Kinship Carers: Statutory Paid Employment Leave

Munira Wilson Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)]

rose—

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

rose—

[Melanie Onn]

We are very popular! I will give way first to my hon. Friend and then to the Lady.

[Melanie Onn]

Yes, my hon. Friend is right. The concern for kinship carers is that they either have to give up work voluntarily or fall foul of their employer’s terms and conditions merely by taking on the moral duty of caring for a child. Introducing statutory paid employment leave for kinship carers would send a signal in society that we recognise the importance of family arrangements and that those family arrangements extend not just to birth parents, adoptive parents or foster parents, but to kinship families as well.

[Munira Wilson]

I thank the hon. Lady for securing the debate. Earlier this month I attended a kinship event in Whitton in my constituency for Kinship Care Week. I met a local woman who had worked as a probation officer in the Ministry of Justice for 20 years. She stepped up suddenly—overnight—to take care of her best friend’s daughter when her best friend was no longer able to do so. The Ministry of Justice had no policy on kinship leave. It was only thanks to her very sympathetic boss that she was able to take a combination of sick leave and annual leave, which allowed her to have some paid and some unpaid time off. Does the hon. Lady agree that both the public and private sectors need to offer statutory paid leave for kinship carers, as a number of leading employers wrote in a letter to the Business Secretary last week?

[Melanie Onn]

The hon. Member makes a powerful point. She is right—as she so often is—that we should not expect these carers to rely on the good will of their employers. The Government have made good strides in having the term “kinship” recognised across Government. We now have the ambassador and pilots across the country, which I will come to later. Strides have been made, but to have this codified and recognised legislatively would spread the word.

There have been good examples of private sector employers offering paid leave for kinship carers, which is incredibly welcome, but they need to be as aware as they can be. It is much easier to notify the public sector of changes through Government, but the private sector might not always be so aware. There is a big opportunity if the Government are prepared to consider this closely and bring forward the outcome of the review that they are undertaking.

We celebrated Kinship Care Week earlier this month. I was pleased to welcome the Minister for children and families—the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister)—to Blundell Park in Cleethorpes to meet some of our remarkable and dedicated local kinship carers and impressive council staff from the children’s services team. I am proud to have secured north-east Lincolnshire as one of the seven areas selected for the Government’s new kinship zones programme. We have already seen more than 450 children in north-east Lincolnshire benefit from a pilot of wraparound, integrated social services support and a financial package on a par with foster carers.

The conversations I had that day remind us how much more there is to do. Kinship care arrangements often happen with little or no warning. Families can be given as little as an hour to decide whether they can take in a child—or several children—with whom they may not have the closest of relationships. They may have children of their own or other family responsibilities in the home. There is enormous emotional pressure and often a sense of guilt when the alternative may be sending a child formally to enter the care system.