Clause 8
Child Poverty Bill
1:30 pm
Steve Webb (Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
All these amendments relate to one specific set of issues: the needs of children who are cared for by friends and family but not their parents. Observant members of the Committee will have noticed that amendments 52 and 64 have a certain similarity. Initially, we thought that the only difference was that one used Roman numbering and the other used letters (a) to (e). The very perceptive will notice that we added the words “per year” after “28 days”, which we thought was tidying up but we now think might not have helped at all. Essentially, amendments 52 and 64 are the same. We and the hon. Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North seek to highlight a group of children and families who perhaps have not had the attention that they deserve.
It will not astonish the Committee to know that we did not write the amendment. It was drafted for us by Grandparents Plus, which is a very effective charity. Its profile has been raised considerably recently, including at an event yesterday in the House chaired by the Chairman of the Work and Pensions Committee. The concerns were also raised at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday. The set of families we are talking about are those where for a variety of reasons a child is not with the natural or step-parents but is being brought up by grandparents, other family members or friends. The campaign is trying to highlight the fact that there is a gap in the system. The arrangements under which a child may be placed with a grandparent, or a carer who is of the family or a friend, can be diverse, and not all such arrangements bring money with them.
Amendment 52 specifically focuses on the need to assess the financial needs of carers who are friends or family. Research evidence from a sample survey shows that whereas 15 per cent. of foster carers—the closest analogue—said that they were in financial hardship, 75 per cent. of friends and family carers did so. We are looking at a group of children who may fall through the net unless an amendment of this sort is accepted. The financial mechanisms of support for such families are varied and complex. Although there are specific forms of support such as guardianship allowances, they often apply only in very specific cases. Certainly the mechanisms for financial support are leaving many in financial hardship.
Very often the friend or family carer will make sacrifices for the sake of the children. One grandparent carer wrote on the discussion board of the Family Rights Group:
“Like most we have had a dramatic change of life style. All ‘retirement’ plans gone. I had to give up work and if I try and return later I will have lost all seniority therefore will be on minimum wage”.
So the carers are making sacrifices for the children. When we assess child poverty we do so in terms of the household’s income, so obviously the living standards and needs of the whole household are relevant when we are looking at the well-being of a child. So if there is a set of children whose family arrangements leave the adults in hardship, its needs have to be properly identified and responded to. One way would be to put them in the Bill under amendment 52.
Amendment 53 would define the group that we are talking about. Amendment 54 would find out from the Secretary of State the number of children involved so that we can assess the scale of the issue and know more systematically than we currently do how many children are being brought up by grandparents, relatives and so on.
We must consider the well-being of children. The alternative may be local authority care; we want to avoid situations in which although friends and family are available to provide a more loving, secure and familiar home environment than foster care or that of an institution, they cannot do so because of the lack of financial support. To reduce child poverty, we must track down the causes and, if one is that friends and family cannot afford to have the child with them, the well-being of the child will suffer, which I am sure the Government would not want. Amendment 55 would require that, when the local authority is doing its needs assessment, the needs of that particular group should be taken account of.
As ever, we could have come up with a lot of groups that needed their own bit of the Bill so, in a sense, our proposals are probing amendments to see how much, for example, the Government already know about such groups, what assessments they have already made of the scale of the problem and what policies are either in place to tackle the needs of the groups or would be in place under the Child Poverty Bill. I commend the amendments to the Committee.