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Maria Eagle: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that it is not at all obvious who is eligible for extra-cost benefits such as attendance allowance, for which certain criteria must be met? The only way to find out is if people claim. It is much more difficult to estimate what take-up of attendance allowance ought to be than is the case with other benefits.

Paul Holmes: I accept that it can be difficult to produce reliable estimates of take-up. Attempts were made in 1996–97, but such estimates can be open to all sorts of interpretations.

The Government have said that they do not want to mount a mass awareness campaign but prefer to go through specialist groups. I spent a day with a Chesterfield borough council staff member whose job is to respond to information from bodies such as neighbourhood watch that an elderly person needs a door chain or window locks, for example. He is trained to ask that elderly person whether he or she has claimed pension credit, attendance allowance or some other benefit. He secures benefits worth hundreds of pounds in allowances for those elderly people, or even gets central heating installed for them. That is all well and good, yet cash resources are needed to pay the staff required even though local authorities are told that they must keep council tax down. I hope that the Government will make available resources to make that option work.

A campaign to secure a winter fuel allowance for disabled people was running for a long time before I entered Parliament. The Government refuse even to consider making that allowance available for disabled people, saying that people who are not of retirement age do not need it. However, I received an e-mail this week from a person aged 41 who is suffering from cancer and is confined to the house. That person suffered enormously from the cold as a result, a fact that many disability groups have been aware of for a long time. I cannot understand why the winter fuel allowance is not extended to people with medium and higher levels of disability.

The Government deserve praise for recognising British Sign Language, but what happens next? Finland's population is one-tenth the size of ours, but the country has 600 sign language interpreters. The UK has 400. There are not enough such interpreters available to profit from the recognition of BSL. With the roll-out of the new disability discrimination legislation, employers should make available access to such interpreters, when that is appropriate or necessary. What do the Government plan to do to ensure that more interpreters are trained and made available? They displayed good intentions when they recognised BSL, but they must put those good intentions into practice over the next two or three years.

In business questions earlier, my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) said that he had heard that the Government are to host an EU conference on how to support and introduce the use of sign language. Will the Minister give the House some details about that to clarify what is happening?
 
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There are contradictions in Government policy. A Department may make a statement on a matter that is undermined by another Department. I used to be a teacher, and one example that comes to mind has to do with education. The Department for Education and Skills has said, on the one hand, that it is in favour of social inclusion, and that disabled children should have access to mainstream schools, and all types of school; but on the other hand there is the policy of testing. Our children are the most tested in the western world, from when they enter infant school to when they leave secondary school. League tables reflect their results, and schools live or die by the tables when it comes to the children they attract, the money they get and the performance-related pay of teachers, which depends on how successful teachers are in getting children through exams. I know all about that because in the first year of performance-related pay I filled in my own application to cross the professional threshold, and one of the main criteria is how the teacher's classes are doing in terms of academic performance.

All the statistics, including the Government figures every February and annual Ofsted reports, show that the schools that do best in the league tables of which the Government are so fond as they try to drive up standards are generally those with the lowest number of children with special educational needs. I could provide many anecdotal examples of schools in Derbyshire that are high in the league table but where the head will tell people their child would be better off at the school up the road because it is better suited to their needs.

On the one hand, then, the Government say they want social inclusion; on the other, they follow educational policies that work absolutely against it.

The Select Committee on Education and Skills, on which I serve, is nearing the end of its scrutiny of the draft School Transport Bill. Almost every witness before the Committee has said that most of it is pointless. Almost all the experiments in it to get children to walk to school or use buses and so on are already being done by various local authorities around the country, so there is no need for a Bill to set them out. The only thing that the Bill does that cannot be done now is that it would let local authorities ignore the ruling in the Education Act 1944 about free school transport, which is that children attending junior schools more than two miles from their home and children going to secondary schools more than three miles from home can get free transport. The largest part of local education authorities' transport budgets is that for SEN children.

I visited an excellent deaf unit at New Whittington primary school in my constituency three or four weeks ago, and one of the children comes from 15 to 20 miles away from somewhere in Derbyshire and gets in a taxi each morning to be taken there. A lot of people who have children with SEN who have to travel some distance to an appropriate setting are afraid that they will be charged under the experiments contained in the draft Bill. Again, on the one hand the Government have excellent policies on SEN children's inclusion in schools and the provision of specialist units like the deaf unit in Chesterfield, while on the other they are considering an
 
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experiment that people fear will lead to children and parents being charged for access to the special provision that they need.

