Kinship Care and Parental Leave

Kinship carers are remarkable people who step up when children need them to provide the most important thing in any childhood: loving relationships and a secure home. They are a critical part of our care system and the support and respect they receive should reflect this. I was proud to set up the first cross-party kinship carers taskforce in 2018, which is now an All Party Group shaping kinship care policy. It is an issue very close to my heart.

As well as failing to help families early, the care system has not been sufficiently focussed on finding children loving homes and relationships that will give them the best possible start in life, but a series of changes enacted by our Government will change that for good.

I am proud to support this Labour Government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which enshrines the first definition of kinship care in law and will mandate local authorities to publish their kinship local offer. This will increase their accountability, ensuring all kinship families are getting the information they need about the support that is available to them.

It will also require local authorities to offer families a group decision-making meeting before applying to take a child into care.

In the 2024 Autumn Budget, our Government invested £44 million of funding to a Kinship Allowance pilot – the single biggest investment in kinship care to date. The pilot will provide a financial allowance for kinship carers, equivalent to the allowance for foster carers. It will begin later in the year and will support around 5,000 children in kinship care. The pilot will run in up to 10 local authorities to begin with to allow the effectiveness of the policy to be tested. I strongly support this evidence-based approach to policy making as the best route to giving kinship carers the support they need. Our Government is also funding dozens of kinship peer support groups across the country and testing family network support plans as a route to back kinship networks who could safely look after one of their kin.

On top of this, the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund provides valuable therapeutic support for children and their families to lead more stable family lives. It has so far helped over 54,000 children access the support they need, strengthened family relationships, and helped to prevent family breakdown. That is why I am glad that £50 million was provided for the fund for this year. Applications to the fund that run into the 2026/27 financial year can now be made, giving families the clarity and reassurance they need to plan for their children’s ongoing support and reassuring those in the sector that they will be able to continue delivering services. Next year, our Government will launch a public engagement process to better understand how well the fund is working to ensure that effective services are reaching children and families as efficiently as possible.

I am definitely keen to learn more about how parental leave works alongside kinship carer rights, so thank you to anyone who brought this to my attention.