Mr Hugh Bayley (York, City of)

I am grateful for being called so early in the new Session and I congratulate you, Madam Deputy Speaker, on your appointment. I am also grateful to the electors of York for returning me as their Member of Parliament. I pay tribute to my predecessor, with whom I had many sharp disagreements on many issues. However, in one area of policy he made his mark in the House, as I am sure hon. Members will agree. It was child safety and safety in the home. I also pay tribute to his predecessor, Alex Lyon, who is still remembered in York as an exceptional constituency Member of Parliament. That was sharply brought home to me when my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Ms. Short) visited York a few months ago. People came to her in the street to ask about Alex.

I know that my maiden speech should not be controversial, but I am provoked into responding to a couple of matters raised by the hon. Member for Leicestershire, North-West (Mr. Ashby) who spoke about the problems, as he saw them, of local authorities owning property. In York an extremely old city council has owned property for hundreds of years. There are advantages in that. Shambles, one of our city centre streets, which is the finest and, I think, probably the only complete medieval street in Britain, is there because it has been in public ownership for hundreds of years. It was taken into public ownership under environmental health legislation. Traditionally, it was the butchers' street in York and taking it into public ownership was a way of providing regulation.

York city council's heritage of owning property in the city centre puts it in the enviable position of being able to levy what I think is the second lowest poll tax in Yorkshire and one of the lowest in the country. It was able to do that because it had the benefit of investment which it built up for the public good over the centuries.

I am also provoked to respond to the suggestion of a need for a national police force. In North Yorkshire, my county, crime has risen from 20,000 reported offences a year when Labour left office in 1979 to 50,000 such offences. The North Yorkshire police force has exceptionally good information technology and perfectly adequate means of communicating with other police forces. We need not a national police force but more police officers and more resources for local authorities to put into crime prevention.

Partly because I have digressed to respond to the comments by the hon. Member for Leicestershire, North-West, I shall spare the House the traditional guided constituency tour that occurs in so many maiden speeches. That is because I suspect that many hon. Members have already visited York. I invite those who have not done so to visit it in the near future. I shall use my time in the House as an advocate for my constituency and my constituents. I hope to be involved in debate on the future of the confectionery industry and on the need for the current GATT talks to retain export restitutions so that food manufacturers in the United Kingdom can compete on equal terms with manufacturers from outside the European Community.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Mrs. Prentice) spoke eloquently about the need to improve rail services for London commuters. She spoke about the desperate state of clapped-out Network SouthEast trains that run from her constituency to the centre of London where the majority of her constituents work. There is a need for new trains and a need for them to be built by BREL in York. It recently received a stop-gap order which will keep the works in business for about 12 months, but we need a much longer programme of orders so that this country retains the ability to manufacture modern aluminium-bodied railway carriages.

BREL in York is the only place in Britain that manufactures modern suburban aluminium-bodied railway carriages. We need the work in York and commuters in the London area need modern trains to provide a good service. There is no point in a citizens charter offering penalty payments to London commuters if British Rail does not have the goods to provide the decent service that the charter requires.

I shall deal primarily with the issue of community care raised by the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Fry). In less than a year, the Government will start to transfer resources of about £2,000 million from the social security budget to social services departments to provide community care. That will be done from the social security residential and nursing care support budget. Is that enough? Community care may be a better option for many patients, but it is by no means a cheap option. Social services departments throughout the country—those in North Yorkshire are no exception—have felt the financial squeeze of pressure on local government finance and the effects of the poll tax. Will they have the resources to improve not just the quantity but the quality of community care, which was one of the matters stressed in the Gracious Speech? The fact that there is an increasing demand for community care is a tribute to the existence for more than 40 years of a free and demand-led, needs-based national health service.

More people are living to an old age and they need community care in their later years. More children survive infancy. Many of those who would not have survived some years ago are disabled. I have heard many harrowing stories from my constituents about the difficulties that they have in obtaining the community care that they need to enable them to look after their children.

I was approached recently by a family who have a 21-year-old Down's syndrome daughter. The family took the decision to foster a 21-year-old Down's syndrome man. That family will look after their natural child and foster child for as long as they can, but they recognise that at some stage they will no longer be able to care for them. The family hope that the natural child and the foster child will be able to look after each other and provide companionship and security. The family would like to find full-time day care for the two children in the same clay centre. North Yorkshire social services department admits that the two children should have that care but it is unable to provide either child with full-time day care. It is certainly unable to provide the two of them with full-time day care at the same day centre.

Had the foster child not been fostered, he would have spent the rest of his life, as he had spent the beginning of it, in an institutional home. He has been given the opportunity to live with a loving family in the community, but without community care support that sort of benefit for those who would otherwise be in institutions is likely to be lost.

I have been dealing also with the case of an extremely severely disabled young woman whose parents are now no longer able to care for her. An argument has developed between the health and social services authorities over who should take responsibility. The young woman is occupying a respite care bed at huge expense to the health authority. There are others who need that bed and she is preventing them from taking it because no long-term provision can be found for her.

