Steve
Webb: All these amendments relate to one specific set of
issues: the needs of children who are cared for by friends and family
but not their parents. Observant members of the Committee will have
noticed that amendments 52 and 64 have a certain similarity. Initially,
we thought that the only difference was that one used Roman numbering
and the other used letters (a) to (e). The very perceptive will notice
that we added the words “per year” after “28
days”, which we thought was tidying up but we now think might
not have helped
at all. Essentially, amendments 52 and 64 are the same. We and the hon.
Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North seek to highlight
a group of children and families who perhaps have not had the attention
that they
deserve. It
will not astonish the Committee to know that we did not write the
amendment. It was drafted for us by Grandparents Plus, which is a very
effective charity. Its profile has been raised considerably recently,
including at an event yesterday in the House chaired by the Chairman of
the Work and Pensions Committee. The concerns were also raised at Prime
Minister’s Questions yesterday. The set of families we are
talking about are those where for a variety of reasons a child is not
with the natural or step-parents but is being brought up by
grandparents, other family members or friends. The campaign is trying
to highlight the fact that there is a gap in the system. The
arrangements under which a child may be placed with a grandparent, or a
carer who is of the family or a friend, can be diverse, and not all
such arrangements bring money with them.
Amendment 52
specifically focuses on the need to assess the financial needs of
carers who are friends or family. Research evidence from a sample
survey shows that whereas 15 per cent. of foster carers—the
closest analogue—said that they were in financial
hardship, 75 per cent. of friends and family carers did so. We
are looking at a group of children who may fall through the net unless
an amendment of this sort is accepted. The financial mechanisms of
support for such families are varied and complex. Although there are
specific forms of support such as guardianship allowances, they often
apply only in very specific cases. Certainly the mechanisms for
financial support are leaving many in financial hardship.
Very often
the friend or family carer will make sacrifices for the sake of the
children. One grandparent carer wrote on the discussion board of the
Family Rights
Group: “Like
most we have had a dramatic change of life style. All
‘retirement’ plans gone. I had to give up work and if I
try and return later I will have lost all seniority therefore will be
on minimum
wage”. So
the carers are making sacrifices for the children. When we assess child
poverty we do so in terms of the household’s income, so
obviously the living standards and needs of the whole household are
relevant when we are looking at the well-being of a child. So if there
is a set of children whose family arrangements leave the adults in
hardship, its needs have to be properly identified and responded to.
One way would be to put them in the Bill under amendment 52.
Amendment 53
would define the group that we are talking about. Amendment 54 would
find out from the Secretary of State the number of children involved so
that we can assess the scale of the issue and know more systematically
than we currently do how many children are being brought up by
grandparents, relatives and so
on. We
must consider the well-being of children. The alternative may be local
authority care; we want to avoid situations in which although friends
and family are available to provide a more loving, secure and familiar
home environment than foster care or that of an institution, they
cannot do so because of the lack of financial support. To reduce child
poverty, we must track down the causes and, if one is that friends and
family cannot afford to have the child with them, the well-being of the
child will suffer, which I am sure the Government would not want.
Amendment 55 would require that, when the local authority is doing its
needs assessment, the needs of that particular group should be taken
account
of. As
ever, we could have come up with a lot of groups that needed their own
bit of the Bill so, in a sense, our proposals are probing amendments to
see how much, for example, the Government already know about such
groups, what assessments they have already made of the scale of the
problem and what policies are either in place to tackle the needs of
the groups or would be in place under the Child Poverty Bill. I commend
the amendments to the
Committee.
Andrew
Selous: I commend the hon. Members for Northavon and for
Regent's Park and Kensington, North for introducing the amendments.
They are useful, probing amendments and I shall listen with great
interest to the Minister’s response. My briefing on the subject
is from the Family Rights Group, and other groups including
Grandparents Plus, Family Action, the National Children’s
Bureau, the Fostering Network, the Frank Buttle Trust and the
Grandparents Association—a wide range of organisations that have
interest in such issues. We are discussing about 200,000 to 300,000
children throughout the United Kingdom, so it is not a small group. It
is interesting that, of those children, only 6,900 are looked-after
children as defined under the Bill, their local authorities having a
specific and statutory interest in
them. Some
25 local authorities have admitted paying friends and family carers,
even when they had been approved as foster carers, at a lower rate than
other foster carers. That seems odd, to say the least. It is
particularly unfair that grandparent carers are discriminated against.
