Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund

Commons Urgent Question

The following Answer to an Urgent Question was given in the House of Commons on Tuesday 1 April.

“I welcome the opportunity to respond to this Urgent Question. The adoption and special guardianship support fund has for many years provided valuable therapeutic support to adopted children and special guardianship children who were previously in care.

I very much recognise that funding over that period has supported many children and families and helped them towards a stable family life. I have in recent weeks heard many more stories of how important the adoption and special guardianship support fund has been to many, and I pay tribute to the Members from all parts of the House who have been advocates and champions for adopted children and children in special guardianship placements in their constituencies.

I very much appreciate that the delay in confirming the continuation of this fund has been a very difficult time for many. I am especially concerned about children and families, because many of those whom the adoption and special guardianship support fund supports are in great need of continued help.

I also recognise that there has been an impact on providers of therapy, who have not been able to plan and prepare for the year ahead in the way they would have liked. However, the department has been clear with local authorities and regional adoption agencies about transitional funding arrangements, which means that therapy that started in the last financial year can continue into 2025-26, even ahead of full 2025-26 budget announcements.

Appropriate transitional funding has been agreed for a significant number of children. I regret the delay in making this announcement, but I am happy to confirm today that £50 million has been allocated for the adoption and special guardianship support fund this year. We will be announcing further details to the House in the coming days and opening applications to families and children across our country as soon as we can”.

15:50:00

My Lords, this last-minute announcement of the renewal of the fund, while welcome in itself, feels extraordinary, as it came after weeks of obfuscation and a day after the previous fund had expired. Will the Minister explain what happened, what went wrong, when applications will open and what the Government are doing to make sure that the most urgent cases are fast-tracked for support?

I am sure that all noble Lords will recognise the very important role played by the adoption and special guardianship support fund, which provides valuable therapeutic support to adopted children and special guardianship children who were previously in care. I very much appreciate that the delay in confirming the continuation of this fund has been a very difficult time for many people. In relation to individual arrangements, we put in place transitional funding arrangements ahead of the full 2025-26 budget announcements that we were able to make yesterday. This means that therapy that started in the last financial year has continued into this financial year, so most children who are in the middle of their therapy have not missed out. I am pleased that the Government were able yesterday to confirm that £50 million has been allocated for the adoption and special guardianship support fund. We will be announcing further details in coming days and opening applications to families and children across the country as soon as we can.

My Lords, it is nice to hear that we have actually got round to finding some solution here, but will the Minister give us an assurance that we will not have this stop-start approach to something which needs continuation? If we want people to become guardians or to take on these adoptions of very difficult cases, they need to have some continuation and support. Effectively, this delay, this potential trouble, was something that would discourage people. What are the Government going to do to make sure that this never happens again and to undo the damage they have done to the image here?

As I pointed out, for individual children there was transitional support for therapy that they had got permission to receive from last year into this year. However, I concede that this has been a difficult time for both the children and families that receive support through the fund and for therapists who supply support as part of that funding. We will work as hard as we can to make sure that we provide consistency and early indication of budgeting in future years.

My Lords, it seems clear that this support is critical for many children, and I am thinking in particular of children in kinship care. The problem is that at the moment the criteria restrict the fund to those who have previously been in the care system. When kinship care really works well is when the case conference enables the wider family to step in immediately, but the child may still be traumatised and indeed other members of the family may need support too. Will the Minister commit to looking at this so that, when the Government are thinking about the criteria for the now very welcome money, they think about those who are not just coming through the care system?

My noble friend is right that the adoption and special guardianship support fund is specifically aimed at recognising the state’s role in having previously cared for the child at the point at which they are adopted or go into special guardianship. She is also right about the enormously important role that kinship care plays in our system. That is why the Government have made a series of announcements about how we can support the important role of kinship care: the appointment of the first national kinship care ambassador; the new kinship care statutory guidance for local authorities; the delivery of over 140 peer support groups across England, available for all kinship carers to access; and, of course, the recently announced £40 million package to trial a new kinship allowance, to test whether paying an allowance to cover the additional costs of supporting the child can help to increase the number of children taken in by family members and friends, with all the benefits that my noble friend has identified.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that we need to do all that we can to demonstrate that we value enormously people who are willing to adopt a child who has had a very unfortunate start to their young lives? That includes the excellent foster carers who would like to go forward to adoption but who may have difficulty reconciling the financial issues that that raises. Could the Minister assure the House that everything will be done to promote adoption as a positive, creative and enabling way of protecting children?

The noble Lord is right. As I say, I do regret the concern that there has been among adoptive parents and those with special guardianship orders about the certainty of the support that we were able to announce yesterday. I assure noble Lords that this does not show a lack of support from the Government for adopted children or adopters, who, as the noble Lord says, play an enormously important and positive role. Today, the Government have been able to confirm funding of £8.8 million for Adoption England to improve the recruitment of adopters and the matching of children and family support during this financial year.

My Lords, with regard to the delay in funding, I welcome the Minister’s point about transition funding being arranged for existing families, but because of the delay there will be a backlog of kinship families and local authorities that want to proceed with new applications for therapeutic assessments and support. What steps are the Government going to take to ensure that processing can be done at speed for these new applications?

We want to come forward quickly with information about how new applications can be made, and I will be happy to share details of that with the House. I understand that, when applications are made, they are dealt with quickly through the system, but we need to be clear with people about how to go about making those applications, and that is something that we are working on at this moment.

My Lords, the funding that has been announced for the next financial year is welcome, and I know that the Government have said that funding going forward will be subject to the spending review. Is it anticipated that there will be an announcement that this fund will be secured over more than one year?

I think the noble Baroness answered the question in her question. We have announced £50 million for this financial year and, as part of the coming spending review, we will look to consider the position over a longer period. That is not only in respect of this particular fund but is the case with a lot of the expenditure we currently have and would have been the case under the previous Government as well in the run-up to a three-year spending review, which is the period we are in now.

My Lords, will the Minister accept my thanks for having widened the crack she opened about a week ago when this matter was first raised in this House? That was welcome. I also thank her for the very whole-hearted way in which she endorsed kinship care in her responses just now. Does she recognise that in the education Bill, whose Second Reading will be on 1 May, which deals with some aspects of kinship care, there are obscurities and weaknesses in that? I hope that, between now and 1 May, she can give some very careful thought as to how that could be made more precise in the Bill.

I am looking forward to 1 May, when we can start the adventure of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. I am undertaking to continue my learning about the provisions within that Bill over the Easter Recess and, as I have learnt in this House, I have no doubt that we will both get into the detail and be informed by considerable experts on all parts of that legislation. I look forward to explaining more about how that Bill will support kinship care and to learning more about the challenge and what more this Government need to be able to do to put that into operation.