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To speak to an adviser, please call our free and confidential advice line 0808 801 0366 (Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm, excluding Bank Holidays). Or you can ask us a question via email using our advice enquiry form.
Are you a parent, kinship carer relative or friend of a child who is involved with, or who needs the help of, children’s services in England? We can help you understand processes and options when social workers or courts are making decisions about your child’s welfare.
Our advice service is free, independent and confidential.
To speak to an adviser, please call our free and confidential advice line 0808 801 0366 (Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm, excluding Bank Holidays). Or you can ask us a question via email using our advice enquiry form.
Our online advice forums are an anonymous space where parents and kinship carers (also known as family and friends carers) can get legal and practical advice, build a support network and learn from other people’s experiences.
Our get help and advice section has template letters, advice sheets and resources about legal and social care processes. On Monday and Wednesday afternoons, you can use our webchat service to chat online to an adviser.
If you follow your local MP on social media or have joined a campaign lobbying the government to change something, you may have come across ‘All Party Parliamentary Groups’ or ‘APPGs’ for short. You may have thought, what does that mean? What do these groups do?
At Family Rights Group, we often talk about the APPG on Kinship Care, and you may wonder exactly what that is.
Our short explainer is here to answer those questions.
It’s a group of MPs and members of the House of Lords (also called Peers) from different political parties who get together to discuss and campaign on a certain issue they care about.
There are hundreds of these groups in Parliament covering all sorts of issues. For example, it might be that they think that government should work harder to end homelessness and have ideas about how that could be done. Another APPG might be to improve access to sports, or to encourage healthy eating.
While they do not have the power to change the law, they are a way to draw attention to an issue and to bring others together to campaign for change. They can arrange events to promote an issue, hold meetings where they question ministers, and they can carry out research and produce reports.
They are set up by politicians who must follow certain rules for the group to be official. For example, they must elect an MP as a Chair, and they must hold official meetings in Parliament. They cannot be set up by members of the public, but you can be invited to attend events and meetings when those are open to the public.
Some groups are supported by a charity or other organisation outside of Parliament. They are known as the group’s ‘Secretariat’ which means they work with members of the group to support its work. This includes actions like setting up events and carrying out research.
Family Rights Group supports the APPG on Kinship Care. We worked with politicians to set it up in 2021.
Until the recent election, the Kinship Care Group was chaired by Andrew Gwynne MP, who is himself a kinship carer to his grandson Lyle. Andrew is now the Minister for Public Health and Prevention so as a member of the government he cannot hold an APPG position. The Group will be meeting in September to elect a new Chair so stay tuned.
It’s an active, campaigning group with cross party support from MPs and Peers. The group has questioned children’s ministers, lobbied the Government to address the postcode lottery in kinship care support, and helped to secure debates in Parliament (like this one in March) that have pushed kinship care up the agenda.
A key success for kinship carers was achieved last year when the government extended legal aid to some special guardians. It followed the Group holding an inquiry looking at how kinship carers struggle to access legal aid and advice and often end up having to represent themselves in court. Kinship carers giving evidence to the APPG about their experiences in court was crucial to securing this change.
It has also had a significant impact on the national kinship care strategy, published in December 2023.
Following the recent general election there are now lots of new MPs in Parliament – 335 to be exact, out of 650 in total!
Some will have heard of kinship care before – thanks to help from many kinship carers who lobbied their local candidates during the election campaign. But many will not know what kinship care is or why we’re campaigning for better support.
You can help by writing to your local MP and asking them to join the kinship care group. Some MPs – for example government ministers – cannot join APPGs but we still need them to know about the issues kinship families are facing. If you have written to them previously, for example during the election, you can still write to them again.
The next meeting is on 10th September in Parliament and we have created an easy tool so you can send an email to your MP inviting them to be there. Start by putting your postcode in the box below.
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