The Adequacy of Foster Care Allowances

Nina Oldfield

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138342033
• eBook ISBN: 9780429801297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1997, this timely examination of allowances paid to foster carers demonstrates clear evidence that the nature of foster care is changing. The degree of difficulty in caring for the average child is greater than ever before making the tasks asked of carers more demanding and skilful. The fostering allowances were subject to five tests of adequacy. Evidence showed that allowances have maintained their value over time and were adequate to meet the normal costs of child rearing but not the extra or indirect costs of fostering. Moreover, a unique cross national study of payments uncovered that Britain has lower levels of allowance than more than half the 15 countries examined. This book contributes to the debate on the measurement of living standards. It uses budget standard methodology to estimate the cost of a child living a modest but adequate lifestyle in the 1990s.

1 The dynamics of foster care allowances

Introduction

This chapter explores the adequacy of foster care allowances from an historical perspective. First, there is a brief exploration of the interplay of policy, payment and foster care practice during the last two centuries to gain an insight into the nature and objectives of the foster care allowance. How was the allowance originally determined and by whom and what purpose was it intended to serve? Second, an attempt is made to explain why payment for foster care has become an important issue during the last decade, what changes have taken place and the impact these changes had on the payment levels and objectives of fostering. Four issues are examined: the changing balance of care and the effects on the demand for and supply of foster parents and the role of fostering allowances on the supply side; the perceived adequacy of the maintenance allowance; the changing perceptions of foster parents on their role as foster mothers and expectations for payment; and the changing role of mothers in a competitive market place. Finally, as far as possible, given the paucity of information on actual foster care rates through the ages, the issue of whether the allowance has maintained its value in real terms is explored.

There is no national fostering allowance in Britain, the amount varies widely between and sometimes within the same authority. The law, through its statutory instrument (Foster Placement [Children] Regulations 1991), allows local authorities to define the appropriate level of maintenance to reimburse the foster parent for the upkeep of the child. The local authorities as a collective body, however, have not chosen to adopt a national scale of boarding out allowance, each authority or voluntary scheme pays according to its own policy. The allowances are funded from the County Council Block Grant provided by central Government. Consequently, any increase in fostering allowance is allocated locally ‘in preference to other pressing priorities’ (North Yorkshire County Council Memo of March 1990).

Each April the NFCA Fostering Allowances Working Party carries out a survey of allowances paid by local authorities and voluntary organisations in Britain. The variations in basic allowance between and within major regions are shown in Table 1.1. The lack of standardisation is greatest in England where the variation is wide. The highest paying authorities are in the London region.

Table 1.1
Allowances April 1992: The highest and lowest paying authority in each area in relation to oldest and youngest age group. £ per week.

Region	Lowest paying 0–18	Highest paying 0–18
London	61.10 – 110.00	148.72 – 239.44
England	33.32 – 63.91	103.11 – 166.25
Wales	28.07 – 58.24	43.33 – 86.73
Scotland	38.76 – 71.45	58.97 – 119.12

Source: NFCA (1992) Foster Care Finance: p.54.

The basic fostering allowances and repaid expenses are not counted as earnings and therefore are not eligible for tax or national insurance purposes. Similarly, fostering allowances are not counted as income in the foster family assessment of means tested benefits (income support or family credit etc), although any reward element would be. Child benefit is not payable in respect of a foster child provided a foster care allowance is paid by the local authority or voluntary organisation. Foster parents can, however, claim a series of benefits in respect of a foster child with a disability, such as the Disability Living Allowance, Invalid Care Allowance and others - although any reward or fee part of the fostering allowances is counted as income in general in the benefit system.

The origins of foster care allowances

During the period 1782 to 1834 the boarding out of ‘poor law’ children was public policy in some parishes. Parishes were responsible for the relief of their own pauper population and the Gilberts Act 1782 decreed that the children of paupers receiving work relief under the Old Poor Law system could be boarded out with local rate payers. The contract to care for the pauper child was ‘let’ by means of competitive tendering to the lowest bidder despite the risk of low standard care, overcrowding (baby farming) and profiteering. At best the Gilberts Act encouraged responsible people to come forward to care for pauper children, on the other hand, boarding out was a means of saving public expenditure and an opportunity to profit on the part of the foster parent. This type of fostering, where allowances were paid according to the market, lasted until 1834.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 introduced the concept of uniformity in the treatment of paupers, ‘less eligibility’ and the workhouse test which was designed to stop the payment of ‘out relief’ as a deterrent to the state of pauperism. Strictly speaking, boarding out was contrary to the principles of the 1834 legislation because it was considered by the Boards as a form of ‘outdoor relief’. The notion of ‘less eligibility’ was that no person should receive in ‘poor law relief’ more than the lowest earnings of a labourer. The principle of 1834 was non interventionist beyond keeping the destitute alive (Webb 1910:270). As far as children in the workhouse were concerned, however, the ‘less eligibility’ was no deterrent to pauperism which was in the hands of their parents. For the first time children were beginning to be seen as a special group, blameless for their pauper state which was brought about by their ‘inadequate’ parents. They were the deserving poor who, along with future generations, could be saved by rehabilitation (Horsburgh 1983). It was taken for granted that workhouse children should be educated (trained for adulthood), even though universal education had not been introduced, at the risk that this may encourage parents to become paupers (Crowther 1981). Barrack schools and later district boarding schools separated the poor law children from their parents. In general, this type of institutional care remained the norm for the majority of pauper children. Some exceptions were made by the Poor Law Commission for the boarding out of orphaned and abandoned children preferably outside their areas of origin in farming or rural locations.¹

