The carer’s home should be able to accommodate the child in a way that meets their need for warmth, health and safety, privacy, and the space to go about their daily life, including any needs arising from a disability. However, the potential carer will often have had no time to plan for what is happening and their accommodation may not be appropriate for additional children. In these circumstances, the social worker undertaking the viability assessment should explore the willingness of the family member to move to alternative accommodation to meet the needs of the child.
The social worker should inform the family member about what support may be available to help them resolve any problems with accommodation. This may include house swaps, prioritisation for alternative housing and assistance with deposits, or help with altering the current home. Some local authorities have protocols between children’s services and housing departments that recognise the needs of kinship carers.
The Department for Education’s statutory guidance on family and friends care states:
‘Housing authorities and registered social landlords should be engaged to ensure that their policies recognise the importance of the role performed by family and friends carers, and that whenever possible family and friends carers living in social housing are given appropriate priority to move to more suitable accommodation if this will prevent the need for a child to become looked after.’
All households should be expected to be safe and functional and a viability assessment will need to consider what is required to achieve that. Children living with family and friends foster carers have the same rights to privacy and suitable sleeping accommodation as other looked after children, but these should be seen as part of the total assessment of suitability, to be balanced against other factors.
Sleeping arrangements must be adequate but may not always meet the same standards as for unrelated foster carers. For example, it may be acceptable for a child to have a sofa bed as their own bed and to sleep in a lounge area, but this will clearly need to take account of the needs and age of the child. This would also be more acceptable as a short-term arrangement and less so as a permanent one. The individual circumstances of each case should be considered.
Subject to an appropriate risk assessment, it can be acceptable for children to share bedrooms with other children and, although not ideal, for children to sleep in the same room as adult relatives, depending on factors such as the age of the child, their relationship with the carer, the wishes and feelings of all parties, and a full risk assessment.