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Special Educational Needs and Disability (Support) Bill

May I first, in this era of heightened precaution, declare my entry in the Register of Members' Interests and my interest as a vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on autism, a subject which features large in the debate? As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) said, the attendance today is perhaps unfortunate. I hope that it represents the fact that many of our honourable colleagues are out on the stump for the impending elections, if not attending to media interviews on their financial affairs. However, the attendance does not belie any lack of interest in this very important subject, which is relevant to every hon. Member. The contributions thus far have been extremely heavyweight. We have all been intoxicated, as we have been asked to say, by the contribution of the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh)—and we mean that in a way that is, I believe, permissible in parliamentary language. She made a very wide-ranging speech, with great detail, which extended from foetal alcohol syndrome, in which I have a particular interest, to the Lupset centre in her constituency, the art of Italian gesticulations, the stigma of deafness and dyslexia, and an awful lot besides. It is refreshing to return to a very important, weighty subject following some of the distractions of the past week—it is the kind of subject that our constituents send us to this place to deal with. As my hon. Friend said, at least one in five children—the official figure—is classified as having a special educational need at school. He did not, however, say that that number has actually doubled in the past 20 years, and that at least 1.65 million children in this country are affected. An awful lot of our constituents give much more of a flying flamingo for this subject than for others, as does my hon. Friend. He has enormous form in this area, for which the House will be duly grateful. We welcome the Bill because it contains some important measures to address what most of us will acknowledge is the woefully inadequate SEN provision across the United Kingdom. We would support the Bill's progress to Committee for proper scrutiny. One would hope that the Government could adopt part of the legislation, or at least incorporate it into regulations and guidance, certainly given the height of reasonableness of the Bill to which my hon. Friend referred. We cannot justify continuing to sweep such problems under the carpet and to attribute them to bad behaviour or other social ills. The matter needs to be tackled head on once and for all. As well as my hon. Friend's good work, not least the review that the Secretary of State commissioned of him, and the Special Educational Needs (Information) Act 2008, which was promoted by the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson), we have the Autism Bill, courtesy of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), which is in Committee. Special educational needs are topical at the moment—and not before time. As several hon. Members have said, someone needs to take responsibility. Too often in SEN, the buck does not seem to stop with someone who is in a position to do something about it. I have referred to that as a vicious triangle. All hon. Members have had anxious parents come to see us about their battle to get a statement of SEN or special support for their children at school. We have then been told by the school or education department, "It's not to do with us, it's to do with health or the primary care trust," which is often the case when it comes to speech and language therapists. We then go to health bodies only to be told, "Oh no, it's not us, you need social services/ children's services." That vicious triangle does not address the problem—the problem does not go away simply because of such frantic buck-passing. My very first case following my election 12 years ago was that of a young teenage boy who had had a quite late diagnosis of Asperger's. The problem was being pushed from pillar to post in trying to get support for that child. In the end, it was almost literally a case of banging the heads together of the representatives of social services, and health and education services, to get them round a table. After a lot of stress, hassle and hard work, we got them jointly to fund a pot of money to provide a package of support for the child. What an ordeal that was, not only for those like me who came to it late, but for the child's parents over too many years. How much better it would have been if the problem had been picked up earlier and if support had been offered earlier, rather than the great treasure hunt of parents having to try to find support with a minimum of help and information. Many problems affect SEN, and I want to touch on a few of them. On assessment—this goes for SEN and particularly speech and language needs—too many parents tell us that they have encountered substantial difficulties with school-related assessments and provision. They mention two important problems. First, when a pre-school child has been identified as needing help, adequate SALT—speech and language therapy—assistance is often not available. When no identification has been possible pre-school, assessment and help is often difficult to obtain and slow in coming, if it comes at all. Secondly, in special schools where children have serious language disorders or where language problems are part of a child's wider spectrum of special needs, parents too often find that the statementing process is too adversarial and drawn out. In too many cases, after considerable expenditure of time and money, it can result in little or no help for their children. The Conservatives believe that the system needs to be streamlined, easier for parents to navigate and less adversarial.