Children and Young People with Cancer

Chris Bloore Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Clive Jones]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. She is absolutely right: cancer is the worst thing that can ever cross a family’s doorstep. It affects every family, every person, very differently. Financially we need something called Hugh’s law, which I will talk about later. That could give a family £700 every month from diagnosis. At the moment people have to wait at least three months, then fill in the forms and wait another three or four months. But Hugh’s law, for not an awful lot of money, could change all that very quickly. I will come on to that.

I hope I have made it clear that the costs are overwhelming; and yet the existing support from the Government is woefully lacking. I would go as far as to say it is downright cruel. Disability benefits are vital for children and young people with cancer because of the costs associated with diagnosis. They come in the form of personal independence payments, disability living allowance and, subsequently, carer’s allowance. Despite those benefits’ being so crucial and the effects of cancer being so immediate, children and young people face a three-month qualifying period before they can claim PIP or DLA. I would just like to repeat that: children and young people are subject to a three-month qualifying period, which for most is from the point of diagnosis, before they can access support.

The very purpose of welfare or social security is to deliver support for the most vulnerable. Young cancer patients go through some of the toughest, unimaginable pain—pain that even I, as a cancer survivor, could not contemplate. They do it with perseverance, with diligence, and somehow they do it with hope.

Tragically, some families lose their child to cancer. To be told at the start of that journey through hell that patients and families need to wait three months before applying for vitally needed funds is simply inexplicable. The evidence shows that the costs are immediate, and yet patients and families are deprived of support that they urgently need from day one. Can the Minister please clarify why it is necessary to have a three-month qualifying period? Can he explicitly put it on the record whether he thinks that that is appropriate in the case of children and young people with cancer? Alternatively, could he please publish the advice from civil servants that are insisting on the three-month qualifying period?

The argument has to be made that the impact of a condition needs to be evidenced for three months before DLA or PIP can be provided to avoid benefit fraud, but it is very clearly established that children and young people with cancer will be significantly impacted by their cancer from the start, even before it is diagnosed. Surely a confirmed medical diagnosis is enough. The Minister may claim that someone with cancer might have been impacted by the condition before their diagnosis was given and therefore their qualifying period will have begun prior to diagnosis. However, experts make it clear that until the diagnosis is given, it is almost impossible for children and young people to know that they have a serious condition that qualifies them for benefits and to evidence the impact. The diagnosis is key. That is simply the reality.

In the experience of charities that I have talked to, children and young people who apply for disability benefits are nearly always successful. Very, very few are rejected at the point of initial application or subsequent appeal. However, I recognise that it may be concluded that that is anecdotal. Therefore it would be incredibly helpful if the Minister could confirm that the majority of children and young people with cancer are successful in their applications for PIP and DLA and that very few, if any, are rejected for benefits. If he could provide the precise statistics, I would be very grateful.

Research also shows that once the three-month qualifying period has concluded, there are significant delays in applications’ being processed after they are submitted. This period currently sits at up to 20 weeks. The qualifying period and these additional delays are leaving children and young people without benefits support for several months. For the application processing, the benefits can be backdated, but only to the point of application rather than diagnosis. That leaves people missing out on benefits support for the first three months of their illness. Based on data from Young Lives vs Cancer, it concludes that children and young people with cancer and their families will have incurred additional costs of on average £2,100 before they can even apply for any benefit.

[Chris Bloore (Redditch) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for allowing me to speak and for securing this important debate. That issue of up-front costs and the costs to some of these children and their families has been underpinned by research by the organisations that he has mentioned. Just 12% of families say that their costs are covered by the current scheme. As children’s cancer therapy gets more specialised, with those families often being forced to travel further and further, there is a big concern about that. It is happening in my constituency, where some families are forced to miss appointments or delay the start of treatment because they cannot afford the costs. Those delayed and missed appointments are actually costing the NHS a lot of money at the moment. While we try to establish new arrangements for travel funding, there are opportunities for savings, by stopping those missed appointments, that could be put back into the pockets of those young children.

