Debate on the Address

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Wednesday 9th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tessa Munt]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree, therefore, that the courts have the ultimate solution in that, if a parent with care prevents a child from accessing his or her other parent, the care can be taken up by the parent who is excluded, and that that is the ultimate sanction and might encourage parents to stick to the rules and ensure that their children have absolute access to both parents?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. May I remind the hon. Lady of Mr Speaker’s announcement at the beginning of the debate about parliamentary convention for this Session and the need for interventions to be brief, not substantive speeches or long points, interesting as they may be?

[Charlie Elphicke]

I thank the hon. Lady for her interesting intervention. The full tool box needs to be available to the court system, but the legislature also needs to send a strong message to the court system, social workers and everyone involved in child care and child care access about what we expect it to look like, which is that people who stand in the way of their children’s rights should have the book thrown at them and should not be allowed to do so anymore.

I want to make a brief point about the education of children with special educational needs. These children have been badly let down for too long. They find it very hard to access the right school. I chaired a summit recently to which, I am delighted to say, came the leader of Kent county council, a cabinet member for Kent county council and a group of parents of children with severe special educational needs—many of them high on the autistic and Asperger spectrums—who have had a very difficult time. It is wrong in principle that parents facing the significant challenges of looking after a child with special educational needs should, on top of that, have to battle the education system to get the right education for their child. It is wrong in principle that, in many cases, it has taken two or three years for those parents to find the right school for their children.

Several things became clear to me during the summit. The statementing process is too slow and cumbersome. That is wrong. It should be more fast-tracked, efficient and effective in looking at children’s needs and diagnosing them correctly. Once that is done, each county council or education authority needs to maintain a decent database of which schools in their authority area can cater for which needs. Too often, it seems, there is muddle and confusion in the bureaucracy over which schools can cater for which needs. The whole system should be fast-tracked so that parents are offered schools appropriate to their child’s needs, rather than schools that are not appropriate. That happens in many education authorities. Everyone knows that. It is wrong and needs to be dealt with.

Furthermore, on special educational needs, there must not be an apartheid between the state sector and the private sector. We need to put the children first. If a private, independent school caters best for the special needs of children, parents should be offered that school and not just told that a maintained school has to take yet more pupils because the education rules and laws are such that pupils can be shoved into a school, whether the school likes it or not or does not have enough places. In my constituency, there is the perverse situation in which one independent school catering brilliantly for special educational needs has 20 spare places, while another special needs school doing an outstanding job in the maintained sector needs a portakabin in the playground to cater for the number of special educational needs children, because it has been told by the education authority to take yet more children. We need to strike the right balance: we need to give parents much greater say and choice, use the places available in the system most appropriately and ensure that the statementing process is as quick as it can be. In education, when it comes to looking after our children, we need to put the parents first. We need to ensure that they can make the decisions that are right for their children, because, broadly, they know best because they know their children best of all.

I am delighted to support the Queen’s Speech. It focuses on the economy, on utility bills, on the cost of living and on helping hard-pressed families. It focuses on families and children, and on helping families to bring forward the next generation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Skidmore]

Oh dear; hopefully the Hansard reporters can delete that for me—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. To help the hon. Gentleman, I think that his colleague was telling him, “Good luck in making your maiden speech.”

[Chris Skidmore]

Indeed, and I wish the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) the best of luck in contributing to this excellent debate on the Queen’s Speech.

The first line of the Queen’s Speech refers to the importance of growth in the economy, but one of the sectors in which we know there will certainly be growth is social care, because we have an ageing population. We used to say that there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. We now know that our population is getting ever older; by 2030 the number of 85-year-olds will double and 11% of the population living today will reach 100. Therefore, we have an enormous cost—not a burden—that society will face as a result of the population getting older, which is inevitably a good thing. The Queen’s Speech recognises this, importantly, by proposing a draft Bill that will seek to modernise adult social care and support, which I absolutely welcome, but it is worth reflecting on the word “modernise” and on what we need to do to modernise adult social care and support.

The Government recognise that tackling social care is not just an issue of tackling the funding of social care, important though that is. The Health Committee, of which I am a member, has already produced a report on the Dilnot commission and recommended it to the Government, and I hope that the Government will look at it in the forthcoming White Paper and that we will have proposals on the table. I know that there is cross-party support for looking at the Dilnot commission proposals and that we had a Backbench Business debate on that in the previous Session. Members from across the House, regardless of their party colours, are passionate about tackling this issue and the impending crisis.