Adoption and Kinship Placements

Munira Wilson Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) on securing this important debate; she and I are both passionate about this issue, and I know she cares about it deeply.

I will start by reminding colleagues—as many have done already—about who the children we are talking about are. These are children who have experienced the kind of trauma that none of us should ever have to experience in our life. After I first brought up the adoption and special guardianship support fund with the Prime Minister in March, a lady from Lincolnshire wrote to me. She is a special guardian for a child who witnessed her mother being murdered by her father at the age of two. For some reason that child does not qualify for child and adolescent mental health support, and has been able to access only a limited amount of counselling. That is the sort of child the ASGSF is for.

These are also children who have been abused and neglected. When I spoke to the Purple Elephant Project, a therapy provider in Twickenham, its chief executive officer Jenny, who has worked with adopted children for many years, spoke to me about children she had worked with who had been made to sleep in the garden, or who had ingested heroin. Those are the sorts of experiences these children have been through. They need our collective help and support to overcome that trauma, as do the amazing people who step up to care for them, whether through adoption or often as kinship carers overnight.

As one adoptive parent in my constituency said to me, these children deserve

“the absolute best second chance in life.”

I implore the Minister, who has a professional background in this area and cares about this issue deeply, to please listen to the pleas from those on all Benches about the support that is desperately needed.

Before I talk in a bit more detail about the ASGSF, let me say a couple of words on kinship carers, given that I have been proud to campaign alongside my party for kinship carers for a number of years. I welcome the limited progress we have seen under this Government and the previous one on support and recognition of kinship carers, but as the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) said, we have to go much further. We have to roll out allowances on a par with those for foster carers across the country to all kinship carers, extend employment leave to kinship carers and ensure that children in kinship care are given the support that they need in education through pupil premium plus and priority school admission.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) said in a recent debate, adoptive parents make a “lifelong commitment” to children. We heard from the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury), who has also adopted, that the state needs to give them a lot more support. One constituent said to me that the ASGSF is the only post-adoption support there is for these children.

That brings me to the ASGSF. I cannot begin to describe my anger and dismay at what has happened. I will try to contain that emotion as I speak. The stories that have been sent to me, and that I have heard face to face as I have been working on this issue in recent weeks and months, have on a number of occasions moved me to tears. These families faced months of uncertainty. The Minister had to answer a litany of written questions and letters from Members from all parties on whether the ASGSF would continue for this financial year. Those Members were stonewalled.

I have explained the trauma that these children have experienced. They have had a huge amount of uncertainty and instability in their lives, and the Government added to it. We were all stonewalled. It took me dragging the Minister kicking and screaming to the House of Commons Chamber to answer an urgent question the day after the fund expired for her finally to commit to renewing it for this financial year. There was a sigh of relief among carers, adoptive parents, kinship carers and charities across the sector that the uncertainty had ended, despite the backlog that had built up in the meantime and the interruption in therapy for so many children who had had to stop therapy because they had run out of money from last year’s fund.

However, there was no hint from the Minister during her response to my urgent question of the cuts that were to come. Instead, the Government waited until the depths of the Easter recess to sneak out a private letter to local authorities and charities about the 40% cut to grants, the removal of the assessment grant and the scrapping of the match funding. An adoptive mother I met at the drop-in organised by Adoption UK and Kinship yesterday told me that that felt very underhand. She said, “It felt like the Government didn’t care as I was dealing with my adoptive son, who was dysregulated and trying to hurt me.”

There was no consultation with the sector, despite the fact that the Government have reference groups, such as the kinship care reference group, that they talk to on a regular basis. There was no consultation with them and no formal public announcement. Even the Government website on the ASGSF remained out of date for several weeks, until our first day back after recess, when the Minister issued a fairly scant written ministerial statement. My first question to her is: when she answered my urgent question on 1 April, was she aware that these cuts were coming, or did she inadvertently mislead the House on that occasion?

The impact of the changes to the ASGSF means that we have a backlog. Everybody who had previously applied—some 46% of applications for grants for this financial year exceed the £3,000 limit—has to reapply. There will now be a delay and an interruption in therapy. The mum I met yesterday told me that she is borrowing money from friends and family to continue therapy because, in her son’s last therapy session, they finally achieved a breakthrough and she cannot bear to stop it. Purple Elephant in Twickenham is desperately fundraising to try to make sure that there is no interruption in therapy for the 40 or so children that it supports.

We know that, with smaller grants, providers will struggle to provide adequate therapy. Given the sorts of trauma that we have talked about, these children’s brains need rewiring and they need time to build trust. Often, therapists have to run several sessions before a child will even come through the door. That takes time; it will not be done in the few short sessions that the grants will cover. Given that the assessment costs will now have to come out of the reduced grant of £3,000, after a bespoke assessment is made there will be very little, if anything at all, left for the actual therapy.

In addition to the impact on the children and the carers who are desperately trying to look after them, the changes will undermine and destabilise the charities and other providers that offer support in this area. As many hon. Members have said, we are talking about children who are dysregulated and exhibit challenging behaviours, and the changes will lead to adoption and kinship care placement breakdown, which will result in extra costs for the taxpayer, because more children will go back into care. We will probably also see more school exclusions as a result of dysregulated behaviours, and therefore poorer educational and employment outcomes. Sadly, care-experienced children are four times more likely than other children to end up with a criminal conviction by the age of 24.

The costs to the taxpayer of the changes, in the short term and the long term, are exorbitant, yet the fund is only £50 million; in the grand scheme of things, it is not a huge amount of money. If the Government wanted to extend the fund, say by 50%, I could tell the Minister exactly where she can get the money from. In her written ministerial statement, she suggested that the fund can be topped up from local authority children’s services budgets. I am not sure whether she is aware of this, but a lot of local authorities are on the brink financially, and many children’s services budgets are in huge deficit. However, where she can find the money is in the £46.5 million that the Department for Education spent on advertising, consultancy and marketing costs in the last year. I suggest that she halves that budget, and instead expands the ASGSF by 50%.

These cuts are entirely incoherent and contradict Government policy. The DFE has recently written to Adoption England calling for improvements in adopter recruitment, and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill mandates the signposting of support, yet everything we have discussed today will go against those measures. I have three asks of the Minister: please apologise to carers and children up and down the country, reverse the cuts—I have told her where to get the money—and fight tooth and nail in the Treasury over the spending review for the next financial year, and make that announcement early. Carers and children will continue to campaign, and I will be alongside them.