My Lords, guardian’s allowance is not separately listed in the Chancellor’s Excel sheets of benefits and budgets in the Autumn Statement. It is invisible. However, it emerges from obscurity to be included in the benefit cap.
What does guardian’s allowance do? Why does it matter and why should it be exempt? Guardian’s allowance supports those at the sharpest end of kinship care, not where parental care is extremely neglectful or unstable, as it is for many children in kinship care, but where no parental care is possible at all. It goes to those caring for orphans. Usually they are physical orphans whose parents have died but, very occasionally, they are what the Victorians would call moral orphans—the father is in jail and the mother is an addict or on the game, sectioned or imprisoned.
More usually, the mother has died and the father is missing, not known or not registered on the birth certificate. There is no known parent. Sometimes, sadly, both parents have died in a car crash. In one case, a lorry lost its load and killed both parents in the car behind it. In another instance, an 82 year-old grandparent, not of course herself affected by the cap, learned that her daughter had died of an overdose and 24 hours later her son-in-law followed suit. At 82, she was asked to be guardian to four children. Guardian’s allowance is worth just £16.55 a child on top of child benefit. It goes to those caring for those children: the maternal grandparent, sometimes an aunt, often the close friend of the child’s dead mother. Their guardian receives the allowance until the children leave school.
Why do they need it? The children come to them following an extreme, often unexpected and irreversible emergency, and they come for life. This is not revolving-door temporary care. They immediately need extra bunk beds and bedding and, depending on the home from which they have come, clothes, shoes and toys. There are no grants and no social fund for this. They may need a larger home with higher rent and therefore more housing benefit. They will be the most distressed and traumatised of children and usually it is distressed and traumatised adults who will be caring for them, having themselves lost their daughter, sister or best friend. Such guardians, if in work, usually have to give it up.
Few people know about guardian’s allowance. Government certainly seem to discourage any take-up of it among kinship carers, although I am sure that kindly staff do their best. The result is that only around 2,500 people receive guardian payments each year, a figure that has been stable since my time in DWP. No one can find out the total cost because the Chancellor does not seem to publish it. However, I estimate—and I could be wrong—it is in total perhaps £3 million to £4 million a year.
Most guardians will not be affected by the benefit cap. The maternal grandmother may be of pension age, although with women becoming a grandparent at the age of 51 and the raising of the state pension age, many other grandparents will be trapped.
Other guardians may be in a household where an adult works and is therefore not caught by the cap, but there will be some of those 2,500—perhaps 500 or 1,000—who will be caught by the benefit cap because they too, like the children’s dead mother before them, are in straitened circumstances. They will be her mother, her sister, her friend. They may be on benefit themselves. They probably have children themselves. If they are on benefit, have children of their own and become guardians, they will probably be caught three times over. First,
they will be caught by the two-child policy: no additional child tax credit payments for them for cherishing these bereaved, traumatised children. Secondly, if they are in the private rented sector, they will be caught by the various housing benefit caps: no larger home for them, but more children cramped into the same tiny bedrooms as their birth children. Thirdly, if they are near or at the benefit cap, there will be no extra child tax credit, no child benefit and no guardian’s allowance either.
Children already deeply traumatised will also bring with them as their dowry greater poverty for every other member of the family which has taken on their guardianship. The same income at the benefit cap must now be stretched to cover them as well. Stretch and you tear. The orphaned children often have to be split up because of financial pressure. Having lost their parents, they lose their brothers and sisters as well and cry their way into their future.
Guardian’s allowance is not itself a means-tested benefit and currently does not count against tax credits or tax, so somewhat better-off families will receive it in full. They are better off, and they will rightly get the lot. Poorer families whose needs are greater, who are pushing at the benefit cap, may get nothing at all. That is palpably wrong. We offer more money to the better off and deny it to the poorest when they are doing the self-same selfless job of caring for grieving children. Decent social policy would seek to do the exact opposite: prioritise those in greatest need. Unless, of course, we think that poorer families are not up to being kinship carers and that these bereaved children should be removed from their family and community roots for the fault of being orphaned. I am sure that that is not what the Government intend, but that may be the effect.
You might think that this policy was essential to give the Chancellor big-ticket welfare savings, but it is to save what? I calculate that it saves perhaps £500,000 or £750,000 a year by removing guardian’s allowance from the benefit cap. I stand to be corrected, because I have been unable over a week to find the statistics.
Do we want kinship care? Do we want loving friends and family, themselves and their birth children already on benefit, to provide a lifeline and lifetime care for these additional traumatised children whose parents have died? Do we want them not to live in severely overcrowded homes as a result of the cap? Do we want such children to have the best possible chance of recovering from the unimaginable tragedy of their young lives by being wrapped in love and care and so making a decent life of their own?
If so—and I am sure that everyone in this House wants this, certainly everyone on the Government Benches—why in heaven’s name are we including guardian’s allowance in the cap? Why are we punishing the poorest for undertaking some of the hardest, most generous and selfless care of other people’s children in our society for the sake of saving less—possibly quite a lot less—than £1 million a year?
On the contrary, we should be increasing this amount, widening its eligibility and encouraging more kinship carers who qualify to apply for it. We should as a society be for ever grateful for the loving duty that they have so generously undertaken. I beg to move.