Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund

Munira Wilson Excerpts

Thursday 4th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I warmly congratulate my friend and colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett) on securing this debate and for so brilliantly outlining the issues at the start. I pay tribute to her tireless campaigning, alongside that of all the carers and parents who are here today and those who are not, who have been filling our inboxes and cannot afford to be here because they are busy looking after vulnerable and traumatised children who need our help.

There have been many powerful and moving contributions today from hon. Members across the House. I salute the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) and his partner for stepping up to adopt, and I hope they get the support they need from the ASGSF that they have applied for. However, I was disappointed by his party political swipe, because until now, there has been cross-party consensus in all the debates I have been in on this issue that the changes made in April were short-sighted and extremely damaging.

It is no accident that when I secured my urgent question in April, the day after the fund had expired, the Minister came forward and announced its extension. It is no accident that we are having this debate today, and that a written ministerial statement has come out with this fig leaf of an extension of the fund into next year. The reality is that, yes, there has been cross-party consensus, but we Liberal Democrats have led the charge on this and dragged the Minister, kicking and screaming, to make the announcements.

I really hope that we do not end up being blindsided once again, as we were in April. We all welcomed the announcement in the Chamber that day but then, quietly, in the middle of the Easter recess, the announcement was snuck out that the fair access limits were to be reduced, the assessment grants slashed and the matched funding cut. These parents, carers and families deserve far better. I really hope that Ministers and officials have learnt the lessons from earlier this year.

It is worth repeating and reminding ourselves who we are talking about today: some of the most vulnerable children in our communities, who have suffered unimaginable trauma, including abuse and neglect, sometimes witnessing unspeakable violence in their homes. Their carers—both adoptive parents and kinship carers—have made the most amazing commitment to step up and provide a loving, stable home to help heal and give them a second chance in life. The impact of these short-sighted cuts to the grants has been utterly devastating. The decision has resulted in a backlog of applications, delaying assessments and therapeutic support, and leaving already deeply traumatised children with a heightened sense of abandonment.

I received this email from a parent in June:

“My youngest daughter has recently had her sensory therapy put on hold for two months, due to all the delays by the government. My daughter started her new therapy at the beginning of February this year, had 4 therapy sessions and then had to stop due to the uncertainty around the funding.

We were just starting to see real progress when the therapy stopped abruptly. It was what I can only describe as ‘opening Pandora’s box and violently slamming it shut again’. The regression we saw was severe. We experienced behaviours (including feral screaming), which our daughter had not displayed in over 4 years. This regression not only affected our youngest daughter, but also her older sister (who is also traumatised).”

The charity Home for Good and Safe Families recently surveyed parents and carers to understand the impact of the recent changes to the fund. It found that the loss of therapeutic support is already affecting many families, particularly those without the means to pay privately, leading to increased inequality in access to services, with financial vulnerability closely linked to greater disruption.

In mid-July, one adoption support provider reported that only 50% of their families waiting for support had any funding from the ASGSF in place. That has raised serious concerns about the impact on children’s mental health, with the vast majority of parents and carers saying that they are “extremely” or “very concerned” that their children’s mental health will be negatively affected. For some children and families, long periods without support have caused extreme difficulties—declines in mental health, suicidal thoughts, self-harming, school absence and an escalation of violence in the home. These are children whose lives have been characterised by loss and separation, for whom trusting and consistent relationships are vital.

The cuts have meant that the Purple Elephant Project, which is now in the constituency of the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), right on the border of mine, has reduced its yearly programme of support to just 26 weeks. Six months is a long time in a child’s life. For some children and young people, gaps in therapy greatly risk their willingness to engage in therapy in the future. The Government’s failure to communicate their planned changes has also led to providers reporting substantial financial losses, particularly small providers such as Purple Elephant, which is relying on crowdfunding and emergency funds to stay afloat. Some, including Purple Elephant, are already having to cut their staff, and they are concerned that some therapists will leave the profession altogether. We cannot afford that when we look at the scale of the mental health crisis not just among children in adoptive and kinship care, but more broadly across society.

The irony and the frustration is that the Government have sabotaged a tool that works. An evaluation of the fund in 2022 found that at the end of funded support, the mental health difficulties of school-age children improved, and there were also significant improvements in family functioning. Some 94% of parents say the fund is “absolutely vital” or “very important” to their family and is a need that could not be met elsewhere.

The ASGSF helps families to stay together and prevents family placement breakdown. It also helps children to stay and thrive in school. One adoptive parent I met in my constituency was very clear that her child would not have been able to stay in school without the supportive therapy provided by the ASGSF. As we have heard, there is anecdotal evidence of potential adopters being put off going through the process because of concerns about a lack of post-adoption support. We know that for every child adopted, £1.3 million-worth of value is created through improved outcomes from adoption, and there are the lower financial costs of adoption compared with care. The economic case is unquestionable.

The Government keep telling us—the Minister with responsibility for early years, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), just told us this in the main Chamber—that giving the children the best start in life is one of the Government’s biggest priorities. If they really mean that and want to break down barriers to opportunity, this Minister needs to understand the outrage and despair not just of Members here, but of families and carers up and down the country. The Government have sabotaged a supremely effective fund.

Aside from today’s announcement, there are rumours about the Department reforming the fund, and a paper has been released by Adoption England that proposes devolving funding to regional adoption agencies or local authorities as grants. A whole host of organisations are publicly opposed to those proposals and are concerned that the model will compromise fair and equitable access of funding for all children, regardless of where they live or the agency they have been adopted through.

Furthermore, regional adoption agencies are typically responsible only for adoption services. We are not sure what this would mean for special guardians or those who have child arrangement orders in place and how the funding would be split between kinship families and adoptive families. The Government desperately need to consult families and sector experts. I note that today’s written ministerial statement alludes to engagement—not before time, because people were not consulted or engaged with when the changes were made at Easter.

I believe, and I have told the Minister this privately and publicly, that she and her Department deeply care—as I and my hon. Friends do—about the lives of children and families. But I think that the failure so far in joined-up policymaking and engagement is actually being driven by the Treasury, not by her or her Department. If she needs help with the Treasury, which is desperate for savings, she has support here in all parts of the Chamber, and we will continue to bat for children up and down this country.

I reiterate the calls that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex made at the start of this debate. We need to see a permanent ringfenced fund restored to the previous full amount in terms of grants per child. That will mean extending and expanding the size of the fund. I have told the Minister this before: she can find the money in the £46.5 million budget that the Department had for advertising, consultancy and marketing costs in the past year. She should halve that budget and instead expand the ASGSF by 50% so that the fair access limits can be restored to what they were. There needs to be an end to the surprise annual announcements. As my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean) said, children are not adopted or taken into kinship care for one financial year. That is done for life, and with love, and this Government should honour that.

I hope that the Government will start to engage properly with the sector and families up and down the country. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex, I ask for a two-year moratorium on further changes so that the reforms are evidence-based. It is incumbent on all of us as corporate parents to ensure that our most vulnerable children are properly supported and given the best second chance in life, which many of these children are being offered. This is a tiny budget in the context of huge Government spending, but it has a massive impact on those precious and fragile lives. It is time to think again. It is time to do far better. It is time to put children, who are our country’s future, first.