Auditing local family & friend care policies

Kinship care has gained significant political attention. The new national kinship care strategy published in December 2023 reflects a commitment by Government to support more children to remain safely within their family networks. Currently, there is significant variation in the way different local authorities prioritise and support kinship care. New research by Family Rights Group has found that many are failing in their obligation to set out what support they will provide to kinship families. It points to the need for Government to simultaneously strengthen through regulation the requirements on local authorities and invest in kinship care support services on the ground.

There are more than 130,000 children across England who are unable to live with their parents and are being raised by relatives or friends, in what is known as kinship care (DfE, 2023). Many of these children will have experienced tragedy or trauma and have additional needs as a result. Their carers have often stepped up in a moment of crisis. Becoming a kinship carer has a big impact on family life, with emotional, practical and financial challenges. For example, our surveys show that over half of kinship carers find themselves needing to reduce their working hours or even cease working altogether.  

The last major national government guidance on kinship care dates back to the 2011 Family and Friends Care statutory guidance. Family Rights Group was key in influencing its creation. This guidance “sets out a framework for the provision of support to family and friends carers, whatever the legal status of the children they are caring for. It requires each local authority with responsibility for children’s services, in collaboration with its local partners, to publish a policy setting out its approach towards meeting the needs of children living with family and friends carers. It also explains what the policy should cover.” (Para 1.3, page 5) 

The statutory guidance also states that the local authority should “identify a senior manager who holds overall responsibility for the family and friends care policy. He or she will need to ensure that the policy meets the statutory requirements, and is responsive to the identified needs of children and carers…The responsible manager must ensure that local authority staff understand the policy and that they operate within its framework so that it is applied in a consistent and fair manner across the authority; an alleged failure to do so has been a significant source of complaint from family and friends carers.” (Para 4.9-4.11, page 22) 

Family Rights Group has recently conducted an audit of local authority family and friends care policies across England, updating a similar exercise we carried out for the Parliamentary Taskforce on Kinship Care in 2019. Our findings are extremely concerning. They show that a majority of local authorities are failing to adhere to the statutory guidance on family and friends care. The vast majority of local policies, where they exist, fall short on multiple criteria.  

The findings below are based on a content analysis of the 105 policies that have been reviewed since 2019, leaving out the policies that are insufficient for their lack of up-to-date information alone. Only the first finding takes into account all local authorities in England and the publication date and accessibility of their family and friends care policy.

Family Rights Group has a directory where you can find a link to all published family and friends care policies, with contact details (where available) for the manager responsible for the policy and its implementation.  

According to statutory guidance, local authority policies should be “clearly expressed, regularly updated, made freely and widely available and publicised by relevant means.” (Para 4.2, page 21)  

Alarmingly, over a third of all 154 local authorities in England fail to meet these criteria, as their policies are either outdated or not readily available.

 Specifically, 36% of local authority policies have not undergone review within the past five years or are not freely accessible online. Policies that cannot be accessed by kinship carers or contain outdated information serve little practical purpose. Families need to be able to understand their local authority’s approach and the support available to them. 

To ensure accountability in implementation of the policy, as per statutory guidelines, a senior manager must be identified “who holds overall responsibility for the family and friends care policy.” (Para 4.9 page 22) 

However, more than half of local authorities fail to designate a manager with overall responsibility for the family and friends care policy within the policy itself. Furthermore, among those that do identify a responsible manager, only two provide contact information for this person.  

Consequently, in the majority of cases it remains unclear whether there is a responsible manager, let alone how to contact them. This means that it is not clear if and how the policy is being implemented, and who can be held accountable. Moreover, (potential) kinship carers who are seeking information about support or who wish to raise concerns do not have a straightforward method of contacting the local authority.  

English local authorities should ensure that their policies and the support they offer align with the needs of kinship families residing in their area. Hence, it is crucial for them to actively engage with local families and utilise available data concerning children in kinship care within their locality. Accordingly, statutory guidance states that authorities “must consult children and young people, family and friends carers and parents as appropriate in drawing up their policies, and set out how policies have been informed by their views.” (Para 4.8, p22) 

While several authorities claim to have consulted local families during the policy development process, only two authorities include the outcomes of their consultation within their policies. An equally small number of authorities engage with quantitative data, such as the number of children living with kinship carers in the local area. This suggests that these policies were created without seeking to engage with kinship families in the specific localities the policies are intended to serve. 

Deciding to become a kinship carer for a child within your network is a decision that significantly impacts both the carer and the child. Surveys by Family Rights Group have found that half of new kinship carers have to give up work or reduce their hours and many become reliant on welfare benefits as a result. Understandably, access to financial support is often key for kinship carers. Similarly, they may require assistance in finding suitable housing, a school place, or need help arranging for the child to safely spend time with their parents.  

Statutory guidance (see paras 4.9-4.33, pages 24-26) sets out that local family and friends care policies should provide details on the types of support available from the local authority, any eligibility criteria that are in place, and how to apply for such support. It specifically mentions this in relation to financial support, housing assistance, educational support for the child, and facilitation of family contact. 

While most policies touch on these topics, they generally provide insufficient information for families seeking support. Many local authorities utilise a standardised format, provided by Tri-X, for their family and friends care policy. However, the standard texts in this format are not tailored to the individual local authority and its support offerings. Therefore, the untailored policies can only offer vague, minimal information on the various types of support available, lacking details about its nature, eligibility criteria, location, or how to apply. As indicated in the graph below, only a small fraction of local policies provides specific information, as outlined in statutory guidance, and some policies fail to include information on these types of support altogether. 

