Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support Amendment No. 37. We are all grateful to the Minister for the full letter that he wrote to us, setting out responses to some of the questions that we raised, particularly so far as I was concerned. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said, the research shows how valuable kinship care can be in reining in the damage to challenging children, especially given that the children’s needs may be volatile, intermittent and flexible. There may well be a revolving-door situation for some of those families that are under strain. Foster care with, so to speak, professional strangers may not be the most appropriate way forward for those children. It can be appropriate but, where there is no history of abuse but rather a history of neglect, all the research suggests that kinship placements are much more satisfactory for the long-term health and well-being of the child. The problem is that the grandparent needs a resource to be able to provide kinship care. Children do not come cheap. My noble friend’s letter suggested just how inappropriate central government financing structures are for such children. The grandparent may not know whether the child will be with them for two months, six months or six years. They need financial help; they will almost certainly need a lump sum immediately for beds and so on, as well as some form of income attached to the child for their maintenance. Although in his letter my noble friend describes perfectly accurately—I would expect no less—the existing system, none of it gives me any comfort that the problem that I have identified will be addressed. It is true that the Social Fund can make grants through the community grant scheme to individuals, but very seldom, so far as I am aware, has that money gone to grandparents in these situations. The budget is cash limited and the preference is for budgetary loans, repaid over time, in order to acquire white goods. It is not appropriate where a grant for grandparents is needed and I know from my own experience that such grants are very rare. So that does not help. What about income? After six or eight weeks, the child benefit book may go to the grandparent, if that is not contested by the natural parents—and often in such circumstances it is contested by a parent who is reluctant to give up even the modest income that comes with that benefit book. But let us suppose that that goes across; it is still a fairly low-value benefit. It is going up to £20 and we are delighted about that, but it is still fairly low. The two high-value benefits that are available are either the child tax credit, which is the tax credit payment for children, or the childcare tax credit, which is what allows a registered childminder to be paid while the parent goes out to work. Neither of those will be easily available to the grandparent. The child tax credit requires a new claim to be made by the grandparent, which will be at odds with the existing child tax payments to the natural parent, where the assumption is that they will run for 12 months. There will be serious delays and probable difficulties about the evidence of where the primary carer is. What about the childcare tax credit? Given that we are talking about a grandparent, there is no provision, even if that grandparent is an experienced foster carer, for them to look after their grandchildren solely. The tax credit would have to go to the next-door neighbour, or a stranger, who would be paid to do what the grandparent would prefer to do herself but is not, by law, allowed to. The grandparent falls right down the middle of the benefit system. Although my noble friend describes the structure fairly, not one penny of the money available will necessarily help the grandparent to finance the child maintenance that is necessary if that child is not to have the additional struggles of being deprived of financial support, as well as the stress and strain that they may suffer from the effects of some form or other of parental neglect. If, as apparently is the case, my noble friend cannot seek to produce any central government resource to help grandparents in this situation, the only other avenue is the local authority. I am not at all confident that local authorities would manage, incidentally. As the noble Baroness said, they, too, are resource driven and the issue would be bandied to and fro between the two tiers. Is it central or local government’s responsibility? The result would be that the grandparent would still get nothing. I know, having accompanied a delegation with my noble friend Lord McKenzie on some of these issues, how many grandparents were forced to give up kinship care because they could not get any financial support. Those children were then placed permanently in the care system, so that the possibilities to rehabilitate the children with their natural parents in years to come were lost for ever. That is very sad. I hope—indeed, I am confident—that my noble friend is aware that there is a real lacuna of financial support with appropriate flexibility for grandparents in this situation coming from central government. It has not been identified, responded to or addressed. In that absence, local authorities must act if central government will not. It is for that reason that I support my noble friend’s amendment.