(10 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Edward Timpson)
I beg to move,
That the draft Special Educational Needs (Personal Budgets) Regulations 2014, which were laid before this House on 9 April, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
The regulations are the first to be laid under section 49 and—it gives me great pleasure to say—under part 3 of the Children and Families Act 2014. As I think we can all agree across the House, the 2014 Act has the potential to make a massive improvement to the lives of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
The regulations will introduce the option of a personal budget for education, health and care plan holders from September 2014. The SEN pathfinders have shown that personal budgets can make a real difference to children and young people; indeed, according to some parents on the pathfinder programme, they can be life-changing. However, the introduction of personal budgets is complex, and hon. Members may want some reassurances about their introduction in September, especially in relation to the testing of direct payments for SEN provision.
If personal budgets are to work, parents must be given clear, up-front information about their availability, as well as advice and support on requesting, taking up and managing a personal budget, including on direct payments. Personal budgets must be embedded in the education, health and care planning process, rather than seen simply as an addition to the system. Their introduction from September, as part of the wider reforms, means that councils are developing personal budgets as a coherent element of the system, rather than just a mere bolt-on. I must stress that, building on the experience of the pathfinders, our approach to implementation will be one of evolution, rather than the proverbial revolution.
The draft code of practice, which was laid before Parliament on 11 June and is subject to debate in its own right, is abundantly clear on that important underlying principle of successful implementation. Subject to the will of Parliament, the code of practice will, along with regulations covering the local offer and EHC plans, set out a flexible framework for implementation, while providing a clear expectation of what councils must have in place in September 2014 and of how it should evolve over time as joint commissioning arrangements and local offers mature.
To turn to the substance of the regulations, they contain many of the provisions that we have previously debated as part of the pilot scheme for direct payments for SEN provision. They give parents and young people the right to ask for a personal budget when an EHC plan is being prepared, or during a statutory review of an existing plan. Parents must be given up-front information about personal budgets, including the information that will be required in, and consulted on as part of the local offer.
We have maintained the considerations in relation to value for money and the impact on other service users—an issue that has been of concern in debates in this House and the other place. We have repeated the requirement for the permission of a school or college and added early-years settings where a direct payment is being used on their premises. I understand that there are concerns that that could be a get-out clause and a barrier to inclusion, especially in further education. However, we have seen no such evidence from the pathfinders. It is only right that institutions have the final say on who can work on their premises. I can, however, reassure hon. Members that we will keep a careful eye on that aspect of our reforms.
Finally, I want to return to my earlier theme of the complexity of implementation. I draw the House’s attention to the comprehensive package of support that is in place to help councils meet this important challenge. An ever-increasing array of materials, including practical advice, case studies, checklists and frameworks for implementation, is available on the SEN pathfinder website. All those materials have been developed with expert support from local authorities, their partners, and voluntary and community sector groups that work in the area, including those that represent parents.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
Last year, the Minister kindly met me and representatives of CLIC Sargent to consider the position of children who suffer from cancer. Will he assure Members that there will be the necessary flexibility—this is the key issue—to deal with children with varying abilities and concerns?
Mr Timpson
I can reassure the hon. Gentleman absolutely on that point. The meeting that we had last year informed not only the legislation, but the underlying code of practice, which is now in draft form. The whole point of personal budgets is to embed flexibility and personalisation in the support that is available to parents, and to put them much more in control of the choices to ensure that they and their children get the relevant support when they need it. I hope that he will take time to look at the code of practice. I know that CLIC Sargent, which works closely with the Department, has done so. I am grateful for the work that he and that charity have done.
Our SEN advisers are visiting councils the length and breadth of the country to establish what more local areas may need and, when necessary, are making referrals to our pathfinder champion support team and the newly appointed national champions for personal budgets.
That package will be complemented by a thematic evaluation of personal budgets and integrated resourcing, which will be undertaken by SQW, the evaluator of the pathfinder programme, and will be published this summer. The research will re-examine the progress that has been made by pathfinder and non-pathfinder areas to identify good practice and lessons learned to inform the development of less advanced areas.
To conclude, with the framework for implementation set out in the regulations, the code of practice and the support that we are providing with our partners, I am confident that we have an approach that will, in the coming years, make a huge difference to the lives of children and young people. I hope that hon. Members will give it their support.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
The Opposition support the principle of personal budgets and direct payments, so we will not oppose the regulations. However, I have a number of questions about safeguards and how the proposals will work in practice.
