Baroness Gale (Lab)

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My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Massey for moving this amendment. It has been welcomed across the House, which is a good sign that we can have a really good debate on this. It is a sensible amendment as it asks the Secretary of State to,

“undertake a review of the impact of this Act on disabled children, their families and carers, and the provision of support services”,

with,

“a report of the review to be laid before each House”.

As other noble Lords have said, Acts of Parliament are seldom, if ever, reviewed, so no one knows whether or not they are working. This amendment will ensure that Parliament can at least understand how the Act is working.

My noble friend Lady Hayter said at Second Reading:

“Despite the contribution that disabled people make to national life and their human right to equality of treatment, there are, sadly, still huge hurdles in the way of many of them being able to pursue a full, and indeed fulfilled, life”.


She went on to comment on the lack of adequate resources to meet the additional needs of people with disabilities and made this very important point:

“Of course, all this is not helped by the Government’s welfare reforms”.—[Official Report, 21/10/16; col. 2558.]


There are approximately 12 million people living with disabilities, impairment or limiting long-term illnesses in the UK today. Of these, 5.7 million are of working age, 5.2 million are over 65 and 0.8 million are children. It is recognised that raising a child with disabilities costs up to three times as much as raising a child without disabilities. Twenty-one per cent of children in families with at least one disabled member are in poverty, a significantly higher proportion than the 16% of children in families with no disabled member.

The Government revealed in the Autumn Statement that they had set aside £360 million over six years to ensure that families with a disabled child will receive child disability tax credits in future. However, the payments will be backdated only to April, meaning that individual families may have lost out on entitlements totalling up to £20,000 over the past five years. This is a big loss. The recent UN committee investigation into the rights of disabled people in the UK said that a range of measures introduced since 2010, including the bedroom tax and cuts to disability benefits and social care budgets, had disproportionately and adversely affected disabled children. These are big cuts for people suffering from disabilities. Cuts to the employment support allowance work-related activity group will take more than £1,500 a year away from 500,000 disabled people—this from a fund that was designed to help people stay in or find work. These cuts will reduce support for disabled people by £650 million a year.

An analysis from the TUC found that the Government are years behind schedule on their manifesto commitments to halve the disability employment gap. At their rate of progress, it will take until 2030. The research forecast that by 2020 just over half of disabled people will be in work, which is 11% less than the Government promised. There is no doubt that disabled people are suffering, and will suffer, from the cuts made by government so there is much more to do in this field.

That is why the Labour Party is calling for a complete overhaul of the current system. We are undertaking an intensive consultation exercise, with disabled people at the heart of shaping our approach, through our disability equality roadshow. It is why I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Massey for bringing this important amendment before us, which allows us to highlight the difficulties that people with disabilities have to face now and in the future. Can the Minister take note of the needs of disabled people, which are much greater than those of non-disabled people, to find ways of giving a lot more assistance than they receive at present?

Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB)

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My Lords, before the Minister sits down, are the Government supportive of the Equality Act?

Lord Shinkwin (Con)

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My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in support of my Bill, and I thank sincerely and in good faith the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, for her amendment, which I not only accept but welcome as a logical extension to a logical Bill. It is a Bill that brings the law as it currently applies to disability before birth into line with how your Lordships’ House has already ensured that the law applies to disability after birth.

The amendment is about the impact of my Bill. But it is a simple, wonderful truth that I owe your Lordships’ House so much because of the impact of legislation that it has already passed. Without your Lordships’ House, a commitment to disability equality would never have been enshrined in law. Noble Lords will know that noble giants such as Jack Ashley and Alf Morris, with both of whom I had the privilege of working and whose spirits I invoke today, led the fight to outlaw disability discrimination. All my Bill does is to carry on their noble work, because it would allow us to outlaw disability discrimination where it begins—at source before birth. It is simply unfinished business. The amendment would help because it would measure the Bill’s impact on disabled children, their families and carers, and on the provision of support services.

