Supporting Carers

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton, although the matters that I have to deal with are somewhat distressing. I wish to address the proposed closure of the Hammersmith and Fulham carers centre, which is the main carers centre in my constituency. Hammersmith and Fulham council is closing the centre at the end of July in the most irregular and arbitrary way, and that will leave no service for carers in the borough for the foreseeable future.

I should perhaps begin by declaring an interest. The centre was set up in 1998, when I was the leader of the council, and I have been a strong supporter of it over the past 12 years. The centre occupies substantial premises in Hammersmith road, which is about five minutes’ walk from Hammersmith Broadway, so it is located in the centre of the borough and highly accessible for the carers who use it. It has a lot of space, so it can run activities, and it has—or had—six staff. It has provided a service to many thousands of people, and I shall read some of their testimonials in a moment, but let us just say for present purposes that it has run a good service. It should now be delivering a service to adults and young people using its budget of £300,000, which is split roughly 70:30 between those two groups. In addition to providing services in the main building, it also provides outreach services across the borough.

In 2008, the then relatively new Conservative council decided to conduct a tendering exercise. It is a moot point as to whether that was necessary, and the council failed to identify whether the body involved should be voluntary or whether staff would be employed by the council, but it went ahead. The problem was not the exercise itself, but the fact that it was so incompetently managed that three separate tendering exercises were carried out over the ensuing two years with no successful resolution. Despite the council going to great lengths and spending a lot of money on the process, the most recent exercise had only one bidder, which was the existing carers centre. The centre passed its appraisal, at least as far as the adult part—the majority part—of the quality assessment was concerned, so it anticipated being awarded the contract. However, at that point—again, entirely arbitrarily—the council decided that it would terminate the contract with immediate effect. Indeed, it should have been terminated yesterday, on 30 June, but a winding-up extension has now been granted until the end of July.

Some people thought that these events might be connected with the fact that the council, as part of its fire sale of most of the borough’s capital assets, wanted to sell off the building for an estimated £1.7 million. It had initially tried to move the centre into small, unsuitable premises in a less accessible location, which had to be accessed through another charity’s premises, but it then decided to get rid of the centre altogether.

Events then take a more remarkable turn. The chair of the management committee, Kamaljit Kaur, who has an extensive background in the voluntary sector, has been trying to run the centre in an exemplary way over the past few years since taking over that role. She met the council’s director of adult services on 23 June and failed to persuade him—because his mind had already been made up by politicians—to reconsider or even to extend the centre’s tenure while alternative provision was made. We now know that there will be no alternative provision until at least April. After the failure of that meeting, she wrote a letter to carers and other interested parties, including me, in very mild terms given the circumstances. Part of her letter read as follows:

“The Council went through a tendering process for Carers Support Services and made three attempts to attract potential bidders for this contract. However, we were the only bidders for their adult and young carer’s contracts. Our bid was evaluated by the Council's TAP: our bid was successful in the adult carer’s contract and was recommended for funding by the TAP, but eventually turned down at senior officer level.

The Council have been informed that the prime reason for the lack of interest in this contract for potential bidders was the requirement to employ existing centre staff and the financial liabilities that go with this requirement. We now believe that the Council's sole intention behind closing down the Carers Centre is part of its strategy to remove existing staff, thereby removing the requirement for new bidders to take on this financial responsibility. We also believe that this will attract national organisations to bid for this contract.”

That is quite likely, because that is a method that the council has used before—getting rid of local organisations and bringing in national ones that they believe can handle matters cheaply if not as well.

The response to that letter, which also explained how people could protest about what was happening, was an extraordinary six-page letter from the director of adult services making serious personal allegations against the chair, including an allegation of an improper family relationship with someone who had a pecuniary interest in the contract. Late last night, the councillor responsible—Councillor Carlebach—and the director of community services had to issue an apology:

“Since issuing our letter of 28th June on this matter, we have received a single representation that we have misunderstood and mis-stated the position”.

They state that they are

“writing to clarify that it has now been made clear”

to them that the individual in question

“is not the brother of Kamaljit Kaur.”

The letter continues in an exculpatory way to try to excuse them for what happened. The chair informed me earlier that she now feels under an obligation to resign and is taking legal advice with a view to an action for defamation. I do not want to pursue that matter, but I simply set out those facts to show that the local authority is out of control and behaving in a highly improper way—as it is in many other respects.

