PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES - United Kingdom Parliament

107 Debate on the Address
9 MAY 2012
Debate on the Address
108
[Priti Patel]
The Government are to be congratulated on recognising
the challenges families face and the barriers to family
life in this country, but more needs to be done across
government and all the political parties. We must take a
pragmatic and rational approach and introduce some
positive, proactive measures to alleviate the struggles
and challenges families face and to remove the barriers
that are often in place in respect of child care and
employment.
I know that many households across the country, and
certainly in my constituency, will welcome the proposals
outlined today. We need to give parents more flexibility
over working time and over maternity and paternity
leave, too. I can only speak from my own personal
experience, but I was one of those parents who went
back to work three weeks after having my son and,
quite frankly, had I had the opportunity to swap with
my husband, that really would have been great.
The Government should be commended for considering
relationships between children and both parents. Fathers
should absolutely have equal, fair and the right kind of
access to their children when the family relationship has
broken down. In my time as a Member of Parliament
thus far, brief though it has been, many fathers have
come to me who feel that their children are being used
in the court system as an emotional and financial
weapon, which is unacceptable. We need to bring some
sanity back to the situation. Shared parenting is absolutely
the right thing and, if nothing else, we have to start
putting the rights of children first, not the rights of
warring parents or warring mothers against warring
fathers. Children come first and children’s rights are
key.
That brings me on to adoption. In my view, the
Government should be congratulated on their commitment
to supporting the adoption process. I personally feel
that it is nothing short of scandalous that the number of
adoptions last year totalled just 60 when thousands of
children are going through the care system in local
authorities up and down the country. That is simply
wrong. They deserve loving families and loving homes
and hundreds of loving families want to provide good,
stable homes for children. It is a shame on our society
and on the system that red tape and bureaucracy get in
the way and prevent children from being put into loving
families. I welcome the change and hope that the
Government will ensure that we can start to address the
scandal and start to put children into proper loving
homes.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dover talked about
bureaucracy and red tape and I welcome the steps being
taken to support children with special educational needs.
As a local MP I have met dozens of families who have
been let down by the system. Those mums and dads
naturally want the best for their children but all too
often bureaucracy, officialdom and, sometimes, bad
practice in schools and local authorities let them down
and damage the prospects of their children. They are
left fighting hard, going through assessment after
assessment, just to get the extra help that their children
need. More often than not, in many cases, the needs of
their children are recorded or summarised through some
sort of tick-box process. The real understanding of the
emotional or physical needs of the child is often ignored.
One school in my constituency has a very poor record
on special educational needs provision and is the source
of many complaints from parents to me. Rather than
helping an autistic child, the school has classified him
as having average communication skills. It is completely
failing that poor child and failing to understand his
needs because the school does not want to be seen to
have too many children with special educational needs
on its books, which is wrong and appalling. I would like
more to be done to empower parents and I welcome the
proposals to do that and to simplify the assessment
process with the introduction of the single assessment
process and education, health and care plans.
We also need to encourage the spread of best practice
to get good results in the running of special educational
needs services in other schools. A very positive example
of that in my constituency is set by the inspirational
head teacher, Jane Bass, at Powers Hall junior school in
Witham. She sets a good leadership example and works
tirelessly to help children with learning difficulties and
special educational needs. I think she should be commended
for her work. She has a strong track record of supporting
children who have come to her school with very challenging
problems and seeing them through their time there so
that they leave with more skills and greater independence.
That is good for the children and is genuine relief for
their parents. Importantly, the parents know that their
children’s needs are being met. In taking through the
relevant Bill that will be introduced this Session, we
should learn from schools that have a good track record
of working with children and their parents to understand
how to meet a child’s needs and relate that to the
legislation. We need more head teachers like Jane Bass and
I am optimistic that the legislative programme can deliver
positive changes to special educational needs provision.
I welcome the Government’s tough stance on drug
drivers, which I hope will lead to robust legislation. It is
shameful that our criminal justice system sentences
perpetrators for these offences—people who have taken
away lives and ruined the lives of victims’ families—to
just a few weeks behind prison bars instead of the
lengthy spells in prison totalling many years that they
should receive. I know that Ministers have listened
closely to people’s concerns about this issue. Indeed, my
right hon. Friend the Prime Minister today spoke about
the many representations from families that he has
listened to and the campaigns fought by victims’ families.
Clearly, the Government have responded positively to
those representations, but many more victims of other
crimes have been excluded by the criminal justice system.
Ministers need to listen to their concerns and introduce
positive changes.
Victims and the public are being put in danger by a
criminal justice system that, from the top down, sets
free far too many offenders so that they end up roaming
our streets and committing more crimes. There are
more than 250 offenders with more than 100 convictions,
more than 3,500 with 50 or more convictions and more
than 2,000 offenders who have served 25 or more separate
spells in prison. In addition, there are rapists and sex
offenders who are never sentenced to serve a day behind
bars. That should change. Some 20,000 offenders who
are let off with community orders are out on the streets
committing 50 crimes a day, including offences against
children. The Government’s reforms to community
sentences are a positive step forward, but there are tens