House of Commons Hansard Debates for 20 Nov 1996 (pt 6)

Social Services (Lancashire)

11 am

Mr. Nick Hawkins (Blackpool, South): On 22 November 1995, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North (Mr. Elletson) was fortunate--in the same way as I have been this morning--in obtaining an Adjournment debate on the subject of social services in Lancashire, which was responded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Bowis), who was then the Minister responsible.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North drew attention to the catalogue of incompetence and mismanagement of social services by Labour-controlled Lancashire county council. My hon. Friend the Minister ensured that a report into the position in Lancashire, with particular regard to community care, was made by the social services inspectorate. That report contains some very serious criticisms. In particular, the summary of the report said:

"Management of the process gave cause for concern . . . Measures to contain spending and target resources have been unpopular and not always carried out smoothly or equitably across the county . . . The Council's home care policies give an initial preference to in-house services"

and so on.

Those criticisms were brushed aside by the Labour councillor who chairs the social services committee of Lancashire county council, who bears the staggeringly inappropriate name of Councillor Humble. The one thing that none of us on the Conservative Benches has ever seen from Labour councillors in Lancashire is humility. They are completely unapologetic about all the many sins of commission and omission for which they have been responsible.

Yesterday, as a further sign of how much is wrong with the Labour party in Lancashire, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Mr. Atkins) drew attention during Prime Minister's Question Time to the recent revelations in the past few days about systematic fraud and corruption in Labour-controlled Preston council. None of this comes as a surprise to any of us on the Conservative Benches, and all those matters are connected. There is a seamless web of connections between the main Labour-controlled borough councils in Lancashire and the Labour group on the county council.

Mr. Robert Atkins (South Ribble): Is my hon. Friend aware that some of the people mentioned in the auditor's report to which I referred yesterday are members not only of Preston borough council but of Lancashire county council?

Mr. Hawkins: As my right hon. Friend says, in some cases they are the same people; in others, for example, there will be a husband on the county council and a wife on one of the borough council Labour groups, or other forms of "partners" that the Labour party so often go in for, with one partner on the county council and another on the borough council. The connections are closest between county hall in Preston and the Labour Lancashire county councillors who run personal empires from there, and Labour councillors on Preston borough council. There is much that is rotten in the state of Lancashire, and all that is rotten is Labour.

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I now come to the specific effects that this has on the people who are unlucky enough to have to rely on the appalling Labour-controlled county council for care when they need it. What are the details of the huge amounts that Lancashire county council has been provided with--out of taxpayers' money--by the Government to spend on social services? In 1990-91, Lancashire county council had £92 million. By 1993-94, this had risen to £147 million. In 1994-95, it was £169 million--up £22.6 million in one year--and by 1995-96, it was £185 million.

How has Labour-controlled Lancashire county council organised its affairs given those huge amounts? In 1993-94, the county council underspent by £6.3 million. The Conservative group on the county council wisely recommended that that be carried forward. Instead, Labour put it into its general balance for other use--or, more likely, misuse. In 1994-95, the county council found that it had miscalculated so badly that it faced a possible overspend of £14 million. Its response was to withdraw home help services.

Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd (Morecambe and Lunesdale): My hon. Friend should be congratulated on mentioning that point. He will be aware that many of the elderly and others in my constituency have suffered from those cuts. He mentioned the cut in the social services budget of £6 million in 1993-94. Perhaps he will go on to deal with the figures, but I invite him to comment at this stage on the fact that it was also cut by £3 million in 1995-96. I understand that there is a large underspend this year. I find those cuts quite unacceptable and I should be grateful for his comments. Does he agree that the only explicable reason why the county has done this is to build up a war chest for next year's council elections?

Mr. Hawkins: My hon. Friend makes an important point. One is bound to be suspicious, in the light of history, of precisely why those sudden cuts were made, and it is our constituents who are suffering. There is undoubtedly political gerrymandering going on with the budgets. I know that my right hon. Friend's constituents have suffered badly. Independent evidence shows that damage has been done in many parts of Lancashire--a point that I shall come to later.

We have covered all of this in the House before, but more scandals continue to crop up. There was the scandalous overspend by Lancashire county council on a new social services home in Bold street, Blackburn. It spent so much on that--about £240,000 to £260,000 for a small number of residents, at a cost of about £26,000 per resident, while there was a vast increase in the budget for social workers--that it became a byword for the incompetence of the social services committee, which refused to use the vastly cheaper but much better provisions in large private sector care homes in Lancashire. Many of the people who provide private care home facilities are members of the excellent Lancashire Care Homes Association, which has done its best to present their case for greater use of their facilities.

The scandal of the hugely expensive home in Bold street, Blackburn came to light because of the diligence of a Conservative councillor in Blackpool, John Woolley, who was presented at a different committee with a large--in his view excessive--claim by a Lancashire county council social worker for a big increase in travel

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allowances. Councillor Woolley rightly kept digging until he uncovered the whole story. So often, at Labour-controlled Lancashire county council, it is a case of jobs for the boys and jobs for the girls.

The debate grows mostly out of the latest scandal from which some of my constituents have suffered personally. Mr. and Mrs. Gardner of Knaresborough avenue, Blackpool have a son, David, now aged seven. David, sadly, suffers from cerebral palsy and needs a lot of extra care. The Gardners have had a lot of help from charities, especially Scope and the Leonard Cheshire Foundation. Unfortunately, they have been among the many families who have been badly let down by Lancashire county council social services. The biggest problem has been a lack of continuity of care for David. As the Gardners have said to me in their many visits to my surgeries over the past year or more as the case has developed, every time there is a change of social worker, the plans for what the social services department offers to provide seem to change.

The only part of Lancashire county council that seems to work properly and has helped the Gardners is the welfare rights service. I give credit, on behalf of the Gardners and other constituents, to the genuine help that Alun Pugh, Jim Dickson and their team have given, for which they were rightly recently awarded the Government's charter mark.

The Gardners, however, have not been so fortunate with the social services at Lancashire county council. Despite their general practitioner, Dr. Morrison, writing a strongly worded letter to social services at the end of 1995 urging continuity in the care facilities provided for David, the plans have continued to change. There were all sorts of problems with David's speech therapy service, but the most important feature of the case was the proposed changes to the service provided for David at his home.

Frustrated with this long saga, I decided to take up the matter with the Leonard Cheshire Foundation, which was involved in providing much of David's at-home care. The council wanted to withdraw that care and I thought it was important, not only for the Gardners but for so many of those whom we represent in Lancashire, to seek an independent, unimpeachable view from a charitable source about the case and about the general picture of Lancashire county council social services provision.

I was delighted to receive an extremely detailed letter on the subject, from Martin Perona-Wright, director of services in Lancashire for the Leonard Cheshire Foundation. He said:

"All the staff, Manager, supervisors and care attendants who have been involved with the care of Mr. and Mrs. Gardner's son David, share the considerable concern about the future. Continuity of care and choice by the client appear to be of secondary importance to financial considerations. We operate in Lancashire against the competitive backcloth of a policy which refers every client in the first instance, to their own Home Care service".

That is the county council's service. Conservative Members constantly make that precise point and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North referred to it in his Adjournment debate in late 1995. The letter continues:

"The Local Authority service--which is not subject to the same rigorous annual Inspection, which the LCF Care at Home Services in Lancaster and Blackpool have recently undergone--can therefore