Invisible army of carers must get support

Kinship carers – a term I’m neither fond of nor believe many understand – care for 300,000 children in the UK, and the number is rising. The majority of these carers are grandparents. We hear lots about grandparents providing childcare to enable their own children to work, but little recognition is given to the army of family members who are full-time carers bringing up children who are not their own.

These “missing generation” families are common all over the country and we rarely hear their story. One lives close to me. Peter and Cherry, both retired, have cared for their teenage granddaughter for five years due to her mother’s drug misuse and absent father. Neither of them are in good health, but they do an amazing job and provide a safe and loving home for their granddaughter and are helping her through college despite little financial support.

A study by the charity Grandparents Plus suggests that 60,000 grandparents have dropped out of the labour market to bring up their grandchildren. This often means these carers then have to rely on benefits, as most do not receive any allowance from their local authority for their caring responsibilities. Ironically, many of these children would be in expensive local authority care if their grand-parents hadn’t stepped in to care for them.

Many of these children come with emotional baggage because their own parents can no longer fulfil a parenting role due to health, drugs and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, illness or imprisonment. For grandparents, it can often mean a total life change. Caring is exhausting and often carers feel isolated and face practical challenges. Unlike new or adoptive parents, working-age grandparents and family carers are not entitled to paid leave when children move in. Many of those who have to give up work because of their new caring responsibility experience financial hardship. Four out of 10 become reliant on benefits because they can’t work and only one in eight manage to find their way back into a job, with an alarming number of families falling into poverty.

The adoption system needs an overhaul and the government’s desire to speed up the process for finding children a permanent home with a loving family is to be applauded. But in the rush to accelerate the process and meet targets, local authorities must ensure that family members are properly considered when children cannot live with their own parents. Simply hurrying up adoption practice could result in rushed decisions that are not in the child’s best interests.

Relatives can provide a more stable, safe and loving home for children rather than putting children into care. If a child cannot live with their parents, placing them with the wider family should be considered rather than taking them into care, costing the state billions of pounds.

So why do government and local authorities do so little to support families providing kinship care? It could be that many are “under the radar” and not known by children’s services or schools. Arrangements made within the family are often without the involvement of a social worker. But more must be done to identify these carers.

Children’s centres could provide help for families who take on younger children and schools could do more to support grandparents who struggle to help grandchildren with homework and the curriculum. Finally, as many charities are urging, government, children’s services and employers must take action to reduce the number of grandparents and family carers who are forced to give up work when they take on the care of a child.

This support should include: entitlement for kinship carers to take paid leave when they take on full-time care of a child; extending unpaid parental leave for kinship carers up to the child’s 18th birthday; transferable maternity leave if the mother or father is unable to look after a baby; the right to request flexible working; local authorities to implement the statutory guidance on family and friends care and to respect their obligations to assess carers and in many cases pay financial allowances; and the introduction of a national financial allowance for family-related carers who look after a child for more than 28 days.

Without action to support this hidden army of carers, the care system – and hundreds of thousands of children – would be in crisis.

Denise Burke is director of United for all Ages and www.goodcareguide.co.uk