Leaving aside the process, what is the effect on carers? Hon. Members might have seen in the debate pack an article from The Guardian of 16 June, part of which I shall quote:

“For 12 years, Margaret Turley has known where to go in a crisis. Eighteen months ago, when the 26-year-old learning-disabled son she cares for developed epilepsy and began going blind, Turley headed for the Princess Royal Trust Hammersmith and Fulham Carers Centre.

‘You’re among people who know what carers do,’ she says of the Hammersmith Road centre in west London. ‘I can come in here just because I’ve had a horrendous day.’ The centre provides advice and peer support, and runs a Department of Health-funded programme, Caring with Confidence, offering free training for carers who want to develop their caring skills.”

Later the article says:

“Pat Williams, who cares for her disabled son and runs the Caring with Confidence sessions, says: ‘It’s a fait accompli—get us out of the building, don’t give us the contract, and run the organisation down.’ ”

Hon. Members will not be surprised to learn that I have received an extraordinary number of letters about this matter. I will not take up too much time, but I want to read excerpts from some of them, as I think that hon. Members should realise what a serious matter this is for thousands of carers in my constituency. I shall not give names, but one letter states:

“I have been a member of Hammersmith and Fulham Carers Centre for the last 10 years and have relied on the Centre for support through all my times of crisis during those years…I am shocked and devastated at the closure of the Carers Centre…Not only will the Centre close, but there will be no co-ordinated service for carers…How can the Council close down our service and offer nothing in its place? What on earth are the Council playing at?”

The letter continues:

“I can get no sense from anybody at the Hammersmith and Fulham Council…In the meantime, where will we H and F Carers meet for our support groups? Who will we talk to when we need help? Will a building be made available to us? Without a place to come to, when we are in distress, how will we manage?”

Another carer wrote:

“Dear Andy, I am one of the borough’s many fulltime carers and have learned this week that after some 12 months of what the council has termed ‘review’, they have pulled all funding from the carers centre…My 2 sons use the services of the Young Carers Group, and get the kind of support and respite that we will not, again, find anywhere else. I feel passionately that carers are such a soft target, as our responsibilities make it so hard to mount the kind of defence of these services that they deserve.”

Another of my constituents writes:

“I care for my mother who is over 90 years, and also my daughter who is disabled. I do use the carers centre and found that the people who run it are very helpful.”

A further letter reads:

“I have been caring for my wife with severe dementia for 20 years, and the aspect that worries me most is the fact that the centre holds the emergency contact to look after my wife, if anything happened to me; an accident or such like.”

This is the letter that touched me most:

“I am an eleven year old boy. I have a brother with cerebral palsy. My dad died when I was seven from a heart attack. I love my brother so much but I had to face very difficult things. Children have made fun of me because of my brother’s condition. People that don’t understand my brother’s condition treat me differently to other people. I didn’t go on holidays. People made fun of me when I was near my brother. I missed a lot of school. I felt stressed and unsure. I was unsure if I was doing the right or wrong thing. I didn’t have anyone to talk to.

When I first went to the young carers project I made friends quite quickly. I told them my experiences and they told me theirs. The young carers project took me on trips and I was able to express my emotions and feelings. They helped me to understand bullies and that there was nothing wrong with me. They helped me realise that I did do things correctly. They also took me camping, which was lots of fun and taught me different dances for example street dancing and martial arts style dancing. It is a chill out zone for all young carers and adult carers. It gives us freedom from our caring role.

If you close the young carers project, you'll be closing a family of people who came together because of difficulties. Which is unfair for all young carers and adult carers. I just can’t believe you’re closing down the young carers project for all the good work they have done.”

There is, of course, substantial resistance to the decision. There are daily pickets outside the town hall. I have written to the leader of the council to ask him, at the very least, to extend the contract until alternative provision is in place, and to allow the carers centre to bid again for the contract. The matter was debated at full council last night on a motion from the Labour opposition, but of course that was voted down by the Conservative majority on the council. Given the exceptional circumstances that I have set out, I ask the Minister to take a personal interest and to look at the matter. I believe that the situation has arisen not simply because the council is a Conservative one; the local authority is acting without its jurisdiction, in a highly improper way.

What I have described is not an isolated incident. Some hon. Members might know about the council newspaper in Hammersmith and Fulham. Last weekend, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, referring in part to the Hammersmith and Fulham council newspaper, said:

“Councils should spend less time and money on weekly town hall Pravdas…our free press should not face state competition from propaganda on the rates dressed up as local reporting.”

