News Insight: Social care - Ruling gives kinship carers hope

Family rights groups have heralded a High Court judgment made this month as an important victory for kinship carers.

The case saw the court rule in favour of a grandmother who looks after her grandchild, ordering Kent County Council to pay her the same wages as a foster carer.

Grandparents Plus chief executive Sam Smethers believes the ruling could be a landmark decision.

The council, which is appealing the decision, claims the girl's case was a "private arrangement", thus relinquishing any responsibilities they had for looking after her.

Smethers says this is frequently argued by local authorities, meaning they only have to provide financial support at their discretion.

Significant implications

"This case could have significant implications," says Smethers. "It means kinship carers would have to be paid foster carers' rates." There are about 300,000 children in kinship care in the UK and the average cost for a child in foster care is £40,000 a year. Smethers is calling on local authorities to pre-empt a potential £12bn legal bill by seeing how they can offer more support to kinship carers now.

She wants the state to offer universal benefits. "There should be a national allowance for kinship carers. It does not have to be at the same rate as foster care and could be means-tested," Smethers says. "It would benefit the children and carers and would be preferable to local authorities being pushed into paying fostering rates."

The Local Government Association is awaiting Kent's appeal hearing, knowing the implications could prove too much for local budgets to bear. "Costs could increase at a time when we're seeing a lot more demand on social services in general," says an LGA spokeswoman. "In order to meet child protection responsibilities, many local authorities are already dipping into reserves."

But John Simmonds, policy director at the British Association of Adoption and Fostering, believes the outcome of the case is unlikely to create a domino effect. "The Kent case indicated the local authority had sufficient concerns about the safety and welfare of the child for her to be seen as looked-after under the definition of the Children Act 1989," he says. "Other cases will be affected by this judgment, but it does not touch the much larger group of children cared for by family and friends who are never likely to be defined as looked-after."

At the launch of its Foster Care Fortnight campaign last week, The Fostering Network revealed that an unprecedented number of children being taken into foster care has left a shortage of 10,000 foster families. The organisation's chief executive, Robert Tapsfield, says this means local authorities are looking towards kinship care placements more often.

Statutory guidance

According to Tapsfield, the judgment regarding the Kent grandmother is in line with draft statutory guidance, which the Labour government was planning to issue in April 2011. "This states if children's services play a major role in the placement of a child, the child should be regarded as looked-after," he says.

He admits to concerns that many kinship placements are arranged informally by the local authority, which means it will be difficult to determine what role they have played in the placement. "This case may well leave kinship carers hopeful of more of an allowance from the local authority, but decisions will vary on a case-by-case basis," he adds.

The statutory guidance under consultation places a requirement on local authorities to be more explicit about their relationship with kinship carers, keep a database of carers and ensure support is provided according to children's needs rather then their legal status.

But with the advent of a new government, it is not clear whether the guidance will make it past its draft form, with the Department for Education saying it is unable to comment on its approach to kinship care.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF BRINGING UP GRANDCHILDREN

Jeff, 61, cares for his grandchildren James, 13 and Sarah*, eight.

"I look after one of my six grandsons and my granddaughter. They're my youngest daughter's children. She went off the rails, took drugs and went to prison for theft. She eventually abandoned the children in a council refuge as she was about to be evicted in June 2008.

Social services brought the children to us. Since then, they've not got involved.

We applied for a special guardianship order. This is supposed to accrue a payment at the discretion of the local authority, but in England you don't tend to get anything until you take the local authority to court.

There are all these different orders and allowances for different circumstances. There's no uniform system, so it is extremely costly and confusing. The only people making money out of it are the solicitors.

We chose not to become foster parents because we didn't want social services in the children's lives forever. But some sort of financial support is fair because we're saving the local authority money and saving the children's lives.

My wife and I saved my army pension to grow old on, but if it hadn't been for that we'd be destitute.

We did not envisage looking after children into our 60s. Many people say 'they're you're grandchildren, why should we pay you?' The answer is if they don't, the children go into care and cost you more money."

*Names of children have been changed.