Law Commission looking at Kinship Care reform

The Law Commission have been asked to review the law on Kinship Care, following on from the publication of Championing Kinship Care: The National Kinship Care Strategy by the Government in 2023.

The consultation document is 329 pages, so it is an in-depth review that isn’t easy to summarise, but they have helpfully created a summary document too.

The challenges they have identified with the current process are summarised as:

(1) a lack of information provision to kinship carers (and sometimes to parents) about the different types of kinship care arrangement, their consequences, and the support which accompanies them;

(2) late identification of prospective kinship carers once care proceedings are underway, where the kinship carer may often not be a party to the proceedings, or a rushed private law order application leaves the kinship carer underinformed of both the child’s needs and their own needs in caring for the child. Furthermore, kinship carers often do not have legal representation;

(3) inadequacy of assessment processes and post-approval follow-up designed for unrelated foster carers which may appear inappropriate or intrusive in the context of kinship care (and which kinship carers may fail as a result);

(4) disparate approaches among local authorities in carrying out the assessments with variable opportunities to consider kinship-specific factors or to provide sufficient information for the prospective kinship carers; and

(5) uneven support for kinship carers depending on the legal mechanism used to recognise kinship care, and differing local practice by local authorities. We have been told that this leaves kinship carers feeling unsupported and without provision tailored to their individual family circumstances, especially where there has been a high level of trauma in the family.

I don’t think anyone with experience of the current system would disagree with any of the above.

They are proposing:

(1) In future, replacing Special Guardianship Orders and Child Arrangement Orders with a new Kinship Care Order (KCO).

(2) In case the Government is not minded to do the above, they have also made alternative proposals to try to address the current issues with SGOs and CAOs when applied to kinship care.

(3) Create a Kinship Parental Responsibility Agreement (kinship PRA), which would allow parents to share parental responsibility with kinship carers who are close relatives, without a court order.

The consultation period ends on October 16th, and the form to provide feedback is here.

Stuart Black

26th August 2026.