Vulnerable Children: Kinship Care

Baroness Drake Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Drake (Lab)]

My Lords, in previous debates in this House, the Government have recognised the contribution that kinship carers make to the well-being of some 200,000 children. The reasons are indeed compelling and my noble friend Lady Armstrong and the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, have set them out persuasively. Kinship care is the most common permanency option for children who cannot live with birth parents. The carers provide vital support for vulnerable children when parents are unable to care for them, often in urgent circumstances such as domestic violence, drug abuse and parental illness. The only notice that they may have is when the social worker arrives on the doorstep with the children late at night. The children frequently have emotional difficulties, often because they have been living with parents who are drug-dependent or who have abused them. The kinship carers save the taxpayer considerable expenditure and a number of studies demonstrate that most children in kinship care are doing significantly better than children in the care system.

However, kinship carers who voluntarily embrace vulnerable children continue to face many barriers. I cannot list them all, but they certainly include that, unlike birth parents and adopters, the vast majority of kinship carers raising children are not entitled to even one day of statutory paid leave from employment when they take on the care of the child. They care at their own cost. Some 49% give up work permanently and others reduce their earnings because they need to take that time to settle the child. As my noble friend said, a requirement is often imposed by the social worker that they do that—for good reason, because the children can be traumatised and insecure.

Kinship carers do not receive the financial support that foster parents receive. Many still get little help from their local authority, but face a considerable increase in costs. A recent Family Rights Group survey revealed that only 13% of local authorities have a dedicated worker or team supporting kinship carers. The Family Rights Group has identified areas of improvement in both the assessment of and support for kinship carers, recognising that many kinship care placements will be under huge financial strain due to inadequate support. Some may well now break down as a result of the benefit cuts, to the detriment of both the child and the taxpayer.

The Family Rights Group advice service advises more than 2,000 kinship carers a year. My noble friend Lady Armstrong gave a compelling explanation of the Rolls-Royce service that it gives. But funding constraints mean that it can answer only four in 10 of its callers, so the needs of six in 10 remain unmet. Funding has been cut two years in succession and there is no commitment to fund beyond March 2016. That cannot be right.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Armstrong on securing this debate, particularly at this time, because we now see, in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, direct withdrawal of support for kinship carers by the Government, with no coherent reasoning for that withdrawal of support. It is unfair to kinship-caring families, directly undermines the interest of vulnerable children and does not stack up in public expenditure terms. The Bill removes eligibility to the child element of child tax credits for the third and subsequent children born and introduces a two-child limit for receipt of the child element of universal credit for families making a new claim. Kinship care families with three or more children could lose up to £2,780 per year for each additional child, yet some 29,000 kinship carer families have three or more children in their households. The impact of the two-child limit on their family income will be further compounded by the biting of the benefit cap as it is set at an ever-lower level, precisely when these carers are voluntarily taking on vulnerable children and bearing the additional cost. It will be particularly harsh in its impact on kinship carers who already have their own children living with them.

I repeat the figures that I deployed in Committee yesterday because they are worthy of endless repetition. Exempting kinship carers from the two-child limit would cost £30 million. But these carers already save the taxpayer the considerable cost of placing these children in care. The cost of a child in care for a year is £40,000. The cost of care proceedings is £25,000. The savings that these 132,000 kinship families deliver by voluntarily caring for these 200,000 children runs into billions of pounds. The two-child limit needs to deter only 200 kinship carers from caring for three or more children, and that £30 million saving would be wiped out. That is without taking into consideration the human cost to the child or additional pressure on the local authorities when these children need to go into care. No reasoning has been given in any policy document for the withdrawal of support from kinship carers in these reforms.

The noble Lord, Lord Freud, for whom I have the greatest respect and who has previously shown a sensitive and considered understanding of the contribution of kinship carers, had considerable difficulty yesterday in persuading the House that there was a coherent line of reasoning in this withdrawal of support. The impact assessments gave no assessment of the disincentive effect, no assessment of the cost to the other areas of public expenditure from this effect and no assessment of the outcomes for the children. The withdrawal of this support will impact on some of the most vulnerable children. It is not explained, it is not defended and it is not assessed.