The families who foster vulnerable adults

The Parker family lives in a large detached house down a narrow wooded lane in remote west Wales. In the front room a wood burner the size of a fridge glows through the night, providing hot water and heating for seven bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, Lorraine Parker's swanky new kitchen and an extensive hall area which Steve Parker, who runs a garden maintenance business, is busy turning into a playroom for their children, Dani, nine, and Jake, six. But long before the rest of the household is awake, a solitary figure in sturdy outdoor trousers is already out in the garden, collecting wood. Roy, 65, has learning difficulties and a history of chronic alcoholism; his has not been an easy life, but to borrow a phrase from fostering and adoption, the Parkers are now Roy's 'forever family'. Ask him what he likes best about this situation and he says simply, 'Freedom'. By which he means freedom to get up before dawn and potter downstairs to make a cup of tea. Freedom to take it out to his shed and puff contentedly on his first roll-up of the day, 'coming to, nicely,' as he puts it, while he gets the wood in. 'I make sure the fire's strong, before the children get up,' he says, pulling an ancient woolly hat over his ears. 'That's my job, see. And I like doing it.' The appropriate care of adults with learning difficulties and mental health problems is a thorny issue. They want what we all want: warmth, food, stability, love and a degree of independence. They don't want to be stuck in residential care, but cannot live unsupported. The solution is obvious, yet peculiarly difficult to grasp. It takes a leap of faith to embrace the idea of taking in someone like this and making a commitment to care for them until the end of their lives, yet this is exactly what the Parkers have done. Through a little-known charity called Shared Lives, Lorraine and Steve also look after Randall, 74, who is deaf and without speech, and suffers from schizophrenia, and in December last year they gave a home to 'the seventh member of our family', Mark, a 44-year-old with bipolar disorder and learning difficulties. Lorraine, a baby-faced 33-year-old, is both subtly demanding – 'we'll have that playroom finished in a couple of weeks, no bother, won't we, Steve?' –and astonishingly laidback. Jake was only six months old when Roy and Randall arrived in 2006; he has never known his family any other way. He shows me a shoebox he has decorated with a sticker for each member of his family: 'There's Mum, Dad, Dani, Roy, Randall, Mark… So many of us there's not enough room on the lid,' he squeals. In the mornings the children walk down the lane to breakfast club at school, leaving Lorraine pouring cereal into bowls for herself and 'the boys' while simultaneously getting vegetables ready for lunch. Randall, in pinstriped jacket and battered slippers, does not stray far from the fire, but Steve regularly takes Mark and Roy to work with him, cutting hedges and mowing lawns. 'They love to be out and about, everyone knows them,' he says. This particular kind of community care can be traced back to the city of Geel in Belgium, where a system of foster family care for the mentally ill that began in the Middle Ages endures today – close to 500 psychiatric patients are still placed with local inhabitants. It surfaced in turn-of-the-century Brighton, in direct opposition to the asylums and institutions that proliferated after the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. The first modern scheme, Boarding Out for the Elderly, was started by a social worker, Sue Newton MBE, in 1978; in 1992 Newton became the first chairman of the National Association of Adult Placement Schemes, now known as Shared Lives Plus. Deb Winnicott, Shared Lives' officer for west Wales, describes the scheme as 'like fostering, but for adults. It can be short-term – we've placed people recovering from alcohol misuse who need a bit of protection en route to independence, and young people emerging from care as well as the elderly, who need a permanent, stable base.' But compared with fostering, the scheme has had little publicity. The result is that many Shared Lives carers have worked in the care system or have connections with it. Steve's parents, Chris and Lesley, ran a small residential home in the 1990s; Randall stayed there on a fortnight's respite break in 1999 when he was 60, and never went home. In those days residential homes were rarely homely; whether you had three residents or 40, the rules and regulations were the same. 'You had big, clanking fire doors separating family from residents, and health and safety posters everywhere,' Steve grimaces. 'And you were inspected constantly. However nice my parents tried to make it, it felt like an institution.'