It’s all well and good to put gran at “the front of the queue” in child custody and care hearings, but who will make sure she can cope once she gets there? Parity of support between extended family and regular foster carers is the only way to fix the UK’s creaking care system.

In Spain, 85 per cent of children in foster care are with relatives – often grandparents, but also aunts, uncles and older siblings. When a child’s birth parents can no longer look after them, the authorities automatically look to the family to see who can step into the breach. And thanks to Spain’s strong family culture (Spanish children don’t leave home on average until they are 29 – one of the longest stays in Europe), only 15 per cent of children have to be taken in by “strangers”.

Intuitively, this makes sense – why use up the scarce resource of a formal foster parent, or worse yet put a child in residential care, when many children can often just go to their gran’s?

It is all the more surprising, then, that England and Wales have such low levels of kinship care. Although the numbers are not recorded centrally and vary from authority to authority, it is believed on average there are 7-8 per cent of children formally “in care” living with their extended families.

Ok, so we are not a country with a strong Catholic family tradition like Spain. But how come over 50 per cent of children in care in Australia are with their families? And 16 per cent in Scotland? And 20 per cent in Northern Ireland? 

According to the Tories, this is all the authorities’ fault – for not putting grandparents at the “front of the queue” at custody and care hearings. They have pledged that a “fair deal for grandparents” will be a feature of their forthcoming family strategy, to correct this oversight. 

And yes – many local authorities don’t consider family placements as the first choice for children needing somewhere to stay, and according to the Family Rights Group, 69 per cent of councils don’t have a formal written policy on family care.

But this isn’t the whole picture. Although we lag behind internationally, there are still around 200,000 children being raised by relatives, often grandparents, in this country. And for these people, life can be pretty bleak. Although an estimated 93 per cent of children in the care of relatives are there due to abuse, neglect, or parental substance misuse, the vast majority of extended families receive no support – either financial or otherwise – from local authorities and social workers. Whilst formal foster carers receive fees and allowances, training, social worker visits and respite services to support them with the challenges of their role, grandparents – who are older and poorer than foster carers on average – usually get none of the above.

So it’s all well and good putting grandparents at “the front of the queue”, but who will make sure these pensioners actually cope once they’re there? The Tories have remained silent on this.

Today, the Kinship Care Alliance are protesting in Westminster on just this issue, asking the government for better support for families looking after the children of relatives. But nothing less than parity with foster carers seems appropriate or fair.

This is what the Scottish thought too, and in 2009, Holyrood passed legislation that not only ensured family were considered first for care placements, but that consistent and equal financial support, training and respite was provided for kinship and foster carers alike. The result has been a 15 per cent increase in the number of kinship carers looking after children in Scotland.

South of the border, we are a world away from achieving this. The support foster carers currently get varies hugely between local authorities, and there is no standard fee or allowance, meaning foster cares in some parts of the country receive hundreds of pounds more a year than others. This would need to be addressed before parity could be sought with kinship carers.

But it must be worth the trouble. The "Baby P effect" has seen applications for children to be put into care rise by 47 per cent. These children will join the 60,000 or so already in the system, ratcheting up the pressure on the over-stretched foster system (we are between 8,000 and 10,000 foster carers short at last count) and prohibitively expensive residential homes. By any measure, the care system is creaking at the seams - it seems unbelievable that we are not using the huge untapped resource of extended family as the key to easing this pressure. 

But just because kinship carers are "family", doesn't mean they can cope any better than a foster carer or residential home worker with often severely traumatised children. Those put "to the front of the queue" at custody hearings might want to look after their grandchildren, but will be less daunted by the prospect if they know they will have some extra cash to pay for school trips, and the backing of a professional support team should things go awry. Poor, vulnerable and often elderly relatives struggling with troubled youngsters will do them, nor the children, any good.

So the Conservatives have hit the right note by recognising that grandparents, and extended families, have a huge amount to offer - but making kinship care the mainstream is unlikely to turn into a reality, or worse, do more harm than good to children - if the issue of supporting these carers isn't tackled. 

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