Children and Families Bill

Baroness Eaton Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Grand Committee

This amendment also ensures that having considered the best shape of inclusive, accessible services for disabled children and young people, local authorities and the NHS should then secure this provision. Existing provision for disabled people is marred by the fact that services are rarely designed to meet the needs of disabled people and young children from the start. Rather, provision is retrofitted for access for disabled people, often resulting in badly delivered or compromised services. If services are poorly designed or continually adjusted, it prevents them securing the outcome that would most benefit disabled children and young people. Most importantly, this amendment is comprehensive; it seeks to embed the principle of access and inclusion throughout local authorities and NHS processes in England from planning to commissioning to delivery and, finally, ensures that such services are robustly evaluated to drive improvements consistently.

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in support of Amendment 219, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Wilkins, and the noble Lord, Lord Low. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has already said that this amendment would ensure that local authorities and their partner NHS commissioning bodies promote and secure inclusive and accessible education, health and social care provision and that they consider disability at every stage, be it the planning, design, commissioning, funding, delivery or evaluation of such services.

I am very pleased to say that some of this is already in process. Suffolk County Council is already leading the way in this area and is working with the disability charity Scope to provide Activities Unlimited, a brokerage service which works closely with parents and other agencies to encourage mainstream services to be more inclusive and accessible. Activities Unlimited has recognised that there is significant demand for services from families with disabled children who have personal budgets to spend which is not currently being tapped into. Activities Unlimited works closely with parents and other agencies, not only in commissioning services and identifying new high quality service providers, but involving them in the evaluation process as well, using feedback from families to support improvements to services and signposting families towards the most appropriate support. When local services are inadequate or where uptake is low, Activities Unlimited signals a need for improvement, shifts resources towards more effective services and eventually withdraws public support from underperforming services.

Through forcing services to work in a more competitive economy, a better quality of mainstream provision is ensured whereby consumer demand supports the best quality providers. Through increasing provision for disabled children and young people, families have a genuine choice between providers. This has produced real outcomes for both families and the local authority. By increasing the availability of local inclusive and accessible services, such as youth clubs, swimming pools and play centres for families across Suffolk, the council has not had to provide any expensive emergency respite care for disabled children. Indeed, this is such a successful service that Scope is going to be working with Blackpool and Leeds to set up a comparable brokerage service.