When I was five my parents split up, and as neither of them was able to care for us at the time, my three-year-old brother and I went to live with my paternal grandmother. She was in her mid-sixties, a widow with a house full of antique furniture. For two years she looked after us full-time until my father remarried. We had a wonderful experience as she devoted her whole life to making us happy, but in retrospect I can see that to take on two boisterous young children when you are not in the best of health is a sacrifice — one given gladly, but a sacrifice nonetheless. Shortly after we moved out she had a stroke from which she never fully recovered.

This kind of sacrifice is being made every day all over Britain by grandparents who give up their jobs, their independence and their social lives to care for grandchildren whose own parents are missing, dead, sick, drunk, drugged, imprisoned or just not bothered. There are reported to be about 200,000 grandparents who have full-time charge of their grandchildren.

They include Colleen McManus from Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, who at the age of 51 took on the full-time care of her daughter’s two sons, aged one and four. Colleen’s daughter, Ruth, is a heroin addict and Colleen tells me that her first reaction when social services asked her to take on the boys was: “Thank God. At last I can keep those children safe.” At first she tried to keep working, but she found it impossible to hold down even a part-time job and look after two pre-school children. Colleen is a widow, she has one son at college, both her parents are getting on and she worries about the day that her mother’s hips go and she, too, will need full-time care.

“Sometimes I just sit down and cry because it’s so hard — I’ve lost all my friends and I have no social life outside the children. Every night I’m sitting down with the kids and watching Charlie and Lola. But they have had such a poor start, I will do anything I can to make up for what they haven’t had.”

David Willetts, the Conservative spokesman on family policy, is a fan of grannies such as Colleen. He wants grandparents to be “at the front of the queue when it comes to options for raising a child whose parents can no longer care for it. There is no doubt they provide a better quality of nurture; they enrich a child’s life”. He wants local authorities to have a written policy that says they must look first at the grandparent option.

Local authorities shouldn’t need much persuading to call in granny. If Colleen hadn’t taken on her grandchildren, they would have gone into local authority or foster care at a cost of about £40,000 per child annually. Granny-care is a whole lot cheaper, not that all councils are keen to acknowledge this. Colleen has about £280 a week to live on — a combination of child benefit, family tax credits and a so-called special guardianship allowance of £173.32 a week, which is a means-tested benefit for friends-and-family carers in recognition of their responsibilities. She used to have £80 a week more until two weeks ago when Ashfield council decided that the special guardianship allowance was “other income” and therefore should be set against her council-tax and housing benefit.

No doubt Ashfield council, like every other local authority in the country, is desperate to make savings wherever it can, but given the amount of money Colleen is saving the system and the quality of care she is giving the children, this seems a cut too far. Applications to take children into care have gone up 47% since the Baby P debacle. As Sam Smethers, the chief executive of Grandparents Plus, says: “The foster system will be unable to cope with the demand. Grandparents usually provide the best standard of care, and they are certainly the most costeffective option for the child and cost 10% of what we pay foster parents. But we have to remember how hard it is for these grandparents — 60% have to give up work; most of them are in their mid-fifties and will find it tough to get another job. They are effectively writing off their working lives.”

The statistics are grim. According to a survey by Grandparents Plus, one in three grandparent carers is living on less than £200 a week. One in five of them says that they receive no benefits or allowances, and only two-thirds claim the child benefit they are entitled to — largely because, Willetts says, “the process of paying child benefit to someone other than the mother can be disgracefully slow”. Not surprisingly, eight out 10 of these heroic grandparents describe themselves as “isolated” or “worried”.

When I ask Colleen whether she has any regrets about taking on her grandsons, she says: “None at all. What else could I do?” And there’s the rub: most grandparents would do anything to make sure their grandchildren get the best possible start in life — even if it means putting their lives on hold and an impoverished old age.

Tough women such as Colleen are not looking for handouts from the state; like most people in her position she would have taken on her grandchildren regardless of the cost.

I welcome the Tory championing of grandparents’ rights when it comes to custody and contact but we must also acknowledge the cost to these grandparents of doing their duty. Just because they will grin and bear it, that doesn’t mean it is right. We can’t let them be the safety net for the imploding care system. Let’s give them the modest help they need so that these silver sacrificers can do the right thing by their grandchildren without giving up their own futures.

• Forget the Eden Project or the Jurassic Coast; the best half-term attraction in the southwest has to be the Popham branch of Little Chef, which has been made over by Heston Blumenthal. There are still banquettes covered in luxurious pleather and lashings of scarlet plastic but it’s all done in a knowing, postmodern way. The waiters wear T-shirts with greedy quotes from AA Milne on the back, and a visit to the loo involves listening to Food, Glorious Food sung by choirs of tone-deaf schoolchildren.

The highlight of this culinary theme park is fish and chips. Not so much the dish, which looked pretty standard — although the mushy peas now come in a charming china ramekin — but the aerosol that Amy the waitress sprayed in the air above me, “so it smells like you got it from a chippy”.

Molecular gastronomy for £8.50 — although, as the woman next me said: “If I’d wanted to smell like a chip shop, I’d have poured vinegar on my cardigan.”

Eleanor Mills is away

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