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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. It might be helpful if I point out to the House that no speech has yet been made in less than 32 minutes. Six hon. Members seek to catch my eye and I hope that everyone will bear that in mind, given the time available.
3.46 pm
Liz Blackman (Erewash) (Lab): I feel sure that I will be able to comply with your request, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am pleased to speak in this afternoon's debate on disability. It is such a broad subject that I have decided to focus my remarks on the disability of autism. I am chair of the all-party group on the issue.
Autism is a communication disability. It affects not only communication, but social interaction and the ability to imagine. People who have autism often find it difficult to pick up social cues. They can also behave in extremely rigid and obsessive ways. It is a spectrum disorder, which means that any of those characteristics can be displayed to a greater or lesser extent. At the high functioning end, including Asperger's syndrome, it is often, rightly, called the hidden disability. Therein lie many of the problems. It is estimated to affect some 500,000 people in the UK, and there is disagreement on whether the number is increasing or we have become better at diagnosis. The cause of autism is unknown, but it is a lifelong disability.
It is fair to say that in the past few years our understanding and awareness of autism has increased significantly. Policymakers in government and parliamentarians certainly have a greater understanding, and that is the result of much work by the National Autistic Society and many other groups that campaign to raise awareness and improve services for people with autism. The media have also played their role in highlighting the disability.
Recently, and laudably, Vodafone has put £6 million into a partnership with the NAS to raise awareness. Hon. Members may have seen some of the advertisements in the press over the past few weeks, which cleverly portray—in a visual and striking way—what autism means to the individuals who have it, their families and the wider community.
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The all-party group was formed in 2000 by my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman), who is now the Under-Secretary of State for Health. My hon. Friend knows much about autism, and I praise the Government for putting him in the Department of Health and giving him responsibility for autism, among his many other responsibilities. Under my hon. Friend's chairmanship of the group, a manifesto was launched last year. It has a 10-year time scale, although we will probably be able to move much more quickly than we had expected. This year, during autism awareness week, we celebrated the first anniversary of the manifesto. The week had a theme of planning for life. That was deliberate because, although it is fair to say that services and policy have moved forward, especially children's services, a whole raft of policy initiatives needs to be taken on adult services.
We still have a long way to go on children's services. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, South (Miss Begg) said, the job is never finished, as our expectations become higher and higher. However, many recent policy initiatives have been taken. They are encouraging, and they will make a difference. Services for children with autism are being used as an example in the disabled children's module of the children's national service framework, which aims to set national standards for what children and their families can expect. Early support pilot programmes funded by the DFES aim to improve the delivery of services to disabled children under three and their families, including children with autism. The special educational needs strategy that has recently been announced singles out autism as an exemplar, and there will be pilot work.
Children's trusts will be enormously important when they come on stream. They will create a statutory framework whereby different agencies can pool their budgets. We will then get a real improvement in multi-agency work not just for children with autism but children with other disabilities and all children. Those are extremely positive steps forward. We will reap the rewards of laying those foundations as they come to fruition. There is no doubt about that.
The picture is not quite so rosy when it comes to the point of transition for children with autistic spectrum disorders. There is a lot of confusion not only around the law but in practice. The transition planning framework for England and Wales is set out in the Education Act 1996, as amended by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001. The SENDA code of practice makes it clear that there is a statutory obligation to prepare a multi-agency transition plan for year 9 pupils with a statement, but evidence collected from the National Autistic Society support programme for parents suggests that more than half of parents were not aware of the 14-plus transition review and what it should mean for their child. Too often, professionals have not turned up when the review has taken place.
Many children are not entitled to such a review because they do not have a statement, but there is a parallel transition process under the Disabled Persons (Services, Consultation and Representation) Act 1986. Education departments are required to notify social services of all 13 to 14-year-olds whom they consider
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disabled. Social services are then required to co-ordinate multi-agency assessments to be linked to the transition and care planning for adults under the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. Understandably, the experience is poor for many families who find, first, that the processes are not integrated and, secondly, that the organisational structures prevent transfer of information.
Certainly, the Children Act 1989 will help. However, there has been some progress. Connexions has accepted responsibility for preparing a needs and provision assessment under section 40 of the Learning and Skills Act 2000 for all children with special educational needs. That puts more pressure on training, and there is no legislative framework to insist that the different agencies—especially adult social services—co-operate.
The need for multi-agency co-ordination in transition planning is recognised in the Green Paper "Every Child Matters", the SEN strategy "Removing barriers to achievement" and the forthcoming NSF. They all have transition themes. The Department for Education and Skills is committed to producing national transition standards and to working more closely with Connexions and learning and skills councils.
I want to focus on services for adults, where there is such a long way to go. Fifty per cent. of people with ASD live at home and only 12 per cent. are in some kind of paid employment, so the picture is much bleaker. The statutory framework falls away. Many young people and older adults fall between mental health teams and social services learning disability teams, coming into contact with one or the other only when they are in crisis. Despite the fact that the valuing people strategy signals access to those services, that does not yet happen as it should.