The issue of boarding out was finally brought to a head by two Poor Law Board reports: The Boarding Out of Pauper Children in Scotland, and in Certain Unions in England, Parliamentary Papers number 176, dated 1870. In England, boarding out was first regulated by statute in 1870 and 1877. Subsequent legislation in 1889 and 1905 had regard to the distinction between fostering children within and outside their present area of residence. This distinction disappeared when the statutes governing fostering were clarified and codified under the same order of 1911. The weekly boarding out sum in 1870 was not more than 4 shillings (increasing to 5 shillings) for the child’s maintenance, although payment for clothing, school money and medical attention were at the discretion of the individual boards of guardians (Heywood 1978:82). The allowance, however, was especially low for relatives acting in the capacity of foster parents, Webb 1929:745 suggests sometimes as low as two shillings and sixpence a week with 10 shillings a quarter for clothing - an ambiguity still seen in some local authorities today (Jervis 1990, Rickford 1992). During the last quarter of the 19th century the amount of allowance received by foster parents was three and sometimes four times that of the cost of a child on outdoor relief which Webb (1929) suggested was far in excess of what the ordinary labourer could spend on his children. During this period, the Central Authority controlled local authority spending on foster care by capping foster care allowances. This hold on foster care rates was not to be relinquished until the regulation was rescinded on May the 3rd 1920.

Government regulations authorised the setting up of voluntary committees to supervise and regulate the contractual arrangements between parents and Union. The duties of foster parents were stated in 1889 as:

He will bring up the child as one of his own children, and provide the child with proper food, lodging and washing, and endeavour to train the child in truthfulness, obedience, personal cleanliness and industry, as well as in suitable domestic and outdoor work² so far as may be consistent with the law; that he will take care that the child shall attend duly at church or chapel according to the religious creed to which the child belongs, and shall attend school … provide for the proper repair and renewal of the child’s clothing ....... report such illness to the guardians and to the boarding out committee, … permit the child to be visited and the house inspected … and upon the demand of a person duly authorised …. give up possession of the child. (Boarding out without the Union Order, 1889 cited in Webb 1910:196)

The selection of foster parents excluded any person in receipt of poor relief, or whose sole income would be the foster care allowance. Only in special circumstance were children boarded with relatives. The foster father could not be employed in night work and manual outdoor workers were preferred to indoor sedentary workers. Attention was paid to accommodation offered in the home including separate sleeping rooms for different sexes and the number of children placed was limited to two. The clothing provided was to be good and of ordinary character with no resemblance to a workhouse uniform. Furthermore, the foster child could only be employed in work with the permission of the guardians. The view that foster parents were only interested in the money was gradually rejected as confidence grew in the selection process which served to eliminate ‘hard up’ volunteers.

The Central Authority, however, did little to encourage the expansion of boarding out, it was described as just one method for removing children from the workhouse (Webb 1910:195). The Poor Law Institutions Order 1913 prohibited (other than very short term) the maintenance of children aged between three and 16 in the workhouse. Children, however, were more often placed in local authority and voluntary residential children’s homes or sent on emigration ships to Canada than found foster homes. During the post war period (1914–18) there was a decline in boarding out for poor law children which Webb (1929:743) suggests was partially attributed to the level of payment to foster parents³. Some guardians responded by increasing the payment per week to 7s and 10s.

Once removed from the natural family the child tended to stay in the care of the local authority until adulthood. There was no vision of prevention work or rehabilitation of the child and family. The Children and Young Persons Act 1933 extended the grounds for bringing the neglected child into ‘the care’ of the local authority, establishing a principle of placing the child’s welfare first. Confusion and defects in the administrative system, however, were manifested in the death of a foster child, Dennis O’Neill in 1945, and a subsequent public enquiry. The Monckton Enquiry highlighted the urgent need to overhaul the system of caring for deprived children and this led to a Royal Commission on the Care of Children - Cmd 6922 (1946) referred to as the ‘Curtis Report’.

The Curtis Report identified an assortment of government departments and regulations managing foster care: the Ministry of Health (through local authority departments) was responsible for the destitute, homeless evacuees, children fostered for reward under the age of nine years and those pending adoption; the Home Office was responsible for those children removed for care and protection by order of the courts; the Board of Control was responsible for mentally disordered children; the Ministry of Education responsible for children with physical or mental handicap; and the Ministry of Pensions had responsibility for war orphans (Cmd 6922 s99). The supervision of children, the selection of foster homes and the calculation of fostering rates in each area was the responsibility of three main committees: Public Health, Public Assistance and Education. Curtis (1946 s130) finds little evidence of common policies between committees with the exception of some instances of sharing visitors. Other instances revealed conflict between the departments (s131 ibid) leading to inequality in the treatment of similar children. The rates of payment to foster parents for the boarding out of children were usually derived separately by the various authorities though sometimes the result was similar. Moreover, the allowance for a child placed outside the authority would frequently reflect the authority of origin and not that in which the child was placed. Curtis (Cmd 6922 s362) suggests that the repercussions of paying sometimes three different levels in a locality and three different levels from outside the area in the same locality, for a similar child, caused resentment in the lower paid group of foster parents and could not be justified on any economic basis.

Curtis examined 41 counties in England and Wales and found the lowest and highest payments a week for the maintenance of a child under 14 years was 10 shillings and twenty shillings and sixpence respectively with no allowance for school dinners. There were instances of special rates for children with special difficulties. It was usual to increase the payment with age in three age bands with some exceptions, for example, some committees added a supplement for a child below the age of 7 years. The total sum in this case was:

• twenty shillings and sixpence for a child under 3 years

• fifteen shillings and sixpence for a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Definition of terms
• Introduction
• 1 The dynamics of foster care allowances
• 2 The direct costs of a child
• 3 The extra costs of a foster child
• 4 The indirect costs of fostering
• 5 The comparative cost of a foster child: a survey of fifteen countries
• Conclusion
• References