So why ARE we abandoning Britain’s secret army of saints?

Some 200,000 children are looked after by a relative to stop them going into care. But in this shocking investigation, we reveal how ‘kinship’ carers are left to struggle almost entirely alone

OVeR the course of one night in the summer of 2018, Diana speed’s family of six became one of seven. it started with the phone ringing at 1am. Diana, 46 , who lives in east sussex with husband John, 47, has four children, aged 11 to 21.

At that time her older daughter was at university, and the younger one was on a gap year on the other side of the world. ‘i was sure it was one of them,’ she says. in fact, it was social services. her one-year-old nephew, Tom, had been found in a park in the early hours of that morning. his mother, Joanna — Diana’s half-sister — was passed out drunk nearby. ‘his buggy had tipped up and he was found inside,’ says Diana. ‘he could have died. it was like a nightmare.’

Diana knew Joanna’s life was chaotic. her mother’s daughter from her second marriage, ‘ she had some horrible things happen to her when she was a child’. stories have emerged of abuse outside the family, and also of domestic abuse within the home. ‘ she chose to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol,’ says Diana.

When Joanna got pregnant at 30, Diana hoped she would change. Joanna never revealed who the father was, and it was Diana who supported her through the pregnancy. she saw her regularly after Tom was born. ‘We thought she was doing really well,’ says Diana. sadly, the truth was that her life was spiralling out of control.

‘Tom was delivered to us by two policemen at about 3am. he came to us in a hospital gown and a nappy and that was it. John and i lay awake for the rest of the night looking at him in the middle of us,’ says Diana.

she thought her days of having a small child were behind her. ‘We were just getting a bit of time back,’ she says. she worked four days a week as a classroom assistant; her husband worked long hours as a GP. They didn’t have a spare room, or anything for a baby to sleep in. ‘John had to go to Tesco and get nappies and wipes, pyjamas, clothes, a cot,’ she adds.

But when confronted with tiny Tom, and the social worker’s question ‘Can you have him?’, Diana didn’t hesitate. ‘From the minute he came into our lives, i knew there was no way i could let him go again,’ she says. ‘There was no way he was going into any system, or up for adoption. he was with me and that was it.’ The

number of kinship carers — those who step in to look after the children of relatives, to prevent them being taken into care — has risen dramatically over the past decade, says Lucy Peake, chief executive of the charity Grandparents Plus. she estimates there are around 200,000 children in kinship care in the UK.

The rise is partly down to court guidance issued in 2013, when kinship care was promoted as a way of addressing the rising numbers of children in the system. sir James Munby, then president of the family division of the high Court, said social workers must show that all alternatives had been considered before putting a child up for adoption.

Research shows that young people tend to do much better if they have grown up with family, rather than in local authority care, says Lucy.

They are with people they know and trust, which is important when you consider what they have experienced — neglect or abuse by parents who are often mentally ill or dependent on drugs or alcohol, as well as the trauma of being removed from home.

Kinship care is wonderful, says Lucy, but she notes the financial, professional and emotional support available to carers is ‘seriously inadequate’ and ‘in stark contrast to support available to foster carers and adoptive parents. There are loopholes and it’s not a clear system. Caught up in that are families who are stepping in at moments of crisis, trying to do the right thing.’

This takes its toll on carers, many of whom are grandparents with illequipped homes and diminishing energy and funds. ‘We have a lot of kinship carers struggling financially, practically, emotionally,’ says Lucy.

A recent survey by Grandparents Plus found that a third of kinship carers were so concerned about the impact on their health that they were not sure they could continue.

‘ That makes me really angry, because if we don’t support the carers to support these children, that’s a lot of children who are at risk of going into the care system,’ says Lucy.

sarah*, who is in her 30s, lives with her husband in the North of england. They have four children, aged eight to 13. her niece, now five, first came to stay for the weekend when she was five months old. ‘i was in Marks & spencer and the police called, and said, “You do realise she is on an at-risk register?” i had no idea.

‘All i could think was, “i don’t want to be arrested in Marks & spencer. i need to get out!” ’ [Any adult looking after a child on an at-risk register must be CRB- checked and have a social worker’s permission.]

