Foster care ruling could have implications for councils

14 May 10
A High Court ruling that has given a grandmother the right to be paid the same amount as a foster carer for looking after her 15-year-old granddaughter could have wide-ranging implications for carers across the country, campaigners have said
By Jaimie Kaffash

14 May 2010

A High Court ruling that has given a grandmother the right to be paid the same amount as a foster carer for looking after her 15-year-old granddaughter could have wide-ranging implications for carers across the country, campaigners have said.

Kent County Council was forced to pay the grandmother £146 per week, the same amount a foster carer would receive. The grandmother claimed that if she had not looked after her granddaughter she would have been taken into foster care. On May 10 the judge ruled that the council must treat the granddaughter as ‘being looked after in terms of financial and other resources’.

Welcoming the court’s verdict, Nigel Priestley, a senior partner at law firm Ridley & Hall’s who represented the grandmother, said this should serve as a warning to other councils. He told Public Finance that, ‘if the local authority’s fingerprints are all over the case, they will have to stump up’.

He added that there was a chronic shortage of foster carers across the country, making it right for local authorities to try to place the child with a relative. But, he said: ‘The impact of a child descending on a single woman in her 50s is significant. There is no reason she should not be financially supported, even if she is a grandparent’.

Priestly claimed that local authorities across the country were trying to ‘duck the obligation’ to support children in care.

Sue Himmelweit, a professor of economics at Open University, recently wrote a report for Unison, Who cares: who pays?, calling for more recognition of carers’ employment rights.  She welcomed the court ruling, saying it ‘chipped away’ at the prevailing attitude that families should provide care for nothing.

‘What this case does is recognise that the people who do it out of love also need financial support. There is a great tendency, particularly in England, to believe that giving family care is incompatible with paying the carers,’ she told PF.

Himmelweit added that the recognition of the employment rights of carers could eventually lead to them being formally employed by local authorities.

Kent County Council is seeking permission to appeal the ruling. A spokeswoman for the Local Government Association said it could not comment on the case until after any appeal had been heard.

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