The draft code of practice, to which the Minister referred, states in paragraph 3.39 that, as an “integral part” of the process of planning personal budgets,
“partners should ensure children, young people and families are involved in the decision-making processes at both an individual and a strategic level”.
How will the Minister monitor that and ensure that those fine words are translated into deeds? In the same paragraph, the code indicates that
“the new joint commissioning strategies will support greater choice and control year-on-year, as the market is developed and funding streams are freed from existing contractual arrangements”.
What steps will he take to ensure that he does not preside over a postcode lottery, with innovation and greater choice in some parts of the country, and reactionary, conservative obstacles in others?
The Minister may be aware of the suspicion directed at his Government that what he describes, understandably, as “choice” could be used by some as a device to save money. As he will know, a number of organisations in the field of special needs education are reporting cuts to the provision for young people, particularly in areas such as speech and language therapy, and are consequently expressing doubts about how the Minister’s brave new world will fare in an environment where severe cuts in local authority services and welfare changes mean that families with disabled children and young people are already facing extremely difficult times.
Will the Minister cite some good examples from the pilots of the kind of joint commissioning models he wants to see, which could be regarded as exemplars that others might follow? It is worth noting that last year, in a survey by the National Deaf Children’s Society, only 12% of parents were aware of the detail of the Government’s plans and only 17% of parents in the pathfinder areas were aware of them. I understand that only six of the 31 pathfinders have piloted personal budgets and that, across the country, only about 500 personal budgets are in existence. Is the Minister confident, therefore, that he has sufficient evidence to support the regulations?
One issue that was raised during the pathfinders was the need to comply with the requirements of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs when families end up acting as employers because they are contracting their child’s support. Is the Minister happy that the guidance on that is sufficiently clear? He will know that those who have experience of personal budgets and direct payments have complained that large parts of the budget can be consumed on administration and paying for insurance and payroll services.
Whose responsibility will it be to ensure that the work force and cultural changes that are necessary for a person-centred approach, for which the Minister has called, actually happen? If that falls to the existing service-level development managers, is there not a risk that they will have an incentive to protect their own roles by tying up organisations such as parent participation groups in bureaucratic service-level agreements, thus weakening their capacity to assist parents, children and young people? What practical steps will he take to guard against that?
There seem to be two potential risks in this approach. There will be authorities that see it as a classic opportunity to minimise the direct provision of services, and which therefore overstate the benefits of personal budgets. There will be other authorities that want to use regulation 6(1)(c) to argue that, however valid the individual request, to accede to it would mean disaggregating funding that supports the provision of services for a number of children and young people. There are obviously legitimate concerns that it will be harder to engage in the planning and co-ordination of services in an environment where much of the funding is in the hands of individual parents and families.
The experience in Essex was that providers were concerned about the impact that spot purchasing would have on their security because of the unpredictability that it brought to the amount of money they would receive over a set period. That is likely to have planning implications. Similarly, Essex county council claimed that the back-office implications included increased invoicing overheads as a result of moving from a large block to individual family contracting. Does the Minister recognise those dilemmas? How does he plan to be kept informed and to intervene to address those problems, if it is necessary? Will the first-tier tribunal be given any guidance on how it should consider such arguments? Indeed, should not regulation 7 specify the exact grounds on which a local authority may refuse? In the circumstances in which a person moves to a new authority, which opts to conduct a new needs assessment, what is to stop it drastically redrawing the terms of the personal budget? That is a common problem with the direct payment provisions for elderly people that already exist. What safeguards will the Minister put in place to prevent this further possibility in postcode lottery funding?
Who will be charged with identifying and encouraging agencies and organisations in each area to be in a position to be nominated to receive direct payments? Will it be necessary for such organisations to be added to an approved list? How will that work and how will a body—especially a new one offering a new type of service—gain access? Conversely, what safeguards are in place to ensure that money is not spent on programmes of dubious or unproven effectiveness?
The Minister helpfully told us that he was looking at the concerns about further education and direct payments, but how will he ensure that colleges do not simply see the money as an opportunity to offer more of the same, rather than personalisation? It is interesting that the disabled students allowance, which I believe the Government plan to scrap, is a personalised, portable payment for the individual rather than a direct payment to the university.
