Thérèse Coffey
Main Page: Thérèse Coffey (Conservative - Suffolk Coastal)Department Debates - View all Thérèse Coffey's debates with the Cabinet Office
(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas). I listened to his speech with great interest.
I shall focus on three specific sets of proposals in the Queen’s Speech that build on many of the strong reforms the Government introduced in the previous Session: the measures on children and families—which my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) has already touched on—crime and the courts, and enterprise and regulatory reform.
As a Conservative, I believe in stronger families forming the foundation of a stronger society, so I welcome the measures to support families. As my hon. Friend said, arranging child care is one of the biggest challenges working parents face. Those of us who daily do the school run know all about the pressures of juggling child care commitments with work. For households in which both parents are working, that can be a great struggle. Whether in respect of babysitting toddlers, looking after unwell children, doing the school run or attending school assembly, it can be very difficult for working mums and dads, especially those in traditional working arrangements, to support their children fully and meet their needs. We must not forget that young children—whether attending nursery, pre-school or school—have active lives and social lives, too, and that there are therefore also other commitments such as taking kids to after-school activities
Many households now need two parents to be working and bringing in full-time incomes in order to pay the bills because—let us face it—life is tough at the moment and the cost of living is high and is rising. Many Members have spoken about the rising utilities and fuel bills.
Suitable child care provision in this country is incredibly costly. Many of us could give examples of the average bill for sending a child to nursery in normal working hours exceeding £800 a month. That is equivalent to a monthly mortgage repayment in some households, so is it any wonder that two parents have to go out to work to cover child care costs in addition to the cost of living?
The Government are to be congratulated on recognising the challenges families face and the barriers to family life in this country, but more needs to be done across government and all the political parties. We must take a pragmatic and rational approach and introduce some positive, proactive measures to alleviate the struggles and challenges families face and to remove the barriers that are often in place in respect of child care and employment.
I know that many households across the country, and certainly in my constituency, will welcome the proposals outlined today. We need to give parents more flexibility over working time and over maternity and paternity leave, too. I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I was one of those parents who went back to work three weeks after having my son and, quite frankly, had I had the opportunity to swap with my husband, that really would have been great.
The Government should be commended for considering relationships between children and both parents. Fathers should absolutely have equal, fair and the right kind of access to their children when the family relationship has broken down. In my time as a Member of Parliament thus far, brief though it has been, many fathers have come to me who feel that their children are being used in the court system as an emotional and financial weapon, which is unacceptable. We need to bring some sanity back to the situation. Shared parenting is absolutely the right thing and, if nothing else, we have to start putting the rights of children first, not the rights of warring parents or warring mothers against warring fathers. Children come first and children’s rights are key.
That brings me on to adoption. In my view, the Government should be congratulated on their commitment to supporting the adoption process. I personally feel that it is nothing short of scandalous that the number of adoptions last year totalled just 60 when thousands of children are going through the care system in local authorities up and down the country. That is simply wrong. They deserve loving families and loving homes and hundreds of loving families want to provide good, stable homes for children. It is a shame on our society and on the system that red tape and bureaucracy get in the way and prevent children from being put into loving families. I welcome the change and hope that the Government will ensure that we can start to address the scandal and start to put children into proper loving homes.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dover talked about bureaucracy and red tape and I welcome the steps being taken to support children with special educational needs. As a local MP I have met dozens of families who have been let down by the system. Those mums and dads naturally want the best for their children but all too often bureaucracy, officialdom and, sometimes, bad practice in schools and local authorities let them down and damage the prospects of their children. They are left fighting hard, going through assessment after assessment, just to get the extra help that their children need. More often than not, in many cases, the needs of their children are recorded or summarised through some sort of tick-box process. The real understanding of the emotional or physical needs of the child is often ignored.
One school in my constituency has a very poor record on special educational needs provision and is the source of many complaints from parents to me. Rather than helping an autistic child, the school has classified him as having average communication skills. It is completely failing that poor child and failing to understand his needs because the school does not want to be seen to have too many children with special educational needs on its books, which is wrong and appalling. I would like more to be done to empower parents and I welcome the proposals to do that and to simplify the assessment process with the introduction of the single assessment process and education, health and care plans.