Consequently, in the majority of local authority areas in England, kinship carers cannot rely on their local family and friends care policy to inform them about the support they may be able to access in their locality. 

The issue of standardised formulaic policies also extends to the provision of information about family group conferences.

Family and friends care statutory guidance states “When difficulties arise, families may need support to help them to identify resources available to them with the potential to enable children to remain within the extended family. Family Group Conferences (FGCs) should be considered as an effective method of engaging the support of wider family and friends at an early stage of concerns about a child who may not be able to live with their parents. They promote the involvement of the wider family in the decision-making process to achieve a resolution of difficulties, and offer a way of ensuring that all resources within the family’s wider social networks have been engaged for the benefit of the child.” 

The guidance goes on to say that local authorities should establish arrangements to offer family group conferences or other types of family meetings, and should outline these arrangements in their family and friends care policy. (Para 4.37, page 27) 

Unfortunately, the standardised Tri-X text commonly used by most authorities fails to adequately explain the concept of a family group conference. It also fails to provide clarity as to when they can be offered, who can request them, and how to do so. Three-quarters of the policies reviewed utilise this standardised text, with 13% failing to address family group conferences or any other type of family meetings altogether. As a result, families might not be offered a family group conference or know they can request one. 

Another area where local authorities frequently fall short is in guiding kinship carers towards local services that are available for children and young people. Statutory guidance recognises that kinship carers may be less familiar with local services compared to others raising children, particularly if they have not previously been parents or are of a different generation. Therefore, it states that local family and friends care policies should bridge this knowledge gap by ensuring that information about local services and how to contact them is made accessible to family and friends carers (Para 4.15, page 23).

Unfortunately, as can be seen in the figure above, three-quarters of the local authorities in this audit fail to signpost to local support services in their family and friends care policy, leaving kinship carers unaware of potential support services available to them or the children they are caring for.   

Lastly, the examination of local family and friends care policies reveals that only a fifth of the policies reviewed address support with the legal expenses that kinship carers may incur, such as the legal costs of applying for a special guardianship or child arrangements order. While not addressed in statutory guidance, information about what support is available to help pay for legal fees is important for kinship carers.  

The APPG on Kinship Care inquiry on legal aid and advice, which Family Rights group facilitated, found that too often families face difficulties navigating a complex legal system. 82% of kinship carers did not feel they knew enough about their legal options to make an informed decision about the best options for their kinship child. A third said they were not satisfied with their current legal arrangement for their kinship child. Too often the costs of securing legal advice and representation during court proceedings can mean families are forced into debt, to self-represent, or are excluded from the process. Therefore, clarity regarding the support available from local authorities to cover these expenses is crucial to the decision-making process. 

Despite its significance for kinship carers, it is concerning that 80% of local authorities do not currently address this aspect in their family and friends care policy. It underscores the necessity for this matter to be included as a requirement in the updated statutory guidance for family and friends care. By doing so, local authorities can ensure that kinship carers and prospective kinship carers have the necessary information to make informed decisions about whether they want to apply for a legal order.  

Our analysis presents a concerning picture. A significant proportion of local authorities lack an updated kinship care policy that is readily available to the public. Even among those with such policies, the majority fall short of meeting a number of requirements outlined in family and friends care statutory guidance. Typically, these authorities have not engaged local families in the formulation of their policies. They often provide vague, limited, or no information at all about the support available from the council or other local services. In essence, local authorities are failing to adhere to statutory guidance and thereby neglecting to provide necessary information and support to kinship carers and the children under their care. 

This conclusion is supported by the calls made to our specialist national advice line, which regularly reveal poor, inconsistent and unfair practice. Local Government Ombudsman investigations also reinforce that picture, such as the recent decision on the unfair calculation of special guardianship payments in Devon.    

The Government has committed to a factual update to the statutory guidance, which should bring it up to date and renew its status. We are concerned that unless the guidance is given more teeth, families will not see meaningful change in their area. 

Our recommendations: 

• Government should put the local policy requirements on local authorities on a firmer footing than statutory guidance alone, by introducing regulations 
• Government should also consider reframing the requirement as a ‘local offer’ for kinship children and their carers. We explore this further in our blog here. 

We have presented Government with proposals for how they could regulate to bring this into effect.  This could be done ahead of the general election, without requiring new primary legislation. 

This research was carried out by Laurie Bolling, Executive Assistant at Family Rights Group. 

For this analysis, we collated the family and friends care policies of local authorities through online searches. In cases where these policies were not available online, we contacted the respective councils and requested their most recent family and friends care policy.  

We then conducted an audit of the policies. Only those policies that had been updated in 2019 or later were considered in this audit. It should be noted that the gathering of policies ended in January 2024 and any updates made to policies after this have not been taken into account in this study. 

The content analysis has focused on several key requirements outlined in the Department for Education’s Family and Friends Care: Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities. These include management accountability, informed by local data, information about local authority support, details about family group conferences, and guidance on accessing local services. It is important to note that this review does not evaluate the actual support provided by the local authority. Instead, it assesses whether the policies offer sufficient and clear information regarding what support it available and how these can be accessed.