Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps are being taken to ensure that kinship carers are being vaccinated against covid-19.

Being a kinship carer alone is not cause for prioritisation for a COVID-19 vaccination. This is based on the clinical assessment that most children are not considered to be at increased risk of COVID-19 mortality. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advises that only those children at very high risk of exposure and serious outcomes, such as older children with severe neuro-disabilities within residential care, should be offered vaccination as part of Phase 1. There are currently no plans to prioritise kinship carers that are not in the first nine COVID-19 vaccination priority groups in the next phase of the COVID-19 vaccination programme.

Unpaid carers are included in the JCVI’s priority group 6; which includes individuals who are eligible for a carer’s allowance, or those who are the sole or primary carer of an elderly or disabled person who is at increased risk of COVID-19 mortality and therefore clinically vulnerable. This means that if a kinship carer is the sole or primary carer of a child who was prioritised for vaccination in cohorts 4 or 6, they will be offered the vaccination in cohort 6 themselves.