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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I wondered why the noble Baroness was in her place but did not speak to her amendment. I thought that she might expect me to give a reply anyway, since it was in this group. However, she has reduced my task significantly because the next few pages of my speaking notes can wait until the noble Baroness brings her amendment back. I turn to Amendment No. 11. As I said in Grand Committee, the Government are committed to making significant improvements in support for family and friends carers. We hope that this will reduce the numbers going into care, as my noble friend Lady Massey wanted to see. She can tell the meetings that she will address later that it is our intention that local authorities should provide an enhanced range of services precisely to avoid the need for children to go into care when they would not need to if they had appropriate family and friends support. However, we cannot support the amendment as drafted. It would require local authorities to treat any person who is not a parent but is caring for a child in the circumstances set out in subsection (2) as if they were a local authority foster parent with whom the child had been placed by the authority under Section 23 of the Children Act 1989. This would be the case even if the local authority had had no prior involvement with the child or his or her family, even if the local authority considered the placement to be unsuitable or had concerns about the carer’s capacity to care for the child. The carer’s entitlement to financial and other support under this provision would not depend on any assessment either of the carer’s needs or of those of the child. It would not allow the local authority to take into account the means of the carer or the parents and could impose on local authorities a duty to provide financial support for what is, in essence, a private fostering arrangement. The local authority would be obliged to assume financial responsibility for a care arrangement that it would have little power to police, and where it had no particular duty to ensure that the arrangements promoted and safeguarded the child’s welfare and no continuing duty to rehabilitate with parents. The local authority would have no power to interfere in any way with the arrangements that the carer makes for the child, even if it considered that those arrangements were not in the child’s best interests, unless it obtained a court order. The carer could pick and choose the support they wished to accept from the authority—for example, accepting the financial payments but refusing social work support either for themselves or the child. The law imposes on local authorities specific duties to those whom they have approved as foster carers, because authorities have taken responsibility for the care of the child and they rely on foster carers to perform the practical daily aspects of that care. For similar reasons, foster carers are controlled and regulated and the local authority can impose sanctions if foster carers fail in their trust. These related powers and responsibilities flow from the fact that the local authority has a particular legal duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of a child it looks after. However, family and friends carers are already able to access a range of support under existing legislation, including both special guardianship and residence order allowances. Through the Bill we are amending the Children Act 1989 to add to this. I have already mentioned that we are seeking through Clause 21 of the Bill to amend Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 to extend local authorities’ powers to provide financial support to promote the upbringing of children in need by their families. By removing the existing restriction that allows such support to be made only in exceptional circumstances, we will enable local authorities to provide financial assistance on a longer-term basis where they are satisfied that doing so would promote the child’s welfare—including, I stress, services for grandparents. So the Bill makes a significant move in the direction set out by my noble friend and supported by the noble Lords. Further, family and friends carers have similar entitlements to those of a parent who cares for a child. There is a range of financial support, such as child benefit and child tax credit, both of which are unaffected by any payments made under either the existing Section 17 of the 1989 Act or the extended Section 17 that we propose in our amendments. Carers can qualify for other benefits on broadly the same terms as parents and, if they are bringing up a child on their own and are unable to work, they may claim income support on the same basis as other lone parents. My noble friend Lady Hollis asked me about the eligibility requirements. As there is no greater expert in the House on these issues than my noble friend, I certainly do not feel equipped to reply precisely, benefit by benefit. However, I undertake to write to her setting out those issues and, in particular, responding to the concern which I know underpins her question, which relates not to formal eligibility but to the arrangements that we are making to promote uptake by carers who may not be the birth parents of the children in question.