Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Lords Chamber

In light of the various amendments tabled in my name and those of my noble friend Lady Hollins and the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the issues that I have raised. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hollins]

My Lords, I support the amendments of my noble friend Lord Rix. He made reference to people with learning disabilities and in particular expressed concern about people with complex needs. I should like to say a little more about people with learning disabilities who have challenging behaviour. It is estimated that as many as 40 per cent of people with learning disabilities may present behaviours that are challenging to family and other carers. These behaviours can be so intense and frequent as to have a major impact on the quality of life of the individual and their families.

People who present severe behavioural challenges are among the most disadvantaged and marginalised individuals in our society and are at much greater risk of exclusion, institutionalisation, deprivation, physical harm, abuse, misdiagnosis and exposure to ineffective interventions. Their carers are subject to physical harm, psychological ill-health, physical ill-health and to an increased burden of care and financial consequences. It can also have an impact on their employment prospects and quality of life.

Commissioners, policymakers and providers all face escalating costs and risk undermining national policy. Providers face high staff sickness and turnover, service breakdown, scandals and exposés such as the recent “Panorama” programme about Winterbourne View in Bristol and previous scandals in recent years in Cornwall and Merton and Sutton.

Back in 1993, Professor Jim Mansell emphasised the need for commissioners of health and social care to work together to provide good support and services for this group of individuals. He recommended locally based, individualised packages of care. He suggested that the environments where people are cared for should be skilled and capable of maintaining support for the long term. He revised his report in 2007 for the Department of Health and made the same points because insufficient progress had been made. He and others, such as the Challenging Behaviour Foundation, have made it very clear that large institutional provision is not the answer, yet many people with learning disabilities have care packages commissioned within such institutional care, mainly in the independent sector, funded by the NHS and by social services. These placements are often far from home. They have little guarantee of high-quality, skilled care and are vulnerable to the kind of restrictive practices that have been revealed time and again in a variety of high profile exposés. This care is often very high cost, as well as not delivering good outcomes for people.

A recent publication entitled There Is an Alternative, published by the Association for Supported Living, makes a strong argument for local, community-based support, saying that it is more successful and cheaper than specialist in-patient provision. However, for that to happen requires vision, commitment and a will to make it happen. It cannot be achieved without the will of effective local commissioners, a will that must be expressed in decisions to invest in local community-based services, rather than to farm out problem cases to expensive out-of-area placements—what in the world of learning disability we know as the “crisis Friday afternoon very expensive mistaken placement”. Most successful supported living services have their roots in commissioners' decisions to invest in that service model, acting on sound demographic knowledge of the communities they serve and the needs and wishes of the people with learning disabilities who live within them.

I am sure that health and well-being boards will have an important role in thinking about the needs of their population with learning disabilities in that way. However, it is clear that there need to be good lines of accountability in future. There is a worry that local clinical commissioning groups will not be able to commission adequately when specialist services are needed. They will have to be able to address a comprehensive local strategy that can deliver early intervention, timely and skilled professional expertise and support, competent and high-quality providers of individualised support and services, flexible crisis intervention services, such as psychological therapies, which are very underdeveloped for that group of people, and psychiatry, which can build the support required for each individual—real individualised care. The numbers of individuals are relatively small but they can be very high cost if the services are not planned well.

It is essential that the needs of this group of individuals are specifically considered within the new commissioning arrangements. I always say that if we can get it right for people with learning disabilities and complex needs, we can get it right for everybody else. There may be an argument for looking to the National Commissioning Board to take this overall responsibility without compromising the need to find ways to ensure local responsibility—the delivery of creative, flexible and local solutions to meet the needs of individuals and families within their own communities. This is quite a challenge, which is why I have gone to such lengths to explain the problem faced by this complex group of people. I ask the Minister to comment on how such services might be commissioned in the future.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, perhaps I may intervene briefly in support of the general thrust of the amendments without necessarily saying that I agree with every dot and comma. I also agree, not least, with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. The noble Lord, Lord Rix, and I have known each other for quite a long while in the field of learning disabilities and, indeed, through my role many years ago as Minister with responsibility for disabled people, so I am happy to lend a sympathetic word on this point.

I ought to declare an interest in that several times I have told the House that I am the chair of a mental health trust. Of course, mental health trusts often deal with learning disabilities as well, as indeed does the health trust that I chair, although happily last year it transferred most of its residents on old-style campuses to Suffolk County Council for a more complete version of genuine living in the community and community care, and I am rather pleased that we did that.

We need to recognise that, although there are overlaps—the word “co-morbidities” is used in one of the amendments—between mental illness and learning disability, they are not the same, and we need to make sure that we take particular and appropriate account of the needs of learning disabilities in all this. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure us that that will be the case.