My Lords, I have my name on the amendment and give my noble friend Lord Rix my full support in moving it. The case seems self-evidently made and I do not wish to add a great deal to what my noble friend has said.
The raison d’être of this legislation, by and large, is the Government’s attempt to sweep away the barriers of bureaucracy which, it has been well attested, have come between parents, families, children and young people and the assertion of their rights in relation to special educational provision. The Government have, very laudably, brought forward this legislation to try to tackle some of those barriers by developing an integrated system of provision through the integrated education, health and care plan.
We said in relation to an earlier amendment that it does not make much sense to put things in an education, health and care plan and give people the right to enforce provision only in one or maybe two areas but not a third. Equally, it does not make any sense to create an integrated system of provision using education, health and care plans, with a view to sweeping away barriers of bureaucracy by putting in place an integrated system of provision, and then give people a wholly
unintegrated system of enforcing their entitlement to what is specified in those integrated education, health and care plans.
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The Government seem to have got themselves into an impossible position here. You cannot possibly say that what you are trying to do with this legislation is sweep away barriers of bureaucracy and then require that, when people try to assert their rights under the integrated system of provision that you have put in place, they may have to go round three different places to assert their entitlements under different parts of the plan. It seems that the Government are really on a hiding to nothing here and must give some ground.
I know what the problem is. I think the Minister and the Department for Education fully agree with us—it is their Bill and they want to see this integrated system of provision, with people being able to assert their entitlements under it and bureaucratic barriers swept away—but the department’s problem is that they have to get other government departments to co-operate with this vision, and they do not always do so. Although the Department for Education may be perfectly happy to put in place a system of appeal regarding educational provision, the department lacks the power to get the Department of Health to help it put in place not separate systems of appeal but an integrated, one-stop-shop system of appeal. This is not just the Department for Education’s problem but the Government’s problem and it needs to be sorted out at a cross-governmental level.
I know the Minister shares our concern about this and I hope that he will be able to give us some indication that he is making progress in achieving a genuinely integrated cross-governmental approach. I know he is trying and I very much hope that he will be able to give us some comfort with what he tells us about the progress he is making. If he is not able to succeed, we will pass into law a brilliant system of integrated provision through education, health and care plans—which we are improving by the minute with these amendments, many of them the Government’s own, which we are passing today to make the system ever more integrated—but we will be in danger of passing a very nice system of provision into law with a completely unintegrated system of asserting children’s and families’ rights under it.