Mr. Jeremy Hunt (South-West Surrey) (Con): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble). She made an excellent contribution not only today but in last month’s debate on improving the life chances of disabled children.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) on bringing his private Member’s Bill before the House. He has been an MP for 14 years, but I do not believe that he has had a private Member’s Bill before. During those 14 years, however, he has developed a high reputation for campaigning for the needs of the socially disadvantaged, whether for better treatment for drug addicts in his constituency or for the needs of poorer people in the developing world, during his time as shadow Secretary of State for International Development or now, as chairman of the Conservative party’s human rights commission. It is characteristic of him that he should use his precious private Member’s Bill slot to campaign for another extremely disadvantaged group—disabled children and their families. I commend him for doing that.
I also commend the efforts of the Every Disabled Child Matters consortium, led most ably by Steve Broach, and its constituent organisations, Contact a Family, Mencap, the Council for Disabled Children, and the Special Educational Consortium. I have been shadow Minister for disabled people for just over a year. It seems to me that the problems and challenges that disabled children and their families face are one of the most pressing issues, if not the most pressing, among the range of issues in the entire disability agenda. The efforts of the Every Disabled Child Matters consortium have moved the issue right up the political agenda, and it is to be congratulated on doing that.
I think my hon. Friend understands that, as the official Opposition, we are not able to support the Bill, not because we disagree with his powerful and eloquent arguments, nor because we think that what he said was not valid. We intend to be a responsible Government—indeed, the kind of responsible Government who deal with precisely the issues that he outlined, if they have not been dealt with by the time we get to power. If we want to be a responsible Government, we have to be a responsible Opposition. We have no idea what the fiscal or financial environment will be after the next general election, which could be as many as three years away.
I reassure my hon. Friend, however, that the issues he raised would have the highest priority under a future Conservative Government. That commitment comes right from the top. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has spoken on many occasions of the need to improve respite provision. The Conservative party’s statement of values, “Built to Last”, which was mailed to all Conservative party members last autumn, and voted on and accepted with an overwhelming majority, stated that one of the key priorities of a Conservative Government would be clearer rights to respite care, so the commitment runs right through our party.
Why do we give such a high priority to the issue? One reason is to do with simple demographics. The number of disabled children is increasing at a significant rate. In 1975, there were 476,000 disabled children, but the figure has now risen to closer to 772,000. According to Mencap, the number of disabled children has doubled, increasing from 25,000 in 1988 to 49,000 now. Some people say that the figure is nearer to 75,000. Nearly 100 severely disabled children are born every week and there are probably 400,000 families in the United Kingdom bringing up a disabled child.
One of the most striking things about meeting families with disabled children is the tremendous bond between parent and child. I remember meeting a mother of a four-year-old boy with severe cerebral palsy. He could not walk, talk or eat unassisted, and often he could not sleep; but what he could do was communicate with his mother through his eyes. That was an incredible thing to see. Those parents want to focus all their energy and attention on the child, but the system makes them focus it all on the disability. That is why it is so important that we have this debate.
There has been a lot of discussion in the media this week about the role of families, prompted by the tragic murder of Billy Cox. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has led the national debate, by saying that if we are to deal with the root causes of the problems we must look at family breakdown. Disabled children, too, suffer from family breakdown. The Mencap report to which my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon alluded stated that eight out of 10 families with disabled children say that they are at breaking point because of a lack of access to short break provision, while 76 per cent. say that the pressures and stress of bringing up a disabled child are bringing them close to the point of family breakdown. Indeed, 9 per cent. of such families say that their situation has directly led to separation. The result is an army of lone parents battling against the odds to bring up a disabled child. How ironic it is that the very moment at which families most need the support of two loving parents is the precise moment at which they are most likely to break up.
John Mann: This is perhaps an appropriate time to ask the hon. Gentleman precisely how much additional money he anticipates committing to the issue, because being in government is about making such priorities. In the context of the youth social services budgets that are about to made throughout the country, will he commend those local authorities that increase their social services budgets for such provision in the next few weeks?
Mr. Hunt: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He will have heard earlier that the estimated costs of the measures in the Bill are thought to be between £150 million and £200 million. However, as I was about to indicate, there is a much wider issue about the type of support that we give to families with disabled children. I urge him to address his comments to those on his own Front Bench, who are in a position to decide whether they want to make that investment. We are in opposition, and, as I have said, as a responsible Opposition we are not going to make financial commitments when we do not know what the fiscal environment might be if we took office.
John Mann: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I hear his answer, or non-answer, to one half of my question. On the second half, social services budgets are being set—for example, by Nottinghamshire county council—in the next few weeks. Should such councils increase their budgets to allow better provision for my constituents who have disabled children? When they set their budgets next month, should they spend more money?
Mr. Hunt: I hope that all social services departments make adequate provision for disabled children, but the financial environment that those departments live in is largely affected by national Government decisionsand the funding settlement that they receive from the Government. It is not simply in the gift of local social services departments to increase spending to the levels that they want if the funding settlement from national Government has not been generous, as I know from my own county council, Surrey, which I think receivesthe second least-generous financial settlement in the country. It is therefore finding it difficult to offer the support that it would like to.
Returning to the argument that I was making, family breakdown leads to social breakdown for many sections of society and the same is true for disabled children. One example of that is the school exclusion statistics, which the Minister, who is from the Department for Education and Skills, will know well. A disabled child is 13 times more likely to be excluded than a non-disabled child, and 64 per cent. of exclusions are of children with special educational needs. Disability is a challenge not just for disabled people, but for us all.
Mr. Swayne: Has my hon. Friend shared my experience of surgeries and been faced with a family who are at breaking point—at the end of their tether—because of the hoops that they have been made to jump through simply to obtain a statement of special educational need? I have had that experience with well-educated families who have been in tears at my surgery because of such a situation. I just wonder how on earth those who are less articulate and less well educated manage to cope.
Mr. Hunt: My hon. Friend makes an extremely important and powerful point. I have two constituents whom I met in the last six months and who said that they have had to spend more than £10,000 on legal fees to get the education package that they require. That is whymy right hon. Friend the Member for Witney set upa special educational needs commission underSir Robert Balchin to consider whether the statementing process can be improved so that it is easier to deal with not just for articulate parents, but for parents who do not have the same advantages, so that they too can benefit from the right education package.
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.
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 tipof 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.
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. In 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 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.