FOSTER Carers’ Fortnight, which runs until May 28, is a time when we rightly celebrate the incredible contribution of foster carers in providing loving family homes for some of our city’s most vulnerable children.

Unfortunately, in Glasgow, it is also a time to remember that for a decade and more, successive Labour and SNP administrations have underfunded that vital care, meaning that most of the city’s foster and kinship carers have seen their incomes collapse in real terms by around 30%.

Green councillors brought a motion to the last Full Council to try to right this ongoing injustice. Unfortunately, this was blocked by SNP and Labour councillors uniting to deny carers their human rights to collective pay bargaining.

All parties heard loud and clear the scale of the crisis facing foster carers at a recent summit hosted in the City Chambers. Only the Greens put a proposal on the table to give those carers a meaningful voice, allowing them to organise via a trade union – not as workers under UK employment law – but respecting their European convention rights under article 11 to organise collectively and be heard.

Much was said in the debate about young people not feeling the monetising of their care. That is an important point from The Promise and it is one we respect. But care doesn’t happen without money, unless we want it to be the preserve of the already-wealthy. And monetisation is most obviously a problem when there isn’t enough. When lack of family income denies foster children the same opportunities as their peers. Or when foster carers are forced to get other paid work, or even leave fostering altogether, meaning worse outcomes for those in care.

Carers organising to ensure they can provide for their families is entirely consistent with being loving parents. They are not seeking to enrich themselves. This is only about being able to provide for the children in their care, and to be part of decisions that affect their welfare.

The SNP administration says there are different ways, other than union recognition, to give carers meaningful involvement and mutual respect. That’s well and good. But they need to spell out how they will do that, pronto. Because this issue isn’t going away. Ignoring the issue hasn’t worked. It needs a credible alternative put on the table – one that respects carers’ human rights and has proper democratic checks and balances in place.

Labour, unbelievably for the party of the trade union movement, offered no way forward – just a flat denial of carers’ rights – and whipped their members to vote against union recognition and collective bargaining rights. It is indeed a strange world we live in.

Right now, as a result of the big parties’ inaction, we risk losing some of the best, most loving carers to what should be our gold standard in-house fostering service, increasing the hold of private agencies and reversing progress on shifting the balance of care. That is shameful.

It’s time to give Glasgow’s foster carers a seat at the table and give them what they really need to support the children in their care. Green councillors will keep on fighting for a fair deal for foster carers and their families.