Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I, too, was delighted to add my name to this amendment. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on pushing at this in such a way that all the political parties now recognise that a family need not be exclusively parents and children but may be older parents or three generational. That wider approach to the concept of family and the need for family support is very welcome, as reflected in the Government’s latest Green Paper. I am sure that the parties opposite share this view. When I was involved with the CSA, one was often trying to get feckless, young, sometimes chaotic single fathers to pay maintenance. They would often do so only if they had had contact and bonded with the child. As these were 22 year-olds who were mostly living at home, the only way to make that work was for the mother—the paternal grandmother—to support, nag and encourage her somewhat chaotic son into bonding with that child. Often, that was the way in which the young man grew up into adulthood. Many of us were very aware of children rotating between the parental and the grandparental home, often when there was a breakdown of relationships through the mental ill health of the mother. One tried to boost and reconfigure, with the full support of DWP, the guardian’s allowance, which was then designated only for physical orphans—children whose parents were perhaps killed in a car crash. It seemed an appropriate, flexible benefit to extend for children who were effectively moral orphans—whether because the mother was on the game or on drugs, or the dad was in jail—and as a result were dependent on the support of other members of the family. We have modified the allowance somewhat—it now applies for two years rather than five years in prison—but we still have some way to go to allow it to fill a very necessary space. It was also clear, when working on lone parent policy, that often the only childcare that was acceptable to a lone parent, because she trusted it, was that offered by her mother. As a result, the lone parent was willing to go into work without guilt and hung on in work in a way that she might not have done if she regarded her childcare arrangements with more suspicion, so that they broke down too easily and too frequently, pulling her back out of the labour market. Again, we could not get support—understandably perhaps—for paying the childcare tax credits to grandparents, because of the extra cost, but I was delighted when my noble friend and the Treasury agreed that grandparent carers looking after children for more than 20 hours a week were at least able to get national insurance contributions. Although they might not get payment, they none the less were not penalised through their pension. I was delighted when that happened. I am delighted that both parties understand—as I am sure my noble friend does above all—that for children whose own parents may be chaotic, fragile, incompetent, on the game, in jail, with poor mental health or addicted, the grandparents may be the only stable loving adults in their life. We have to do all that we can to allow willing grandparents to keep such a family afloat, particularly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, as that child may be troubled and difficult in the formal care system and find their foster parent relationships breaking down time after time, because of the baggage of disadvantage that is brought to that new relationship. Grandparents hang on in when foster parents may not feel able to do so. In the process, as the noble Baroness rightly said, they give those children continuity with their roots. Often those children may love their hopeless mothers deeply and feel simultaneously protective and resentful of the situation that they are in. Loving grandparents can help those children to negotiate a complicated, ambivalent relationship with their natural parents. The advantage of grandparent care, as both my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, is that it is flexible, informal, reliable and swift. You do not have to go through the bureaucratic hurdles of taking your child into a looked-after relationship, nor is it so threatening, so definitive and so labelling. In all these ways, it avoids the stigmatising of the child and the stigmatising of the family and is, therefore, a much more welcome approach in many situations. Obviously, as the amendments say, we need data and we need consultative conferences to get the best outcome for the children. However, we also—and above all—need cash. It is quite simple. What often stops many willing grandparents continuing to support grandchildren is shortage of cash, particularly if they themselves are on a pension or have had to drop out of the labour market. What sort of cash do they need? Often they will need, as the noble Baroness said, instant cash. I would like to see a right, under Section 17 of the Children Act, as amended in 2008, for grandparents to go for a community care grant from the Social Fund for instant access to £200 or £250 to produce the bunk beds, the sheets and the spare clothes that that child, who may have come the day before, may need. That is the first port of call. Secondly, I would like to see non-conflictual help in resolving the issue of the benefit book, because the child benefit book is the passport to all other child-related benefits, including childcare tax credit. Perfectly sensibly, normally you do not change it within eight weeks; otherwise you will often find estranged husbands having it after two weeks because they were looking after a child for the summer holidays. We are trying to avoid that situation. The problem is that many biological mothers, particularly if they are addicted and so on, are extremely reluctant to hand over an obvious source of cash, while the grandparent, equally understandably, is reluctant to take them through the court procedures to get the benefit book restored to them, because that would break down whatever fragile bonds of trust there may be. Therefore, you need not only family conferences but an alternative route to give the financial support to grandparents. That, I think, could be a beefed-up guardian’s allowance, which at the moment is about £14 per week. There is no reason why it should not be beefed up to something like £50 a week. Alternatively, we could use as a temporary measure the care allowance that we give to carers. That would be particularly useful in those cases not where the child is long term with the grandparents but where there is a revolving door, as may happen when the mother is in poor mental health. The mother may break down and the grandparents take over for six weeks or 16, after which the mother is well enough and the children go back home; then, six months down the road, it happens again. In that case, a flexible guardian’s allowance, without fussing about the benefit book and so on, would allow the grandparents to have a carer’s or a guardian’s allowance to help them to manage the additional financial costs that fall to them in such a revolving, fluctuating situation. Finally, if grandparents are carers for the long term, we should give them proper financial support. Local authorities often find it very hard to find foster parents who will take on large sibling groups, mixed-race children or children with a disability, because they do not necessarily have the appropriate experience. Equally, the child may already be in his early teens, resentful and hard to handle, even for experienced foster carers, who may find him truculent and awkward for very obvious reasons. We know how hard it is to find such foster parents; there is a national shortfall of something like 10,000. I was privileged to spend a couple of days with one of the best private foster carer organisations, which charges £800 a week for a foster child. It was doing admirable work with the children whom the local authority found hard to place, but I suspected that in some cases, had there been more efforts to find kinship care, the child could have had a more family-friendly placement at a fraction of the cost and with potentially better outcomes. That very good organisation said that its biggest hurdle, despite recent changes in the law, was getting head teachers to accept children into schools as looked-after children ahead of other children. It told me, as have other organisations—I hope that this is not the case and that, if it is, my noble friend will resolve it—that academies are given a three-year pass on taking looked-after children in order to avoid implications for their results and the like. I very much hope that my noble friend, and perhaps other Members of your Lordships’ Committee today, can run with that and correct it if that is indeed the situation. I appreciate that all this could have some financial repercussions, but there would be savings in the direct foster care bill and huge savings in the longer-term outcomes for children. It is the right thing to do. We should not simply rely on exploiting middle-aged women to pick up the slack in the system, although they do so with grace and generosity. Rather, we should fund them, support them and help them as they should be helped.