By Peter Swallow, MP for Bracknell

This Friday I met with a group of kinship carers in Bracknell to hear their deeply moving stories, and learn about the many barriers they face. Kinship carers are close relatives and friends who step in to provide care to children whose parents are unable to look after them.

This is almost never a gradual and well-managed thing; kinship carers become full-time parents after a panicked phone call, or a visit from the police, or in a hospital waiting room in the middle of the night. These friends and relatives do what I hope many of us would – they open the door unconditionally, without questioning the long-term implications of stepping in, to provide love and continuity to family caught up in a crisis.

But the next day, when perhaps the dust has settled and the future has to be looked at, they come up against an impossibly complex system. There are no less than six options available for these carers: kinship foster care, private foster care, special guardianship, child arrangements orders, testamentary guardianship, and adoption.

Each of these is a complex arrangement designed to mitigate different situations – in some the parents retain parental control, or it is shared, or it is severed altogether. With some options there are some funds available to support kinship carers, but more often than not the support is limited. Children in kinship care often do not have access to the same help available to adopted or fostered children.

The support received from different councils can also differ wildly, because the guidance from government has not been robust enough. Kinship carers have too often been left to fall down the cracks. New guidance for councils was published by the Department for Education on Friday, and it’s been welcomed by the Kinship charity – who praised the ‘requirement, through a local kinship offer, for local authorities to provide visible, accessible and up-to-date information for kinship carers on the support available to them.’

Last week was Kinship Care Week, and the government used this as a chance to take two further big steps in the right direction: an update to the national minimum standard for judging foster carers to specifically take account of the role and importance of kinship carers, and the appointment of a Kinship Care Ambassador to advocate for kinship carers across government.

Janet Daby, Children and Families minister, wrote last week that more is on the way for this overlooked group. I will certainly be pushing the Government to do more as it develops its policies toward kinship carers. There are more than 180,000 children in kinship care across the country – it’s time we bring the loving and essential work of kinship carers into the spotlight.