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26 Feb 2009 : Column 160WH—continued
I have described the picture for those leaving school and looking for help, but carers and constituents have come to me from the other end. They are elderly parents whose children are perhaps in their 40s. Because people are living longer, people well into their 70s may end up caring for children in their 40s. One mother phoned me last summer, before the Rosehill closure was an issue. Her daughter goes to Rosehill. She had been told, again in an arbitrary way, that her 43-year-old daughter’s day care was to be cut by one day. She was in tears on the phone, saying, “How can I manage? I can only manage her over the weekend because five days a week she goes to her day care. What happens when she can only go four days a week?”
Such are the individual stories that illustrate why the Government have to get it right. We must also get it right in services for older people. There is a huge job of work to be done by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The way we behave towards older people with disabilities, particularly learning disabilities—I hope that this is happening only in Aberdeen—is nothing short of a diminution of their human rights.
Another decision by the council in Aberdeen is to move everyone over 65 into older people’s services. The result is that adults with learning disabilities who have turned 65 are now being reassessed. If they are in supported accommodation, they are being told that it is too expensive and that they will have to go to an old folks’ home. The only reason they have to move is that they have turned 65 and they have learning disabilities. Their relatives have been knocking on my door in the past week. I was quite horrified. I honestly thought that I had got it wrong. I wrote to the chief executive of the council expecting an immediate rebuttal saying, “No, we’re not doing that. Of course we wouldn’t dream of doing that.” It has not come. Instead, the lead councillor on social work has accused me of scaremongering in the press, saying, “Actually, we’re just going to assess them, and then we’ll decide from there where they’re going to live.” Those people are living in a home situation where relatives may be caring for them, and they are being told where they must live. It is appalling. I was horrified, and I have got increasingly angry as the week has gone on since I found that out.
Those things are happening in Aberdeen, where we thought we were getting better. If it is happening now, the situation may be happening elsewhere, in other local authorities that are finding that their money is being cut. It is difficult to get to the bottom of where the money is coming from. Some of it comes from Westminster and some of it from the Department for Work and Pensions in the form of benefits to both the cared-for and the carers, but in other areas it may come from the local council. It is difficult and confusing.
I hope that we can behave better in the 21st-century world. We are a rich country. We should be valuing our disabled people. A measure of how civilised we are is how we treat the most vulnerable, and part of the package of those most vulnerable people is their carers. How we treat the carers in our society should also be a measure of how civilised we are.
3.55 pm
Mr. Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich, West) (Lab/Co-op): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Sir John. I preface my remarks by saying that I feel something of an interloper at this debate, as I did not serve on the Select Committee that wrote the report. None the less, on reading it, I was impressed. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney), and all those who participated in the process, on producing the report.
My attention was drawn to one particular conclusion:
“Protect the interests of young carers, ensuring that in caring for family members they are not disadvantaged in accessing opportunities for education, training and employment”.
I turned to the Government response to see whether I could find a specific reply to that conclusion. Reading the range of responses, I could identify some that might be relevant to it, but try as I might, I could not find anything that directly satisfied me that the Government are addressing it as a specific problem.
I felt, therefore, that I would like to make some remarks based on my personal experience in my local authority of the specific problems faced by young carers on top of the better-known problems experienced by carers as a whole. A number of hon. Members referred to carers as a silent group, deprived of effective advocacy. There is a lot of truth in that. Young carers are even more silent and less able to advocate their cause than carers as a whole, for obvious reasons.
Mrs. Humble: I am sure that my hon. Friend is well aware that one reason why young carers are a silent group is that they hide the fact that they are carers. It is not that it does not occur to them that they are carers, as it does not occur to many adults. They often know that they are carers, but they do not want their school friends to know. They are often bullied at school if it is found out that they are carers. They do not want their teachers to know. They do not want anybody to know, and so they hide it. We need to reassure them that they can come forward and be helped.
Mr. Bailey: My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. I was going to come to the difficulties of identifying young carers. As well as the problem that she mentioned, it is even more frightening that some young carers will not divulge that they are carers for fear that if the nature of their parents’ handicaps is revealed, they will be taken into care and removed from their family situation, which to their young minds is a powerful disincentive to revealing how much support they give their families.
My local authority is relatively lucky in having a very able carers’ organisation. Most unusually, it has an organisation specific to young carers. Ably led by director Tracey Smith and a team of employees and volunteers, it provides services for young carers. I know that other areas have similar organisations, some of which are dealt with in the overall remit of carers’ groups—Harrogate has been mentioned as an example.
