Welfare Reform Bill

If the Committee will indulge me, I will repeat an incident that happened to me over Easter when I was with a friend, who is a patron of a wonderful charity in my city. It helps disabled children and disabled adults with learning difficulties. Since it was the holidays, children were going to the centre as well as the adults. They were trying to encourage the adults to come out with them in a bus to the local cinema. The problem was that they could not take the disabled adults with learning disabilities—some with complex health needs, but perfectly competent in all sorts of ways—because in the case of two of the group their carers came to put them to bed at such a time that it was not possible for them to go to a matinee at the cinema. This was the very group for whom many noble Lords, myself included, pressed in the 1990s, as well as after 1997, to ensure direct payments would happen. I asked the manager of the very good charity what he was able to do about this. He said that he thought the charity should be providing all the care and then the people would be able to go to the cinema. I asked him, "Why row when you can steer? What about encouraging younger people and those who wish to, to go on to direct payments?" He said, "They won’t be able to manage it". I said, "This is a city of financial services. There are a couple of thousand people employed in all the major financial companies, and there is a hunger to offer services for voluntary work. Why don’t you organise a help list of volunteers who have financial and management skills and want to do two or four hours a fortnight, put them in contact with some of your clients and see whether together they can run a direct payment service so that at the next half-term they can go to the cinema?" He said, "Oh well, I don’t know about that". This is part of a city that is not central London, not one of the big metropolises and, to some extent, at the end of the railway line, so it is trying to work within the confines of its own experience. It seemed such an obvious way to go. The centre, which is a very good voluntary organisation, could match volunteers and needs to expand choice and put the disabled person at the centre of the care service and not at the edges of it; in other words, as the organiser of it and not the recipient. That probably cannot happen, particularly for somebody with mild learning difficulties, without the support of voluntary organisations helping them to manage and employ. We are not talking about expenditure. We are talking about simple, straightforward ways of encouraging the players in local authorities and the voluntary sector to see themselves as facilitators of bringing together people who are offering voluntary time to those who may be glad of that service so that they can take greater control of their own lives. If my noble friend can take this forward even more successfully than it has been taken so far—many of us have been fighting for this cause for many years—he will earn the gratitude of all of us.