Children and Families Bill

Debate between Debbie Abrahams and Meg Hillier

Monday 25th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I recognise what the Minister is trying to do in seeking to reform important areas of law affecting children, young people and their families. New as I am, however, I am beginning to learn that the devil is in the detail when it comes to many of this Government’s Bills. I am not alone in that view. The Children’s Commissioner for England, Maggie Atkinson, said that she supported

“the objectives of the Children and Families Bill”,

but was

“concerned about some of the detail. Some measures proposed could be interpreted as overriding the principle that all decisions are to be made in the best interests of the child”.

In preparing for today’s debate, I was deeply disappointed by the lack of an impact assessment of the full effects of the Bill. I found one on business, but I did not find any relating to how the provisions would affect the groups of children and their families to whom the Bill applies. I feel that that is deeply disturbing. Again, my views are shared by others, including the Association of School and College Leaders. Because of the Bill’s complexity and the range of areas that it covers, there is concern about whether proper parliamentary scrutiny can be given to ensure that it has no unintended consequences. I think we should listen to such organisations.

The Bill’s positive elements have been recognised, but a number of concerns have also been raised, and I would like to focus on a couple of them. Although the steps forward on adoption have been recognised, we have heard concerns about adoption and about the importance of ensuring that the interests of children are paramount in the family justice system and of the need to strengthen the independence and powers of the Children’s Commissioner for England.

If I may, I will focus in my remaining time on part 3, which deals with special educational needs. These provisions have been heralded as the biggest reforms to SEN provision in over 30 years. Replacing the dual system of assessment for children and young adults with a single system and the education, health and care plans is a positive change. I am mindful of what colleagues on the Education Committee said in their pre-legislative scrutiny. The Committee observed that

“the legislation lacks detail, without which a thorough evaluation of the likely success of the Government’s proposals is impossible”.

Although some proposals, such as the pathfinders, have been supported and taken forward, Scope and other disability charities in the Special Education Consortium have continued to express their ongoing concerns, particularly about clause 30 and the local offer. The real concern is that, as the provisions stand, they allow for no more than a directory of services, with no duty on local agencies to provide what is set out in the local offer or to define service standards, although there has been some movement there. The risk is that the Bill’s objectives in seeking to improve educational outcomes for children with SEN and disabled children and their families will not be met. There is also concern that children with less complex needs will fail to reach the threshold for new education, health and care provision in much the same way as only the adults most in need of care services are able to access them.

[Meg Hillier]

One concern I have encountered a lot in my constituency is where a child has something that is difficult to diagnose or put a name to. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that unless we get this right in the Bill, those children, their parents and their teachers will not have any better provision than is currently on offer?

[Debbie Abrahams]

I do indeed share that concern. Similar issues have been raised with me in my discussions with different charities.

We know that one in eight families has a child with SEN, and it is estimated that one in six will not be provided for under the Bill. We already know that 1.4 million children with SEN do not have a statement and will not be eligible for EHCP—education, health and care provision—under the Bill. Approximately 87% of all children with SEN are currently supported through school action or school action plus—in the provision of speech and language therapy, for example. With the abolition of these programmes, those children will rely totally on the local offer, so we must ensure that it is strengthened.

I want to refer quickly to accountability, which is still an issue in respect of these services. We need to make sure that children and their families can hold people to account and be engaged in the provision of their services, and the monitoring review of those services. Simply publishing the comments of parents and young people does not really do what is needed. We need to ensure that the engagement is meaningful, as reflected in the UN convention of the rights of the child.

This Bill is inadequate not only in the proposals it puts forward, but in its failure to recognise the policy context that surrounds it. My hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) spoke about that context, which includes complex legislation on welfare reforms and health system reforms, as well as massive cuts in local authority funding. It remains to be seen how well those local authorities will cope with that.

I want to conclude with a reference to one of my constituents: the mum of an eight-year-old son with Down’s syndrome. She says that taking him to all the various appointments he needs, whether for physiotherapy or speech therapy, or even for accessing an appropriate shoe service, given that he needs to wear corrective boots, has proved to be a full-time job in itself. Such demands on her time meant she was forced to give up work. As the household income has dropped with her loss of earnings, her husband has taken a higher-paid job in Scotland to make ends meet. Now the family is together only for the occasional weekend. Joanna says:

“I am not naive, I don’t expect services to exist just for me, or facilities to be for my convenience. The frustration comes from the possibility of services being made easier.”

This is an example of the stress experienced by families across the country in raising children with disabilities and special educational needs. Positive though some elements of the Bill are, it does not reassure us that the particular pressures that these families face will be addressed. I hope that the Government will look again at how to strengthen the provisions.

Energy Bill [Lords]

Debate between Debbie Abrahams and Meg Hillier

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier]

I’m not your love, matey, and I suspect someone else might find that surprising, too.

It is important that we get the detail in Committee and I make that point for a good reason. The Government have form on not giving answers in Committee. The Bill has been in the other place and so we might have expected it to be better. We gave it a fair wind and we would still like to see it succeed, but we need more detail before it can do that.

There is a yawning gap between Ministers’ rhetoric and their actions and it grows day by day. In public, Ministers talk about being the greenest Government ever, so why have they called the Climate Change Act 2008 “red tape” and placed it in a review of what they call “burdens on business”? Ministers might huff and puff and say that the Act is safe in their hands, and I do not doubt the commitment of the DECC team, but why then is it in the red tape review? Perhaps they need to talk to other members of their Government.

Why have Ministers ended the commitment to zero-carbon homes? That fact caused the WWF to resign its place on the working group as the decision was so out of the blue. Why will the green investment bank not be up and running for two more years? Allegedly, the money to fund it is coming from Britain’s stake in a uranium enrichment company, URENCO, which the Financial Times suggests is in doubt.

There is an elephant in the room and we all know what it is. The Energy Secretary has had his eyes on a prize other than reducing carbon emissions. I know that he has had to pull himself away from the detail of the Bill in recent days to attack his coalition partners by article, letter and leak, and it is a shame that he has had to do so because—to give him credit—it might be a better Bill if he had applied himself to it. We also know that the demands of the alternative vote campaign have, for some reason or another, taken up much of his time when he might have been meeting with green groups, consumer groups or businesses that would have told him what a mess the Bill was and how to improve it. There is still no excuse, when he is backed up by the gold-standard civil service of this country, to come to the House with this dog’s breakfast of a Bill. It is weak on specifics, clouded in uncertainty and built on such shaky foundations that few can have confidence in its standing up to scrutiny. We want the Bill to succeed, but we have no detail and no plan from the Government about how it will be implemented.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I agree with my hon. Friend that there is still much to do before the Government can claim to be the greenest ever. There are also significant gaps in the Bill. One example from my constituency concerns a community hydro project in Saddleworth that might not go ahead because of the anomaly in the current legislation, which is not addressed by the Bill, that prevents it from securing the higher feed-in tariff rates. Surely that is something we should be encouraging.

[Meg Hillier]

That is another example of the Government’s dither and delay in making decisions that can have perverse effects on the ground.