Then there is overall Government policy and its intentions. I am thinking of the new deal for the disabled and associated programmes. One problem of the new deal, often aired in the Chamber, is its emphasis on the quick fix, partly so that targets are hit as people are got into work and off long-term unemployment by recycling them through the new deal, but partly because of the philosophy, which has some degree of truth to it, that the longer someone is unemployed, the less likely they are to get back to work. In terms of people with disabilities, many of whom have never worked but want to get into work, and many of whom have not worked for many years, none of that is as applicable. Is it best to deal with such people by calling them for compulsory interviews with the threat of sanctions if they do not do as they are told? Or will that frighten people with learning disabilities? I attended a recent meeting in Chesterfield involving Phoenix, a good not-for-profit company that delivers part of the Government's programme in this area, and community psychiatric nurses who were there to learn about the condition management programme being piloted in Derbyshire. The nurses were worried that the people they work with would receive demands out of the blue, telling them that they had to attend interviews and would lose their benefits if they did not. Is that really the best way to deal with people with mental health problems and learning disabilities?

There are many good examples of how those people should be dealt with, but they are being handicapped, to some degree, by the strictures of the new deal approach. For example, the empower project being run by Chesterfield chamber of commerce works with disabled people, though not exclusively, and has found that even to get some people to a level at which they could think about applying for a job might take some weeks or months of basic life skills training before they could consider being placed in a job or a workplace. It is difficult but not impossible to match up such projects to the demands of the new deal. Phoenix, a not-for-profit company, has done innovative work in this area in order to deliver some Government programmes. The Government must respect the Shaw Trust because it is now the largest job broker for disabled people for the Government across the United Kingdom. In the next year it will work with 30,000 of the 1 million disabled adults who say that they would love to get back to work if they could be helped to overcome the obstacles in their way.

All those bodies and Unum, a private insurance company that works in this area, say that whatever the disability, more resources, more quality input and more time is needed to achieve a positive outcome than the new deal, in its initial stages, allows. The Government need to rethink their approach there.

Let me give one specific example. Recently I was talking to some advisers at the Chesterfield Jobcentre Plus who find that the return-to-work benefit is useful in some cases. They cited the example of a lady who had had a pressurised job as a personnel manager and had a nervous breakdown, but who wanted to get back to work. She could return partially without worrying too much about the loss of money because for one year she
 
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got the return-to-work benefit. At the end of the year she would probably regain enough confidence to return full-time—she had gained some confidence in two or three months—and would not need further benefits. That would be a win-win situation for everyone; no problem.

Many disabled people would not be in that category. Some will never be able to work full time. Some will have disabilities that come and go, such as multiple sclerosis and ME, and may be able to work all this week but not next week. They express the fear that having struggled hard to gain access to disability benefits, if they return to work they will lose the benefits and face the problem of getting back on them. Would it not be a good idea to introduce a partial disability benefit, whereby some disabled people can sign up to work, say, 20 hours a week, but will get the relevant percentage of benefit for the rest of the week because they will never be able to work full time? That would offer such reassurance to people in those categories that it would be worth the risk, as they see it at the moment, of trying to get back into work.

Finally, there is the question of financial resources. There are resource issues in everything that we have talked about this afternoon. There are many examples and there is much research evidence from the various disability groups to back this up. The John Grooms report said that 300,000 wheelchair-accessible homes are needed now. Who is building them? Where is the money? What is happening? The Joseph Rowntree report recently said that care homes are short of £1 billion. The Shaw Trust points out that if we spend five times more on employment programmes for disabled people, we will reach the European average for the first time. That is a 500 per cent. increase.

The National Autistic Society says that 90 per cent. of short-break schemes for carers have waiting lists. Carers cannot get the breaks they need. Yet, if they reach breaking point, as outlined in the earlier Mencap report on the same theme last June, the state, taxpayers and everyone lose out. If the disabled person who is being cared for has to go into residential care, it is far more expensive and far less satisfactory for everyone. Last year's Mencap report pointed out that six out of the 10 families that the authors talked to had never had a carer's assessment, let alone got on a waiting list for a weekend break or a weekday break for carers.

This May, the Down's Syndrome Association pointed out that the Government's stated policy for more inclusion in education is failing in practice because of local education authority reluctance to provide sufficient resources. That brings us to arguments about whether the Government are giving LEAs enough money but they are spending it elsewhere, or whether the Government are not giving them enough in the first place. Those arguments were raised last year in the education funding debate, for example.

Money can be spent more efficiently. A couple of years ago I went to Leicester and looked at the organisation run by the Red Cross there. On behalf of Leicester city, Leicester county council and Rutland council, it operates the distribution, collection, cleaning and redistribution of the whole range of mobility aids. Because it operates on that scale, with computerised inventories and so on, it has saved a lot of money. It gets the equipment back because it knows where the equipment has gone. Often hospitals and social services
 
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do not know that. Because of the scale on which it works, it can also return equipment to a state in which it is fit to issue to someone else, rather than having to buy brand new equipment and losing it to somebody's outhouse. Money can be handled in better ways and some efficiency savings can be made, but I am dubious about the idea that all the funding can be provided from such savings.

As the population ages, we will have more disability. The older people are, the more they suffer from disabilities of various kinds. The more that we talk, legislate and create a framework of equal rights for disabled people, the more money will be required to make the rhetoric a reality. I hope that the Minister will accept my more critical comments in the helpful spirit in which I intend them. I support much of what the Government have done in the past few years, but much more remains to be done.

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