When I think about the incredible role that strong women—women such as my own mother—play in the lives of their disabled children, anything that supports families and carers after birth and, crucially, on diagnosis before birth is welcome. Moreover, it stands to reason that such support services, be they provided by the state, charities, parents’ organisations or disabled people’s organisations, should be included in an impact review so that people can learn and disseminate best practice and, where necessary, ensure that improvements are made.

Baroness Gale (Lab)

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My Lords, we have had a thorough debate on this amendment and I thank my noble friend Lord Winston, who has such great expertise in this field, for his clarity in explaining why he wishes to move this amendment.

This is a sensitive matter with strongly held views on both sides. The noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, mentioned a woman’s right to choose: many people hold that view. My noble friend Lady Massey said that this was not a political issue. I agree that it is not a political issue. Whenever these matters are debated, in both Houses, Members have to make up their own mind; I think that that is the right thing to do. The term “back-street abortionist” has been used several times this afternoon. Many of us remember those days and absolutely no one wants to go back to a time when women were put at such great risk.

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, mentioned Northern Ireland. We may be debating that later, on other amendments, but I take her point. The arguments have been well rehearsed on both sides of the debate today and from the Front Bench I can say only that the Opposition still fully support the Abortion Act 1967.

Lord Shinkwin

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My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have expressed support for my Bill and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Winston, for his medical lecture on so-called serious foetal anomalies. I address the noble Lord, Lord Winston, with respect but I also address him and all other noble Lords as an equal. I should say at the outset that I totally reject the very premise of this amendment. Other noble Lords have already explained why the amendment is totally inappropriate and, indeed, crassly insensitive, from a Northern Ireland perspective in particular, when it is linked to Amendment 8. I offer a disabled person’s perspective on why it is unacceptable. I have been consistently clear that the purpose of my Bill—a disability rights Bill—is to bring the law as it applies to disability discrimination before birth into line with the laws that your Lordships’ House has already passed to counter disability discrimination after birth.

Noble Lords will know that I accepted an amendment in Committee for an impact review as a logical amendment to a logical Bill. However, in the context of a Bill which promotes disability equality where discrimination begins before birth, this cynical amendment is not remotely logical. Indeed, it runs counter to the very essence of my Bill. The amendment reinforces discrimination because it singles out even more acutely a particular group for destruction on grounds of disability. It seeks to legitimise their destruction after 24 weeks with terminology that commands no clinical consensus and despite the fact that cell-free foetal DNA can first be detected in maternal blood as early as seven weeks’ gestation, which means that genetic or chromosomal abnormalities are being detected well in advance of 24 weeks. So what justification is there for abortion after 24 weeks on the grounds of so-called serious foetal anomaly?

Some noble Lords have seen that I recently asked the Department of Health about the number of fatal foetal abnormalities diagnosed in each of the past five years. The answer was that the information is not collected centrally. I followed up and asked about the number of fatal foetal abnormalities diagnosed after 24 weeks in each of the past five years. The answer was the same: the information is not collected centrally. I find that revealing, not because information is being concealed but because it reflects the reality—the truth of the situation.

Those noble Lords who were invited to attend a meeting on this issue, which I understand was held somewhere in the House on Wednesday, could be forgiven for thinking that there is some medical authority—some clear medical consensus—behind the definition of “fatal foetal abnormality”. There is not because there is not an agreed definition. Indeed, the consensus is that what is considered fatal or life-limiting involves a degree of subjective judgment which is influenced by understandings and by the availability of technology, both of which can change with time. The noble Lords who received the invitation to that meeting might also have got the impression, as was intended by the wording of the invitation, that those 230 disabled babies aborted after 24 weeks in 2015 had all been diagnosed with severe or fatal foetal abnormalities. They were not. Of the 659 babies aborted for the crime of having Down’s syndrome, for example, two were aborted at 25 weeks, one at 26 weeks, one at 28, one at 30, another at 31, three at 32 weeks, two at 33, two at 34—and one at 39 weeks.