Children’s Services

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Edward Timpson)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. I congratulate the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) on securing this important and timely debate. I know that she speaks from personal experience, and that she gives support to people in her constituency. I believe that she will be doing that on 1 February when she attends an employment fair for individuals with autism in the city of Sheffield. I hope the fair goes well. She has a strong and sustained interest in the issue and I am delighted that she has taken the time to look carefully at the Green Paper that was brought out by my predecessor and subsequently at the draft clauses that were subject to pre-legislative scrutiny by the Select Committee.

I will endeavour to cover as many points as possible in the short time that is left. In the usual way, I will be happy to write to the hon. Lady to provide full answers to any outstanding points; all her points carry weight and deserve a full response. Let me deal with the specific points that she raised at the outset. In relation to the local offer and where it will sit in the future provision of services for children with special educational needs and disability, clearly the purpose of the local offer is to have, for the first time, a single source of information, which is transparent and which sets out all the services in the local area and beyond. Clearly, there are not provisions for some low-instance conditions in every local area, but it is important that parents and young people know where they can access them if they fall outside their local authority area. Parents need to know how to access all the services in their local area and what support is available to enable them to do that. Where the support is not provided, parents need to know how they can redress that.

The approach of the Scope campaign has been constructive. It has supported many elements of the Bill that we, hopefully, will be introducing shortly. To allay some of its concerns over the veracity of the local offer and over how parents and young people will be able to review the services that are on offer to ensure that they match the need within the local area, it needs to be involved in the consultative stage of the local offer; I will come on to that in relation to the point that the hon. Lady raised about the framework and where it will sit as a national model. I do not see the local offer as a static document. It is important that it is an evolving piece of information and guidance for local people who have the opportunity to review, monitor and influence it to ensure that it reflects everything that is required by all young people with a special educational need or disability within the local authority area. I want to have local people as involved as possible in the whole process, and that is something that I hope to take forward in the Bill, which will deal with many of the issues that Scope has raised.

What will the local offer look like? What we have found from the 20 pathfinders across 31 local authorities is that close involvement of parents and young people in the development of the local offer, through the parent carer forums funded by the Department, is a much more powerful way of ensuring that the services that local authorities will provide match the local need. To drive up national consistency, the code of practice, which is not in primary legislation, will set out a common framework that shows what should be in the local offer. We do not want it to require local authorities to provide only what is in that framework; it must not be a race to the bottom. It will set some parameters so that both local authorities and other agencies and services know their responsibilities and their duty to co-operate and to provide information for the local offer. Parents and young people need an explicit assurance that they will have that information available to them.

[John McDonnell]

That is really helpful. Our concern is that some local authorities will simply re-badge what they have already, and they will not drive up standards. A key role is to ensure that parents and local groups work with the local authority to raise those standards.

[Mr Timpson]

That is a sensible approach and one that we share. As is illustrated in the Green Paper, the redrafted Bill following the Select Committee’s pre-legislative scrutiny, and the subsequent regulations in the code of practice, the whole purpose behind many of these reforms is to put parents and young people at the heart of the whole process—before the assessment and through the assessment, the delivery of service and any redress that follows. That can be done on an individual basis and also with the help of professionals. It can also be done through existing groups such as parent carer forums, which can be a powerful voice for parents in their local area.

The Bill will strengthen the role of young people in the system, which is hugely important. We will move to a single system for those aged nought to 25 with a more co-ordinated assessment and joint commissioning, and increase the opportunities for young people over the current age requirement to take their own case to tribunal where their request for an assessment has been refused. We will also pilot a scheme for children to take forward an appeal if they feel that they have not been provided with everything that they require. That is a huge advance in ensuring that this system moves away from the huge barriers which the hon. Lady rightly referred to in her speech. Too many parents are still finding obstacles in their way, too much duplication of information and that they are having to retell their story again and again. We need to get away from that and have a system that has parents and young people at its heart from the start, rather than when it is too late and when there is too much division between them and the services that should be there to support children.

[Bill Esterson]

What the Minister is saying is absolutely right; I think we all agree with him. But without the additional resources, and given the constraints on local authorities because of the funding problems that they already have, will this be deliverable? That is a very grave concern for local authorities.

[Mr Timpson]

The overall spending on special educational needs is consistent; about £5.7 billion is being spent across local authorities. Clearly, other services fall outside that funding envelope. What we are seeing from the pathfinders, particularly with the onset of personal budgets, is that there is a much better way of bringing together services so that they can co-ordinate their response. Not duplicating efforts means that there can be a more efficient and effective provision of the service that the individual child needs.

The hon. Lady raised the issue of transport. That will be contained in the local offer, so it will be clear to parents and young people what the opportunities are for accessing transport. One pathfinder has demonstrated the power of personal budgets in that regard: in the East Riding area, a group of parents have pooled their personal budgets to provide a mode of transport on which they can all rely, which is far more cost-effective and puts them more in control of the arrangement.

Mr Sheridan, I am conscious that I have only 40 seconds left and there are many issues that we have not managed to cover. None the less, I welcome the hon. Lady’s broad support for the direction of travel of our reforms. When the Bill is finally published and we take it through Parliament, I hope that she will see that I have taken time to listen to many of the aspects that she has raised today and to the concerns of parents and others, and that I have taken on board much of what the Select Committee has said to get the proposed legislation in as good a state as possible. However, I recognise that this is about not just the legislation, but the culture change that we need, and we are determined to make that happen.