Parents Of Disabled Children Launch Respite Care Campaign

Campaigners for parents of disabled children have this week launched a two-pronged drive to secure their right to claim respite care.

Lawyers say legal reform is needed, even though new research suggests a “strong argument” that an enforceable right to short breaks for families with disabled children already exists in English law.

The Every Disabled Child Matters campaign (EDCM) is to contact supporters to find parents willing to bring legal cases to test this opinion in the courts.

At the same time, EDCM is urging MPs to adopt a new bill that would give families a clear right to the breaks many need to sustain their caring responsibilities.

“Legal opinion suggests that thousands of families with disabled children have been denied services which may have been theirs by right,” said Christine Lenehan, the director of the Council for Disabled Children and an EDCM board member.

“However, what families really need is a clear and unequivocal right in legislation.”

Community care lawyers Paul Bowen and Luke Clements said the right to respite care may already exist, either as a residential short break care (under the Children Act 1989) or short break care at home (Children Act 1989 taken together with the Chronically Sick and Disabled Person’s Act 1970).

The opinion was published on the day that EDCM launched its proposed disabled children (family support) bill 2007, the campaign’s second attempt to change the law through a private member’s bill.

The EDCM campaign hopes to persuade MPs to commit to taking up the bill if they are drawn high in tomorrow’s ballot for private members’ bills.

The government has already pledged £280m to improve respite care for families of disabled children and Gordon Brown has announced a review of services and support for these families.

But both lawyers support EDCM’s call for new legislation to give clear rights to support.

Bowen and Clements said: “The extraordinary complexity of the current legislative regime and the extreme difficulties some families face in accessing vital support services cannot in our opinion be a substitute for effective law reform: reform that clarifies, simplifies and underpins the rights
of disabled children and their family carers.”

They said the current interpretation of clauses in the Children Act 1989 to create a target rather than a specific duty to provide short break care for disabled children may be open to challenge under
the Human Rights Act 1998.