| UK Council on Deafness | |
| [home] [search this site] [about us] [members] [news] [press area] [events] [publications] [campaigning] [consultations] [deaf awareness week] [grants] [affiliation] [contact] |
In this Report
Lords Hansard (1 Dec 2005)
Social Inclusion
Baroness Henig: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, on initiating this debate. One of the most important responsibilities facing any modern government is to frame policies that promote social inclusion. We have seen all too graphically, both in this country and very recently abroad, what happens when groups feel so marginalised, alienated and dispossessed that they take the law into their own hands. That is why I welcome this debate. I know from my work as a Lancashire county councillor and as chair and now president of the Association of Police Authorities how much good work is going on up and down the country to combat social exclusion and promote community cohesion.
The role of governments in this important arena is to create a framework of policies at national level to help the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in society and to promote social inclusion and social integration while at the same time celebrating diversity and cultural difference. A lot has been done at national level in the past eight years, but I want to focus on how these policies are being delivered up and down the country and on what impact they are having. Good policies are important, but unless they are effectively delivered on the ground to communities and families, we will not achieve the levels of social inclusion that we all want to see.
One of the most important developments over the past 10 years at local government level has been the development of a network of welfare rights advisory services across the country. These offer practical help and advice on benefits and allowances tailored particularly to those who most need help and are least likely to know where to find it. Welfare rights officers have developed imaginative and hard-hitting projects to reach the disabled, those who care for them, other vulnerable groups, the desperately poor—whether single mothers or elderly pensioners—and ethnic groups.
Examples of that work include the Children with Disabilities project run by Hertfordshire Money Advice Unit, which maximises benefit income for the families of children with disabilities, and outreach work in Bristol relating to disability benefits among ethnic communities, which uses interpreters to provide information and help with claims. Tameside, like other authorities, runs a very comprehensive welfare rights service. But I was particularly struck by its post of Macmillan welfare rights officer, developed in partnership with the primary care trust and Macmillan Cancer Relief. The main source of referrals is Macmillan nurses and district nurses. That strong partnership enables those who face critical and debilitating health challenges to access the financial and other help that is available. Tameside also has a Visual First Welfare Rights Officer to ensure that all newly registered blind people get a benefit check and the help and support that they need to make claims and to access help.
People who suffer from mental health problems are particularly vulnerable in our modem society even though there are so many innovative care in the community initiatives. It is particularly important that police officers in custody suites are properly trained to deal with potential offenders who have mental health problems and that they have close links with health authorities. So often the solution to what seems like offending behaviour is medical help. Having nurses in custody suites to help with mental health and drug problems has been invaluable in diagnosing individual problems and endeavouring to find appropriate treatment programmes—a practice which needs to be extended. Engagement in sport has proved a particularly effective way of helping disadvantaged and disabled young people. The programme run from the Royal School for the Deaf and Behaviour Disorders in Cheadle for a summer sports camp with 500 able-bodied young people and 500 disabled youngsters—organised with the help of Sport England and local grants—has been such a success that, next year, it will be expanded to three weeks. Using sport as a vehicle for constructive engagement is also true of schemes across local authorities. In Burnley, for example, the mentoring of young offenders and those vulnerable to crime on a one-to-one basis and engaging them through sporting activity not only helps them to integrate into society and become more responsible young citizens; it then uses their skills to reach out to help other youngsters in trouble.
Standing Committee (12 December 2005)
Childcare Bill
Annette Brooke: My party will support that amendment. It occurred to me while the hon. Gentleman was speaking that two deaf parents could have a child with good hearing who would need a certain amount of social interaction with other children.
Tim Loughton: That is a good point, hence my wanting to include disabled parents as well as disabled children. I cannot see that they are included in the Bill, and they could be missed out. For the reasons that the hon. Lady gave earlier, it may not be not reasonably practicable to provide such people with the more expensive child care that is often involved. If that happens, we will miss the children who are in many respects the most disadvantaged. For them, the experience of a nursery place or other form of child care helps their development and is a positive boon. The child gets some of the things that they miss out on because of the limitations of home environments in which they spend more time because of their disabilities.
I am grateful to the Minister for responding in great detail to our many probing amendments. She has shown sympathy with many of the fears and concerns that have been articulated today, and I hope that they will be addressed when the regulations are published.
Stephen Hesford: In many ways, the Committee could sympathise with what the hon. Gentleman says, but the formula of words used in the amendment is too vague. It looks more like a probing amendment than one that would do what the hon. Gentleman seeks, and I could not vote for it on that basis.
Lords Hansard (14 Dec 2005)
NHS Funding: Patient Care
Lord Ashley of Stoke: My Lords, I naturally accept the figures that my noble friend put forward on expenditure on the health service. However, I am constantly in touch with primary care trusts that are refusing deaf people cochlear implants. Time and time again, surgeons refer cases to me. I get in touch with the PCT but it says, "We are sorry. We are short of money. We are in debt". Time and time again, these letters come to me. There is evidence of people being refused treatment. What can my noble friend do about that?
