Welfare Reform Bill

As I have explained to my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), we are trying to strike a balance. We think that we have struck the balance in the right place. The proposal involves working with registrars to get far more fathers registered, and registrars have plenty of experience and are at the cutting edge of practice in that area. The proposal represents the first way in which the Bill will give people greater control over their lives by making sure that families work to support our important efforts on child poverty. The second area where we need to make a real change involves giving disabled people the right to control the services that they receive. Hon. Members on both sides of the House recognise that Britain is probably at the cutting edge in terms of the framework for disabled people. In particular, good work has taken place on giving disabled people greater control over the support that they get in the health service through individual budgets. Although that change may sound dry, it is completely transformative. I was in Barnsley yesterday talking to people who have benefited from individual budgets. In particular, a man called Patrick spoke about how he had been stuck in residential care for years and had been unable to go out because his carers did not have time to offer that to him. He felt that he was trapped and did not have control over his life. When he and two of his friends got individual budgets, they were able to rent a house and hire carers to look after all of them. They are now saving up the time with their carers to be able to go on holiday in Spain. Their lives have been completely transformed. Geoff, another man who was there, spoke about the change in his life. It meant that he had gone from being treated as a body that needed to be cared for to a person who needed to be helped. He mentioned that he now said to the people who looked after him that they were not his carers, but his enablers and that he was their boss. That is a complete change in the power relationship for disabled people. Through the Bill we want to take that idea, which has worked particularly in health, and widen it to a much broader range of support that disabled people get. We want to include a much wider range of services for disabled people, so that they can put them together to spend as they feel fit.