I support the principle of personal budgets, as I have said, but the Opposition would not be doing our job if we did not speak up for the many parents, children and young people on whom the Government plan to unleash this system.
Mr Timpson
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) for his comments and questions on the regulations, as well as his support for the principle of personal budgets and direct payments. I recall that when we last debated this issue in a Committee Room upstairs he had a host of relevant and pertinent questions, so I would have been disappointed if he had not had a further raft of questions to pose on this important issue in his usual manner. I shall try to answer as many of his questions as I can, and if I fail to cover any of them in detail I will write to him with a further and better answer, as I did after the last debate.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the evaluation of the implementation of these reforms and specifically about how children will be involved in the decision-making about personal budgets and more generally. Throughout the whole process, we have been at pains to involve children in the formulation of the new legislation, both through the EPiC group—Equality, Participation, Influence, Change—which works within the Department, and more widely through the Council for Disabled Children, which is a strategic partner. That relationship will continue. We are also ensuring that Ofsted is involved in looking carefully at how the reforms are bedding in. It will provide us with an evaluation that will form a good evidence base to determine whether the reforms are having the impact that we all want to see.
In relation to the financial implications and the burdens on local authorities imposed by the reforms—of personal budgets in particular—we have done an assessment, as we always do. That is why a £70 million reform grant has been made in this financial year, and I announced last week a subsequent £43 million for implementation in the first year. It is also worth noting that there is not necessarily a direct correlation between personal budgets and additional costs. In fact, the evaluation of personal health budgets in the pilot that was undertaken found them to be more cost-effective in delivering services. I am confident that the reforms will not only help to deliver better services, but will alleviate some of the financial pressures on local authorities.
The hon. Gentleman asked about joint commissioning and whether I could point to any exemplary work that showed that it was starting to make a difference to families. I encourage him to look at what is happening in Wigan, which has made excellent progress. It has demonstrated substantial change to its arrangements, and joint commissioning is at the heart of the work it is doing. It has subsequently seen an improvement in the services available to parents and children.
The hon. Gentleman asked about how parents will be made aware of the availability of personal budgets, and that is an important point. It is why I wrote to parents through the various networks available to give them as much information as possible about what will happen in September. We are also working closely with schools, which are often the first port of call and the daily contact that parents have with the special educational needs system, so that they are informing parents now about what they can expect to happen in September and the role that personal budgets can play.
The hon. Gentleman asked how we can ensure that we have a person-centred approach and what practical support we are providing to make sure that that is the case. Above all, I would direct him to the £30 million that we are providing to recruit and train some 1,800 independent supporters. They will not be from the local authority or health providers, and are the one aspect that parents have consistently told us are the most helpful addition to the support they receive as they enter the SEN system, both at the point of assessment and in the further work required to ensure that children achieve the desired outcomes.
The hon. Gentleman also asked how organisations that are not currently involved in the delivery of services can make themselves known to potential users of personal budgets. That is, of course, the whole basis of the local offer that will be brought into being through consultation with parents and children, and should be a showcase of what is available in special educational needs services in a local area. I would expect that to include all those organisations that have the capacity to help to deliver some of the services that personal budgets and direct payments are designed to obtain.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the experience in Essex. I recall that when we last debated this issue he mentioned the experience in Solihull. I hope the fact that he has now moved on to Essex suggests that I have satisfied him that Solihull is ready for these changes. In fact, we have done a readiness survey of all 152 local authorities to satisfy ourselves that they are ready to go come September, not only on personal budgets but more widely across the reforms that we are bringing in. Some 90% of local authorities have said that they are confident that they are ready, but I am seeing some personally to satisfy myself that they have managed to deal with some of the issues that remain so that they are up to speed come 1 September.
I said at the start that this is a complex issue, and I think that point was behind some of the hon. Gentleman’s questions. It will create dilemmas for some of the funding streams and the disaggregation of finances. We are aware of those possibilities and we will keep a close eye on how they develop, not only through Ofsted but with the CDC and the evaluation that we have done, up to now, with SQW. I am confident that we are in a good position to ensure that personal budgets play a key role in delivering much better services for children and young people with special educational needs. I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s support in principle for the steps that we are taking, and I will keep a keen eye on how these important changes are delivered on 1 September for many young people. I am sure that they will benefit from the Government’s work.
Question put and agreed to.