Once in a lifetime chance to make disabled children’s social care work

3 mins read

Tuesday 8 October 2024

The Law Commission has today launched its long-awaited consultation on reforming social care law for disabled children in England.

The consultation, led by Commissioner Alison Young, is part of a major review to make the law “fairer, simpler and up-to-date”.

Currently, a patchwork of legislation governs disabled children’s social care law, some of which dates back more than five decades. This has contributed to a variation in the amount and quality of support local authorities provide. It’s also unnecessarily complicated the routes to accessing support for parents with disabled children.

A promising consultation that aligns with our asks

Anna Bird, Contact’s CEO, says:

“The Law Commission’s consultation proposals are extremely promising and align with some of Contact’s key social care “asks” to address the broken social care system for families with disabled children. Together with the Disabled Children’s Partnership (DCP), we have campaigned over many years to increase funding for social care and ensure families can access help from social services more easily and fairly.

“The Law Commission proposals are a helpful step in that direction. They go some way to end the pervasive culture of blame parent carers encounter when they ask social care for help and make it much clearer what help families are entitled to. We would especially welcome a single duty in legislation to assess a disabled child’s social care needs and national eligibility criteria for disabled children to access support.”

Stronger approach to ending conflict needed

Anna continues:

“Other proposals could be stronger. We would like to see a stronger approach to ending conflicts between health and social care services that leave disabled children with the most complex needs without vital support. We want to understand how well the proposals improve and increase families’ access to effective support when they need it, including carers. And we will be testing those proposals with parents in focus groups in the coming weeks and months so we can feed into the consultation.”

We will work with parents, the DCP and the wider sector to understand the full implications of the reform proposals.

What questions is the Law Commission asking in its consultation?

The consultation asks more than 80 questions. These include:

  • Whether there should be a new legal framework for disabled children’s social care, taking disabled children out of section 17 of the Children Act 1989.
  • Whether there should be national eligibility criteria for disabled children’s social care.
  • How we should define disability.
  • What remedies should be available for children and families when things go wrong.

The Department for Education asked the Law Commission to review disabled children’s social care law because it is too complicated, inaccessible and potentially unfair for disabled children. The legislation also includes offensive language when talking about disability.

How to respond to the consultation

Read the full consultation paper, summary document or easy read version.

You can respond to the consultation on the Law Commission website. We will be hosting focus groups for parent carers to collect your views for our final response.

The consultation runs until 20 January 2025.

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