The unpaid grandparents who care

There are, throughout the UK, approximately 200,000 grandparent carers who care full time for their grandchildren to prevent them being taken into foster or residential care. They save the local authority about £40,000 a year per child. Often the children are escaping from a desperate situation, the majority fleeing from either abuse, neglect or drugs and alcohol misuse or domestic violence in the home.

Yet research has found that 38 per cent of this number live on under £200 a week - below the poverty line of £235, and that a further third live on less than £300 weekly, says a report on timesonline.

Many social workers greatly prefer this sort of "kinship" care as they know that that the child is being cared for by his or her own family in a home situation that is more stable and permanent than foster or residential care.

Increasingly, the courts look favourably upon grandparents who are increasingly becoming a formal part of the care system. Care arrangements by grandparents are then ratified by the courts as residency orders or special guardianships.

However, although grandparents who care are often retired, local authorities are not obliged to offer them financial assistance, despite the ever rising costs of childcare.

CEO of Grandparents Plus Sam Smethers said that the value of these caring grandparents has been largely underestimated. She commented: “Not only are they left unsupported, often in extremely difficult circumstances, but they are not even counted in official government statistics. They are the forgotten families of family policy and it is time to change that."

Ms Smethers added that the survey conducted by her organisation showed that a small amount of support for family and friends carers would be cost effective but that one in three are not even receiving child benefit. It was found that many grandparent carers receive no child benefit as they do not wish to upset their relationship with their children by asking for the money.

It is envisaged that in the event of the conservatives winning the next election, millions of grandparents would be given sweeping new rights. In an interview with the Daily Mail at the end of 2009 David Willets, the conservative party's spokesman for the family said that there would be legal reforms to ensure that grandparents are given new contact and custody rights so they can maintain contact with their grandchildren in the event of bereavement, separation or divorce, and would be given preference in terms of custody to avoid their grandchildren being placed in care.

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