Grandparents who step in to provide full-time care for their grandchildren to prevent them being taken into care will be given guaranteed financial support under a government pilot scheme.
Charities welcomed the trial as groundbreaking and said if fully rolled out across England it had the potential to transform the lives of tens of thousands of children looked after under “kinship care” arrangements.
Kinship carers are grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings or close family friends who take on full parental responsibility when a child loses their birth parents as a result of death, a family court order, severe illness or imprisonment.
Campaigners have fought for more than two decades to establish financial recognition of the role and personal sacrifices that kinship carers make. Some carers say they have felt ignored and exploited as a “cheap option” despite saving the state billions it would otherwise have had to spend on foster or residential care.
About 132,000 children in England live under kinship arrangements, but most carers receive little or no state financial support to meet the extra costs of raising a child. Many say they gave up work to care for a child relative. Most are already on low incomes and at heightened risk of poverty.
Under the trial launched on Friday, kinship carers in seven council areas will for the first time receive a financial allowance in line with that of foster carers, which is between £170 and £299 a week depending on where they live and the age of the child.
This means a kinship carer living outside London and looking after a 15-year-old would receive an allowance of £13,832 a year from April. This is not means tested and will not affect universal credit or child benefit payments.
Introducing the scheme on Friday, the children’s minister, Josh MacAlister, said: “As a country we owe kinship carers our thanks and our support, and the new financial allowance which we’re piloting recognises the vital role they play ensuring families can stay together.
“We promised to introduce this scheme to support kinship carers who step up for the children they love and give every child the best possible start in life.”
In effect MacAlister is charged with implementing proposals he originally outlined in an independent review of children’s social care he authored for the previous Conservative government in 2022, two years before he became a Labour MP.
Academic evidence suggests kinship care is not only far cheaper than foster or residential care, but also more likely to lead to better health and employment outcomes for the child. It helps them retain a strong sense of family, identity and culture.
The chief executive of the charity Kinship, Lucy Peake, said the scheme could be life-changing but in its pilot form covered only 5,000 children. She urged ministers to rapidly extend the allowances to all kinship families across the country.
“Kinship carers hold our care system together, and the government must provide the right support to ensure they are not pushed into poverty for doing the right thing and keeping their family together,” she said.
The chief executive of the Family Rights Group, Cathy Ashley, welcomed the “groundbreaking” scheme but said it should be made universal as soon as possible. “We urge national and local government to build the fair, effective support system that children and families need,” she said.
The seven council areas participating in the three-year trial are: Bexley in Greater London, Bolton, Newcastle upon Tyne, North East Lincolnshire, Medway in Kent, Thurrock in Essex, and Wiltshire.