The family was offered a bed in a home in Skipton, which is many miles from York. If the young woman had moved to Skipton, her family would no longer have been able to visit daily and she would have felt abandoned. Are we to provide community care services that will ensure that people are cared for in the community in which they live and in which their families can provide support, or are they to be shuffled off to wherever a bed is available?

I welcome the commitment in the Queen's Speech to the citizens charter. Coming from York, I could hardly do otherwise, because four years ago the city produced the very first citizens charter. However, merely to have a citizens charter is not good enough if public services are not provided with the funds to deliver the high quality of service that the charter demands.

North Yorkshire county council is examining a proposal to divest itself of 20 old people's homes. That may save the council money in the short term, but only between now and April of next year when the community care budget is transferred from the Benefits Agency to local government. The real question is whether the divestment will improve the quality of care that is referred to in the Queen's Speech. Will it improve choice for the residents? Will it improve the opportunity to obtain provision that is local to where people live so that an elderly person who moves into a home is able to retain links and friendships in the community in which she or he lived?

Previously I was employed in a professional capacity as a health economist. I undertook a study not long ago into long-term care for the elderly, which included interviews with 1,300 people living in nursing and residential homes. Among other things, they were asked to express their views about the care that they received, the freedom of choice that they had in their homes and the overall quality of care that was available. Those who lived in local authority homes thought, generally speaking, that the quality of care was good. In the private sector, opinions were extremely variable. Some private homes were extremely good and some were unacceptably poor.

If more old people's homes are to be transferred from the public sector to the private sector, it will be necessary to ensure that the quality of care within those homes is retained. According to the 1,300 residents, the public sector was much better than the private sector when it came to quality control.

The problem with statutory inspection and regulation procedures is that they concentrate on areas that can be measured relatively easily, such as the number of rooms, the number of toilets, staffing and the control of drugs. They do not focus on the key to caring, which is the personal relationship between the carer and the elderly person, the handicapped person or the disabled person. That relationship cannot be measured through the statutory process, but it must be ensured if high-quality care—the sort of care that the citizens charter wishes to ensure—is to be maintained. It is not only North Yorkshire county council that is proposing to divest itself of its old people's homes.

I am concerned about what divestment means in terms of freedom of choice for the residents of old people's homes. Will they have freedom of choice about the life that they lead within the home—for example, whether they can choose when to have a bath, whether they have a choice of different dishes at meal times and whether they can choose the clothes that they buy and wear? All those facets are important, and equally important is whether people retain a choice when it comes to the type of home into which they should move.

As I said, I was involved in interviewing 1,300 residents. Only one in 20 of those in local authority homes said that he or she had even considered moving into a private home. Only one person in 30 in private homes said that he or she had even considered moving into a local authority home. These elderly people had extremely firm views about the type of home and the type of regime in which they wanted to live, and that choice must be maintained. The short-term cash benefits for social service departments of divesting themselves of their directly managed homes, which will run out in a matter of months, mean nothing when set against quality of care and choice for residents.

The residents of these homes will live in them for the rest of their lives. As people who are concerned with the provision of community care, we have a responsibility to ensure that quality and choice within residential homes are as good as they can possibly be. There should be a granny test: if a home is not acceptable for someone's parents or grandparents, it should not be acceptable to anybody else's.

It is all very well to say that the Benefits Agency now or the social services department in future will pay the fees of those who cannot afford to pay for themselves in private sector homes, but that is not always the outcome. I recently received a call from a couple who were extremely frightened on having received a bill for £2,121.95 in respect of the woman's brother two weeks after he had moved into a private care home. They did not have the means to pay the bill. They also received a demand to sign a form to indemnify the home against the fees if the woman's brother was unable to pay them. In addition, they received what I can only call a pressurising letter from the matron of the home.

Fortunately, I was able to take up the matter and say that that couple had absolutely no responsibility to pay the fees on behalf of the woman's brother—and, sure enough, the social security authority agreed to pay the fees. What would have happened if that couple had not found somebody to shout for them at that critical time? What if they had used their life savings to pay the fees? It is not good enough for the public sector to provide services on contract unless it can guarantee that the proper people, at the proper time, will pay for them.

I welcome the community care approach, but there are 6 million unpaid, informal carers throughout the country, without whose services the community care system would fall apart. Ten thousand of those carers are in my constituency, with about the same number in other constituencies. They need a decent carers' benefit and respite care for those for whom they are caring. They need proper community services, such as home help and laundry services, which are not being provided by social services departments because of the financial squeeze on them. Those informal carers are the biggest army of overworked, unpaid, undervalued heroes and heroines in this country. The whole system could fall apart. The closure programme for long-stay institutions will certainly fall apart if carers do not get the back-up and support from social services departments that they need.

The hon. Member for Wellingborough said that it was unclear how social services departments would finance their responsibilities. That is a disgrace. It is only 11 months from when they will have to meet those responsibilities. It is no wonder that those who care for the elderly, the disabled and those with learning difficulties are scared. It is a great shame that £14 billion has been spent on the failed poll tax when it could have been used for decent funding for social services departments to provide the community care that we all know is needed. It is a public spending responsibility that the House must grapple with and come to terms with, and it must do so quickly so that those who depend on that support can know well in advance of April that they will get the backing that they need.

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