Kinship care leave

Current action

Alongside the National Kinship Care Strategy, the previous Government delivered new guidance for employers on how they can support kinship carers at work. This sets out best practice for supporting kinship carers at work, including how to adapt internal HR policies and improve cultures of support. It encourages employers to take steps to better support their kinship carer employees, and signposts Kinship’s own Kinship Friendly Employer scheme.

The Department for Education has also committed to introducing their own pay and leave offer for their kinship carer staff. Further details on scope and eligibility are yet to be determined.

Our verdict

Last year, the Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy committed to “explore additional workplace entitlements” for kinship carers and provide an update in the National Kinship Care Strategy. Therefore, it’s particularly disappointing that no further commitments were made in the Strategy or since to introduce a right to statutory pay and leave for kinship carers and provide the crucial employment support which kinship carers need, as called for by our #ValueOurLove campaign.

Our Forced Out report, published in June 2023, revealed that more than 8 in 10 kinship carers had been forced to give up work permanently or reduce their hours after taking on the care of a child, unnecessarily pushing valuable workers out of the labour market and plunging kinship families into poverty. A period of paid leave would not only allow carers to better support children and give them the time they need to settle into their new family environment, but would also create financial stability for kinship families and prevent carers from having to leave the labour market unnecessarily. It would also ensure vital nurses, teachers and support workers are kept active in our hospitals, schools and communities.

The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care also recommended that paid leave on a par with adoption leave should be introduced for special guardians and kinship carers with a child arrangements order where the child would otherwise be in care, and a similar recommendation was also made by the House of Lords Children and Families Act 2014 Committee.

We’re pleased to see the new guidance for employers signpost to our own Kinship Friendly Employer scheme. This will help encourage employers to grow awareness of and support for kinship carers in their workplace, and backs up the suggestion made in Stable Homes, Built on Love that “businesses can ask themselves whether they have employment policies in place to support kinship carers”. We have already seen large employers such as Tesco, John Lewis Partnership, cardfactory and B&Q announce forms of kinship care leave for their kinship carer employees as a result.

What should happen next

We want to see the Department for Business and Trade work closely with the Department for Education and for the new Government to make a commitment to introducing paid kinship care leave in the future.

Labour has previously outlined plans to deliver employment reform through its ‘new deal for working people’ paper and its manifesto committed to a first-year review of parental leave, offering opportunities to push for the consideration of kinship carers. Introducing kinship care leave would also align extremely well with other previous initiatives to support people with parental and caring responsibilities to remain in the workplace when they would like to, including the ‘day one’ right to request flexible working and the introduction of leave entitlements for other specific groups such as unpaid carers.

Family Network Pilots should include testing of how local authorities can support kinship carers with navigating changes to their employment, such as compensating for lost hours at work and helping with securing more flexible working arrangements. This will be particularly important for informal kinship carers who do not have a legal order securing their family arrangement and may not benefit directly from future statutory entitlements to paid leave.

At Kinship, we will continue our work engaging with employers to develop our Kinship Friendly Employers scheme and encourage organisations to adopt paid leave and other supportive policies ahead of potential future rights for kinship carers, building on the success of early adopters such as Tesco, John Lewis Partnership and cardfactory. Many kinship carers who might not benefit from a statutory paid leave policy on a par with adoption leave would still be well-served by greater understanding of and support with other workplace entitlements, including the option of shorter periods of leave, altered working hours or more flexible working arrangements.