Kinship Care Strategy

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Alistair Strathern) on securing this important debate. The turnout in the Chamber reflects the importance that MPs across the House place on this issue.

I have some brilliant local kinship carers and I pay tribute to the work that Enza Smith has done over many years on behalf of kinship carers in Worcester. I also pay tribute to a constituent, Julie Rose, who came to see me recently to raise some of the issues and some of the concerns of the #ValueOurLove campaign.

I do not want to repeat points that other hon. Members have made, because they made them very well, but respite care is vital and I have to say that in my constituency at the moment I am concerned by cuts to respite care. I hope the additional £500 million for children’s and adult social care announced in the Budget might help local authorities to redress some of those cuts, but that issue is undoubtedly important.

I also think kinship carers need access to other forms of support—bereavement support, in many cases. Even when a parent has not actually died, children face separation issues, having moved away from their original parents and into the care of another family member. Support such as counselling, which is offered to foster families in many cases, also needs to be considered specifically for kinship carers.

Of course, I welcome the fact that we now have the first kinship care strategy and I very much welcome the pilots; indeed, I have asked for Worcestershire to be considered as one of the areas in which those pilots take place. However, given the scale of what we know kinship carers are doing for children, we should be going beyond pilots and looking to fund and support kinship care more systematically across the country. The returns from doing so are pretty obvious and pretty clear.

Regarding the outcomes, we have already heard that the Education Committee has begun an inquiry into children’s social care; I do not want to pre-empt the outcome of that inquiry, because we are in the early days of receiving evidence, but we have already heard about the much better outcomes for children in kinship care, in terms of life chances, long-term employment and life expectancy. We should celebrate all those outcomes and the contributions that families can make to them.

I know my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) wishes she could be here for this debate. On the Education Committee, she has already made the point about the need for kinship carers effectively to have parental leave and for a more systematic approach when people take on the responsibilities of kinship care, so that they can then have some time to spend with their new charges. We should make sure that businesses support that. The guidance mentioned in the kinship care strategy is a welcome first step in that direction. We will continue to work on this issue as part of our work on social care in the Select Committee. I look forward to hearing the evidence that kinship carers can bring to us, so that we can strengthen the evidence-based case for the Government to take further action.