A granny’s love and the answer to crisis in fostering

EvEn the most avid supporter of multicultural Britain would have to admit it seems spectacularly insensitive of Tower hamlets Council to have placed a five-year-old Christian girl with a strict Muslim foster carer.

But, leaving aside the question of cultural integration, there is a wider issue here: why was the child being fostered?

The details of why she was removed from her mother are not known. What we do know is that her grandmother made repeated attempts to obtain custody of the child, but was blocked at every turn by the council.

you might have thought that placing a child from a troubled family with a carefully supervised close relative would be the first choice for any local authority. But that is simply not so.

years ago, a good friend of mine had a daughter who fell into a cycle of addiction. She was a gorgeous, bright girl from a loving, middle-class family — but drugs got her at a young age and, despite numerous stints in rehab, she never truly recovered.

ShE ended up becoming pregnant, and the child was born prematurely, in agonies of withdrawal. despite this, the baby survived, and the mother was allowed to take it home, whereupon she fell prey once again to her addictions.

The baby suffered terrible neglect, and my friend was desperate to get her grandchild out of this toxic environment.

But Islington social services in north london blocked her at every turn. She was treated as an interfering nuisance. It was heartbreaking: not only had she lost her daughter to drugs, now she was losing her grandchild, too.

luckily for the baby, my friend was made of stern stuff. It took her many distressing hours in court and most of her life savings in legal fees, but she finally prised the child out of their clutches.

and my friend is far from being the only grandparent who’s had to fight just to be able to look after their own flesh and blood.

Just one example was reported three years ago, when it emerged that a couple from Essex had spent 18 months fighting to gain guardianship of their little granddaughter. Their daughter had become too mentally unstable to look after her own child. In the end, they came within two days of losing the girl for ever after Essex social services launched proceedings that would have resulted in her forced adoption by strangers.

There is another issue here that has received little attention: money. did you know that Tower hamlets advertises foster carer allowances for a child aged 5-10 of between £313 and £353 a week? That’s a nice little earner.

But hang on. Why are we paying unsuitable people to look after children when there are countless couples longing for a child to love?

how many have spent years on adoption registers, jumping through ridiculous hoops and performing endless box-ticking exercises, only to be told that they don’t quite come up to scratch — or their lifestyles are incompatible?

That is the real scandal that underpins this case, and others like it. The fact is that either through stupidity, inefficiency or sheer bloody-mindedness, social services would rather pay someone, irrespective of whether or not the child will be miserable, than find a home where someone wants to offer the one thing that has no price: a mother’s love.

Frankly, in most families, the child’s own grandparents should be the very first port of call.