The moral case for becoming a foster carer

Three months ago I travelled with my wife to Ireland’s west coast for a reunion with our first foster placements, now settled with their new family. The two sisters, then aged five and two, had been removed by police from their home in pyjamas and driven to our house in 2017. I remember trawling around shops the next day, panic-buying clothes and pushchairs while my wife fed them, read to them, bathed them and administered nit treatments. The five-year-old stayed with us for two years. Her younger sister left us after a few months for another temporary foster family. Both now sail, ride horses, play rugby and are about to get Irish citizenship.

We are temporary foster carers, whose own four children have left home. We can take short-term emergency placements or placements of up to two years. We have looked after Syrian, Iranian and Afghan refugees found clinging to lorries at our local port of Felixstowe. We have hosted children from the travelling community, emergency cases removed from their homes, children at risk of sexual exploitation, children born addicted to opiates. We have taken on children as respite care for long-term foster carers who need a break.

Some of the kindest and most effective carers in my experience are from modest backgrounds – painter-decorators, council workers, administrators and builders. Our first two girls are now with a health and safety specialist and his wife, who runs a small arts and crafts business.

Fostering agencies tend to pay carers more than local authorities, but the amounts are never life-changing. Nobody fosters for the money. Successful applications for foster carers are declining even as overall demand for places skyrockets, with nearly 100,000 children predicted to be in care by 2025 in England, up from around 70,000 in 2015.

Before lockdown my wife and I used to get on average three requests a month to help. After lockdown we could get as many as three requests for an emergency placement in a week. Lockdown led to the near total withdrawal of vital services such as day care, healthcare, educational and social support, leading to unimaginable suffering for children living in pressure-cooker environments.

The increase in numbers has meant that local authorities have had to rely on expensive agencies to provide care home accommodation. There have been official recommendations that they use less agency care, but this takes little account of the pressures placed on them. After lockdown we received many calls on a Friday, as social workers tried to find a cheaper and more convivial place for their charges before the weekend. Our catchment area grew as children were sent from further and further afield, miles away from relatives and their local schools.

Spiralling demand has combined with a decline in volunteers; growing numbers are deciding to quit altogether. A foster carer has an uncertain status, neither employee nor volunteer. You don’t have full employment rights but nevertheless play a demanding and vital role in public sector care provision.

Emergency carers often hold the fort while a child’s legal status is processed through the courts. They have delegated authority only and little discretion. In truth there is often no option but to use common sense, seeking forgiveness rather than permission from social workers, who in any case can sometimes be hard to contact.

Many of those with the mental, moral and emotional robustness to foster, but modest means, are giving up because of the rising cost of living. This is where the more affluent should step in. Sponsoring a child in Africa via direct debit is not the same as actually inviting one to live with you.

My wife and I don’t foster because we like it particularly, or because we want to be heroes in some romantic, redemptive human narrative. Fostering limits freedom and tests patience and relationships. It imports tragedy into the home. We foster because we have the space and resources and because there was no real excuse not to, especially once we began the vetting and training. If there is a reward, it is witnessing a child, with basic necessities such as safety, nourishment and routine secured, learning how to trust.

Many of those we have cared for have many siblings, often produced by a single mother and a host of absent fathers. One boy had seven brothers. Another 14-year-old girl who visited had 14 siblings. Thus a vast tapestry of care provision is created at soaring public cost, delivered by a host of public servants, from police to social workers. The father of one child we cared for moved on to get another woman pregnant a few months later, the baby being placed almost immediately under supervision.

There are not enough social workers or foster carers to cope with this. Too many children, some of them moved between different carers and care homes ten, 20 or 30 times, are released into society at 18 – bitter, incapable of trust, with little education and destined to repeat the whole pattern.

After tragic murders of children under social care provision there is usually a media pile-on in which social workers are blamed. But social workers do not possess magical powers of discernment about what is going on in the privacy of a home. Parents can be very clever in thwarting their efforts and the lawyers assigned to their cases often know how to make things difficult. I have met social workers just out of their twenties who are handed multiple complex cases. There are going to be mistakes.

I believe the primary cause of rising numbers of children in care is family breakdown, but irresponsible fathers, child-like mothers and the lack of incentives aimed at securing family cohesion all play a part. Little is done to reinforce the notion that a child is a responsibility rather than an accessory. And running through all of this is addiction, addiction to drugs, to alcohol or gambling. In the addicted household, a child born to provide comfort and love soon becomes an impediment.

No government has the spine to take on the task of reconstituting stable family environments and risk falling foul of the culture wars, so we are left with a problem of capacity. Given the numbers involved, throwing more money at child services is only part of the solution. The immediate answer lies in recruiting more foster carers. I hope this article helps towards that end.