To read the paper in question one would think that everything was well at the carers centre. According to its front page, the leader of the council says:

“We will sell assets we no longer need because, when times are tough, we have to put services before buildings.”

Last night, the council announced a fire sale of most of the public buildings in the borough, ranging from the Irish centre in Hammersmith Broadway, which has an international reputation, to Fulham town hall and many voluntary sector buildings, including one that was referred to in the article in The Guardian, Palingswick House, which is home to more than 20 voluntary groups but is to be sold later this year.

Lest there be any doubt, the incident that I am recounting is not a mistake or isolated incident; it is a calculated attack on the poorest and most vulnerable people in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, in the guise of putting through a policy that was never agreed. It is being put through not just callously, but without the remit of the local authority. I ask the Minister to take a particular interest in what is happening in Hammersmith and Fulham not just because of the staff and the build-up of expertise in the past 12 years, which will be lost for ever at the end of next month if a stop is not put to what is happening, but on behalf of the thousands of people—we believe that there are more than 11,500 adult carers and many young carers in the borough—who rely on an excellent service, but will be without it from next month.

[Mr Joe Benton (in the Chair)]

Before I call the next speaker, I ask all hon. Members to ensure that they have switched off their mobile phones.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Burstow]

The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) made some important points about the situation in his constituency and what his local authority was doing. The hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) also made references to the impact of tendering. Those are issues to consider, but I am not going to become a Minister responsible for micro-managing every single local authority and the decisions that they take on the allocation of resources—that is not a Minister’s job. However, we do need to ensure that there are not unintended consequences with respect to the rules and procedures followed by local authorities that fall under the Government’s responsibility. I will be very happy to hear further from both hon. Members, either in this debate or afterwards, to ensure that we have the correct rules. We want to support local services that are appropriate to a local community and that the community actually values.

[Mr Slaughter]

For the avoidance of doubt, I just want to say that it is not so much the financial situation in my area that I am concerned about, because my local authority says that it will, in due course, provide a service for carers. I am more concerned about the impropriety and mismanagement that has led to a long-standing service being simply dissolved overnight although there is no provision in place for the best part of a year to come. I would have thought that that was something in which a Minister and the Government would be interested. It is not to do with involvement in individual cuts; it is to do with the fact that a local authority is unable to manage its own affairs.

[Mr Burstow]

The hon. Gentleman has been a Member for some time, so he will know that there are regulatory systems in place that would deal with local authorities that were performing in the way that he describes. I am not aware that the authority’s activity has been reported in such a way. However, I stand by the offer that I have made, and I will be happy to receive further representations about the impact of tendering arrangements.

I want to pick up on the references that were made to the operating framework because the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South was right to point out that, in the operating framework that the Government issued just last week, we identified a requirement in the local priorities for the publication of dementia strategies. We think that that is an important signal. It was a signal to local PCTs that we wanted them to be more public facing and accountable to their local communities, and that they should account for why they have chosen not to spend money on dementia strategies. The signal was not specifically about dementia, but that we expected more of that sort of transparency in general. People should not need freedom of information requests to get information from PCTs about how public money is being spent, and I hope that that message will be understood by our local organisations that deliver such services.

The hon. Lady also talked about ring-fencing more broadly. The Government are determined to ensure that there is as much flexibility as possible for local authorities to make choices about how they prioritise their resources to deliver what is necessary to meet the needs of their local communities. We have made it clear that because we see the social care transformation grant as such a priority for investment in changes to services, so that they are genuinely personalised in the future, the budget for the final year in which it is available to local authorities will continue to be ring-fenced. We wanted to send the signal that we considered that grant to be important, and we want to ensure that local authorities deliver that grant during the course of this year.

The hon. Lady made a number of very useful points about good practice and the way in which GPs, schools and others play a part in delivering early identification of carers, whether those carers are young, old or otherwise. That should certainly inform the thinking of any Government when it comes to delivering a good carers strategy.

The hallmark of this important debate has been the great consensus about what needs to be done and the value that Members from all parties place on carers. I shall now try to address some of the other points that have been made.

The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) talked about financial issues and benefit changes, and such concerns were echoed by others. The carers cross-government programme board, which is charged with providing cohesion around the carers strategy, will look at those issues and hold cross-government discussions about them to ensure that the way in which we go about simplifying the benefit system actually delivers the right results at the end of the day.