We also need to encourage the spread of best practice to get good results in the running of special educational needs services in other schools. A very positive example of that in my constituency is set by the inspirational head teacher, Jane Bass, at Powers Hall junior school in Witham. She sets a good leadership example and works tirelessly to help children with learning difficulties and special educational needs. I think she should be commended for her work. She has a strong track record of supporting children who have come to her school with very challenging problems and seeing them through their time there so that they leave with more skills and greater independence. That is good for the children and is genuine relief for their parents. Importantly, the parents know that their children’s needs are being met. In taking through the relevant Bill that will be introduced this Session, we should learn from schools that have a good track record of working with children and their parents to understand how to meet a child’s needs and relate that to the legislation. We need more head teachers like Jane Bass and I am optimistic that the legislative programme can deliver positive changes to special educational needs provision.
I welcome the Government’s tough stance on drug drivers, which I hope will lead to robust legislation. It is shameful that our criminal justice system sentences perpetrators for these offences—people who have taken away lives and ruined the lives of victims’ families—to just a few weeks behind prison bars instead of the lengthy spells in prison totalling many years that they should receive. I know that Ministers have listened closely to people’s concerns about this issue. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister today spoke about the many representations from families that he has listened to and the campaigns fought by victims’ families. Clearly, the Government have responded positively to those representations, but many more victims of other crimes have been excluded by the criminal justice system. Ministers need to listen to their concerns and introduce positive changes.
Victims and the public are being put in danger by a criminal justice system that, from the top down, sets free far too many offenders so that they end up roaming our streets and committing more crimes. There are more than 250 offenders with more than 100 convictions, more than 3,500 with 50 or more convictions and more than 2,000 offenders who have served 25 or more separate spells in prison. In addition, there are rapists and sex offenders who are never sentenced to serve a day behind bars. That should change. Some 20,000 offenders who are let off with community orders are out on the streets committing 50 crimes a day, including offences against children. The Government’s reforms to community sentences are a positive step forward, but there are tens of thousands of offenders on our streets for whom prison is the best place. Importantly, if they are in prison the public will know that they are being kept safe. Keeping the public safe should be fundamental to any criminal justice reforms we make in this Session.
We should also do more to support the victims of crime. I have seen from the work I have done with victims—let me refer hon. Members to my private Member’s Bill in the previous Session on championing victims’ rights—that victims are fed up with seeing policy makers and the courts focusing their efforts on appeasing offenders instead of helping victims to get through the horrific experiences they have faced. The former victims commissioner, Louise Casey, did a good job of highlighting this issue alongside charities such as Victim Support, the National Victims Association and Support After Murder and Manslaughter Abroad. The Government’s response to the consultation on its “Getting it right for victims and witnesses” strategy is due later this year, and I very much hope that they will recognise where the proposals need beefing up and that they will show some flexibility and deliver the new and improved services that victims of crime need. At the moment, my constituent Marie Heath and her family are being subjected to the horrendous ordeal of travelling to Germany every week for the ongoing trial of the defendants alleged to have brutally murdered her son. The family face huge logistical challenges and thousands of pounds in costs. The Government are aware of that case and I hope that in the Bill they will learn from the experience of the Heaths and many other victims of crime.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about people’s need to feel secure, to feel that sentencing is appropriate and to feel that those who should be behind bars are behind bars. Does she, like me, want the Government to take steps to ensure that sentences mean that if someone is sentenced to four years, for example, they serve those four years as opposed to perhaps just two?
Priti Patel
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are talking about public confidence in the criminal justice system, which should do what it says on the tin. If an offender is sentenced to four years, the public do not want them released within 18 months or a shorter time. They want to know that the full sentence will be served. This is a good opportunity for the Government to restore public confidence in our criminal justice system.
I welcome the proposals the Government have outlined to free up businesses and scrap costly and unnecessary burdens on them. I refer to regulation. As the daughter of a small shopkeeper, I have recognised throughout my adult and teenage working life how important small businesses are for jobs and economic growth. I have also become very aware of regulation. As shopkeepers, my parents have owned a range of small shops—post offices, supermarkets and newsagents. We have been through many iterations of health and safety legislation, business and small shop regulation, Sunday trading, opening hours and particularly employment legislation. You name it, Madam Deputy Speaker, and we have been there, seen it and done it.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are the bedrock of our economy. We were once described as a nation of shopkeepers, but we do not feel like that any more, as small and independent retailers are decimated in our high streets. More needs to be done. SMEs support two thirds of jobs throughout the country. In my constituency, the figure rises to 83%, which is high and I should like it to be higher. With greater economic liberalisation and less regulation I am sure that will happen.
