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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I want to build on the issue of services to the adult rather than the young carer. If those services were seriously in place, the young carer’s emotional stability would be much improved. Clearly, they, too, need support because of the anxiety that they have about the parent. But looking at the recent report from the Commission for Social Care Inspection on the availability of home care services, we can see that, although there are more hours, those hours are going to fewer and fewer people. From my contacts, I know that if you have back pain, which means that you are quite seriously inconvenienced if not totally disabled, the likelihood of your getting help is very narrow indeed, and your child is therefore going to spend a great deal of time caring in the home. We should face the realities of those issues, especially now that adult and child services are separated. I hope that the Minister will encourage children’s trusts to be firmly in touch with the adult social care services in their area in co-ordinating the work for these young people and other vulnerable young people in schools, because I have some anxieties that these splits will make it even more difficult to get the right service to the right people at a time when, even if gross resources are not shrinking, net resources sometimes are.