Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

The subject of the amendment is vital. Members of the Committee have spoken to it most eloquently, so I will not rehearse the points already made except to say that access to short breaks can make all the difference between families coping with their disabled children and those children being taken into care. A couple of years ago, I visited the Red House charity in Bury. The stories of the families whom I met were extraordinarily moving. A common plea from all of them was to be able to have some respite from the exhaustion of looking after their much loved children. However, they also wanted to be able to choose where their children went for short breaks, so that the children were looked after by people whom they knew and trusted. The families wanted to be able to care for their own children; they simply wanted some support to help them. We are of course aware that there are cost implications. As a party, we are looking at how we could implement a single assessment process in order to improve the wide variety of social services that disabled children require. Currently, over a quarter of spending on families with disabled children is wasted on the assessment process and so never reaches the pockets of those who need it most. If the system were simplified, more money would be available for services such as short breaks. In short, people should not have to fight to get the support that they deserve.