The ability of business owners and entrepreneurs to create even more jobs has been compromised by the unrelenting growth of regulation from both Whitehall and Brussels. In 2011, 84% of businesses reported that they spent more time dealing with legislation than in 2009. The annual cost to SMEs of that compliance is about £17 billion, which is equivalent to the cost of Crossrail, and 12 times the Government’s budget for apprenticeships.
The Government are committed to the red tape challenge; they have already identified more than 600 regulations to be scrapped or overhauled. The sooner the process begins, the better. Freeing business from the costs imposed by regulation will allow them, importantly, to invest in more jobs and economic growth.
I urge the Government to take more robust action on EU red tape. For me as a new Member of Parliament, one of the most disappointing aspects of EU regulation was the enforcement in the previous Session of the agency workers regulations, which unfortunately the Government could do nothing about because the previous Government had done the deal. That has cost business £1.5 billion. Such regulations do far more to create unemployment and block job creation than they do to support workers’ rights.
In my constituency and throughout Essex, more people are prepared to take risks and set up their own business. As many Members may have seen in the news over the past 24 hours, there has been a great deal of political focus on Essex; one might argue that the only way is up in Essex. It is indeed a county of dynamic entrepreneurs. Many of my constituents are prepared to go out on a limb and do the right thing, which is to take risks and set up a business. In the county of entrepreneurs, there are 6,000 new enterprise births a year. The figure is high, and I hope that it will grow higher.
As the Prime Minister saw on his visit yesterday, those wealth creators will be key to the future economic success not just of the county of Essex but of our country. By taking steps to empower them to create more wealth, jobs and prosperity, we can once again restore dynamism and strength in the British economy, and as a country we shall start to regain our rightful place in the world economic league tables. That is why I support the Queen’s Speech and everything the Government are doing on economic and regulatory reform.
Chris Skidmore
Indeed, and I wish the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) the best of luck in contributing to this excellent debate on the Queen’s Speech.
The first line of the Queen’s Speech refers to the importance of growth in the economy, but one of the sectors in which we know there will certainly be growth is social care, because we have an ageing population. We used to say that there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. We now know that our population is getting ever older; by 2030 the number of 85-year-olds will double and 11% of the population living today will reach 100. Therefore, we have an enormous cost—not a burden—that society will face as a result of the population getting older, which is inevitably a good thing. The Queen’s Speech recognises this, importantly, by proposing a draft Bill that will seek to modernise adult social care and support, which I absolutely welcome, but it is worth reflecting on the word “modernise” and on what we need to do to modernise adult social care and support.
The Government recognise that tackling social care is not just an issue of tackling the funding of social care, important though that is. The Health Committee, of which I am a member, has already produced a report on the Dilnot commission and recommended it to the Government, and I hope that the Government will look at it in the forthcoming White Paper and that we will have proposals on the table. I know that there is cross-party support for looking at the Dilnot commission proposals and that we had a Backbench Business debate on that in the previous Session. Members from across the House, regardless of their party colours, are passionate about tackling this issue and the impending crisis.
Chris Skidmore
The Dilnot issue, which is one of presentation, is that the Government commissioned a report that addressed the specific question, “How do we fund social care as it currently stands?” That is why I want to turn to the issue of modernisation, but we have to remember the important tenet that Dilnot does not cover all forms of social care. It does not cover domiciliary care or living costs, so it is not a panacea, and we as parliamentarians must ensure that we work together and at the same time—Dilnot was very strict on this—come up with a proper system by which we can inform not only elderly people now but the elderly people of tomorrow that they need to begin to save. Only by developing a savings culture and a culture of contribution, which I shall turn to also in my speech, will Dilnot work and will we ensure that the social care system works tomorrow as well as today—although today it is beginning to fail, as I shall explain.
In modernising social care, we need to recognise that the current system is not working on several levels. Personally, I feel that local authorities are becoming not the best places in which to deliver social care. Last week I published a report on local authorities and their delivery of social care, demonstrating from a series of freedom of information requests to every local authority in the country that local authorities have already written off £400 million of debts owed to them by families—and are still owed more than £1 billion.
Put simply, we have a system in which local authorities are not only struggling to provide care, but for financial reasons have lowered the bar and reduced their eligibility criteria. They have done so principally because they have to juggle social care with the services on which people really want to focus when they pay their council tax. For instance, people want their bins emptied or potholes filled, and that, for democratically elected local authorities, can take priority over those citizens who are most vulnerable but who, unfortunately for them, form a small minority. So roads and bins take precedence over social care. That should not be the case, but at the same time local authorities are deeply mired in debt because of their services, and we desperately need them to break out of that.
