Disabled Children Matter

Providing an update to an earlier post, I've noticed the BBC has reported that most Assembly Members have now backed a call for £21m to be safeguarded to support disabled children in Wales.

Campaigners gathered outside the Senedd on Tuesday to demand "significant extra resources" from ministers. Children's Minister Jane Hutt told AMs she was considering the funding issue and also how best to develop flexible services to meet individual needs.

Labour AM Lynne Neagle said she was encouraged so many backbench AMs, from all parties, had supported her call for better funding by signing up to a statement of opinion she had tabled in the assembly. She urged the minister to respect the "majority opinion" in the assembly and do everything she could to get the £21m spent in the way most AMs wanted.

Lee Ellery, 23, from Swansea has cerebral palsy and was hopeful ministers would respond positively to the campaign:

Disabled people need to have the services that everybody's entitled to - education, social services and all the other services that go with it. The problem for many disabled people is the transition process from school to college. They don't have the correct careers advice and general problems from people not seeing disabled people quite as they should. They sort of assume that they should be able to do jobs which are not the jobs that they want to do themselves.

The following is an update of the list of Assembly Members that have added their names to the Statement of Opinion:

OPIN-2007- 0082 - Mae Plant Anabl yn Bwysig/Disabled Children Matter
Codwyd gan / Raised By:
Lynne Neagle
Tanysgrifwyr / Subscribers:
Andrew RT Davies 13/11/2007
Karen Sinclair 13/11/2007
Mark Isherwood 13/11/2007
Joyce Watson 13/11/2007
Sandy Mewies 13/11/2007
Ann Jones 13/11/2007
Jeff Cuthbert 14/11/2007
Janice Gregory 14/11/2007
Darren Millar 14/11/2007
Nicholas Bourne 14/11/2007
Huw Lewis 14/11/2007
Lorraine Barrett 15/11/2007
Christine Chapman 15/11/2007
Eleanor Burnham 15/11/2007
David Melding 15/11/2007
Mike German 15/11/2007
Lesley Griffiths 15/11/2007
Val Lloyd 15/11/2007
Leanne Wood 15/11/2007
Alun Davies 19/11/2007
Kirsty Williams 19/11/2007
Paul Davies 19/11/2007
Trish Law 20/11/2007
Irene James 20/11/2007
Jonathan Morgan 21/11/2007
Mick Bates 22/11/2007
Mohammad Asghar 22/11/2007
Bethan Jenkins 22/11/2007
Alun Cairns 22/11/2007
Nick Ramsay 26/11/2007

Welsh Government Package for Disabled Children

Miss Wagstaff hears that there has been a call for the Assembly to cough up the 'consequential' in response to a massive investment in disabled children in England.

It is feared the £21m – Wales’ share of a £340m UK government package for disabled children – has been swallowed up by the general health, social services and education budgets, already struggling under the strain of a tight financial settlement.

In England this money will be used to fund short breaks for disabled children, provide childcare and support, and help disabled children shape the services they need.

The equivalent funding for Wales, known as a consequential, amounts to £21m. But the money is not ring-fenced and the Assembly Government is under no obligation to spend the money in the same area as England – in this case, on disabled children.

Labour AM Lynne Neagle has managed to get herself on the front page of today's Western Mail, along with a few high profile children's charities. She has called for the Assembly to cough up the money and put us on par with England.

Wayne Crocker, from Mencap Cymru, said:

Without real money to help them do this they will continue to be left at the bottom of the box and live lives limited by the type of poor opportunities given to them in today’s Wales.

The Plaid Cymru/ Labour coalition are saying "NO", which shouldn't be a big surprise after the recent budget announcement. Of particular interest, however, is Lynne Neagle's Statement of Opinion calling for the cash to be forthcoming. The Welsh Conservatives and Welsh Liberal Democrats have all signed up, and every Welsh Labour backbencher, bar one, has signed as well. However, as of Monday morning, only one Plaid Cymru AM, Leanne Wood, has signed.

How come? It has been explained to me that Helen Mary Jones might be trying to enforce a 'three line whip' (drastic measure) against signing the Statement of Opinion on the basis that... wait for it... it would mean the One Wales Government doing the same as they are doing in England!

This doesn't look good for disabled children in Wales, and all for the sake of Plaid keeping their political purity. As an aside, any idea who the only Labour backbencher not to sign is? Step forward former Plaid politician and now Labour AM, Alun Davies. Maybe he's trying to tell us something.

Update: 21 November 2007 at 11:30

The following was received from a reliable Plaid Cymru source.

This is Leanne Wood and Helen Mary Jones' amendment to the statement of opinion by Lynne Neagle. Worth adding to your blog discussion I should think.

This Assembly notes the evidence from the Children's NSF SAAT Report 06/07, showing that services for disabled children and their families are consistently the weakest area of service delivery across Wales.This Assembly therefore calls on the Welsh Assembly Government to reaffirm its commitment to fully implementing and funding both the NSF and the recommendations of the Equality of Opportunity committee report on services for young disabled people and to ring fence funding and make it clearly traceable through the Assembly government budget.