The figures quoted in the report are frightening, particularly those acknowledging that in the 2001 census, 165,000 young people were carrying out carers’ duties. The report also gives the statistic that 1 per cent. of the population are affected. When researching my own
statistics, I found that an independent organisation has estimated that there are more than 2,000 potential young carers in my local authority area of Sandwell, from a population of 3,000 young people in that educational group. Although 2,000 young people might not be a huge proportion of the total number of carers, if one thinks of that figure as a proportion, it is a significant section. The educational opportunities that are lost to those young people as a result of their caring duties are a considerable handicap to them and could jeopardise their life prospects for many years. Those lost opportunities are also a drag on educational improvement statistics in the local area. There is a pressing moral need to enhance the life prospects of those young people by giving them appropriate support.
Dr. Hywel Francis (Aberavon) (Lab): I apologise for arriving late. I have been speaking in the Chamber about a Welsh Assembly Government legislative competence order on carers. Does my hon. Friend agree that we ought to recognise the excellent work that Crossroads does for carers, particularly at the local level? It works closely with local education authorities to assist young carers and help them through problems such as bullying. May I place on record the thanks of the all-party group for carers to the Select Committee for its tremendous report? At yesterday’s all-party group meeting, I was asked to come along today to place that thanks on the record and to say that we look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Mr. Bailey: I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and join him in thanking Crossroads and recognising its work. I also recognise his contribution to promoting the cause of carers.
I note that my local authority is probably better off than many others because it has its own organisation that is dedicated to helping young carers. However, it deals with only 155 such carers, and there are estimated to be 2,000 in Sandwell, so if my area is relatively well off, it is frightening to think what the situation could be in other parts of the country.
I said that I would talk about the difficulties of identifying carers, and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) rightly outlined a number of reasons why young people are unwilling to come forward and acknowledge that they are carers. However, there are mechanisms and organisations that should enable us to identify young carers. It has been suggested to me that GPs are well placed to identify families in which a parent has some disability or health problem and to be able to say, from their knowledge of that family, from where that parent is getting support. In most cases, it will be from the children in the family. I am informed that GPs have an obligation to keep a register of carers, but they do not seem to be obliged to use that register for any other purpose. That is a suitable area for investigation and recommendation on ensuring that the information that GPs hold can be passed on to an appropriate body that would enable young carers to get support.
Similarly, teachers will often notice that young people are not staying on for after-school activities, are not doing homework, or are showing signs of sleeplessness or other symptoms of a lifestyle that is distracting them from basic educational involvement. Sandwell Young
Carers, in my area, gives training sessions with schools, but that is not obligatory, and I wonder how many other areas have similar training sessions. That could also be considered as a way of assisting with identification.
My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, South (Miss Begg) mentioned the needs of young carers. What is coming back to me is that carers need recognition of their caring role, which gives them a certain status and sense of responsibility that should be acknowledged by society. Rather than being some sort of stigma, it is a mark of credit.
My hon. Friend also mentioned respite care, which is essential to young people who have to deal not only with the pressures of full-time education, but with the very difficult pressure of what is often a problematic home situation. Those young people are also often deprived of peer group support and the social interaction, perhaps of playing with others, that would be normal for a person of their age. They are socially isolated, but have a higher level of responsibility than one would normally expect a young person of their age to bear. Having respite, being able to go to an organisation where they can meet others in the same situation, and perhaps getting a holiday somewhere, when they would never otherwise have a holiday, is essential to the well-being of those young people.
Education was highlighted in the report. Many young carers lose out either because they cannot attend school as often as they should or because they cannot participate in the full range of activities at school. Some of them find it difficult to get to school because, unlike many young people with parents who take them to schools, they have no transport. That is a significant issue for young people with caring responsibilities. Likewise, they have no grant income to deal with any special needs that they might have.
Those problems are specific to this age group, and, unless they are resolved, they will undermine both the Government’s investment in the wider education system and the futures of a significant proportion of our young people today. I asked my local young carers’ association which single thing, if anything, would help them to highlight their specific problems within the vast range of problems that carers have, and would help them to promote solutions, and the first thing that was put to me was that young carers need a dedicated national organisation. That is not to criticise the excellent Children’s Trust or the Princess Royal Trust for Carers, which do a good job in taking on board young carers’ issues. However, a specific range of needs is covered by local government, education departments, the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions, none of which, unfortunately, has ownership of those matters. In those circumstances, it is crucial to have a dedicated organisation looking at Departments and tying policies together that will deal with young peoples’ problems.
Although I recognise that not all my remarks might be in the Minister’s specific remit, I hope that he will take them away and feed them into the forthcoming Green Paper on health and social care, so that the matter can be seriously considered and measures implemented to promote the interests of this specific group. In doing so, I commend the section in the report on the trip to Australia, which mentions Australian respite and information services. Australia seems to
have a much better developed process for identifying and assisting young people with these responsibilities than us. It is important that the Government look at that particular model to see how it could be replicated to deal with the problems we are discussing.
