Clause 28

9:45 am

Mark Harper (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Forest of Dean, Conservative)

I beg to move amendment 23, in clause 28, page 36, line 37, leave out ‘aged 18 or over’.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr. Amess. Part 2 of the Bill, which starts at clause 28, is about the right to control the provision of services to disabled people. Amendment 23 is a probing amendment, in which we seek to test why the Bill’s provisions are restricted to adults. The clause sets out the purpose of part 2 and does not in itself set out the right to control, which is dealt with in later clauses. However, I want to test the Minister on why we are limiting the provisions to adults. The Department for  Children, Schools and Families is piloting individual budgets, but as the Minister will know from our evidence-taking sessions, having different Departments carrying out pilots on individual budgets with different rules and different processes is a step backwards, not forwards. It would be better for disabled people and their families if we had one seamless framework and set of rules. Apart from anything else, that would make it clear that where a disabled child and their family had the right to control the services that they received, there would be a seamless transition in the provision of those services as the child grew up and became an adult. As a result, they would not have to move from a framework that was run by the DCSF to one that was run by the DWP or the Department of Health.

The Minister will know, and it is commonly said, that there is already an issue in local government social care services with disabled children’s transition from receiving services provided by local government children’s services organisations to receiving adult services. That transition is not always as smooth as one would hope, despite the fact that the legal definitions of a child and an adult relate to being aged 18 and should therefore be pretty predictable to local authorities, which should be able to put in place plans to make the transition seamless.

I seek to test the Minister on whether removing the limit that restricts the provisions to those aged 18 or over and extending them to all disabled people would not only be a step forward and give disabled children and their families greater rights and control in general, but help with the transitional process involved in moving into adulthood.

The other issue is the cost, particularly where local government services are concerned. Have the Government assessed the possibility of having one set of processes to supply more personalised care and support packages for adults and one set that is designed for children, with different rules and different procedures? Have they assessed whether one, seamless framework would be more cost-effective, ensuring that more resources were used to deliver front-line services or give families an individual budget and a more direct payment, rather than being used on bureaucracy and unnecessary cost?

I will hold my comments about amendment 71 until we reach it; I will not stray out of order. That is all I want to say to the Minister for now. We will get to the wider issues when we move on to later clauses.

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