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23 Feb 2007 : Column 549

Mr. Hunt: I am happy to give way to the Minister, because I hope very much that he might tell me that he has changed his mind and is prepared to consider reviewing the statementing system.

Mr. Dhanda: I do not want to get sidetracked into a debate on SEN as we are discussing many other important issues today, but this matter is important for the parliamentary record. We do not want to give parents the impression that there are charges related to the special educational needs and disability tribunal process, should their child need to go through it. That point must be made clear: it does not need to cost anything. The Department is considering the demographics and the make-up of those people who go through the SENDIST process. The number of people involved is very small—well under 1 per cent., although I do not have the exact figure at my fingertips. It is worth recalling the fact that parents do not have to pay a fee. We do not want to give that impression in today’s debate.

Mr. Hunt rose—

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. It is important to return to the debate on the Bill.

Mr. Hunt: I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I shall not yield to the temptation to respond as forcefully as I would like to the Minister’s evasions.

Moving on to the substantive issue, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon for the name that he chose for the Bill. I was with him when he made his final decision and I had a small input to it. The Disabled Children (Family Support) Bill has a good name that encourages us, precisely as the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood said, to take a wider view of what respite care can be. There is an excellent children’s hospice, Christopher’s, just outside my constituency. It offers short breaks, or a weekend or a week, giving residential care for children with life-limited conditions. It has been built by the enormous dedication over many years of volunteers throughout the community, who have helped to run the place and to raise funds.

The dedicated staff at Christopher’s say that they see the future of respite care not as building more such hospices and more residential homes for children to go to for a week or a weekend, but as providing more respite care in the home and being able to send someone to people’s homes—say, for one night a week or one night a fortnight, and staying from 4 o’clock in the afternoon until 11 o’clock at night—to feed and wash the child and put them to bed, which would enable the parents to go out to the cinema or for a meal. More often than not, parents want to do something with a non-disabled sibling, which they would not otherwise be able to do. That wider interpretation of respite is important.

A couple more significant aspects to respite and family support are worth mentioning, one of which is education. Getting the right education package is incredibly important to parents. I remember talking to the mother of a severely autistic 12-year-old girl who said that term time is vital for her to recharge her batteries.


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Work is another important aspect of family support. For the parents of disabled children, work can be incredibly significant as it provides a different social context from the often pressured environment of the family. It helps them to prevent themselves from falling into benefit dependency and stops them falling into poverty. We know that 53 per cent. of the children of workless households grow up in poverty compared with just 20 per cent. of children growing up in households where at least one adult works.

However, in those areas of what might be called a broader vision of respite, progress has been disappointing, which is why the Bill is so important. Conservative Members welcome this week’s Government announcement of an additional £33 million to carers, including £25 million for emergency respite, but I am sure that the Minister accepts that emergency respite is just the tip of the iceberg. We need a sustained programme of investment in support for parents so that the need for emergency respite does not occur as much as it otherwise would.

We need to consider the role that education plays in supporting families and making it easier for parents to get the right education package for their children. The hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood mentioned TreeHouse, which is an excellent school for autistic children. All but one of the children whom I saw on my visit to the school was being funded by the local authority, but in most cases parents should expect to have to go to a tribunal before they can get their child accepted at TreeHouse. That makes parents work incredibly hard, despite the challenges that they already face.

We know from a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report published in December that this country has the highest rate of workless households with children in Europe. We also know that mothers with disabled children are seven times less likely to work than other mothers and that a third of disabled children are growing up in poverty.

I do not want to be entirely negative and the Government have made important progress. We have had the carers strategy in 1999; the Carers and Disabled Children Act 2000, which introduced direct payments; the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001, which strengthened rights to get the right education package; and the Carers (Equal Opportunities) Act 2004, which gave local authorities a duty to tell carers of the care packages to which they might be entitled. However, I am concerned about what we have heard this week from the Government, which I am sure is in response to the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon.

For example, in an article on Wednesday in the Daily Mail the Chancellor talked about having another huge consultation on the future of carers—the biggest consultation ever. It is not that consultations are not important, but we have already had a lot of them. In 1999, we had a report on the carer’s strategy to tackle worklessness, but 20 per cent. of carers of disabled children are still unable to work, often because of disincentives in the benefits system. That report was also going to deal with direct payments, but still less than 1 per cent. of all the support given to disabled people is provided through direct payments.


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The life chances report published in January 2005 was another excellent report, on which there had been wide consultation, but it included a powerful target that, by 2014, families with disabled children should receive as much support as they need to be able to function as a family. That is a very important target, but what we need now are actions towards meeting that target, not just endless consultations.

