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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I support this important amendment and I have put my name to it. I do so partly as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Grandparents and Extended Kin. It is estimated that more than 200,000 grandparents in the UK have their grandchildren living with them—not just staying for part of the time or being looked after part time, but living with them. As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, many of those children have very severe and special needs; many are disabled; and many have parents who are in circumstances which have made life very difficult indeed for them. It is essential that these carers receive adequate support, both financial and in other respects, to support the dependants for whom they are caring. I read an article a couple of days ago which stated that each year more than £50 billion is spent by grandparents on family care. This is not grandparents buying Christmas presents; this is family care. That is a huge amount of money. In the course of chairing the all-party group I have met numerous people doing this job who spend so much of their personal money that they cannot afford it and are living under extreme difficulty. We know that the discretion available to social services departments sometimes results in grossly unfair treatment of grandparents or members of the child’s extended kin who provide exactly the same amount of care as foster parents. The law allows this unfair treatment, or even discrimination, against grandparents simply because they are relatives. One example is that from time to time—I think this is the practice; it has happened too many times for it to be just a one off—late on a Sunday night, or late at night, a grandchild is brought round to the grandparents and they are asked ““Will you take this child?”” That is the last the grandparents see of social services; they do not come back. It is safe for them to say that social services are stretched, they have very little money, ““but we have managed that case and so we do not have to worry any more””. This is not acceptable and something needs to be done. The law needs to be changed so that people doing the same job are treated in the same way, otherwise we cannot talk about equality of treatment.