Children and Families Bill

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 102 in my name. These amendments would specify that local authorities must publish information about the provision both within and outside their area “which is”, rather than “it expects to be”, available,

“at the time of publication for children and young people who have special educational needs”.

I have received a number of briefs that make the case for these amendments with considerable rhetorical flourish. However, the matter can be put much more simply.

The amendments simply require a local authority to call a spade a spade and to set out in the local offer what actually is the case, rather than what it “expects to be” the case, which is much more slippery and imprecise. Expects when? On what does the fulfilment of the expectation depend? Parents, practitioners and the special educational needs and disability sector are concerned that the language of expectation rather than actuality could easily be used to let local authorities off the hook and slide out of delivering what they had appeared to promise.

I should like to make a couple of other points. We should be clear about who the local offer covers and who it does not. Independent research by the University of Bath, to which we have already referred in these proceedings, has shown that 25% of disabled children and young people do not have a special educational need and as such will not be entitled to an education, health and care plan or to access the local offer because it is only for those with a special educational need. It is not clear how these 400,000-odd children and young people who have a disability but not a special educational need will secure the support they need if they are not entitled to access an education, health and care plan or the local offer.

Finally, I underline the importance of the local offer including provision which exists to meet the needs of children and young people with special educational needs outside the authority’s own area. This can be especially important in the case of those with particularly severe disabilities, who need to know about the full range of services, often consisting of highly specialised provision not available in the local area.

There is a concern that local authorities will provide information on provision available in only their own area. This is not the same as providing all the relevant information about what is available to meet special educational needs, including provision out of the local authority’s area. If out-of-area providers are routinely left off the list, it will undermine young people’s ability to access the provision which best meets their needs, as well as potentially threatening the viability of highly specialised but vital services.

Young people and families cannot be expected to find all this information about what may be of help to them for themselves without assistance. Local offers should be robust, accessible and effective in promoting choice. I therefore hope that the Minister will give serious consideration to accepting these amendments. I beg to move.

[Baroness Wilkins (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 104, which returns to the issue of funding. The amendment would require local authorities to include information about funding for SEN provision within their local offers.

I set out at the last meeting of the Grand Committee the concerns of the National Deaf Children’s Society, RNIB, Sense and many other charities that local authority spending cuts will fatally undermine this Bill. In her reply the Minister undertook to propose to her “far more significant” noble friend that their department might discuss this matter with the organisations concerned. I look forward to hearing whether any progress has been made.

In her reply to me in Grand Committee, at column GC 545, the Minister assured me that the Government were not cutting services for deaf children and set out the funding situation. However, we know from the National Deaf Children’s Society Stolen Futures report that many local authorities are already cutting support services for children with SEN. The society found that 29% of local authorities will be cutting specialist support services for deaf children this year.

The Government have argued that the Bill will improve transparency and accountability and that it is this which will enable parents to ensure that their local authority provides the services that their children need. However, on looking at the Bill and at the draft regulations and guidance underpinning it, nothing that I can see would require local authorities to be more transparent about the funding. If the local offer is intended to bring together all the relevant information about SEN provision in one place, in a way that is easy to understand, accessible and improves accountability, surely it must include information about funding. Without that parents will be powerless.

The local offer must give parents clear information about how much funding has been allocated by the authority to support children and young people with SEN; it must allow and empower parents to compare local authority spending; and it must allow parents to identify if cuts have been made from year to year. There is a clear need for transparency. The National Deaf Children’s Society had great difficulties in extracting reliable information about funding of specialist support services for deaf children from the local authorities.

In 2012, 49 local authorities—nearly a third—did not respond to freedom of information requests on budgets for deaf children’s services within the legal deadline. One local authority did not respond until six months later, and only after the Information Commissioner’s Office intervened. Its response confirmed a cut to the education service for deaf children. However, as this was not disclosed until so long afterwards, parents were denied any opportunity to legally challenge this decision before it had been implemented.

This is the battle that the parents and charities must face. If the Government were to accept this amendment and require local authorities to publish information about funding in the local offer in an easy and accessible way, it would certainly give parents and charities real leverage to get the services that they need.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. At the end of the last debate that we had on this Bill, I asked the Minister to explain how the extra funding that would be made available actually would reach those who needed it. She said that she would write to me. I do not know if I have missed that letter or whether there has not yet been time to produce it; however, I look forward to it.

I think that it is quite complicated, but I want to ask for something in relation to the way that local authorities are struggling to meet their commitments at present. I think that I said then that it is far easier if parents understand what is and is not available and are not misled into thinking that they can have more than is possible, rather than having massive aspirations. Of course I wish that the local authorities had funding to meet every child’s needs, but if that is not possible I think that it needs to be clear.

I move on to my Amendment 107, which is grouped curiously with this amendment. It would be far simpler for the Government to accept and implement. It relates to personal budgets. On page 25, line 2, I would like to insert,

“arrangements to assist young people and parents in managing a personal budget should they choose one”.

