Support for New Adoptive Parents

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Ms Ghani, for calling me to speak. It is always a pleasure to see you in the Chair.

I thank the Petitions Committee for selecting this topic for debate, particularly given the number of signatures, because we know that everyone who has petitioned will either have personal experience or know of others with personal experience of what it is to be self-employed and to adopt, and the challenges that brings.

Before I home in on the petition itself, I want to pay tribute to the families who provide safe, loving, forever families for children. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on adoption and permanence, it is a privilege to engage with the whole community involved in adoption, from young people themselves, birth parents and adoptive parents to those in health and social services, the professions working around the child and our secretariat, Adoption UK and Home for Good.

We strive to make the adoption journey one of the most supported and safe journeys around the child: one that puts a young person very much at the centre; one that ensures that funding and services are there; and one that looks at good family making and good family building, with secure foundations. We recognise that many challenges can arise. When we identify those barriers, we need services to respond and Government to use their agility to fix the challenges.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very important point about how we need to support adoptive families and children. I have been campaigning on the rather niche issue of regulating the sale of sperm online. Colleagues might be horrified to learn this is widespread in Facebook groups and on other social media. It is causing children to seek alternative means of finding out where they come from—via AncestryDNA, for example—which causes a lot of problems.

Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to look at all the services that support adopted children and their families in the long term, especially in the online and regulated space?

[Rachael Maskell]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that issue, on which she is probably more of an expert than I am. We have recognised the role of digital and the fact that many children in adoptive settings can be traced or can trace their birth parents without having support around them. We have to recognise the digital age in which children are growing up in order to keep them safe and to protect them. I am sure we will talk more about this subject.

The Minister for Children and Families, the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), is committed to building stable families and providing the care and support that young people and their parents need. He has a sizeable task. Over 80,000 children are in care. I trust that, with the imminent publication of the review by Josh MacAlister, he will simultaneously fix the gaps in the adoption journey. We welcome the commitment of £144 million for the adoption support fund and £19.5 million for the implementation of the adoption strategy over the next three years. It is a sound investment, on which we will see a return.

We need a workforce plan to support children in the care system and their families. There is a deficit in timely support for families, and the scars of trauma emerge in various expressions. Three quarters of children experience abuse or neglect prior to adoption. They need support to be in place at the right time. In our APPG’s “Strengthening Families” report published last year, we identified the importance of aiding parents in the matching process. It has been more challenging through the pandemic, but we cannot let a recovery period delay the process of family building. We are particularly concerned about black and minoritised children in the care system, as well as older children and young people who have been in care the longest. As an APPG, we have more work to do, but so do the Government.

Self-employed parents need help, too. The crucial period of bonding as a family forms is vital in forming attachments and a new rhythm in a child’s life. The self-employed need the same opportunities as other parents to dedicate time to this. Denying statutory adoption pay is nonsensical. I trust that the Minister agrees. We await the legislative response to the Taylor review. I ask that the Minister ensures that the voice of adoptive parents is not lost in that process.

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) made a powerful plea for other parental rights to emerge in such a Bill. I ask that adoptive parents do not suffer any detriment either. If we, as a society, value parenting and recognise its importance, there is no excuse for exclusion. I hope the Minister will forgive me, but I am impatient. Self-employed parents need support now. We know how hard self-employed people work to make their businesses a success.

We heard from the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) about the challenges of the pandemic and how hard people worked to make their businesses thrive. They cannot juggle work around bonding with their child. Ensuring that the right attachments are made is a full-time task. That is why we need to ensure that the self-employed get the financial underpinning to not have to worry about paying their bills, not least at a time when the cost of living is such a challenge to all families.

Adoptive parents should not have to go cap in hand to their local authority either. Special guardians, kinship carers and adoptive parents need recognition that they, even more than birth parents, need to be 100% focused on family building. There is time for the Government to carry out a consultation on the Taylor review prior to their promised employment Bill. I ask the Minister to commit to that consultation today.

The 2013 statutory guidance on adoption states in paragraph 9.38 that

“The local authority should consider making a payment of financial support equivalent to the Maternity Allowance to adoptive parents who are ineligible to receive”

statutory adoption pay. Why is it that adoptive parents continually have to chase everything, and dedicate their time to feeding into the bureaucracy and trying to get it to work for them, as opposed to the Government addressing the issue?

Statutory pay will aid the recruitment of potential adopters and will assist in the success and stability of others. We know that 3,000 children are in need of a family. A full consultation was committed to by the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), who has responsibility for parental pay and leave, during his evidence to the Petitions Committee in 2020, but we must include adoption pay, too. The Government have committed to improving adoption, so this is yet another opportunity for them to do so, and I hope the consultation will therefore be inclusive. He said,

“it is crucial to the success of an adoption placement that an adopter takes time off work to care for and bond with their child.”

