Some local authorities routinely flout the law by failing to provide appropriate levels of financial support to carers who “do the right thing” by becoming legal parents to child relatives, the local government watchdog has said.
Inquiries by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman revealed that councils were paying special guardians at less than the legal rate, often incorrectly calculating allowances, then changing and cutting them without consultation.
After one case investigated by the ombudsman, a local authority agreed to make backdated payments to more than 170 carers after systematically and unlawfully underpaying them over a six-year period, despite being alerted early on to their error.
Campaigners, who say the chaotic and inconsistent nature of state support too often leaves carers in poverty, welcomed the report and called on ministers to take action to ensure that councils were able to ensure that special guardians were fairly and consistently treated.
“Special guardians are relatives and friends who have done the right thing by children who would otherwise be in care system … Too often local authorities ride roughshod over their and the children’s needs, taking advantage of these carers’ good nature and lack of knowledge of the system,” said Cathy Ashley, chief executive of Family Rights Group.
The ombudsman, Michael King, said: “It is imperative that these children and their guardians get the right support available to them – and without having to fight the system to get what they are entitled to.”
Special guardianship orders are an alternative to foster care and adoption, under which children unable to be looked after by their birth parents are legally put into the care of grandparents, older siblings or friends, often known as “kinship carers”. Around 200,000 children in the UK are looked after in this way.
Councils are expected to help meet the needs of special guardians, including providing financial support, counselling and advice. They are supposed to pay means-tested allowances to carers in line with fostering fees, and meet any extra costs relating to the special needs of the cared-for child.
However, the ombudsman’s report, based on 322 detailed investigations into complaints during 2017-18, two-thirds of which were upheld, has confirmed that too often councils were not only underpaying carers, but were failing to provide promised support and giving inaccurate advice.
An intervention by the ombudsman forced North Tyneside council to agree to make backdated payments to at least 172 carers after it emerged that its financial support for special guardians was just 25% of the rate it paid to foster carers. It had been alerted to this breach of the law in 2011, but failed to change its policy until 2017.
The council subsequently tried to limit the backdated payments to 2016, but the ombudsman successfully insisted that they be backdated to November 2013, saying that it was impossible that it could not have known of the error after this date.
North Tyneside refused to say how much the total bill for back pay would be, but council documents estimate the future added cost of paying special guardians at the legal rate to be an extra £900,000 a year.
A spokesperson for the council said: “We have fully revised the way in which we calculate allowances and are writing to all special guardians to explain the changes that we have made in light of the findings of the ombudsman.”
Last month the government scrapped its policy of withholding benefits from kinship carers who fall foul of the two-child limit, weeks after a judge declared it to be “perverse and unlawful”.
Lucy Peake, chief executive at the charity Grandparents Plus, said: “We know special guardians across the country face a postcode lottery when it comes to trying to get support from local authorities, as well as opaque policies and huge variation in practice.”