Lord Warner: My Lords, as my noble friend knows, we have delegated responsibility for these hugely increased budgets which have been provided by the Government to people at the local level. It is up to them to make their judgments about local priorities within national standards and within national targets. I sympathise with the points he has made, but it is down to people at the local level to make these decisions.
Digital Hearing Aids
House of Commons Hansard Debates
James Brokenshire (Hornchurch) (Con): How many people have been fitted with digital hearing aids through the NHS.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Liam Byrne): The Government do not collect that information, as it is for local NHS trusts to determine how best to deliver services. However, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People estimates that the NHS has now fitted more than half a million people with digital hearing aids.
James Brokenshire: What that information does not necessarily show is the times for which people are still waiting to receive digital hearing aids. In my area, people are waiting 12 months or more. With primary care trust funding stretched and increasing demands being placed on the service, it is feared that those times are likely to lengthen further. Does the Minister agree that, at a time when we are focusing on improving rights for those with disabilities, 12 months may be too long for someone to wait to receive a digital hearing aid?
Mr. Byrne: I welcome the Breaking the Sound Barrier campaign, launched today by the RNID. It involves a telephone hearing test. I took the test this morning, and discovered to my surprise that I was not suffering from selective hearing: my hearing is within the normal range.
As the hon. Gentleman knows, digital hearing aids were once an impossible dream, but we are now fitting about one a minute. That is not an accident; it is happening because we have invested £125 million in modernising all hearing aid services throughout the country.
Some primary care trusts do need to do more. I know that in the hon. Gentleman's constituency, the waiting list could be reduced to just 16 weeks if the number of sessions at his local trust were increased by around 20 per week. That will be made much easier by the extra £75 million that will go to his PCT over the next two years.
Mr. Brian Jenkins (Tamworth) (Lab): I am very glad that my hon. Friend will not be suffering from selective hearing when I repeat the claim made by the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire). When we decided to give away the digital hearing aids that have made such a tremendous difference to the lives of ordinary people suffering from hearing loss or hearing impairment, did we not foresee the queues that wouldarrive at the door? Although we are doing very well, it does not help my constituents—however much money we put into the system, with the best will in the world—that we currently lack qualified staff to deal with all the appointments needed to deliver the service effectively. I know that this is a success story, but sometimes, even when there is a success story, we have to say, "Please bear with us". What message can my hon. Friend give me to convey to my constituents? Can I tell them that the waiting times will be reduced?
Mr. Byrne: I thank my hon. Friend for raising a point that he has raised before with Ministers and in the House. We have had to do two or three things to ensure that digital hearing aids are brought within the reach of as many people as possible. We have had to lower the price from £2,500 to just £55, and we have had to invest in more audiologists. The first graduates will leave university next year. We have also had to ensure that there is independent-sector capacity, so that two public-private partnerships are available to support PCTs. None of that would deliver any progress, however, without the extra funds that we are investing in the NHS over the next two or three years.
Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West) (Con): Would the Minister be surprised to learn that the waiting time for a hearing test and then a hearing aid is between six months and four years? Will he please ensure that Ministers know what the waiting times are, rather than saying that they do not know? Will he come to Worthing and listen to an 89-year-old woman, who will not be able to hear him because her hearing has not been tested and she has no hearing aid? Her life is a misery because of the wait.
Mr. Byrne: Digital hearing aids do make an enormous difference to people. They are about 40 per cent. better than other hearing aids. We must do more to ensure that there are enough audiologists to deliver services as quickly as possible. That is exactly why we helped to create a degree for audiologists, it is exactly why we ensured that 350 would take the course, and it is exactly why we established the partnerships giving every PCT an opportunity to develop the capacity to deliver the hearing aids as fast as possible. It is for local NHS managers to use the extra resources that they have been given to deliver the service to the hon. Gentleman's constituents.
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): I think that I heard the Minister say a moment ago that one digital hearing aid was being fitted every minute. A quick calculation will establish that the NHS is spending about £200,000 per minute, and I am pleased that some of it is being devoted to hearing aids. I have impaired hearing myself, with chronic tinnitus. Is the Minister aware that some of the NHS hearing aids that have become available recently have a facility that suppresses some annoying background noises, such as tinnitus? Does he intend to acquire some of those new hearing aids, and tune them to suppress the background noise that we hear from Opposition Members who whine about a lack of investment in the health service, but oppose every opportunity for proper funding?
Mr. Byrne: My hon. Friend surely has a point. We know that a policy commission has been set up by the Conservatives under the chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) and everything is apparently up for grabs. I look forward to finding out whether we shall hear any more about the pledge to abolish all targets, including waiting lists, which was point No. 1 in their timetable for action. I also look forward to hearing about the death knell of the patient's passport.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con): In July 2004, last year's Health Minister acknowledged, in response to my concerns, that waiting times for fitting digital hearing aids were extending. Yet 17 months on, the waiting time to see a specialist audiologist and get fitted in my region of the south-east has risen from 58 to 81 weeks. At the Royal Sussex county hospital in Brighton, the worst wait is for 130 weeks—two and a half years. At that rate, many of our elderly constituents will have appointments with the undertaker before they have appointments with the audiologist. When is the Minister going to get a grip on this scandal, particularly when he could be using hundreds of qualified professionals in the private sector who could be brought on board now at no extra cost?