Dr. Starkey: Despite his apparent criticism of the consultation proposed, does the hon. Gentleman accept that it has been welcomed by those organisations that represent carers as a valuable opportunity for them to shape the development of the carer’s strategy. I am surprised that he is seeking to disagree with those carers associations, or perhaps just seeking to make a party political point.

Mr. Hunt: I am seeking to do neither of those things. I am certainly not trying to make a party political point, as I hope that the hon. Lady will recognise that I have given the Government credit for the legislation that they have passed. Nor am I saying that the consultation is a bad thing—obviously, the good thing about consultations is that they allow us to learn more about the situation and to implement the right policies as a result. What I am saying is that we need action, not just consultation. A lot of big reports have been published that have had a great deal of consultation, but we need to move beyond consultations to action. We need to see things happening. My concern is that another consultation will take yet more time and that, while there will no doubt be more important thinking, further delays will take place before something is actually done.

To conclude, let me briefly point the Government to where they could take some important action to make life better for families with disabled children. First, they could streamline the incredibly complicated assessment processes. At the moment, families with disabled children must be assessed by the wheelchair service, the housing department, occupational therapy, residential care and the blue badge scheme, and by the local education authority for advocacy needs. A single assessment process would streamline the system, massively reducing the stress and pressure on families with disabled children and saving a lot of money: of the £5.4 billion spent on supporting families with disabled children, £1.1 billion is spent on the assessment and commissioning process. By comparison with that, the £200 million cost of my hon. Friend’s Bill is peanuts. We could therefore save a lot of money on the assessment process. As has been discussed, we also need to consider reform of the statementing process.

Finally, however, we need to consider the benefits system. We have talked about the importance of work for many families with disabled children, but they can apply for a large number of benefits. You were in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, for our debate about improving the life chances of disabled children, in which I told the House that for the eight benefits to which families with disabled children are eligible, there are 273 pages and 1,118 questions that parents are required to read and answer. The complexity of that system makes parents concerned about doing anything
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that could threaten that benefits package. That is why they worry about whether it is wise even to think about looking for work.

This debate is about improving support for families at the most vulnerable moment in their lives. Improving access to short breaks would be a small but significant step in improving support for those families. However, a much wider root- and-branch reform is needed of the support offered to families with disabled children. Some 400,000 families look to the House today not just to listen to their concerns but to take action. I hope that the Government’s response will give them the hope, encouragement and support that they richly deserve.

11.35 am

Mr. Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab): It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt) and particularly today, when he outlined the official Opposition’s response to the Bill with commendable clarity and in a way that will not only be helpful to us during the remainder of the debate but as discussions of these issues inevitably continue.

I also assure the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), who said at the beginning of the debate that he would not be too happy if people were encouraged to speak for too long, that the good news is that I have not been encouraged to speak for long; the bad news is that I do not need the encouragement anyway. I hope, however, to put on record some views that are consistent with the excellent speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), to which I hope to return.

I congratulate most warmly the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) on his outstanding speech, which was comprehensive and showed great clarity. As one who recalls that our paths crossed on international development in earlier days, I was not at all surprised by the sensitivity that he displayed and his understanding of the issues. Whatever the outcome of our debate, and whatever progress the Bill makes, I hope that he will feel that his contribution has been very substantial. If we can achieve what both sides of the House want on such important issues, he should be reassured that his contribution has been immeasurable.

The hon. Gentleman was particularly generous. He was rightly generous to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Within the rules of the House and the neutrality that you must exercise, you have shown an outstanding commitment to these issues—one that will long continue and that we appreciate. He was rightly generous to the disabled children’s consortium and the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign, which are following our discussions with great interest. He was particularly generous to my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary, which Labour Members will especially welcome. Despite the fact that, for understandable reasons, my hon. Friend is not in the Chamber today, he has been very much the inspiration behind the remarkable progress made in the past year on issues of disabled children and their families. He knows that we depend very much on his input and on the Treasury to make still more progress, and we are keen to assist him in the objectives that he has set publicly, including in his major speech this week.


23 Feb 2007 : Column 553

As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood referred to the parliamentary hearings on services for disabled children. We were both very happy to lead in those hearings, which reflected a remarkable spirit of all-party participation and the knowledge that parents, carers, organisations for disabled people and particularly disabled children, and in one case a disabled person, were giving us the benefit of their day-to-day experience in non-controversial all-party hearings that were quite intense. They were willing Parliament, and by implication the Government, to make progress in this important area.

