died: they had to choose between experiencing real hardship or seeing their two children taken into care and probably placed quite far away from their school, losing all the relationships that matter.

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

Has my hon. Friend considered the effect of the policy on the nearly 9,000 children who are in kinship foster care of the kind that she has described? Kinship foster carers do not have the luxury of assessing their finances before they decide to foster; keeping the child in the family is not a choice, but a necessity. Childcare is really important to them. Does she agree that the policy is particularly unfair on the children?

[Lisa Nandy]

I could not agree more. The policy is particularly difficult for the family I have been supporting back in Wigan, because all the other siblings who might take care of the children face exactly the choice she describes.

As Edward Timpson—the former Conservative Minister for Children, Schools and Families, who I rated very highly—wrote recently, foster carers who need it should be

“offered flexibility and support to enable them to combine fostering with other work.”

There is a precedent for foster carers to receive additional support, although the Minister has previously suggested that they were not eligible for it. For example, foster carers in receipt of universal credit can claim free school meals for the children they foster, so it is wrong to suggest that there is no way round the problem. With record numbers of children in care—The Fostering Network estimates that we need to recruit more than 7,000 additional foster carers to meet children’s need—the Government are instead pursuing a policy that will make the situation worse, leaving more children stranded in unsuitable placements or forced to leave their siblings or grandparents behind because no local placements are available.

For some of the most vulnerable children in this country, the human cost of that oversight is beyond measure. What makes it even more difficult to accept is that the state is their corporate parent; we hold collective corporate responsibility for them because their parents cannot or will not be responsible. No parent would allow their children to become an afterthought in critical decisions that affect them or to remain unresponsive to their needs or best interests, and quite simply we should not do so either. For that reason I warmly welcome—