Summer Adjournment

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 27th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Our function in this House is to ensure that our information about constituents’ problems is translated into creating better policy so that our constituents have fewer problems. Today, I wish to raise two issues that have recently come to my attention.

On educational provision for those with behavioural and learning difficulties, I have had a case in which a lady—I will call her K—brought into the borough her son with severe learning and behavioural difficulties, challenging behaviour and anger management problems. On 22 July, my constituent made distressed calls saying that the previous day, her son had been out of control. He had ransacked the flat and smashed all the furniture. The tutor who arrived to give him the five and a half hours of educational provision that he was due under statute had to leave and said that he would get help. The police came and the mother asked them for help, but they left again. She rang social services but no one arrived. She took her son to the police station, crying out for help. A social worker arrived, saw the smashed-up flat and took the son away for an hour, then brought him back again saying that they could not cope with him.

Over the weekend, I have arranged for special provision to be made for respite for the mother, but the point is that five and a half hours a week of statutory provision for a child is not enough. This child cannot be accommodated in school, but a local authority has a responsibility. When a parent is keeping a child out of school, it gives fines and parenting orders, yet when it is responsible for the child it need put in place only five and a half hours’ provision a week. That is wrong and absolutely inadequate, because it means that the parent can get no respite.

Section 3 of the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010, which was introduced by the previous Labour Government, ensures that full-time provision is made available. On 14 July, an order introduced provisions of that Act, but not section 3. Will the Deputy Leader of the House say when that section will be introduced, so that children get the educational provision and care that they rightly deserve? My constituent was told that the only way she could get that provision was if the child were put under a child protection order, which would mean that she would be deemed the perpetrator of an assault, when in fact the child was disruptive, violent and aggressive. It is absolutely wrong that that should be the only route to respite for a parent.