The current system also does not work because the failure of social care ends up rebounding in only one place: the NHS. We need to make the point strongly that the NHS and social care are two sides of the same coin, and that if there is a crisis in social care there will soon be a crisis in the NHS. Even the IMF has produced figures on how the NHS will look by 2050 if we do not manage our ageing population and work out ways of prevention. We must also look not only at how elderly people can be given the life and dignity that they deserve, but at early intervention. If any problems that they may have, such as diabetes or a disability, are dealt with soon enough, it costs the NHS less. The IMF predicts that the NHS will end up costing £230 billion by 2050, and that is completely unaffordable. It means that the NHS will go broke unless we solve the social care crisis now.
Dr Coffey
Does my hon. Friend agree that cross-party consensus on the draft social care Bill is critical? That is why a draft Bill is appropriate. Does he agree also that, as long as somebody is in hospital the NHS pays for them, so the draft Bill needs to tackle the key issue whereby local authorities sometimes delay a person’s exit from hospital so that they do not have to pick up the bill in the interim?
Chris Skidmore
That is an interesting point. Obviously, one of the first moves that the Government made when they came into office was to create an output measure of 30 days’ discharge from hospital. Although that was created in August 2011, it is already controversial because we are seeing the scale of the problem. The problem is not new; it has always been there, but the Government are for the first time providing the figures on how many people are leaving hospital and rebounding back into hospital. We should have solved that problem sooner.
My hon. Friend argued for a cross-party approach, and I entirely agree. We must achieve cross-party support on social care. We are talking about a settlement that must last decades, so it cannot be a patchwork solution or a plaster over a wound that might open up in several years’ time. We need to come up with a binding compact on social care. I hope that the draft Bill will aspire to that.
I have talked about the relationship between the NHS and social care. The Government have recognised that the future of saving the NHS will come through a consideration of social care. We focus very much on the NHS, and the Health and Social Care Bill of the previous Session tried to address the matter. Funds were placed in the hands of GPs; for the first time, GPs are taking responsibility for patients. Rather than sending patients directly to hospital, GPs have to look at what preventive measures they must take to cure illness or disability. Over the past three years, the number of over-80-year-olds who have been admitted into A and E has risen by about 40%. We know that 65% of unplanned NHS bed admission stays involve the elderly. If we can solve that, we will solve a huge issue within the NHS.
I am a member of the Health Committee, which recently wrote a report on social care. We visited Torbay, which was instructive. The authorities there have ensured complete integration between social care and health care services. They have done that by pooling budgets; when they have team meetings, there is no empire building in which people say, “This is my budget for the primary care trust, this is mine for the GPs and this is mine for the hospital.” People sit down and consider their overall budget. They have in mind an 85-year-old lady called Mrs Smith, and they ask what treatment pathway they could create to ensure that Mrs Smith gets the best possible care.
The authorities in Torbay recognise that social and community care is the best way to prevent unplanned admissions to NHS hospitals. The result is that Torbay has the fastest-decreasing and lowest number of unplanned hospital bed day admissions in the country. The approach there clearly works, so the modernisation of social care must also be about proper, true integration between social care and health care.
We also need to recognise that to modernise social care is not to speak of the elderly as some homogenous group. Above all, senior citizens are individuals with individual needs. Each will have their own particular pathway through the later years in life. As a Government, we must recognise that to ensure that the individual has the best possible life in old age, we must give them a chance to lead their life as they would like to.
To do that, the Government have built on the work of the previous Government in introducing personalised services. Above all, we have seen the rise of personal budgets. In England, their uptake doubled, from April 2010 to March 2011, to almost 340,000 service users. That is still only about 35% of eligible users and carers. Although the increase in personal budgets is welcome, it has come in the form of local authority managed budgets, rather than individual direct payments, which make up only 26% of that 340,000—that is, 26% of the 35% of eligible users.
Although there has been an increase in personalisation, there has not been a proper increase in individuals being given freedom in how they would like to use their budgets. In other words, councils are offering a menu to choose from but they are not offering a choice of restaurants.