I hope that the results of the hearings, the recommendations that we made and the moving evidence that we heard still remain part of the agenda. There is a heavy responsibility on my hon. Friend the Minister when he responds to the debate. Whatever happens to this important Bill, I hope that our recommendations will still be part of the Government’s agenda. That would be right. Our hearings were signalled in the Chancellor’s last Budget speech, where he said that he was considering carefully the issue of resources for disabled children and was looking for advice on how they should be best allocated. That was followed by an invitation to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood and to me to lead the review, to take the evidence, to make it inclusive and to visit various parts of the country, as she said. We did all those things.

We were particularly impressed by what we saw in Greater Manchester and in some of the London boroughs, particularly Tower Hamlets. We were impressed, too, by the genuine commitment of the eight Ministers who came, gave us their views and often sat through the review and listened to what was said. Later they came to, I am sure, both of us privately and told us how strongly and passionately they feel about the issue and how they, too, want to make the kind of progress that we want to see. I hope that the Minister will confirm that the conclusions of that review, given that they were meant to feed into the comprehensive spending review that is still going on, are still part of that important agenda. If he gives us that assurance, that will be welcomed greatly by hon. Members on both sides of the House.

The issues that we are discussing seem to be clear, and it is not surprising, as the hon. Member for South-West Devon rightly suggested, that there is more impatience and frustration perhaps on the issue of disabled children than on other disability issues. It was there in the things that people told us. There was widespread dissatisfaction with existing provision levels. The plea for more short breaks and for the resources that make them possible was outstanding and cannot be ignored. It is not being ignored today. It should not be, and it will go on.

We also heard that eight in 10 parents rated social services as poor and that five in 10 rated education services and health services as poor. Recently, the Economic Secretary gave assurances in the House, in answer to a question that I put to him during Treasury questions, that the final Treasury/Department for Education and Skills review of young people’s services will respond individually to each recommendation in our report. I
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welcome that, particularly in respect of short breaks. I trust that the Government will respond as well to what we said on speech and language services; shortfalls in equipment; the necessity of early intervention, which is hugely important, as we heard in the evidence and as our discussions went on; and the difficulties on transition to adulthood, which again was one of the most important matters that we discussed—it was raised repeatedly, not surprisingly. That period of transition, as I am sure the hon. Member for South-West Devon will agree, is for many individual families one of the most traumatic in their lives. As a society we have not fully addressed that, certainly not in the universal way that the organisations that are following our debates today would rightly expect us to do.

There is, it seems, a clear and long-overdue groundswell for progress in the field of children and disabilities, and the further attention brought to it by the hon. Gentleman in this Bill is a welcome addition to that interest.

I want to turn briefly to the issue of short breaks. A whole session of our hearings was dedicated to the theme of family support and children’s services. Not surprisingly, short breaks were frequently raised, because all the evidence is that, if families are without support, if carers are left on their own, if there is not the joint planning between public bodies and the agencies, very often the relationship breaks up and two people are institutionalised where it is inappropriate for either of them to be in any situation other than receiving the kind of support that society wants to see. Indeed, that issue was mentioned unprompted in three in 10 of the written submissions to our review. That seems to be a key priority in terms of improving services. It is right that the hon. Gentleman should have considered that an important part of his Bill.

A planned and sensitive approach will, as has been said, also reduce long-term costs and, more importantly, remove the trauma and misery down the line. As one parent told us:

That was an individual case. The response in the end came, although later than we would have expected. We are seeking to achieve such a response in so many cases, so that we not only have best practice—as has been rightly said, not least by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood, there are many examples of that—but best practice becomes the norm.

I look forward to hearing what my hon. Friend the Minister has to say about the Bill, because his speech will be important. However, whatever his response, the focus provided by the debate, which comes so soon before the spending review, has already brought a welcome commitment from the Government to make progress on the issue. Indeed, that commitment may have come earlier than might otherwise have been the case—in “a matter of months”, as the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), who has responsibility for care services, said on the radio this week.

The case for more resources is overwhelming, not least because of the huge increase recently in the population of disabled children: 62 per cent. over the past 30 years. Of course, we all greatly welcome medical progress, but
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as a society we must respond with the services and care that are inevitably needed to follow up that progress. That is only right. As we heard in evidence to the parliamentary hearings, debate continues about how we allocate available resources and how the Government can work with local authorities to ensure that those resources go where they are intended to go. Even when we met representatives of the Local Government Association, who gave excellent evidence, we could not resolve the question whether resources should be ring-fenced. I say that openly. Anxiety remained not only about whether more resources would be made available, which is why we look forward to the comprehensive spending review and why we made our recommendations in that regard, but also that they should be directed at caring services, to recognise every case in every part of the country, whatever the local authority. Universal standards must be profoundly set.

Only this week, my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary said that

I welcome that declaration and hope that a strategy is developed to establish the objectives that my hon. Friend has set both as a Back Bencher and as a Minister. As Contact a Family warned us:


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