Law Commission Consultation on Kinship Care (Consultation Paper)

Overview

This is a public consultation about kinship care by the Law Commission for England and Wales.

Kinship care is when a child is cared for by an adult who is not their parent for a significant amount of time. Kinship carers are usually relatives or family friends, and the kinship care arrangement may be temporary or longer term. Most commonly, kinship care will be an alternative to the child entering the care system, or a way of caring for a child who is the subject of a care order.

Our consultation paper on kinship care was published on 8 July 2026, which marks the beginning of our consultation period, open until 16 October 2026. The consultation paper contains provisional proposals to reform kinship care law in England and Wales which aim to make options for kinship care easier to navigate and to address disparities in rights and responsibilities between the different orders used to regulate kinship care arrangements. Our provisional proposals include a proposal for a new form of kinship care order, which could be tailored to reflect the particular circumstances of the child in the kinship care arrangement, as well as those of their parents and kinship carer. For more information about this project, click here.

We recommend that consultees read the consultation paper before responding to the consultation. A shorter summary is available, which is also available in Welsh and in easy read.  Consultees do not need to answer all the questions if they are only interested in some aspects of the consultation.

About the Law Commission: The Law Commission is a statutory body, created by the Law Commissions Act 1965 (“the 1965 Act”) for the purpose of promoting the reform of the law. It is an advisory Non-Departmental Public Body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). The Law Commission is independent of Government. For more information about the Law Commission please click here.

Responses to this consultation: We aim to be transparent in our decision-making, and to explain the basis on which we have reached conclusions. We may publish or disclose information you provide in response to Law Commission papers, including personal information. For example, we may publish an extract of your response in Law Commission publications, or publish the response itself. We may also share responses with Government. Additionally, we may be required to disclose the information, such as in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We will process your personal data in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation.

Consultation responses are most effective where we are able to report which consultees responded to us, and what they said. If you consider that it is necessary for all or some of the information that you provide to be treated as confidential and so neither published nor disclosed, please contact us before sending it. You can complete the relevant question in the list of questions that follow on indicating that you wish your response to be confidential. Please limit the confidential material to the minimum, clearly identify it and explain why you want it to be confidential. We cannot guarantee that confidentiality can be maintained in all circumstances and an automatic disclaimer generated by your IT system will not be regarded as binding on the Law Commission.

Alternatively, you may want your response to be anonymous, so that in our report, we may refer to what you say in your response, but will not reveal that the information came from you. We will respect that, to the extent that we legally can. You might want your response to be anonymous because it contains sensitive information about you or your family, or because you are worried about other people knowing what you have said to us. You can complete the relevant question in the list of questions that follow indicating that you wish your response to be anonymous.

We ask consultees to avoid including personal information which could identify other people – in particular, please do not provide information that may identify a child or could lead to such an identification being possible. We will redact any consultation response that identifies a child, or which we consider could be used together with other information provided to identify a child. We will do this whether or not consultees have indicated that they wish their response to be treated as confidential or anonymous.

We list who responded to our consultations in our reports. If you provide a confidential response your name will appear in that list even though the response itself will be treated as confidential. If your response is anonymous we will not include your name in the list unless you have given us permission to do so.

For information about how we handle your personal data, please see our privacy notice.

Any queries can be directed to enquiries@lawcommission.gov.uk.

Once you have completed your consultation response, we would be grateful if you could complete a short, anonymous survey to help us understand the characteristics of individuals and organisations who have responded. Your answers will be held and analysed separately to your consultation response. The links to the survey in English and Welsh are below:

Kinship Care Consultation Engagement Questionnaire – Fill in form

Papur Ymgynghori ar Gyfraith Lladdiadau – Fill in form