Grandparents/Grandchildren. (The Way Forward)

Grandparents /Grandchildren.
(The way forward)

Gloria Hunniford is an excellent celebrity to highlight the need for grandparents to be more prominent in their grandchildren’s lives. I have written to her myself a few months ago because of the similarity of losing both our daughters to breast cancer in early motherhood. It was heartbreaking to lose our own daughter but to find out that we could be cut off from her children, especially when they had bonded with us from birth, caused the children and us so much grief and distress it was unbearable.

The UK Government is being requested to remove the need for grandparents to crave a courts permission to apply for contact with their grandchildren. In Scotland we already have the right to go straight to court without asking permission but it has not advanced the cause any further. The problem of being irrelevant persons in the eyes of Social Services and professionals and to convince a court that grandparents are decent enough to have contact with their own flesh and blood. “This being an insult to the extreme”.

We need to be more focussed and specific about what is required.’ The Charter for Grandchildren’ having been thought out carefully by the legal eagles of a government and created by the Scottish Executive needs to be adopted and made compulsory for professionals such as Social Services to accept that grandparents are of huge importance in children’s lives.

The UK Governments are determined that grandparents will never get automatic legal rights to their grandchildren; they claim it would cause more problems than it would resolve. In the stakeholders group that created the ‘Charter for Grandchildren’ we experienced hostility from father’s groups who claimed that grandparents would have more rights than some parents, and if that came about it would cause enormous conflict on a massive scale. We have no desire to take over our grandchildren; we only wish to know them, love them and be part of the family. We consider parents to be the first and foremost in their children’s lives every time, with grandparents a close second.

‘The Charter for Grandchildren’ was to be advisory guidelines for everyone who work in the welfare of children to consider more carefully the role grandparents can play in their grandchildren’s lives, especially in the absence of one or both parents. There is an urgent need to have this as legal protection for children because of the failings of the professionals dealing with their welfare and to ensure children have the best and fairest treatment by Social Services or professionals that is humanly possible.

We have a petition on line to make 'The Charter for Grandchildren' Mandatory for professionals working in the welfare and protection of children to ensure children have the best care and protection available.

Please sign? http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/TCFGRA/ Hard copies are also available for signatures.

For all the Governments of the UK to adopt and make the ‘Charter for Grandchildren’ mandatory for all professionals to be answerable in law for not working “In the Child’s best interest” especially in today’s society where it is everyday headlines in the media about their failing our children.

Jimmy Deuchars
Grandparents Apart UK
22 Alness crescent
Glasgow G52 1PJ
0141 882 5658
http://www.grandparentsapart.co.uk