Disability Living Allowance Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Work and Pensions
George Hollingbery
Main Page: George Hollingbery (Conservative - Meon Valley)Department Debates - View all George Hollingbery's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Hywel Williams
I suppose that that is the overarching concern behind all this. Eventually, some money might disappear, and the question is who will pay it. That is unclear at the moment. Many years ago, I used to repeat endlessly to some of my more starry-eyed social work students that, “It is not as simple as that,” which is a general rule for politics.
I was a young social worker in the late ’70s. I have promised the Minister that I would not use a lot of Welsh, but, inevitably, I would like to make one little point. I used to take some of my clients out on social occasions to try to improve the quality of their lives, and the only practical way to do that at that time was by minibus. It was a big, yellow minibus, which said on the side, “Cymdeithas Plant Araf eu Meddwl,” which translates as the society for mentally handicapped children. Needless to say, the people with whom I worked were neither children nor mentally handicapped, which was a loaded term even then but, for the non-Welsh-speakers present, “araf eu meddwl” is even more loaded—it literally means “slow of mind,” so I was taking people out in a big, yellow bus that said that they were slow of mind. I would say, therefore, that social security and social and health provision have developed over the past 30 to 40 years towards a more normalised provision, based on autonomy and choice.
If we depend on institutions to solve people’s problems of mobility, we will soon get institutional answers, which is something we should avoid.
George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Does he not think that there is room for some standardisation or effort by central Government to ensure that those who are in residential settings and need mobility have at least some consistency of provision across the board? Surely, without that, there would be as much confusion as there would be otherwise.
Hywel Williams
I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. The provision in the public and private sectors of residential care needs to be looked at, but should that be done by reforming DLA in the way proposed? Would that be a blunt instrument? Are there other ways that that can be done?