That must apply to the self-employed as much as to the employed. There is no difference in the eyes of that child, or in that child’s needs.

[Dr Poulter]

I am sure the Minister will find it difficult to disagree with the hon. Lady. She rightly mentions the barriers to adoption more generally. The coalition Government did a lot with my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson), in a previous guise, to reduce some of those barriers. He also highlighted the failure of previous Governments to have joined-up thinking, such as joining up the fiscal and financial incentives to support people in adoption. I hope the take-home message for the Minister is that it is time to do that. I hope he will commit to doing so at the Dispatch Box, and I hope the hon. Lady agrees.

[Rachael Maskell]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Normally it is the parent who does the joining up, and that is clearly not right. The Government need to make sure that the adoption strategy looks at every aspect of an adoptive parent’s journey and ensures that the facilities, support and services are in place to give the child the best possible start in life. It is exhausting for parents, who find themselves having to negotiate—this is where the law stands at the moment—with a local authority to see if they fit any of the criteria, on which there is no guidance. We know that cash-strapped local authorities may not be minded to pay specific attention to what is a very small cohort of parents.

The Government recognise how necessary statutory maternity entitlements are for parents to bond with their child, and they must recognise how much more important such support is for a child who has experienced multiple forms of trauma and who could have complex needs that need addressing. Life is often exhausting for an adoptive parent who is trying to form a new family and working to give their child the safest home possible. The services need to be there in a timely way to support and nurture that child, and to ensure they have the best start in life when perhaps their first start was not the right one.

The “Good Work” review does not accept that there should be a differentiation in the support received. On statutory adoption pay for the self-employed, we are not talking about a lot of people. It is not a high cost to the Government in the scale of things and, as well as the savings to the Government from ensuring that self-employed parents have the support around them, statutory adoption pay would be immeasurable for parents and for the child. Now is the time to act, and I trust that the Minister agrees.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

Mr Jones, you arrived a tad late. If you wish to contribute, I am sure we can find time to accommodate you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to you for pulling me up on that, Ms Ghani.

Moving on to the substantive point, as hon. Members will note, the Government have responded to the petition. It is on the website and those who take an interest in the issue will have seen it. No doubt there will still be a continuing conversation and people will continue to push the Government, but I want to spend a few minutes explaining the reasons behind the response. There will be people in the Chamber, and people watching, who have different views, but I hope at the very least to be able to explain the rationale for why we are here. The Government should always listen and always think through such issues in detail. They should always try to understand the tensions between different policies, and I will take a few moments to outline the situation.

The Government want to support all adopters, including new adoptive parents, to ensure that they can access the support that their children and family need at the early stages of adoption. As has been mentioned by hon. Members already, in July 2021 we published our national adoption strategy, which highlights the key improvements that we expect to see in the adoption system. There is an incredible amount in it and an incredible amount of ambition, and it will take time to get there, but that is the direction that the Government and my colleagues in the Department for Education want to go in.

The strategy sets out commitments to improve services in three main areas, the first of which is the recruitment of sufficient adopters. Hon. Members have already highlighted the importance of ensuring that children who need adoptive parents can be matched with them, and we also have commitments both to match approved adopters with waiting children and to provide support to adopted children and their families, which is exactly what we are talking about today.

Earlier this month, we announced that the adoption support fund will continue to offer important support to adoptive and eligible special guardianship order families up to March 2025—to the end of the spending review period that we are in at the moment—through providing access to therapeutic services. When that was launched in 2015, it was a unique programme that provided funding to local authorities and regional adoption agencies so that they could access a range of support for families and tailor it, including psychotherapy and creative therapies following a review of locally assessed needs.

Supporting and ensuring permanency for children is a priority. I hope that it has been demonstrated that since 2015, through measures such as the support fund, we have been able to offer support to nearly 40,000 children. The additional funding just announced will take that to 10 consecutive years of funding. It is £144 million between next month and March 2025. I hope that demonstrates that the Government are committed to stabilising placements. It recognises the importance of the Government in that approach.

Today’s debate has been very reasonable and important, and the level of cross-party support, interest and gentle pushing—quite rightly—of the Government on such important issues demonstrates the willingness of Members from all parties to take the issue seriously and move it outside the normal bounds of party political knockabout that we often fall into in this place. I hope hon. Members and those in the Gallery recognise that there has been progress in recent years in trying to create a more level playing field for adoption and on making the processes easier and simpler, although there is still much to do in the future.

