I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend, and I pay tribute to him for the work he does with a very challenging condition. A lot of people think Tourette’s syndrome is a funny thing, but for those who suffer from it, it is a challenging and difficult condition
that is often misunderstood by members of the public. Perhaps I should pause for a moment and pay tribute to the families and carers who, day in, day out, have to put up with ill-informed and quite frankly abusive comments from members of the public who should know better, whether those parents are taking their child to use a disabled lavatory in a supermarket or going to the cinema and trying to enjoy a film with their child who may have a special need that means they make a lot of noise or have to move about. We still have a long way to go in society to achieve general understanding among a wider section of the public about what it is like to live with a child who has special needs. It is good that an increasing number of towns offer autism-friendly cinema screenings, for example, that allow people to sit in comfort on a Sunday afternoon without needing to have eyes in the back of their head or worrying about what somebody else will say about their child. I have parenthesised a little, but I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention.
I was talking about “wholly or mainly” and the concern shared by many people that we could end up with a wholly artificial argument about a particular type of provision falling between two stools. Thankfully, it has been made clear on case authority that speech and language therapy would be an educational need, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) said, in a number of examples there will be less clarity and an ugly argument could break out between the health service and the local authority about who is responsible for what.
2.15 pm