Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My name is on the amendment and I am the rather unlikely original sponsor of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Grandparents. I was immensely grateful when the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, a more conventional leader, took over the chair of that group. I helped that group set up the tremendous support that it gives to many children in this country. Coming from the north country, where most of the people in my kind of community looked after their grandchildren, I knew what that emotional support was about. There is an issue with our amendment which seems to imply that every grandparent who takes over the care of their grandchildren wants a payment. I know from working with the Grandparents’ Association that that is not necessarily so. Many grandparents wish to take on that care; they know what has happened to their own children and want to provide surrogate parenting because that is what is needed in the family. But they need all kinds of other things and many of them need financial support. What irks them—and this is rather scandalous—is when children are taken into foster care in an emergency and then, with good kinship care programmes, placed with the grandparents, and finance is given to the original foster parents but no finance is given to the grandparents, who then have a terrible struggle. Not only that, there is very little help and advice about how to access the other financial supports which are available in the system. I have spoken to a number of grandparents who have taken on difficult adolescents—I have lots of surrogate grandchildren and the joy about grandchildren is that you can give them back—who need support as they get older and have to struggle with the adolescent’s emotional needs. It is very interesting that grandparents, like many other members of the community, are not anti-social services. They are not frightened that social services are going to come and take the children away—indeed, they know they will not take them away—but they want local authorities to give them advice and support and sometimes a break. Occasionally a bit of respite care is needed to keep the situation going. I recognise that this comes into kinship care but these grandparents, as a group, underpin our society. I hope the Government will look at their special needs and at how to help them to do the task they are undertaking.