Key to the modernisation of social care will be the introduction of direct cash payments. At present, individual budgets cannot be paid to a spouse or partner to provide care, and that limits uptake and entrenches the difficulty that millions of people have in wanting to care for a loved one in their old age. If we look across to the continent, we see that places such as Germany have a far more liberalised social care system. In Germany, people are assessed as needing care at one of three levels, and they are then offered a choice between an individual budget cash payment with services in kind, including residential care, and a tailored combination of the two. Interestingly, the individual budget cash payment is of significantly lower value than the social care package. In 2007, people who needed considerable care, or care level 1, received €384 per month; those in need of intensive care, or level 2, received €921 per month; and those in need of highly intensive care, or level 3, received €1,432 per month. They were also offered the choice of claiming direct individual budget cash payments that were about two thirds lower than the payments in the social care package, which meant that people at care level 1 received €205 per month, those at care level 2 received €410 per month and those at care level 3 received €665 per month.
One might have expected the population to opt for the higher payment, given that the social care package seems to be more sophisticated and pays more in euros, but in fact 49% of Germans decided instead to opt for the direct cash payment, which gave them greater choice and freedom in how they spent the money, or spent it for their relative. That control is every bit as valuable to individuals as money. It gives them the opportunity to stay in their own home and receive informal care from relatives. They can purchase the service they need without an additional layer of bureaucracy getting in the way. We can learn from what Germany did in modernising social care. Local authorities have traditionally focused on a one-size-fits-all response, in effect acting as a single, inflexible state supplier that cannot hope to offer the choice that people approaching their old age nowadays—baby boomers who have lived their lives having choice—will want equally as they get older.
What would happen if we introduced such a system in this country? In 2009-10, local authorities spent £3.4 billion on residential elderly care. On that basis, if the same thing happened here as in Germany, with half this group opting instead for cash payments and staying at home, we would save £1.14 billion a year, with people receiving £566 million instead of £1.7 billion. We could free up £1.1 billion or £1.2 billion a year, which could go a significant way towards producing the money that might then implement Dilnot.
Above all, the way in which people contribute to their care must be something that they can control rather than something that is done to them. We need to ensure that in modernising social care we make the best possible services available. People will not put up with paying for the current levels of services if they do not think that they are good enough. If we are going to expect people to pay more for their social care in old age, knowing, as we do, that it has never been free of charge—it is a bit of a nasty shock for some people when they find out that it is not provided free—then they need to have the best possible services for their money, and that, essentially, means choice.
With choice comes competition. We must ensure that there is thriving competition between social care providers. We must not only introduce direct cash budget payments but ensure that agencies are available to guarantee a level playing field. The Good Care Guide website is a fantastic resource, but we should be looking to introduce a TripAdvisor-type service into social care so that people can analyse which are the best care homes and write about their own experiences of what they are like. We should trust the people to make those judgments.
I want to end by reflecting on this year. Many Members have spoken about it being the year of the diamond jubilee, but it is also 70 years since William Beveridge published the Beveridge report on 1 December 1942. On that day, there were queues at the shops to purchase the report, and in the first week 600,000 people did so. The report set out what the welfare state would look like for most of the 20th century.
In many ways, Beveridge still casts a shadow over us. The NHS and pensions were established, but when Beveridge wrote his report the average life expectancy was 69. When people received their pension at 65, their pensionable age was only meant to last an average of four years. Beveridge never gave any thought to how we should care for the elderly. It was assumed that families would look after their elderly loved ones. Somewhere along the line, we have gone wrong. I am not blaming any one political party, but why is it that in many countries it is a mark of honour for people to look after those who have brought them into this world? Why do we pay people child benefit in recognition of being parents but not focus on rewarding carers who look after their parents? There is an imbalance, and I hope that by focusing on social care, as all parties must in this Parliament, we can try to redress the balance.
I wish to end with a quote from Beveridge. The odd thing is, the Beveridge report cannot be found online, but I managed to dig out from the Library a copy of the original 1942 report. Everyone remembers the five giants—Idleness, Squalor, Want, Ignorance and Disease—but in the passage after that famous part Beveridge stated that
“social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.”
Beveridge understood 70 years ago that we needed a contributory principle in our public services. Somewhere along the line, that has been lost. Only through individuals making contributions towards their elderly care will we achieve the best social care services. I hope that as we consider how to modernise social care, the draft Bill that will be published as a result of the Queen’s Speech will focus on all the matters that I have mentioned.
Much of the media’s focus has been on the other place, which we might call a retirement home for rather successful eminent politicians, but what we actually need to focus on, and what our constituents want to focus on, is retirement homes for the elderly population as a whole and what is happening to them. We would do well to remember that. I recognise that I have spoken only about one specific point in the Queen’s Speech, but I believe it was possibly the most important one.
Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(James Duddridge.)
Debate to be resumed tomorrow.