In many ways, it is a false economy not to do something about that,
given that outcomes as a result of placement stability are much better
when the family are
involved. We
must bear in mind what life is actually like for the child. When
friends and family are involved as carers, it often enables the
children to stay on at their school, and to keep up with their local
group of friends, which will have significant outcomes for the children
and their earning ability when they, too, become parents. The
amendments are useful. The Department for Work and Pensions does not
know how many friends and family carers are in receipt of income
support. The fact that it is not aware of that supports the point made
by the hon. Member for Northavon when he said that the group is
slightly invisible in the statistics, so I shall listen with interest
to what the Minister has to say on the
subject.
Ms
Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab): I
inadvertently got a few sentences into my speech on this very topic
earlier, so I shall not strain the Committee’s patience by
repeating myself. The hon. Member for Northavon set out the basics of
the case extremely well. I will repeat the fact that shocked
me—reading the Family Rights Group briefing brought home to me
something that I confront every week or two in my advice surgery and
that has massive policy implications. I feel ashamed that I had not
realised what the policy implications were. Clearly, a huge number of
people are providing care for the children of other
adults, often temporarily but sometimes
permanently—the Family Rights Group put a figure of 200,000 or
so on the table. That is almost always as the result of crisis, which
has massive implications for the family and significant implications
for their
finances. One
of the cases that I am dealing with now is that of an 82-year-old
grandmother whose daughter, sadly, is a crack addict who has been in
and out of prison and rehab fairly consistently over a number of years.
The grandmother has brought up three of her grandchildren in those very
challenging circumstances. I am dealing with a specific issue for the
family at the moment. I was speaking to the grandmother a few days ago,
before having read the briefing for the Bill, and she was talking about
everything that she looks for to help the 13-year-old grandchild
materially, such as having a computer in his house. He has a
statement—special educational needs—and has been excluded
from school once. He has no computer because she has to go to the
social services department to ask if they would make provision for him
out of the social services budget as an exceptional case. She said, for
example, “They are always promising me things, and then they
never deliver”, or, “They promised him a
bicycle.” A
13-year-old kid is growing up on an estate that is a super output area
and the most deprived estate in the whole of England; he does not have
a bicycle or a computer at home because the family does not have the
level of financial input that one would expect for someone who is
looking after the children of another adult. Almost all the cases of
people who come to me are as a result of a parent in prison, a parent
who has drug or severe alcohol problems, a parent with a severe illness
or disability—cancer or a major injury—or something of
that kind. That puts extreme pressure on a family, almost always
including the fact that the child or children being cared for overcrowd
the house. We talked about overcrowding and poverty earlier on an
amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North.
Bringing in the children of another adult will almost invariably lead
to overcrowding and physical pressure on a house. The family income
will rarely stretch to providing holidays, outings or extra-curricular
activities for a child, often because the arrangement is not
permanent. John
Barrett (Edinburgh, West) (LD): I listened to what the
hon. Lady was saying, and she is making some important points. She
referred to an 82-year-old grandmother, but would she accept that there
is another group that is badly affected—the many grandmothers
who are still of working age? Dealing with a crisis immediately puts a
stop to their income and has a knock-on
effect.
