Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Wilkins

Monday 19th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, I fully support the amendment just spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, in relation to housing. I speak to Amendment 330A, which is down in my name and in those of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble Lord, Lord Low. It is a probing amendment to ask the Minister to ensure that education providers, including academies, schools and colleges, are represented on the health and well-being boards, in order that there should be integrated planning for disabled children. The National Children’s Bureau, through the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign, has raised concerns that the Bill does not provide equivalency with the Education Act, which has retained the duty to co-operate for schools. This Bill does not ensure that schools will be an integral part of the health and well-being boards, so, while education providers will have a clear duty to co-operate, there would be no equivalent duty on health and well-being boards to include education providers.

Integrated planning and commissioning is particularly vital for children with complex needs, such as disabled and looked-after children, who need co-ordinated interventions from a range of services. Many disabled children require health-related services at school, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech and language therapy, as well as specific medical interventions. There are often problems with providing such services on the school site, or it is not properly co-ordinated with other activities at the school. As Adam, one young disabled person, said,

“I went to a mainstream secondary school. I did not get to see a physio or OT regularly. This is because I didn’t go to a special school for disabled people. I think health, education and social services need to work more closely together”.

This lack of co-ordination of support presents disabled children and young people with barriers to participation in education that their peers would take for granted. As Sir Ian Kennedy’s recent report, Getting it Right for Children and Young People, recognised:

“If children do not receive appropriate support from the school, at worst those with severe health problems receive a ‘double whammy’ as their ill-health damages their education by disrupting their schooling, either through being forced to stay at home or by long stays in hospital. Children with severe or long-term conditions receive enormous benefit from continuing their education during their treatment. And there are social as well as educational benefits. Continuing in education is a signal, to the child themselves, the parents or carers and the peer group, that a child with a severe or complex health condition continues to belong to the ‘community of children’ and does not become defined by their condition”.

When education providers and health services do not collaborate to meet the needs of children and young people, it also has a significant impact on their families. A study by Diabetes UK found, for example, that half—46 per cent—of primary school pupils with type 1 diabetes and one-third—29 per cent—of their secondary school counterparts report that their parents have had to reduce hours or give up work to help them administer life-saving insulin injections. It is clear that when children need such support during school hours, local services should work together to ensure that it is available.

As the Minister will know, the Department for Education’s recent Green Paper, Support and Aspiration: A New Approach to Special Educational Needs and Disability, proposed a more co-ordinated approach to the delivery of education, health and social care. These proposals included the delivery of a single assessment process, a joint education, health and care plan, and a local offer, which sets out all services available to disabled children in the area. EDCM is concerned that these proposals will not be deliverable if education providers, including academy schools and colleges, are not given a presence and a voice at health and well-being board level, which this amendment would provide.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my amendment, Amendment 330C, which relates to the fact that offender health is a public health—particularly prison health—issue. Since almost every prisoner will be released, their mental and physical state when they are is therefore a matter of public interest. I wish to speak to something related to imprisonment, rather than to imprisonment itself. There are two other activities associated with this part of the Bill which also affect activities of other ministries, the Ministry of Justice and of course the Home Office, to which I would like to draw attention.

As we all know, prisons are wells of psychiatric morbidity. At one end of the spectrum, some 500 prisoners have to be transferred to special hospitals each year. At the other end, some 70 per cent are suffering from at least two personality disorders which are bound to impact upon their behaviour. Prisons are also the unfortunate recipients of people who were in asylums, until these were abolished. To prevent that happening the previous Government initiated a report, conducted by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, on diverting people with mental health problems away from prison. This was a very, very comprehensive report, with recommendations which affected the courts and the police in particular. This Government, as I understand, have accepted the recommendations and are working towards them. However, they of course depend on there being proper mental health assessment and treatment available at the point where a person comes into contact with the criminal justice system. This is usually at a police station, to start with, and then at a court. I have been to see one of the pilot schemes in Brighton, where an extremely able psychiatric nurse in the court was able to divert people away from imprisonment, not least because they had taken enormous trouble to ensure that the necessary support for people with mental health problems was available from that moment on. Without that support being available, the scheme becomes worthless. However, before that, the first time that people come into contact with the system is in police stations. What worries me about progress in the future is that unless there is a police representative on health and well-being boards able to represent the needs of the people who make those assessments at the police station, the diversion scheme could fail at its start. The purpose of my amendment, therefore, is to ask the Minister to consider very seriously the addition of a police representative on health and well-being boards, to make certain that the needs of police stations are represented at source, in every area of the country where diversion schemes will start.

I say this because when I started inspecting prisons, I discovered that prisons, alone in this country, were not part of the National Health Service. Indeed, they did not become part of the National Health Service until 2003. The result of that was that the needs of people from prisons were not built into National Health Service estimates, and so they were always competing for other requirements. To avoid that error being repeated, I therefore believe that it is essential to have police representation at the place where planning is carried out.

My second area is to do with probation. With regard to the plans—“Breaking the Cycle”, the rehabilitation revolution and all the noise that has come from the Ministry of Justice about reducing the prison population and providing alternatives to custody—most of that comes down to the probation service. There is absolutely no reason why the probation service should not carry out exactly the same programme as happens in prisons; that is, people are assessed, programmes are made and conducted, and then the person is transitioned into the community. There is no reason why the assessing, the programming and the supervision of mental and physical health treatment should not happen to somebody on probation in exactly the same way as it happens in prison. However, the probation service needs help and guidance in the provision of that assessment and programming. That is why I am asking the Minister to consider that a representative of the probation service should be included on the health and well-being board, in order to ensure that its needs are included in the plans, so that the probation service can make the delivery of community sentences more effective and more acceptable in the public eye, and is therefore able to contribute to what the Secretary of State for Justice is seeking; namely, a reduction in the prison population.