New Kinship report highlights risk of kinship children entering the care system

Kinship’s latest report published on 2nd October 2023 finds the nation’s kinship carers at financial breaking point. 12% of those surveyed reporting that they might be forced to stop caring for their kinship child within the next year.

Breaking point: kinship carers in crisis is the first report in Kinship’s 2023 annual survey series. The survey explores the views and experiences of nearly 1,700 kinship carers across England and Wales. Discovering that more than 19,000 vulnerable children across England and Wales are currently being raised by relatives or family friends because they are unable to live with their parents. However, these are at immediate risk of entering the care system, with kinship carers struggling to cope without adequate financial support.

Unlike foster carers, most kinship carers do not receive a financial allowance from their local authority to help provide for those children in their care.

Of the kinship carers surveyed, 12% reported they may have to stop caring for their kinship child (or children) within the next 12 months, unless their circumstances change. A lack of financial support as well as difficulties getting their child the mental health support they need was cited as a core factor.

This means that more than 19,000 vulnerable children in England and Wales (enough to fill 665 classrooms) are currently at risk of losing their long-term home with a loving family member or friend and being placed in foster or residential care with strangers, due to the lack of support available for kinship families.

26% of those surveyed said that they are ‘facing severe challenges’ or ‘at crisis point’ and 1 in 10 said their household had run out of food within the previous two weeks, and they couldn’t afford to buy more.

There are more than 162,000 children being raised in kinship care in England and Wales, twice the number in foster care. A kinship carer is a relative or family friend raising a child when the child’s parents are not able to. More than half of kinship carers are grandparents, but they can also be aunts, uncles, older siblings, other relatives or family friends.

The report also provides an alarming insight into the number of children in kinship care being separated from siblings in the care system. Almost one in five kinship carers (18%) said they had been unable to take in the sibling of a child already in their care, because of circumstances such as a lack of space (49%) or financial worries (44%). This striking figure suggests at least 20,000 children may have unnecessarily entered the care system in the last decade, despite having a member of their extended family already caring for their siblings, primarily due to a lack of financial or housing support for kinship families.

Kinship’s CEO, Dr Lucy Peake said:

“These figures should shock us, because behind every statistic there are tens of thousands of grandparents and other relatives who are struggling to buy food and clothing for the child in their care and considering the unthinkable: putting a member of their family, who they love deeply, into the care system, just to ensure that child is fed and properly provided for.

“We know, as a society, that what children need is love, so it is deeply wrong to risk children in kinship care being separated from a stable home with people who love them, simply because the system is not set up to provide support for kinship carers the way it is for foster carers.

“Pushing this group of children into the care system is wholly avoidable. In fact, according to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, investing in non-means-tested financial support for kinship carers, on a par with fostering allowances, will start saving the public purse significant amounts of money, within just a few years.

“Kinship is urging the Government to equalise support for kinship and foster families in its National Kinship Care Strategy, and to roll this out as a matter of urgency, before any more children are pushed into the care system as the only way to secure the support they need.”

In May 2022, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care recommended that the Government introduce a mandatory financial allowance for all kinship carers with a special guardianship order or child arrangement order, where the child would otherwise be in care. Responding to the recommendation in February 2023, the Government’s ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’ strategy said it would “explore the case” for implementing this and committed to providing an update in a dedicated National Kinship Care Strategy before the end of 2023. The Government has acknowledged that providing an allowance to kinship carers, equivalent to that already given to foster carers, often makes good financial sense for local authorities, kinship carers, and for children and their outcomes.