The hon. Lady also expressed concern about the impact of public service cuts, which was also referred to by several hon. Members. Again, it is important to remember that some of the measures that are already in place were not initiated by this Government. Nevertheless, we have to be mindful about the impact of any budget decisions that we make through the spending review process. That will certainly be at the forefront of Ministers’ thinking in the coming weeks and months as we consider all the options that will have to be considered as part of the review.

The hon. Lady also talked about the difficulties faced by carers coming back into the workplace—the cliff edge, as she described it. The coalition Government’s programme sets out very clearly a desire to improve this country’s tax system significantly so that we raise the amount at which someone starts to pay income tax to £10,000. We believe that as we move towards implementing that change, we will begin to smooth out some of that cliff edge and start to have a significant impact on easing people’s return to work.

The hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) made a very good speech in which he set out a number of the challenges that we face. In particular, he rightly discussed the current complexity in the benefit system and the way in which it can be an obstacle to take-up of benefits.

The hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) made a very good speech. He set out a range of issues relating to young carers in particular, but he also raised other points. He made a very important point about the Hartlepool carers centre, which he mentioned a lot in his speech, and it clearly provides an important service in his area. He also cited the £150 million a year that it saves taxpayers by reducing pressures on NHS resources. We need to ensure that such examples of social enterprises playing a part in easing pressure on public services and helping carers are considered. Such mutual operations can really make a difference.

The hon. Gentleman, like several hon. Members, talked about the role of GPs. He also made some comments about benefits. I refer him to what I have said about how we intend to move forward on benefits.

The hon. Gentleman also asked specifically about young carers. The key point I would make is that the Department of Health is piloting personal health budgets. In my written ministerial statement on Monday, I announced how we intend to evaluate those schemes. The schemes should give us yet another way of smoothing and removing some of the cliff edge that we have heard about by providing access to resources for care and health in a way that allows people to exercise real control over them and therefore much more control over their lives. That is particularly important for managing and smoothing the transition from childhood into adulthood, and we all want to ensure that that transition is made smoother.

The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) spoke about the key issue of the identification of carers. She said that only 5% of carers in her area had been identified by the local carers centre. A large number of people are hidden at the moment and do not necessarily identify themselves as carers. The identification of carers is a key challenge as part of the process of refreshing the carers strategy.

We have heard about the importance of flexible support for carers. Again, that is why personalisation will remain an absolutely central part of how the Government take forward the development of services. Such services should be tailored to fit around people’s lives, rather than requiring people constantly to navigate around them, often for the convenience of the service provider rather than the convenience of the person or family themselves. We want to accelerate towards achieving that vital aim, and we also need increased use of more user-led organisations that are much closer to the circumstances of the family, meaning that they can play an important part in advocacy, brokerage and helping families to navigate around the system.

I think that I have already addressed the main point made by the hon. Member for Hammersmith, who clearly put on record a number of powerful testimonies from his constituents about the value that they place on the centre to which he referred. However, as I have said, I will not attempt to micro-manage the decisions of local government colleagues of any particular party persuasion, as it is for them to account to their electorate for the way in which they spend public money.

The hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) discussed young carers and talked about the devastating impact that alcohol can have on people’s lives. She offered advice about some of the ways in which the Government might tackle that issue, such as a pricing policy, and cited advice that the NICE has given. I can tell her that we will be publishing a White Paper on public health later this year setting out the Government’s approach on such challenging issues. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health will say more about that White Paper in the not-too-distant future.

The hon. Lady also talked about safeguarding, and we have announced a review of the vetting and barring system. I am one of the Health Ministers with responsibility for safeguarding, so I will receive the recommendations from that review. We need to ensure that the system is proportionate to the risk and that it delivers the appropriate safeguards, but it must not be so bureaucratic and difficult that it actually becomes a barrier to people participating as volunteers, so that is one of the tests that we will apply to the system.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) talked about the USDAW campaign, as well as the importance that she attaches to the role of carers in her constituency, some of whom she has already visited. She also discussed the plight of working carers, their interaction with the benefits system and the need for an examination of tapering as a way in which people could retain an element of carer’s allowance. All I can say at this stage is that the Government are committed to reviewing the system with a view to simplifying it.

The hon. Lady also asked how we could ensure that there is greater awareness of the right to seek flexible working. Again, that is not just a challenge for the Department of Health. We will need a cross-government approach on the issue involving my colleagues in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions. Together, we have a part to play in ensuring that people are genuinely aware of that right.

The hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) spoke very effectively. I was in the House when he made his maiden speech and it was one of the most impressive that I have heard. I know that his speech was excellent compared with mine 13 years ago.