My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, has also just spoken. The general point must be right: there has to be a unified route of appeal. There is no way that parents can be expected to endure the hassle and aggravation of pursuing three separate appeals or complaints if they are not satisfied with the provisions that they are receiving.
This would simply be to answer the bureaucratic hassle identified in the Green Paper and the Lamb inquiry as driving parents to distraction by adding yet more layers of bureaucracy. I assume that the Government have just been defeated by their own bureaucracy in delivering a unified route of appeal; maybe this will give them some insight into how parents feel. To that, I simply say that they need to go away and try a bit harder.
I mainly want to pursue a more detailed point. It is clear that the parent can appeal to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, or SENDIST, about the educational provision. As for health, the local authority must include in the EHC plan, health provision reasonably required by the learning difficulty or disability that causes the special educational needs, and health commissioners must secure that provision. However, it appears that the health commissioner has a veto. The draft regulations say that the health commissioner must agree the health provision. This raises the question: what recourse has the parent if the local authority does not include the health provision in the plan or the health commissioner does not agree it?
If the health provision is directly related to and supports the educational provision—for example, speech and language therapy delivered at school—the parent can appeal to SENDIST. However, if it is purely health provision—for example, if it is delivered at home—what opportunity does a parent have? I ask the Minister: what opportunities do parents have to challenge its non-provision or non-inclusion in the plan? The Government may answer by referring to the NHS complaints procedure but, quite apart from the point that this involves the parent pursuing a second and separate challenge, I am not sure that a complaints procedure is really the most effective way of enforcing the provision of something to which they feel they are entitled.
Similar arguments might presumably be made in relation to social care provision, except that in that case the complaint would be a separate one against the local authority. I would be most grateful if the Minister could respond to these points when he comes to reply.
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