Kinship carers in Scotland: A lottery of support

by Heather Scally,
Mentor UK, Scotland

“I just felt so lost, I didn’t know where or who to turn to”

Over the last three years, Mentor has been working closely with kinship carers across Scotland as part of a European project. Our research published earlier this year, shows that a lack of support for kinship carers is still badly letting down the children in their care.

Traumatic early experiences mean around half of all children being looked after by kinship carers have serious emotional or behavioural problems. Their carers often struggle to cope and many worry that as the children reach their teenage years, they will follow their parents by turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with stress, or to fit in with their peer group.

Carers told us that they wanted support and advice in dealing with these specific issues, and also support for the children.

“My granddaughter constantly hits me. One minute she can be a lovely little girl, then she turns to this horrible monster. I just don’t know what to do with her.”

As kinship carers deal with emotional turmoil, they also face a financial drain on resources. Beds, clothes, furniture and toys must be bought and savings quickly disappear. There is no consistent definition of kinship care amongst Scotland‘s 32 local authorities and each treats kinship carers differently.

“I get £74 a week, while Sue gets £57 and Liz gets £26 and yet we are all in the same arrangement, it just doesn’t make sense.”

The lottery of financial support also extends to whether a carer receives practical help. The majority of kinship carers are not in touch with services at all, but for those who are, there is no guarantee that their social worker will have the knowledge or find the time to help them effectively. Kinship support groups can be a lifeline where they exist, but many carers do not have access to them and remain isolated.

Mentor will continue to make the case for a consistent entitlement for kinship carers for support and services to meet their needs. We also want to help carers access what they are entitled to and will shortly be launching an updated edition of our successful guide for kinship carers in Scotland and the professionals who work with them. The guide will be available for download on www.mentoruk.org.uk from the middle of December and hard copies will be widely distributed across Scotland by the Scottish Government.

“Giving Extended Families The Credit They Are Due,”

by Lord Freud, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for Welfare Reform

Whether through volunteering or caring for a child or young person, the support provided by grandparents and older people hugely benefits their immediate recipients and wider communities too.

The older generation provide this help everyday and in various ways, from collecting a grandchild from school enabling their son or daughter to fulfil their job commitments; by caring for a toddler once a week so a friend or relative can take up part-time work; or by helping a troubled teenager turn their life around by taking part in the Grandmentor (http://www.csv-rsvp.org.uk/site/grandmentors.htm) scheme I launched last year with the CSV.

The role older people play in society, often undertaking jobs that would otherwise full on the state, is enormous – and we must not be ambivalent about this. We must ensure older people get the recognition they are due, when they are supporting others to take advantage of work opportunities.

At the Department for Work and Pensions where I’m Minister for Welfare Reform, one of the first changes we made when the Coalition came into Government was the introduction of Grandparents Credits. This will mean that those below state pension age can start building up credits for a State Pension if they are caring for young children rather than working. Further information will be up on Directgov (www.direct.gov.uk) in time for applications to be made in 2012.

And I’ve been meeting with kinship carers’ organisations as part of my ongoing work into how Universal Credit will support family and friend carers.

We know that family and friends carers’ circumstances vary widely, and under Universal Credit we will have the flexibility to apply conditionality in a way that is responsive to their needs. We will not impose full-time work search and availability requirements on carers responsible for younger children, and there are specific safeguards on this in the Welfare Reform Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.

As people are living healthier and longer lives, we are increasingly depending on the experience, skills and support of older people for a greater period of time and we must recognise and support this – both as individuals and as a society.

For further reading please see Sarah Wellard’s (Grandparents Plus) blog here.

Grandad-hood: the early days

By Terry Smyth

Terry, who looks after his grandchildren while his daughter is at work, remembers how he felt about becoming a granddad and those early days of providing childcare.

I’ll come clean about me and grandad-hood. It’s a prospect I had long avoided facing due to the peculiar social status that attaches to being ‘a grandfather’. Listening to grandparents talking about their grandchildren always seemed to be the same, full to overflowing with gooey clichés. ‘They give me such joy, and you can always give them back’, cheek by jowl with a fixed grin that implied ‘but you wouldn’t understand’. Worse still, I had seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Spending the whole day in bed may have it attractions, but imagine the crumbs, the tedium … and the smell.

Accepting grandad-hood meant confronting ageing – stepping onto the top rung of the ladder where the gale threatens a fast departure. Then there was the anticipation of incontinence, the warm saggy aura of comfort eating, and the threat of a pernicious prostate clamped to my urethra. So far, so awful. But then the veil lifted to reveal two featherweight, fragile babies who had grown impatient with their uterine imprisonment and booked in early before the room had been made up. Overwhelming feelings first enveloped, then obliterated, all my selfish concerns. Truly, I hadn’t seen that coming.

When our daughter was planning how to cope with her return to work, we offered to look after the twins for one day per week. I can remember how anxious I felt at the time, because this was a promise that could not be broken. A day a week may not seem that much but we had to travel from Suffolk to south London, stay overnight and travel back late Monday night. At that time I was very busy as a freelance education consultant, travelling around East Anglia, and had to work out how to make current and prospective clients aware that I would be unable – ever – to work on a Monday (and also be pretty cautious about the Tuesdays given those regular childhood illnesses that afflict even the healthiest babies). And learning -  again! -  how to clean mucky bums, attach 21st century nappies, erect and then dismantle recalcitrant double buggies, and expel wind from two tiny reluctant tummies …. and then remove sweet smelling vomit from the back of my shirt.

