Child Poverty Bill

We have all worked so closely with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, on this that I assumed that she would be taking it forward, but we are delighted to have the noble Lord here, despite the spreadsheet ideas. When we debate the issue of family and friends carers it sometimes gets clearer but sometimes it is more confusing. It certainly gets more passionate and we have to realise, as the noble Lord, Lord Martin, said, that in all these local authority manoeuvrings vulnerable children and families are in the middle of all this. For example, if a grandparent takes over a child who has lost his or her parents, the child and the grandparent will be grieving and there may be all kinds of behavioural difficulties. There is no money. One grandparent said to me, "When I should be reading my grandson a bedtime story I am filling in the bloody forms from the local authority". It simply is not good enough. Some local authorities—Nottinghamshire is one—have at least a part-time worker who will help the kinship carer to fill in the forms, tell them where to get support and generally help them to get the money. The problem is that many local authorities do not have such workers and they do not come up with support, financial or otherwise. It depends on where you live, which is not good enough either. I have met quite a lot of family and friends carers and they all say that the local authority is a point of contact and sometimes they are absolutely useless but sometimes they are really helpful. I know that there is guidance about, but the problem with guidance is that no one has to follow it. I do not think that that is stringent enough to deal with vulnerable children. Maybe the Minister and his officials could meet a group of us to come up with one overarching amendment that is simpler than this one. I am encouraged to ask this because there has been widespread support across all parties. We have to move forward in some way on this issue. I am not entirely happy with some of my noble friend’s responses, although I know that he supports it, but I think that we could come up with something that is more solid and much shorter so that this important issue on child poverty is addressed. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.