Personal budgets have been a great liberator for many adults and families, but for others they have caused extraordinary difficulty. Those of us who work in both the adult and children’s fields have seen in the adult field how many people have found extraordinary problems in managing employment and the financial complexities of budgets. Families are making it clear that they require support to manage personal budgets, and parents with experience of direct payments have spoken of difficulties that they have had in finding, recruiting and CRB-checking good staff, managing money and transactions with the local authority, identifying quality services to purchase, and co-ordinating a package of care. Currently, only 25% of local authorities provide key workers to help manage payments. I find that extraordinary. This leaves families to manage the often burdensome responsibilities of direct payments alone. I hope that discussion around this amendment will help us to better understand the Government’s thinking about the support that they envisage local authorities will provide for those families who opt for personal budgets. Does the Minister accept that all families should have some access to support?

I have a quick case study. As you know, on the whole I do not go in for detailed anecdotes, but I think that this story really does illustrate the issue. Oscar lives in north London with his parents and two siblings. He is about to turn 18. He has autism and learning difficulties. His parents have been receiving direct payments to pay for respite care for the last eight years. His mother explains how difficult it can be to find the right support to buy with direct payments, and to “jump through hoops” to account for them:

“16 months ago our local council agreed to pay for one weekend’s respite care each month, but it has taken a considerable amount of time to agree how to provide this. It has only been in the last two months that we’ve actually been able to use the direct payments to get the support we need.

As Oscar was approaching adulthood, it seemed appropriate for us to try to find him a residential placement for his respite breaks. We hoped that this would help equip him with additional independence skills and that he would enjoy spending time in a new environment. However, when we visited local options it was clear that they were not able to meet Oscar’s complex needs. We decided that the weekend respite would have to take place in our home.

Oscar needs two-to-one support and in a house with two other children this is a challenge to accommodate.

Having two extra adults in our home for a whole weekend has a significant impact on all of us and is confusing for Oscar who wants to spend time with us. But it’s not only space that is the issue. Knowing where to find suitable staff who are equipped to support Oscar has always been difficult, and to cover a whole weekend at least four staff are needed.

I had asked the Council for a list of local carers which they said they would provide, but this never arrived. It is a huge and stressful burden for parents, who already have more than enough to cope with, to have to recruit, interview and train up staff themselves. We are always vulnerable to staff leaving after a few months for better paid work, leaving Oscar very unsettled and us totally unsupported.

For many years I didn’t know who to talk to at the Council about any aspect of this as Oscar didn’t have a named social worker and no one would return my calls. As Oscar is now approaching his 18th birthday, he has now been allocated a social worker and this has made a big difference. However, for many years we felt we were floundering on our own, receiving the occasional official letter threatening action because of some perceived fault on our part.

The Council have now agreed to employ Dimensions, a not-for-profit organisation who specialise in providing services for people with learning difficulties and autism. Together we are now trying to recruit and train a team of four so that we will always have support, even if staff are ill or on holiday”.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, is not alone in having some reservations about setting minimum standards as they may well stifle innovation and individual programmes. Perhaps more thought could be given between now and Report to how we ensure that local authorities provide a range of services. I know that the code says quite a lot about this. My great worry is that if you do not have something which can be inspected and monitored, and an expectation of a range of services, some local authorities might end up with very little indeed in their local offer—and it will be a postcode lottery. There is a real dilemma in how you maintain that flexibility yet ensure that families have something they can turn to which is monitored by either Ofsted or the Care Quality Commission. It would be quite useful to give some thought to this between now and Report so that we can come up with a better solution than a rigid framework, but with something ensuring that the services are there.

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, belatedly, I will speak to Amendment 118 and in support of Amendments 112, 113 and 114. I will be brief because most of what I was to say has been said. The aim of Amendment 118 is to improve accountability around the local offer by requiring local authorities to meet basic expectations around provision for children with special educational needs. This issue is particularly acute, as we have heard, for children with low incidence special educational needs because local authorities are often ignorant of the support that these children need.

A number of organisations, including the National Deaf Children’s Society, the RNIB and Sense, are concerned that the Bill is extremely weak on overall accountability, particularly on the local offer, with a system that relies solely on the parents of children with sensory impairments—many of whom are, as we have heard, busy being parents. A system that relies on them policing it across all 152 local authorities is not likely to deliver the significant change that many of these children need here and now. Other noble Lords have also spoken on the need for increased accountability.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I have a few additional comments to make in support of Amendment 113, to which I have added my name. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, that in our amendment we do not seek a one-size-fits-all approach as far as local authorities are concerned. Of course we understand, and hope, that the provision made will vary from area to area, depending on the needs of the local population. We are simply looking for some commonality in the way the offer is expressed. The advantage would be that it would not just be helpful to parents in enabling them to choose between one local authority or another if they were able to move from one to another; there would be two other benefits.

First, it would deter a local authority from publishing a weak offer, because it would be very obvious that it was a weak offer. The “very little indeed”, as expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, would jump off the pages if there were some commonality in the way that offer was expressed. Secondly, it would help policymakers because this is a very new system. Undoubtedly the Government will wish to monitor how it is going and assess where it is going well and where it is going badly, and whether the regulations need to be tightened up at some point in the future. It would be very much easier to do that if there were a common way in which the local offer could be expressed; otherwise, I can see civil servants spending months digging into all the different local offers, expressed in different ways, in order to dig out that information.