Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)

My Lords, briefly, I lend my support to these amendments, particularly Amendments 103, 104 and 146 in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey. As we have heard, it has been a very interesting group about the role that kinship care is playing. Okay, the number is somewhere between 100,000 and 142,000 or 153,000: it is an awful lot of children who, because they are in kinship care, are not going into the care system, with all the costs that we know that can bring with it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, said in her very interesting and insightful contribution, kinship carers are often doing this at great sacrifice to themselves. Very often—most times—they are doing it out of love, but they are stepping up at a time of crisis to provide that love and care to children who would otherwise be in the care system. I just want to underline the point that the period when the child moves in can be incredibly difficult and require a lot of support. Often the kinship carer, who would not have planned to have taken on parental responsibilities for one or more children, would have to spend time attending meetings with children’s services, be involved in court proceedings, maybe find a nursery, make arrangements with the children’s school, the GP or whatever. The list just goes on. They are all things that tend to need to be done during the day, during working hours, and they all take time and money, which is why I feel that a kinship care allowance and extending the pupil premium is so important and, most particularly, an entitlement for an individual to be absent from work on care leave at the moment when those arrangements are being set up is critical. When I was looking at the very helpful briefing that I have been sent, I was reminded that a right to paid employment leave for kinship carers was recommended by the cross-party Parliamentary Taskforce on Kinship Care, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which we have heard about this afternoon, and indeed by the House of Lords Select Committee doing post-legislative scrutiny on the Children and Families Act, which I actually chaired. I remember that we came forward with that recommendation, and I think it is incredibly important that we take this opportunity to do something about it.