Ms
Buck: That is a good point. The Family Rights Group
briefing talks about one of the major drivers of the financial pressure
of looking after another person’s children being that it will
frequently—again, often because it is born out of
crisis—require people to give up their earning
capacity. The
case has been well made and we understand that the group concerned is
very important and very overlooked. In connection with the amendment, I
urge the Minister to take the matter away and think about how,
cross-departmentally and within the Department, there could
be some proper analysis of needs and numbers, looking at some of the
particular points that have come up in the briefing, such as, for
example, what proportion of people looking after a child for more than
three or six months would be entitled to trigger foster care payments
and to raise their family income in that
way. The
amendment is very important, raising some very important issues, which
are not necessarily appropriate for inclusion in the Bill. However, the
Family Rights Group has done a service—certainly to me—by
making us think about a challenging and often tragic group of people
for whom we do not have an adequate policy
response. 1.45
pm
Judy
Mallaber: I spoke to Ministers about these proposals last
week. I draw attention to the early-day motion tabled by my hon. Friend
the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney) and a similar
one stimulated by Grandparents Plus, which has attracted considerable
support across the House. Hon. Members outside this room think that
this issue is
important. Last
week, I explained to the chief executive of the Family Rights Group
that it would not be appropriate to put the detail of the amendment in
the Bill even though I consider this to be an important issue, for the
reasons set out by hon. Members. I have asked Ministers whether they or
their appropriate colleagues can respond to those organisations about
these issues. The chief executive referred specifically to the lack of
data. One of the big problems is that we do not know exactly what is
involved. It can involve people with a long-term caring relationship
with family or a short-term
relationship. The
most recent example I heard about was when I was out canvassing. A
woman opened the door and said, “I’m glad you’re
here. We were about to try to get hold of your office.” Her
sister had been sent to prison unexpectedly for benefit fraud, against
the advice of the probation service, and she had taken in the children.
One of the children was at school and so needed to be collected and
brought home and the other was older and a bit school-phobic. She had
no problem with taking them in, but was concerned that nobody from
social services had been to ensure that they were being looked after
properly while their mother was in prison temporarily. That is another
eccentric example that demonstrates the range of circumstances in which
this issue can come about. It is hardly surprising that there is a lack
of data and that it is so difficult to get the appropriate cross-agency
action that is needed to deal with these
problems. I
hope that Ministers will ask colleagues to look at this issue and to
give some thought to the groups that are taking up these issues. It has
generated a lot of interest this week, as is reflected in the early-day
motions and the lobbying. Although it is not appropriate to put this
issue in the Bill, I hope it will be looked
at.
Mr.
Timms: We have had another interesting and thoughtful
debate. I am sure that all hon. Members sympathise with the points that
have been raised. I am grateful for the way in which they have been
raised. It
is clear from the evidence that care by family and friends is the best
approach for many children who cannot be looked after by their birth
parents, for whatever
reason. We want to recognise fully the additional support needs of that
group and the contribution that family and friend carers make to the
life chances of vulnerable children. We are taking steps to encourage
families to bring up children and to ensure that family and friend
carers receive the appropriate financial and practical
support. We
recognise that grandparents play an ever-increasing role in family life
by supporting parents and caring for children, as has been emphasised
in this debate. They are an important provider of full-time kinship
care for children whose parents are unable to care for them. Many
grandparents provide flexible and affordable child care, particularly
in the gap between school and formal child care. I remind the Committee
that it was announced in the Budget that grandparents and other family
members with significant child-care responsibilities will be eligible
for national insurance credits. We have heard of a number of examples
of grandparents giving up work to care for their children’s
children. Under that measure, they will at least continue to receive
national insurance credits for state pension purposes. It is estimated
that 135,000 grandparents, and other adults under state pension age,
are caring for family members aged 12 or under for 20 or more hours a
week, of those, an estimated 45,000 could gain basic state pension
under the Budget announcement.
It may be
helpful to clarify that in the Bill “parent” means more
than “parent” in the normal sense. It includes any
individual who has parental responsibility for a child under the terms
of the Children Act 1989, which, under sections 3 to 5 and 14C,
includes many of the persons described in paragraphs (i) to (v) of the
amendment, specifically, parents, step-parents, persons appointed as
guardians and persons with residence orders or special guardianship
orders. Section 17 of the 1989 Act places a general duty on local
authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need in
their areas through a range and level of services appropriate to
fulfilling those children’s needs. That includes providing
services, including financial support, to any member of the
child’s family, which includes persons with whom the child has
been living even if they do not have parental responsibility. The
Children and Young Persons Act 2008 amended section 17 of the 1989 Act
to make it easier for local authorities to provide regular and
long-term financial payments to families caring for children, where
they assess that to be appropriate.
The way that
hon. Members have spoken about the amendments reflects that there will
be more to do. I take the point of the speeches urging me and other
Ministers to reflect on the issues and see what further action can be
taken. Perhaps it would be helpful if I undertake, on behalf of my hon.
Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland, myself and other Ministers, to
write to the organisations mentioned to set out the steps that we are
taking to address the perfectly proper and right concerns raised in
this relatively short but important debate.
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