Mr. Byrne: Let me take the example of the constituency of the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire). We know that waiting lists there could be brought down to just 16 weeks by moving the number of sessions at the local trust from 54 to about 71. That is not an earth-shattering exercise, particularly when we know that an extra £75 million is going into the PCT over the next two years. We have brought down the price, we have put more audiologists in place and we have helped PCTs to use their resources more effectively, so the conditions are in place for waiting lists to fall very quickly over the next 12 months.
[back to top]
Other (20 Dec 2005) Q259 Rosie Cooper: May I throw you one from left field, which is a misnomer on this page. I really want to knock the last three letters off and talk about special schools in the way we talk about them in England? Where do those children who are visually or hearing impaired, perhaps multi-handicapped, fit into the Northern Ireland education system? Angela Smith: Under the SENDO, the Special Educational Needs and Disability (NI) Order, parents have an opportunity to put children into mainstream education. We have special schools as well and we have special schools units within mainstream schools. There is a range of provision, but there is the opportunity now for parents who wish their children to be educated in the mainstream, with the appropriate support provided, to have mainstream education. We have seen a growth in the requirement for special needs education and quite dramatic increases. I have put significant additional money into special needs education in the last year. I cannot recall the exact figure, but I can let the Committee have the exact figures. [**] It is a need. One of the things which concerns me is that we need to identify children who have special needs very early on so we can meet those needs better and sometimes prevent those becoming more acute special needs, if we have identified them early on. There is a lot of work going on in that area. The more we can provide classroom assistants in schools the better. This has been a budgetary pressure, or there has been an issue where you might have three or four classroom assistants in one class and none in anotherbecause it has been led by statementing. We are improving the provision for children with special educational needs Other (23 Dec 2005) Q443 Mr Sanders: We have heard quite a lot in all the evidence sessions we have had about the fantastic increase in choice, services, support for vulnerable groups, communities, et cetera, but can I come back to a problem that has been raised with me by a deaf viewer who receives NTL and, working to choose to go to Sky, would get subtitles, but when Sky programmes are shown through NTL, there are no subtitles. Now, given all the fantastic things we have heard about multi-channels and all the wonderful things that can be done, why is something as simple as that a problem today? Is it NTL or is it Sky? What is the problem? Mr Monserrat: It is something that we are working on with Sky because they provide us with the feed and to put in the necessary subtitling requires a degree of technical inter-working between the two companies. We have made audio-visual descriptions and we have set the promise of a date by which we will be able to do that. Mr Sanders: What date is that? Mr Monserrat: It is towards next year. Mr Sanders: That is only a couple of weeks away. Mr Monserrat: Absolutely correct, but I was envisaging that it would perhaps be towards the middle of next year. It is a technical issue because in the way the cable world developed, we did not have one platform because of the nature of the cable franchises, but we had a number of platforms. The emphasis has been to integrate those platforms together and then be able to try and meet the requirements of the hard-of-hearing or the blind, so it is something that is on the cards and we will deliver it in some areas, but we do not deliver it ubiquitously.
Q507 Adam Price: But in terms of your offering to the visually impaired and hearing impaired you think that your offering might potentially provide more benefit so it could be an attractive option in terms of those groups? Mr Le Jeune: I think perhaps there is a slightly more general point here as well about those who are disabled in some way because it is those groups who are, for one reason or another, exactly the kind of people who need constant contact with government, local authority or charitable services where that interactivity comes into play. We, like other broadcasters, provide broadcast services for the visually and hearing impaired because there is a system regulated by Ofcom to make sure we do that. What we do beyond that is make sure we offer specific helplines, telephone lines - it is covered in our submission - and so forth for disabled customers because if they are going to engage with a company like ours we have to give them special routes to do so and not just treat them as we would any other customer because they need more help and they often need more time on the telephone and advisers who know what they are talking about and engineers who are trained to working with the disabled and so on and so forth. All of this will have to be replicated for a much broader population during the course of switchover, and we are happy to contribute our experience and expertise to that but we are holding up a warning card at the moment. Information relating to primary need only is given here. Totals may not appear to equal the sum of the component parts because numbers have been rounded to the nearest 10. [back to Deafness in Parliament] UK Council on Deafness, Registered Charity Number 1038448 Your use of this site is in accordance with our Privacy
Statement © UK Council on Deafness, 2003-5.
Uncorrected Evidence
Uncorrected Evidence
3 Excludes dually registered pupils.
4 The number of pupils at School Action Plus whose primary need is hearing impairment expressed as a percentage of all pupils at School Action Plus in the same school type.
5 The number of pupils with statements of SEN whose primary need is hearing impairment expressed as a percentage of all pupils with statements of SEN in the same school type.
6 The number of pupils at School Action Plus and with statements of SEN whose primary need is hearing impairment expressed as a percentage of all pupils at School Action Plus and with statements of SEN in the same school type.
[home] [search
this site] [about us] [members]
[news] [press area] [events]
[publications] [campaigning]
[consultations] [deaf awareness
week] [grants] [affiliation]
[contact]