[Clive Jones]

The hon. Member is absolutely right: we could save the NHS a lot of money, because a lot of appointments will be cancelled because people are getting used to the fact that their child has cancer, and that they have to make alternative arrangements in order to take them to the hospital where they will be treated. If they were able to get a payment straightaway, that would save the NHS money in the long term. The money that it might cost to make those payments could be recouped further down the line, so the hon. Member is absolutely right.

Furniture Poverty

Chris Bloore Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bloore (Redditch) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) on securing the debate. I will share my experience and reaffirm my incredible admiration for my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales): every time he tells the story of his upbringing and the challenges that he has faced, I am grateful to consider him a colleague in the House and grateful that he has shared his message with the Chamber.

I admit that I had a fortunate and comfortable childhood. I had a stable home with everything that I could ever need to do my homework, organise my things and get a good sleep—things that I shamelessly took for granted. It was not until I left primary school that I realised that many of my friends faced different challenges and experiences at home that I could not have even imagined at such a young age. It was then that I first understood the detrimental impact that furniture insecurity had on the lives of many of my friends. I remember visiting one of my closest friend’s houses for months, with the washing machine broken and their parents frantically hand-washing every evening while we played video games and ate pizza.

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I want to raise a point about washer-dryers, as opposed to washing machines. As a mother of three, I spend a lot of time doing the washing. It sounds like a trivial point, but in north-west England it is incredibly difficult to get washing to dry—it starts raining in October and keeps going all year. It is all well and good if the household support fund provides washing machines, which are great and a good start, but that will not solve the whole problem. I implore the Minister to raise the point about dryers. Of course, there are other problems about affording the electricity to run them, but we will create damp in homes if people cannot dry clothes in them.

[Chris Bloore]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point.

At the time, I did not know that both my best friend’s parents had lost their job and had gone for months without work, which meant that their important savings were going towards keeping a roof above their head, rather than on a new washing machine. I remember suddenly not being able to visit my friend or to stay over. Later, I learned that that was because his bed was broken and he was too afraid to let me sleep over, as I would see him sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor. Only thanks to donations from family friends were the issues resolved. In those years, the economy was in a relatively good position. Now, in my constituency, almost 1,000 children will sleep without a bed.

I am trying to be quick, but I will mention NewStarts, a community reuse social enterprise that was based in my county council division in Bromsgrove and has now opened a second branch with partners in my constituency in Redditch. For more than a decade, the chief executive Marion Kenyon, her staff and team of volunteers have provided free furniture, emergency food and household supplies to families and individuals in the greatest need, whether they are on low incomes or in financial crisis. Their dedication and compassion are unmatched. I look forward to visiting the branch next week. Their work, however, shows that furniture poverty is not an acute but a chronic problem, often the canary in the coal mine alerting us to many of the problems facing households.

Furniture poverty is absolute. It is a heartbreaking indictment of how all of us in politics must do more to support those who need support the most. Many of the ways that we can support those people were listed by my hon. Friends the Members for North West Cambridgeshire, for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson) and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

I am happy to be a signpost. My excellent office team of Theresa Deakin and Monica Stringfellow are doing great work to link those who need support with existing organisations and funds, such as the household support fund, but that is not enough. I welcome the contents of the Renters’ Rights Bill, but it is time for a radical look at our welfare system and how we reward work and recognise when the system is not working. I am pleased that the Minister is present and that she has promised to reform our welfare system, but right now 10% of all adults live in furniture poverty. When I walk around my constituency, when I visit my schools and when I talk to careers advisers and teachers, it is the same children who are deeply affected by this issue. It is their life chances that we are talking about, and it is their dreams that have been broken by the fact that as a country we have not come to grips with this problem.

I implore the Minister to act. She has been a hero of mine for many years, outside this House, but the children who will staff our NHS, who will be the next generation of teachers, and who will rebuild this country and fix our foundations, are the children that need the Government’s support now.