Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment No. 37, the only amendment to which I have attached my name, as I believe fervently that we have to do something about this issue. We discussed this matter in great detail in Committee. I do not wish to repeat those arguments or the arguments of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, but I will say something about how you have to change practice at the coal face rather than merely hoping that things will happen. We have all had a number of letters from grandparents with heartbreaking stories about their wish to care for their grandchildren and either losing the opportunity or being driven into poverty by the experience. I know that the Government have a strong policy towards kinship care, but the problem and the trick seem to be how we manage to protect the children by giving support to grandparents and how we make government policy happen on the ground. Having spent most of my life trying to get organisational change, I know that, in a situation where you cannot get compliance by encouragement, you have to have a different framework. There are two key issues. First, although we would like local authorities to be principle driven, most are resource driven. If you look at any area of their work in social care at the present time, you will find that, every time we raise the issue of resources, the Government tell us that millions more have been poured into a particular issue, whereas on the ground difficult issues are being resource driven. This is one of those issues. Secondly, on the ground, people set their own expectations. If they have been working with a family, have difficulty with it and then have to receive the children into care, or if there has been a traumatic experience within a family, such as death—social workers, like the rest of us, find bereavement difficult to take—often social workers will think that a separate placement is more beneficial for the children. That is because we have not yet helped most practitioners to know how to use research findings in relation to their work. As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, pointed out, research shows that children in kinship placements do better than those with even the most excellent foster parents found by the local authority. On the resource-driven issue, we need to set up a framework that says that kinship care is a priority. The framework that the noble Baroness has outlined would ensure that these people were assessed as local authority foster parents and then given the opportunity to look at alternative options, because they will need guidance in finding their way through our confused benefits system. I am a great believer in devolving responsibility to local authorities, but you cannot leave this just with the local authority unless there is either something in the Bill—that is what I would like to see, which is why I support the amendment—or extremely positive regulation and guidance. If there is not, we will see no movement on this issue.