Government: Draft Legislative Programme

My Lords, I am delighted to take part in this varied debate as part of a process of legislation. I am equally delighted to welcome the future Children in Care Bill. The process for producing this has been a good one. A Green Paper was followed by the publication of a White Paper that took on board various opinions. If only all legislation had such attention. I shall address one or two general issues about children in care, but I want to focus today on kinship care and within that, care of children by grandparents. I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Hunt will be responding. When he was a Health Minister, he took up the issue of grandparents with the Minister for Children, and I thank him for that. I also thank the National Children's Bureau, Barnardo’s, the kinship care network, the fostering network and the Children’s Rights Alliance for England for highlighting the many issues which surround children in care and their carers. I also pay tribute to the groups of grandparents I have met who have shared their concerns, and to my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton, who has listened to grandparents in a very caring way and has set up an inquiry on their behalf. Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, in his Statement on 10 July, made a commitment to tackling the, "““causes of child poverty, youth crime, family breakdown and wasted potential””.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/7/07; col. 1323.]" He emphasised early intervention and the setting up of a nationwide consultation to draw up a children's plan. It is good to hear someone speak positively for children. This Government have placed great emphasis on children’s welfare, in line with the five outcomes of Every Child Matters. As chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children, I welcome this, of course, and believe that we can do even better. Despite enormous efforts, children in care still suffer from greater abuse or neglect, lower academic achievement, more warnings or reprimands, higher rates of exclusion, higher levels of substance misuse and teenage pregnancy. It is right that we focus on those children, and I know that at least two noble Lords will take up those issues later in the debate. The White Paper includes a section on corporate parenting, which states that, "““a good corporate parent must offer everything that a good parent would provide and more””." In response to the Care Matters Green Paper, many children and young people in care said that they would prefer to stay with parents or a relative and that care by a relative should be considered before a placement is made. We all know that sometimes relatives, including grandparents, are left to pick up the pieces with not enough support, financial or otherwise, and I hope that this issue will be seriously addressed in the Bill. Perhaps my noble friend can comment. I am familiar with cases in which a grandparent has taken over because the son or daughter is incapacitated by drug or alcohol misuse, in prison or dead. It is estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 children live with relatives and that 2,000 to 3,000 of these come from families where one or both parents have serious substance misuse problems. I declare an interest as chair of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse. I know that children living in such families are very vulnerable and that carers—increasingly grandparents—who take them on, do so lovingly, but often in desperation. Research findings on kinship care suggest that, "““good outcomes for the children are sometimes achieved at the expense of the kin carers themselves””." Imagine a grandparent taking on one or more young children. They often have to give up work and they may suffer financial hardship, isolation, poor physical and emotional health, bereavement concerns, poor support from service provision and general worries about how to bring up children who have suffered distress. The Adfam document Helping Your Grandchild highlights that grandparents are often concerned about how to seek legal advice, financial benefits, social services entitlements and other help. The recently published report Mind the Gap, from Mentor UK, makes recommendations that include better financial support for grandparents, appropriate information about drugs and alcohol, a specific worker and appropriate respite. When grandparents and I met the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie—I was grateful for the support from my noble friend Lady Hollis in this—we identified key areas that need to be tackled urgently. These included legislation that will ensure financial support, including income and appropriate ring-fenced allowances for grandparents and kinship care. This would ensure that grandparents and kinship carers could be recognised financially. There is currently an inequity whereby grandparents as carers receive different and sometimes no financial payments. They are often confused about what they can claim; for example, child benefit, working families’ tax credit, minimum income guarantee, disability benefit, residence order allowance and foster care allowance. It is all very complex. In addition, conditions seem to vary between local authorities. All this confuses grandparents, who may be in a state of distress due to bereavement. Statutory services should have a key requirement to work with and support grandparents as carers. Targets should be set within integrated children’s services to ensure that obligations are met across local authority agendas, including adult and social care and substance misuse partnership agendas. Grandparents save the public purse millions of pounds, often for no recompense at all. So we give a huge cheer that we will have the Children in Care Bill, but there will be more cheers if kinship care is also addressed, and I for one will not let it rest.