‘i knew the mum had been involved with social services, but didn’t realise they were still involved. i thought my brother had been a good influence. i didn’t know there were problems,’ says sarah.

in November 2016, children’s services

called to say ‘we needed to go and pick up my niece’.

The children — Sarah’s niece has three half- siblings — were being removed from their mother. Sarah’s brother was off the scene; the couple had been advised to separate by social workers.

Sarah had already agreed that if anything happened, she would step in. ‘I felt that’s what we needed to do. She is my blood niece.

‘But my husband was in shock. He said, “My God, this is for ever, and we’ll open a can of worms.” I just said, “I’ll do it with or without you, it’s your choice.” We had a bit of a barney about it and then he said, “OK”. My niece was with her mum at her mum’s house. We drove there and everyone was distraught.

‘The other children were being put into cars and driven off to foster carers, whereas for us, the social workers took my niece off her family and handed her to us in the street. They said, “You need you leave. Now.” ’

Her niece was 21 months old. ‘I cried a lot. You see it from a mum’s point of view, regardless of anything that’s happened,’ she says. She still wrestles with this unresolvable conundrum, balancing her desire to keep her niece safe with the pain the mum must feel.

She says she tells her niece, who is very close to her youngest daughter, ‘You were in mummy’s tummy first, and then we got you as a special present just before Christmas’.

She adds that her husband is devoted to her niece and, if anything, she is more protective of her than her own children. ‘She’s already had things happen in her life that will have done some sort of damage, and I don’t want anything else to come into that,’ Sarah says.

But she feels she’s battling the system. First, she and her husband were assessed. ‘It’s very intrusive,’ she says. ‘ They speak to expartners, your school, employers. You open up your life to them.

‘Social workers also asked me if I knew how to check the temperature of a bath. I have four children!’ she says. ‘We were also told my niece wasn’t allowed to get into bed with us. So when your own children jump into your bed for a cuddle on a Saturday morning, she wasn’t allowed to — she was excluded.’

Sarah feels such scrutiny is not appropriate when the child is family and you have a relationship. ‘It’s like the system continually tells you she is not your child and she will always be different. Why put these children with family members if you then don’t want them to be part of a family?’

After nine months, they were granted a special guardianship order, which gives them parental rights and responsibility but, unlike an adoption order, does not end the legal relationship between the child and their birth parents.

Sarah’s niece would see her birth mum every six weeks, in accordance with a court agreement. At this point, Sarah’s brother wasn’t granted any contact.

This arrangement involved a two-hour round trip, which Sarah was happy to do, adding: ‘It fitted into our lives without disturbing our children too much.

‘Social services told us that this contact arrangement would stand until my niece was 18. However, within a year we were taken back to court by the parents. My brother wanted contact. My niece now sees her mum one week, and three weeks later her dad, and three weeks later her mum again, and so on.’

SARAHcontinues: ‘ Now they’re pushing for more contact — this time unsupervised — and if we don’t agree we could be taken back to court. They keep moving the goalposts, and it’s really distressing because it’s so disruptive to our family life.

‘My niece’s behaviour at school has got worse since the increased contact,’ she says. To expose her to more is unthinkable. ‘However, we live under the constant threat that if we don’t agree, we’ll be taken back to court.

‘If you’re a foster parent and you don’t agree with something, you just say no. As a family member you can’t say no, because you don’t want to risk losing the child.’

She feels nobody is on her side. ‘You would think that with the millions of pounds kinship carers are saving the system, they could at least spend £50 a week on giving you some support.’

‘I have at times thought to myself, “Would Tom have been better off going up for adoption?” ’ admits Diana Speed, who was granted a special guardianship order last March and now has ‘ intense’ sessions with her half- sister when she takes Tom for contact visits once a month.

‘He would have had a young mum and dad, younger brothers and sisters. Have I made things worse for him?’ she says.

‘All these questions go around in your head. But then you think, in terms of your own identity, surely it’s better to know where you came from, and that there were people in your family who loved you so desperately that they were not going to let you fall.’ *Name has been changed to protect identities.