Let me turn to the specifics on maternity allowance. As colleagues know, there are two types of maternity pay available to pregnant working women and new mothers: statutory maternity pay and maternity allowance. Historically, both were primarily health and safety provisions that related specifically to people being in the workforce but needing safety and support for pregnancy prior to giving birth, for childbirth itself, and for breastfeeding. I recognise that the area is in tension, and I understand the clear arguments that have been made by Members from all parties, but because that support is based on the original principle the challenge is in recognising how we apply it. I am not saying, I would not dare to say, that there are not different challenges. The hon. Member for Sefton Central highlighted the challenges that adoptive parents go through at different times, but the principle behind the benefit that the petition seeks to equalise starts from a different proposition and a different perspective. That is why the Government are not coming forward at this time with the change that is being proposed.

[Rachael Maskell]

The Minister is right to say that the circumstances of an adoptive family are different from those of a birth family. However, the fact that there are different circumstances means that the Government should look at those circumstances specifically. My ask today is that the Government go away and consult on that, to have a better understanding of why these measures are so important.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s comments, and she makes an important point. I am not in a position right now to talk about any future consultation. I know that this is an area where the Government are always keen to get views and that my colleagues in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and across Government elsewhere, such as in Education, will continue to look at the issue and take views from colleagues in the House and outside, and from those who have strong views. I understand and acknowledge the hon. Lady’s point.

Let me turn to a few points that have been made in the Chamber today. My hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington, who introduced the debate so well, highlighted a number of issues that he was keen to put forward. He highlighted some challenges with guidance and clarity, and I am happy to confirm that I will take those away. I am keen to speak to him about them in more detail, so that I can pass them on to my colleagues to see whether there is anything that might be possible.

My hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington talked about variation around the country. As he and other hon. Members know, there is an inherent tension about where and how we structure our policies, and about where and how we put national requirements at the centre, versus local discretion. One answer to the question we are debating is that, as outlined by the hon. Member for York Central—I accept her challenge on this—there is a recommendation and an indication that local authorities should be able to provide discretionary funding where it is necessary and proportionate to do so. Although I understand her point about the challenge of going through the process—such processes can often be challenging—it is there. I hope it is used and that people watching out there who are thinking about adoption and who may be self-employed contact their council, should they feel that that would be beneficial.

The hon. Member for Pontypridd talked about a specific area of the policy on adoption, and I am happy to take that back. I am afraid I do not have an answer for her today, but given the importance of the point, and the profundity of it, it merits being given back to my colleagues, and I hope they will take her points seriously.

My hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe highlighted the challenges and opportunities of self-employment, as well as articulating clearly her support for this change. It is something I understand on a personal level—I think I mentioned a few minutes ago that my dad was self-employed as a milkman for 30 years, and one of the reasons he was doing that was to look after me and my brother when we came home. It was not that common in the 1980s for dads to make the tea, clean the house and things like that, but he did it, and that is a demonstration of how self-employed people try to keep all these balls in the air, try to juggle things and try to make it work. I understand and accept why we are debating this issue today, and its importance to a group of people within that community.

The hon. Member for Sefton Central made his characteristically very direct appeal to the Government on this, as he does on a range of other issues. I am grateful to him for sharing his personal experiences. I completely understand why this matter is so important to him on a personal level, and I respect and am grateful for those experiences being shared in public.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful for the request for clarification, because my point was about the general parliamentary process and the general opportunity for people to continue to campaign, to continue to make their voices heard and to continue to highlight things. I cannot give any commitments on behalf of the Government about what we will or will not do, other than what I have already said. At this stage, we believe that the position is as outlined in the response to the petition.

[Rachael Maskell]

Will the Minister give way?

[Lee Rowley]

If I can just say a couple more sentences, I will be happy to do so. I just want to draw towards a conclusion, before giving way to the hon. Lady.

We recognise that this is an important area of policy, we understand the challenge and we understand why the petition has been brought forward. I hope I have been able to articulate today the reason why the policy is the policy and to outline some of the discretion in the system, which hopefully has the potential to cover those who have concerns. I do understand the challenge, although I am sure the hon. Member for York Central is about to tell me about it for a final time.

[Rachael Maskell]

I just seek another commitment from the Minister. Will he meet the Children’s Minister to discuss this issue further, not least in the light of the Government committing to respond to the Taylor review in legislation? I would have thought that that would be a great opportunity to take this issue further and to ensure that we have the support in place for self-employed adopter parents.

[Lee Rowley]

I am very happy to give a commitment that I will meet the Children’s Minister and pass back the strength of feeling in the Chamber today. I hope the hon. Lady recognises the position I have outlined, which aligns with the petition response. I have set out the rationale for why the policy is the policy, the reason why we think discretion is in place and the hope, on that basis, that it covers sufficient scenarios, sufficient individuals and sufficient challenges, such that it is a reasonable and proportionate place to be.

Before I conclude, I again thank the petitioners and all those who have a significant interest in this issue. I also thank hon. Members for their willingness to debate it in such a serious and proportionate manner. The Government are grateful to people for continuing to raise these issues, even if at this time we think that the current situation and the current discretion should cover most of the challenges that we see on this policy.