Our social care asks ahead of Law Commission consultation

3 mins read

Thursday 26 September 2024

Next month we expect the Law Commission to publish a consultation on proposals to reform disabled children’s social care in England.

The Law Commission aims to ensure the law is as fair, modern, simple and as cost-effective as possible. Their consultation on disabled children’s social care, led by Commissioner Alison Young, will look at the laws surrounding this issue, many of which are outdated.

We welcome this consultation as a once in a lifetime opportunity to fix the law. We hope the result is that disabled children and their families can access social services more easily and consistently across the country.

Amanda Elliot, policy lead for social care at Contact, said:

“We know from families that it’s getting harder and harder to access social care support for their disabled child. There is often no transparency about eligibility criteria, and families say the system is adversarial. How can it be right that a family asking for help to support their disabled child is assessed by the same system that assesses a child at risk of neglect and abuse?

“The system is fraught with issues and anomalies. It often leads to a situation where two families, whose children have the same condition, get completely different amounts of social care support because they live in two different local authority areas. Or a parent seeking respite from social services ends up having their child put under a child protection order. In addition, the complaints system is fiendishly complicated.”

Our social care asks

In advance of the Law Commission launching its consultation, we’ve published a social care briefing. The briefing pulls together what we are hearing from parents through our helpline, local offices and online communities. In it, we set out how the social care system needs to improve to help families with disabled children.

We want the proposals to:

  1. Establish national eligibility criteria for disabled children’s social care support.
  2. Create a separate social care assessment pathway for disabled children, distinct from the one for children at risk of neglect or abuse.
  3. Expand and improve the quality of the disabled children’s social care workforce and improve commissioned services and the direct payments offer to families.
  4. Strengthen the system of accountability to ensure local authorities comply with their social care legal obligations under the Children Act 1989 and Children and Families Act 2014.

In the short term, we want to see:

  • The government to address the £573 shortfall in funding for disabled children’s services and double the funding for the Short Breaks Innovation Fund.
  • More flexibility for direct payments – allowed to pay for family member to care or pay for an activity.
  • Better availability to advice about rights and entitlements for families under existing laws.

Download the full briefing paper.

What else we’re doing

We will be holding a parent focus group to help us respond and feed in parent views to the consultation. We’ll let you know when we’ve arranged this.