My Lords, I wish to focus my comments on friends and kinship care. As my noble friend Baroness Massey noted, up to 300,000 children are growing up in friendship and kinship care. For most of these children, family members step in to avoid children having to be taken into care, while in other instances children are placed with wider family members following care proceedings. Kinship care is by far the most common way of providing permanence and stability for children who can no longer live with their parents.
I fear, however, as do some other noble Lords, that there is a danger that the Bill overlooks the vital role that kinship carers play. While recognising the laudable desire to reduce delays in placing children for adoption, the current drafting of the Bill risks making it harder in future for the wider family to step in, particularly as it removes the duty on local authorities to give preference to keeping children with their families. It is important that the right balance is struck between accelerating the process of approving adoptive placements and ensuring that alternative permanent placements for children with grandparents and other relatives are not overlooked.
On Report in the other place, the Minister, Edward Timpson, showed sympathy for these concerns and said that he was thinking of amending the Bill to make it clear that local authorities must first consider placements with family or friends before they consider fostering for adoption placements. However, we do not yet have visibility of such an amendment. I hope that we see it soon. I know that there are many who will wish to stay with that issue and see that amendment coming forward.
Friendship and kinship carers can be caught between two different public policy priorities—getting and keeping people in work, especially women and older workers, and local authorities protecting the interests of vulnerable and traumatised children by requiring carers to give up work to look after them. This tension was raised during the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, gave the matter his detailed consideration and subsequently provided for the Universal Credit Regulations to exempt kinship carers from work conditionality, looking for work for the first 12 months after taking on the care of the child. An issue flagged up at the time was the increased likelihood of friends and kinship carers losing their jobs because the taking on of such children often occurs at short notice when they have no employment leave entitlements.
The Bill presents the opportunity to extend parental leave entitlements to kinship carers to give them parity with adoptive parents. Kinship care is the most common permanency option for children who cannot live with their birth parents, yet there is a stark imbalance in employment leave entitlements for kinship carers compared with entitlements for adoptive parents. The same arguments apply to the extension of parental leave to kinship carers as were advanced for the introduction of adoption leave: the need for time for children to settle and bond with carers and the advantage of enabling carers to remain in the labour market. There should be access to an entitlement to both paid leave and a period of unpaid leave, the latter to deal with the initial uncertainties when the children first arrive and long-term arrangements may not yet be settled.
Grandparents Plus research shows that almost half of kinship carers who were previously in work leave their jobs when children move in. A Family Rights Group survey revealed that nearly 40% of family and friend carers have left their job, lost their job or taken early retirement when they have taken on the care of children. It is often more difficult for both young and older kinship carers subsequently to get back into the labour market. There are many reasons for this, including the high needs of the children, but a lack of legal entitlement to any time off undoubtedly contributes.
Extending the right to request flexible working to all is welcome. A later retirement age means that an increasing proportion of grandparents of younger children are likely to be in employment. The option of working flexibly will become increasingly important to enabling grandparents to combine work with care.
Emergency leave provisions to deal with family emergencies are available to parents, and an employer must enable them to take a few days’ unpaid leave. In Committee in the other place, the Minister, Jo Swinson, said that this entitlement was available for grandparents
relied upon for childcare. The regulations are unclear, though, and there is evidence to show that most employers and grandparents believe that they are not entitled to take such leave in these circumstances. The Bill should remove this ambiguity and enable a grandparent to take a reasonable amount of time off to provide help to deal with an unexpected event. Currently one in four working families depend on grandparents to provide childcare. With increased longevity, and with people remaining longer in employment, it will become increasingly important that grandparents are able to combine work and caring responsibilities in order to maintain not only their own but mothers’ employment.
The Government should also consider the possibility for unused periods of parental leave to be transferred to a grandparent if neither parent is able to use it. The principle of transferability of leave from mothers to fathers has been agreed. Would it be such a radical step to extend it to grandparents? I know that one of the drivers for transferable parental leave between mother and father was to break the stereotype that childcare is a female responsibility. Weighed against that, though, it is important to recognise who is providing the care, and in many instances it is the grandparents.
I conclude with a quote from the noble Lord, Lord Freud, in his DWP press release of 22 June 2012:
“Kinship carers make major sacrifices for their family and friends and help children in difficult situations to remain in a family environment instead of in the care system. I am determined that the benefits system recognises this important contribution”.
I hope that this Bill will also recognise that contribution.
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