Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many children are subject to a Child Arrangements Order in which the court orders that the child live with a kinship carer in England as of 20 June 2022.

Kinship care arrangements are most often made in public family law proceedings, whereas child arrangement orders, to which the question also refers, are mainly made in private family law proceedings.

The following table sets out the number of private law child arrangement orders made, where there is a non-parent applicant (which we have used as a proxy for kinship carer) for the last five years, and the number of children to which those orders relate.

Figures for June 2022 are not currently available.

Source: HMCTS Familyman system.

1) Includes orders made in private law (Children Act) cases only. Public law (Children Act) cases have been excluded as it is common for Local Authorities to be recorded as the applicant, and it would not be possible to identify in these cases if residence orders were granted to parents or other family members.

2) From data held centrally it is not possible to identify who the residence order was granted to. The data in the table is based on the applicant(s) recorded in the case.

3) Residence orders have been counted where there were no applicants in the case where the relationship to child was recorded as mother or father, or where there were no applicants where the relationship to child was not recorded.

4) There were approximately 220,000 residence orders granted between 2017 and 2021. Of these, around 2% did not have the relationship to child of the applicant recorded on the case. These have not been included in the figures provided.

5) Some cases may have more than one applicant and more than one order recorded against a case. In these cases it is not possible to link an order to a specific applicant. Applicants are linked via case number.