Alan Johnson urges exemption from welfare restrictions for kinship carers
Kinship carers should be made exempt from the Government’s benefit cap and other welfare restrictions to help prevent children being placed into the care of the state, Alan Johnson has suggested.
The former Labour frontbencher made the call as MPs asked the Government to take steps to reduce the number of children entering the care system and help them stay living safely at home.
Mr Johnson told MPs that kinship carers – family or friends who step in to look after a child – save taxpayers billions of pounds every year and more should be done to help them.
He called on the Government to place a new statutory duty on local authorities so that when they decide a child may need to become looked after they would have to consider the potential of relatives or other people connected to the child to help.
He said: “The Government should also consider extending the measures available to adopters to kinship carers such as paid leave and priority school admissions.
“More urgently, kinship carers should be exempted from the limiting of child tax credit to two children, the benefit cap and the extension of work conditionality rules to carers of children under five years of age.”
Speaking during a backbench business debate, Mr Johnson said that limiting child tax credit to two children “will obviously make it financially unviable for some relatives to take on a larger sibling group to keep the family together”.
The backbench motion on children in care was sponsored by Mr Johnson and the Tory MP for Telford, Lucy Allan.
Ms Allan said: “Over recent years we have seen steadily rising numbers of children being taken into care.
“There are now 70,000 looked after children in this country.”
She told the House that number continues to increase.
“There are some who argue that an increase of children in care shows that local authority children services are getting better at identifying children at risk of harm and therefore a rise in children in care must be a good thing,” she said.
“But you only have to look at the outcomes and life chances of care leavers to realise that a childhood in care provides its own risks.”
Ms Allan said that high profile cases of child abuse have “left professionals with an entrenched fear of getting it wrong”.
She said: “I don’t accept that continued increase in a rise of children in care is inevitable.
“What sort of society would it be if we were to assume that state care would do better than parents?”
Meanwhile, she said the “first step” for care professionals should be to help parents look after their children.
She said: “Most parents, however difficult their circumstances or background, set out to do the very best that they can do by their children and the first step must be to help them achieve that goal.
“This is not a mindset that is necessarily prevalent in the world of child protection.
“In fact in some cases it is the reverse.”
She added: “The net in which families are caught is being cast wider and wider.”
Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2015, All Rights Reserved. Picture (c) Lewis Whyld PA / Wire.