The Department of Health has published guidance on eligibility criteria for social care services that instructs local authorities to base such criteria on individuals presenting needs rather than on diagnosis. The guidance states that some councils declare that
"they do not help particular groups of individuals, such as those with higher functioning autism/Asperger syndrome, and make no attempt to assess needs as they should. This is unacceptable."
At the reception we held for autism awareness week, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet announced a new vision for adult social care. That is an opportunity to improve not only the statutory framework but the operation of the various services involved. The integration of health and social care records under the national care records service is not due to occur until 2010, but I hope that it can be speeded up with the onset of children's trusts.
Points have already been made about access to benefits, which is problematic for people with autism and their families. However, I praise the DWP for widely publicising information about benefits in different ways, including the free-phone benefit inquiry line. However, although it is easy to provide information, people with a communication or understanding disorder find it hard to process the information, so access is a real issue. Can the Minister tell us whether operators on the free phone benefit inquiry line can pick up a communication disorder? Do they have relevant training?
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Disability living allowance is a key benefit for access to other benefits, yet it is hard to describe autism within the bounds of the current application form. I know that pilot work is under way on the redesign of the form, so can the Minister tell us how that is progressing? There is also a commitment to update the disability handbook. Can she tell us how that exercise is getting on?
As I said earlier, 12 per cent. of people with autism are in paid employment, but only 6 per cent. work full time. There are 332,000 people with ASD of working age and 260,000 of them have an average or above-average IQ. The Government have a phenomenal record on employment, and my constituency bears testimony to that. However, there are specific groups of disabled people that are difficult to support and get into work. I am sure that the Minister will agree that more needs to be done to ensure that more than 6 per cent. of people with ASD are in full-time employment.
The National Autistic Society survey of adults with ASD found that the biggest barriers to work were worries about the social aspects of an employment environment and lack of support, and employers' negative perceptions, lack of understanding and unwillingness to make reasonable adjustments. However, there are brilliant examples of supported employment projects in the UK, not least of which is run by the NAS's employment service, Prospects, which the Department for Work and Pensions supported between 2000 and 2003 as an initial step toward gathering qualitative evidence on how best to support people with autism into employment. Several key features of the Prospects-supported employment programme are not surprising. Young people need help with job searching, interview preparation, finding out how to stay in a job and getting support in the job as and when that is necessary. The other key feature of a successful placement for people with ASD is the education and support of their employers. If we can get the two parts of the equation right, it will make a big difference.
I recently visited a fantastic scheme in Sheffield in which a charity has an arrangement with Meadowhall, which is a huge shopping outlet—anyone who lives anywhere near it will have visited or at least have driven past it. The same ingredients are present in the scheme. Some of the young people involved in the project gave a presentation because it was a year old, and both they and their employers spoke positively about their work experience. The employers made the point of saying how much progress they had made on understanding autism and the way in which they managed and got the best out of all their employees.
Where do we go from here to improve the figures and make the prospect of work for autistic people a reality? As I said, there are two sides to the equation. We must get both the support and supply sides right. I draw hon. Members' attention to a couple of innovative projects on which the NAS is currently embarking. In July, it will set up the Prospects provider training programme, which will be piloted in Glasgow. The service is aimed at disability employment services. Participants will make a payment for which they will gain Prospects' expertise. In time, the specialist service will become self-funding, so it will be possible to deliver it in more regions. When sufficient income has been generated, a co-ordinator for England and Wales will be recruited to roll out the scheme throughout the country.
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On the employers' side, the employers with Prospects initiative will be set up. It will partner companies, with the aim of widening access. Companies that join the scheme will pay a contribution, actively try to find opportunities for paid employment and work experience, and encourage and support staff who wish to train as ASD supporters. However, the companies will get something back in return. They will benefit from access to an eager, reliable and accurate work force with a high level of availability, and many members of the work force will possess exceptional skills and abilities. The companies will receive good PR as socially responsible corporate organisations, and they will support a substantial yet ignored group, the needs of which are rapidly reaching public notice. Employees will have the opportunity to align with a cause of which many may have personal experience from their family and close friends. I hope that not only the DWP but the Department of Trade and Industry and other Departments will take a close interest as those two projects unfold and do what they can to support them. That is a way forward.
Finally, the 1995 definition does not adequately cover the difficulties faced by people with ASD. The draft Disability Discrimination Bill will not remedy that, but it is encouraging that the Joint Committee recommends that the definition in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 should be updated to address the social and communication impairments experienced by those with ASD. That is absolutely crucial to ensure that people with a communication and social interaction disorder are not discriminated against, whether in work or elsewhere. With that, as other hon. Members wish to speak, I will complete my speech.
4.6 pm
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