So it was that, in May 2007, we began the most emotionally and physically demanding year of our lives – yet the most gratifying. The twins were eleven months old; we were considerably older.

Local authorities’ role in supporting grandparent carers

by Matt Dunkley
President of The Association of Directors of Children’s Services and Director of Children’s Services in East Sussex

More and more children are coming to the attention of children’s services in need of help and protection. This has partly been attributed to the “Baby P effect”. The tragic case of Peter Connolly  has made the public and professionals more acutely aware of the treatment suffered by some children at the hands of their parents. This awareness is a good thing, but it also puts increasing pressure on local authority children’s social care departments to make sure that these children have a safe and stable place to go. In a great many cases this stability is best provided by grandparents or other family and friends carers.

Removing a child from their home can have a traumatic effect on a child, particularly when they don’t understand the reason for removal. Care proceedings too can be a drawn out process full of uncertainty. Throughout the process children are faced with a number of ever-changing adult faces, for whom, however professionally dedicated they are, the child concerned is sometimes one of many on their caseload. Stability and familiarity can be worth their weight in gold and the grandparents’ home can be a safe haven. With a system under pressure from all sides – rising numbers of children needing placements and fewer resources to spend on each child, grandparents and the wider family ensure that at least some of these children can stay in places they know, with people they love and who love them.

There are those who would dismiss family carers on the basis that if the parents have failed, the grandparents must share some of the blame – that is a crude and brutal argument that has no basis in the evidence.  Indeed many of the heart rending stories on this website put paid to the stereotypes  that grandparents are  too old, or too traditional or not traditional enough to offer stability and love to their children’s children. All local authorities are now under a statutory duty to consider grandparents and other relatives as potential carers before the process of care proceedings begins. Family and Friends policies should be in place and I know that many grandparents’ groups around the country have been active in telling their local authority what they need to do more to support their young charges.

Such policies should reduce the delays and the uncertainty in the process and prevent needless court appearances and referrals for further assessment of family before any decision about a child’s future can be made. However, the local authority still has responsibility for assessing the ability of any carer for a child under the council’s protection.  For those of you who are eminently suitable to bring up your grandchildren I know that this can seem perverse and drawn out, but it is crucial that we make the right decision first time to avoid any further risk or disruption to the child. In many cases grandparents will be the best chance these children have for a stable future, and your fantastic contribution allows the professionals to focus more on those children who do not have the luck to find a home with grandparents or extended family.”

Protect grandparent carers from welfare cuts

by Sarah Wellard,
Policy & Research Manager
Grandparents Plus

No one can disagree with the Government’s aim to make work pay and get people back into jobs.  But we have real concerns about the impact of cuts in benefits on families headed by a kinship carer who are already struggling to get by on low incomes.

Coming on top of the cuts in child tax credits and housing benefit entitlement already being implemented, it’s clear that kinship carers and the often vulnerable children they are bringing will be unfairly penalised. Two thirds of kinship carers have incomes of below £300 a week and four in 10 receive benefits like housing benefit or council tax benefit to help with household costs.

David Cameron has said that he thinks it’s wrong for anyone on benefits to receive more than the average pay of someone in work. So the Welfare Reform Bill includes a cap that means no – one  – except war widows and those on disability benefits – can receive more than £26,000 a year. It sounds like a lot of money, and in most of the country benefits carers receive are way below that level. But in London carers with larger families  are already paying upwards of £400 a week in rent, so the cap would leave future carers less than £100 a week to live on to cover all their family’s needs.

What message will the benefit cap send to  kinship carers who are thinking about taking on the care of a group of siblings who have suffered abuse or neglect or whose mother has died?   Bringing up someone else’s children is an enormous emotional and financial commitment.  Kinship carers save the state a fortune by keeping children out of care – it costs £40,000 a year for a child to be maintained in independent foster care.  It makes no sense to push children into care when they could be living with family members who love them.

Grandparents Plus, along with other members of the Kinship Care Alliance, is backing amendments tabled by Baroness Tyler and the Bishop of Leicester to exempt family and friends carers from the benefit cap.

We are also backing an amendment from Baroness Drake which would mean that kinship carers don’t have to look for work for the first year after children move in.  This would give them a period of adjustment to settle the children, find school places, attend meetings with social services and lawyers, and cope with the enormous upheaval of children arriving unexpectedly.  Three in 10 kinship carers say they have to give up work when children move in, and are often instructed to do so by social workers as a condition of the placement.  It makes no sense at all for one part of the state – children’s services – to be telling carers that they must give up work in children’s best interests, and for JobCentre Plus to be saying they must be available for work.

Cuts to disability benefits will also hit hard kinship carers who are raising a disabled child.

We are urging our supporters to write to their MPs or directly to Lord Freud, the minister for Welfare Reform, asking him not to unfairly penalise kinship carers – it will only result in more children needlessly going into care.