Supermarket Asda has been praised for being among the small proportion of employers offering their staff paid leave when they take on kinship care duties to look after a relative or friend’s child.

Its work supporting a kinship carer employee in Doncaster is a case study in a report by the charity Kinship highlighting how almost half of the three in four kinship carers in work have to give up their jobs and careers when taking on their new responsibilities.

The leave is now included in her colleagues' benefits too.

Kinship is calling on the government to introduce statutory paid leave for kinship carers, in line with the entitlement that adoptive parents receive, in its forthcoming review of parental leave this summer,

Currently just 3% of kinship carers can take any kind of discretionary paid leave and 8% are able to take unpaid leave.

The charity’s report details how kinship carer Asda employee Natalie was given three months discretionary paid leave after she took on caring responsibilities for her three-month-old nephew.

She said this was “such a massive relief” as she “needed time to bond with my nephew, establish some stability and simply rest”.

After her period of leave she was able to return to work in a different role and that other kinship carers in the company will be support.

“Upon my return to Asda I started a new role so I can work flexibly from home and at head office and I have also since been promoted, she said.

“I was absolutely delighted when they announced in March this year that paid kinship leave of 26 weeks was being included in a package of family focused benefits for colleagues.

She added: “It’s hard work being a kinship carer but totally worth it. If Asda hadn’t have given me those three months off work, I would have had to quit my job and then I would have lost my home because I couldn’t pay the mortgage, and I wouldn’t have been entitled to benefits.”

Employment problems for carers

According to a Kinship survey of 1,300 kinship carers 45% are forced to give up their job.

Four in five who had stopped working say they have never returned to any form of work.

More than half said that paid employment leave would have enabled them to return to work, either as before or to some extent.

Other survey findings show that three in ten carer support children aged under one and more than a third support children aged between one and four. Paid leave would especially help these carers with “time to bond and a period of stability at this critical period.

“The government’s upcoming review of the parental leave system is a huge opportunity to rectify this gap in the law and totally unfair treatment of kinship carers,” said Kinship chief executive, Lucy Peake.

“You wouldn’t expect a mother with a newborn baby to go back to work the next day and equally there is no justifiable reason why kinship carers who are raising babies and young children should be expected to do so.

“Without statutory paid employment leave they are being forced to abandon their careers and jobs so that they can settle their children into a new home after experiencing trauma, separation and loss.”

Kinship offers a Kinship Friendly Employer scheme. Other firms to offer support to kinship carers include B&Q, Cardfactory, Lloyds Banking Group and BKL.

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