The needs of this particular group have been consistently under-recognised. The provisions to deal with those needs have been, at best, patchy and, at worst, non-existent. Dealing with the problem would provide enormous potential benefits both for the family life and the educational opportunities of the young people concerned. There are also, of course, benefits to the community at large arising from young people having a more fulfilled life and being better able to develop skills and contribute to the community. Although not all of the specific points I have made might be within the Minister’s remit, I ask him to take them away and pursue them with other Departments, so that we can at last change the life prospects of what we know is a minimum of 165,000 young people in this country.
4.12 pm
Harry Cohen (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab): As a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, I am pleased to be associated with this good report, which makes some important recommendations to assist the lives of carers. I pay tribute to all those who have spoken in the debate, including my Committee colleagues. The speeches have been excellent and some very relevant points have been made.
I want to draw attention to only two issues in the report. The first is the recommendation for a national network of carers’ centres, which is an idea we saw in Australia and brought back. It would enable there to be a co-ordinated approach to helping carers, including providing information, advice, guidance and signposting to other specific organisations that can help carers—for example, local organisations or those dealing with services, benefits and other sorts of support.
People have said that there are carers’ centres here—there is one in Harrogate that we saw—but I do not have one in my constituency. There are many parts of London that do not have a carers’ centre, which is also the case for rural areas across the country. The provision of carers’ centres needs to be better co-ordinated and formalised because it is an important way to get information about respite, for example.
In “Putting People First: a Shared Vision and Commitment to the Transformation of Adult Social Care”, the Government said that by 2011 they will commit local government and national Government to making significant progress towards ensuring that all areas have “carer support” and a
“universal information, advice and advocacy service for people needing services and their carers irrespective of their eligibility for public funding”.
That sounds good, but what does it mean in practice? I have written in the margin of my notes that social services would say that they are providing carer support. Alternatively, it might be the citizens advice bureau down the road or in the next borough. Frankly, that is not a national network of carer support. We know from
history that the advice that citizens advice bureaux give can be patchy because they are busy with all sorts of other things as well.
It is not good enough for the Government to say that this is down to local government. To be fair to local government, we have had a briefing from the association of local authorities, or one of those local government bodies, which says, “We’re strapped for cash and we can’t really provide all that we would like to in that way.” Many local authorities will not provide such services and do not see them as a priority—perhaps they are old-fashioned.
Miss Begg: My hon. Friend is right. If a local authority does not consider such services a priority, we get the situation that we have in Aberdeen, where services did exist, but they were easy targets when there were budget constraints and the local authority was trying to save money.
Harry Cohen: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, which I fully agree with. Similar examples in my area give me concern.
Direction from the Government is needed to deal with the problem. They must say, “We want a national network of centres and we are prepared to will the means to do it.” As part of willing the means, the Government must provide the core funding for such centres—for example, the one in Harrogate. Children’s centres provide an example of how that could be done. One of the big things that the Government have done, which is excellent, is provide a children’s centre in every constituency. I fully praise the Government for that; it is tremendous. However, they willed the means and said, “We want it.” They put the money in, worked with local authorities and got it. That is brilliant and the Government should do the same for carers. The Government’s current attitude, which is reflected in their response, is a do-nothing attitude, and that it should be left to social services and the local authorities. That is not good enough.
The second point that I want to make is about the general support for carers. When I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), I mentioned the astonishing fact that the Government have basically said that they do not accept that the general level of support for carers is too low. Will the Minister specifically address that? Do the Government think that the general level of support for carers is not too low? I am interested to hear his response, because we know that at £50.55 the carer’s allowance is the lowest earnings replacement allowance.
Thoughts run through my mind of the recent programme, “Rab C. Nesbitt”, which is probably one of the funniest programmes on television. The MP in the programme says, “I can go and live off that,” and is taken down the pub in Glasgow, or wherever it is, and he spends all his money there. Could the Minister live off £50.55—let alone care for someone as well? I do not think so, otherwise I would say that he should go to live with Rab Nesbitt and try it, but I will not make that particular suggestion.
The Government make two points. They identify that the issue of carer’s benefit will be a priority from 2011. That is too long to wait. Where is the plan now? The other fallback argument is complexity. The issue of a carer’s allowance is complex, which has been brought
out in today’s speeches. Is the carer’s allowance an income replacement? What should we do for carers who are in work? What should we do for full-time carers? We might need different approaches, but the current figure is too low for all those people.
A further point is that pensioners who are carers get quite a poor deal in the current system. They think that they will get some extra cash when they take on caring duties, but they do not. Some people suddenly find that they are caring for a second person. When I was on the “Politics Show”, I spoke to a splendid woman who was caring for her husband, who had had a stroke. Suddenly, she had to care for her son as well, and she told me that there was not a penny of extra support in such circumstances. I do not think that that is fair, either.
My last point is based on a briefing that we received from the Parkinson’s Disease Society, which includes a worrying point that I ask the Minister to address. The briefing states:
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