Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, this Bill is a complex and sensitive one which will deserve careful and detailed scrutiny in Committee and on Report. I intend to concentrate my remarks at this stage to those parts of the Bill that relate to kinship care, an often overlooked and underestimated aspect of the state’s responsibility for children in difficulties in their earlier years. In so doing, I declare an interest as a member of the All-Party Group on Kinship Care. Several parts of the present Bill touch on kinship care, but not always, I suggest, as clearly or as decisively as is desirable.

First, I thank the Minister who opened the debate today for the very wholehearted contribution she made on kinship care when replying to a question on 3 April. That was very welcome, and so were the supportive remarks made on the same subject by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who at the time was a Minister, when she replied from the Dispatch Box some months earlier. So there is an element of bipartisanship—demonstrated by the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, in the reference in his speech to kinship care—about that aspect of the subject, although perhaps not some others, which I suggest ought to continue.

Why is kinship care so valuable and at the same time so neglected and underfunded? If one looks at the way the state contributes to the problems of abused and neglected children—foster care, institutional care and kinship care—one sees clearly that the third category receives the fewest resources, and at a time when resources are singularly stressed. Kinship care gets less, even though it is even more cost effective than the other two. That is not to denigrate the other two, which often provide valuable relief, even if they have their serious weaknesses, particularly in the case of institutionalisation.

Then there are the complexities and the costs of the legal hoops which must be gone through before kinship carers can gain recognised status for their role. Little wonder that many are scared off setting off along the course of kinship care, or abandon it halfway through. Similarly, complexities and obstacles are a discouragement to local authorities, which are now, rather belatedly, being encouraged by the Government through a series of pilot efforts.

When one looks at the relevant parts of the Bill designed to address these problems, it is easy to doubt whether this is being done with sufficient clarity and decisiveness to produce effective results. Yet here is a useful provision being hidden in plain sight. It surely needs some changes on the face of the Bill to remedy that obscurity.

Here are three examples in the Bill of provisions that can and should be strengthened. The first are the provisions about family rights groups. There is a real opportunity to reform the child welfare system by giving a new mandate to local authorities to offer families the chance to come up with solutions for their children’s welfare, to help them avoid entering the care system. There are currently 153,000 kinship care children in England alone, but the expectations for councils to include families in shaping and promoting their local kinship offer are minimal. Would it not make sense to offer kinship children the same right to reasonable contact with their brothers and sisters as they currently have by law with their parents?

Secondly, family group conferences, an idea that emanated from New Zealand and has been developed by Leeds council, should surely be explicitly encouraged. A cost-benefit analysis found an average saving of £755 per family when compared with business-as-usual social care without family group conferences.

Thirdly, there is a lack of recognition and understanding of what kinship care is and its different forms. A third of local authorities do not have a kinship care policy setting out the support they offer to families in their area. Surely that too needs to be remedied.

I hope the Minister in her response will give a general recognition of the need to strengthen and make more explicit in the Bill the provisions for kinship care and undertake to respond in Committee and on Report to the points that I and others have raised. There is a real chance here to promote a cost-effective way of helping some of the most vulnerable children in our country.