Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I will also speak to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson. As far as this fund is concerned, I have been involved in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Permanence as an officer and occasional co-chair for the past seven or eight years. I do it with somebody the Minister will know: Rachael Maskell, the MP for York Central. I was just scrolling back on the group’s website to see how many times we have had to launch a mini-inquiry into this fund and go through a process of appealing yet again to successive Governments to keep it going. In doing that, we have amassed each time a large amount of evidence to show just how much good this fund has done and how transformative it is for families who have adopted children, many of whom are expressing the medium- and long-term effects of the trauma they received in early life. This fund is a genuine lifesaver for those children. I have kept in touch with a parliamentary assistant who works for an MP and is an adoptive parent. She has told me over the past few years about the intense challenges she and her husband have had with one of their adopted children and how, frankly, without the support of this fund, they were getting near crisis point and would have had to give up the adoption, so the child would have lost their adoptive family. It was the fund that enabled them to keep going. I stress to the Minister the disproportionate good that is done for these families by the expenditure of relatively small amounts of money, in the great scheme of things. The quality support and counselling that is required to help children with this level of trauma is not cheap. It requires extremely dedicated professionals who are very focused in this area. Working with children who have experienced trauma is as challenging for the practitioners as it is for the parents and the children. I would hate to think that, over the next four years of this Government, we will have a repeat of what the all-party group experienced under previous Governments, of having to go through this cycle every two or three years of the Government threatening to reduce the fund and us having to go out and get evidence to explain just how important and life-changing it is—along with other groups, of course. In the end, the Government typically listen to the argument, but in each case it has been a challenge to get them to listen, so this group is an opportunity to remind the Minister just how transformative this fund is for the parents of children who have experienced trauma, as many adopted children have. That leads me to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to which I added my name. In terms of numbers, adoption is a relatively small part of looking after children who are unable to be with their birth parents. There are the large numbers in kinship care, which we talked about earlier this week, the large number—we wish it was larger—who are being fostered, and then the extremely large, expensive and distressing number of children who are in residential care.