Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I shall speak to Amendment No. 87 in my name, which is grouped with the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. Whereas her amendments refer to support for family and friends carers after 28 days, my amendment is designed to meet the immediate short-term urgent needs of children and family and friends carers. It would do so by adding to the definition of a child in need under Section 17(10) of the Children Act those children who are being cared for by family members or friends. The current situation is that many relatives and friends take on the care of children without any warning at very short notice, often in an emergency because there is a crisis in the parental home. That often arises in the context of child protection inquiries, as well, in which the children are in fact in danger. If suitable care cannot be found in the family network, the child will almost certainly be taken into care, with or without parental agreement. The lack of planning for such placements, which is in their very nature, often creates enormous financial and other pressures on family and friends carers, particularly where the carer takes on a group of siblings, as often happens, who are traumatised by their previous experience. Such support may include cash to purchase suitable clothing or bedding—or even beds, if family and friends do not have quite enough beds in the house. Specialist mental health or behaviour support may be needed, or help with transport arrangements to enable the children to keep contact with their parents or to get to school or to other services that they need. Without that support, there is a risk that such placements may break down at a later date, or even quite early. That is not desirable at all. Where the child is treated as being looked after by a local authority, their carer will receive a fostering allowance and support to care for the child. Unfortunately, in practice only a small minority of family and friends carers in the situation that I have just described are treated as local authority foster carers, either because they agreed the arrangement directly with the parents to take on care of the child or because the local authority refuses to accept that the child was looked after when placed with the carer. Often that is done at night or at the weekend, when there is no local authority person there to take on that responsibility. In these situations, carers do not receive any fostering allowance and receive support from the local authority only if the child is considered to be in need. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in relation to the group to which she referred, indicated the difficulty of proving that the child is in need and going through some kind of trauma. The amendment would assist those family and friends carers who are not treated as local authority carers to have the child’s needs assessed without having to argue the case for them to be treated as being in need, because the statute would already define them as such. The support services would then be provided for them and they could get the amount of support that they needed, as determined by the outcome of an independent assessment of that need.