Jon Trickett
MP for Normanton and Hemsworth · Labour · United Kingdom
“The shadow Minister has said, “Well, we’ve got to be a bit careful. We don’t want to over-regulate these things.” The idea that these activities should be dealt with using a light touch will raise a bitter laugh in the communities I represent, and in communities all across the country who are suffering from the same kinds of problems.”
“They told me that it is probably the worst site in the north of England—other sites are competing for that award, but let us put that to one side for a minute. However, it became clear fairly quickly that the Environment Agency was understaffed and under-resourced and lacked the powers it needed to begin the process of enforcement.”
“At first, the Conservative Government envisaged light-touch regulation. It seemed to me—this has now been confirmed by the Minister, and I welcome her comments—that light-touch regulation simply does not allow the EA to take the necessary enforcement action when activities such as those I have described take place.”
“I welcome the robustness and energy that the Minister has brought to her task—it is very welcome. Inevitably, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth), wants to revert to some kind of light-touch approach, but we need to make sure the communities we represent are adequately protected—if necess…”
“Many, many years ago, permission was given under licence to do some recycling there, in order to eventually turn it back into arable land. When the people who live there bought their houses or moved in, they had a more than reasonable expectation that that work would be finished within a 10-year period.”
“Secondly, last Monday, we were having a planning appeal on this site, and the planning inspector went way beyond his brief and said to me—I am a Member of the governing party, but he thought I was the Government—“Will you ask the Government what they are going to do about those operators who deliberately take millions of pounds of profit…”
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“It will hand unprecedented, draconian powers to the repressive arms of the British state, but we have been given only three hours to discuss it. The debate on protecting people going for abortions could take three hours in itself, but we are faced with a series of amendments that were debated in the Lords over days. We have been given three hours, and that is outrageous. Why have the Government provided so little time to discuss these matters, some of which go back a thousand years in English history? Lords amendment 6 deals with stop and search without suspicion. The police will be granted the power to intercept people who are not even suspected of committing a crime. That is an extraordinary power after more than 1,000 years of the struggle by the British people for a state that protects our liberty.”
“Thank you for your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker: I just wanted to be clear. I have some sympathy with the points made by the hon. Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer), although clearly the ability of people to go about their lawful business at work, including clinicians, administrative assistants and women going to have procedures, must be protected. I am not convinced that his amendment (a) would achieve an absence of harassment, so I will not support it and the House should not do so either. I have some sympathy with the points the hon. Gentleman made, however, because the whole Bill is an assault on British liberty. That is the central point, and I will illustrate it in several ways later in my speech. This is an extraordinary Bill.”
“That is the point I was just making, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for repeating it. The police used the covid rules, which had been passed by the House, possibly regrettably. But under this Bill, the police will need no excuse whatever, because the law will allow them to arrest people even if there is no suspicion of any kind. It is quite extraordinary to see a clause in a Bill brought before this British House of Commons proposing that people can be intercepted by the police on no suspicion whatsoever.”
“It so happens that those are the areas where there is industrial action—where people are taking action to protect their living standards, a right they have had for more than a century. Why is the list that has been provided to this House in this amendment proposing those particular areas of action? How can minor disruption to services now be regarded as a criminal offence? This will provoke a breakdown in trust between the police force, the state itself and people taking action. I represent a mining community. I went there just over 27 years ago, and during the strike— [ Interruption. ] Are you trying to say something, Madam Deputy Speaker?”
“I have spoken to Lords amendment 6, but I will briefly speak to Lords amendment 1 and the attempt to define what the Government mean by “serious disruption”. The amendment is now being replaced by the Home Secretary, who is proposing amendment (a) in lieu. The amendment in lieu is quite astonishing. It suggests that anybody may be arrested if they have taken action that might, in more than a minor degree, affect work or supply of goods and services. Subsection (2)(b) of the Home Secretary’s amendment in lieu refers to the following activities: the supply of money, food, water, energy or fuel, communication, places of worship, transport, education and health.”
“Why is it suddenly necessary now, after more than 1,000 years of our history, to empower the state to operate in these ways? We have many other Acts; the Riot Act was read on the steps of the town hall, I think, in my home city of Leeds, against the gas workers who were on strike in the 19th century. In Featherstone in my constituency, the Riot Act was read and people were killed. All they were doing was striking to protect their wages and incomes. How can it be that there is no legislation in place that might deal with the kind of actions we can envisage taking place? Why is it that suddenly, in this century, we are about to abandon 1,000 years of our history? I will come to an explanation in a moment.”
“It may be said, “Well, in the light of what’s happening in the country, with the protest movements and so on, we need new powers.” Just a minute, though—will the Minister in responding perhaps tell us why a breach of the King’s peace, or the Riot Act 1714, or other items of legislation which have gone through this House and have protected our liberties over the centuries, might not be appropriately used? A breach of the peace is an act of common law going back before the year 1000, to King Alfred—that is how deep the attachment to liberty is in our country, yet it is about to be broken. The Justices of the Peace Act 1361, preventing riotous and barbaric behaviour that disturbs the peace of the King, also went through this Parliament.”
“Habeas corpus, the right of individuals not to be intervened on by the state or its apparatuses without good reason, goes back centuries. Protection against arbitrary imprisonment by the state was incorporated in the Habeas Corpus Act 1679. The Bill of Rights 1689 went through this House of Commons, and now the House of Commons is being asked to surrender at least part of the principle of habeas corpus, and on no suspicion whatsoever. I add that point one more time, because it is extraordinary that that is what is being said.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. He is right that the British state claimed historically to be the bastion of our liberty, but today it is proposed that it become an engine of our suppression. An authoritarian state is being created here, and it is not acceptable. When I said earlier that these rights go back centuries, I was not exaggerating. The right to freedom of association—for people to meet with whoever they choose, on the streets or anywhere else—is part of the very structure of our society. The rights of free speech, freedom of association and freedom of assembly were built into our constitution for generations and centuries. They will all be fundamentally disrupted by this piece of legislation.”
“I appreciate your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker; I am about to finish on this point. The definition that the Lords tried to introduce was not perfect but it was far better than the amendment before us. We have a failing political and economic system, and consent has broken down across wide parts of the country. There are two ways of moving forward: either we try to produce a just and more equal society or we move from consent to repression. That is where this Government are taking us, and it is a seriously bad step. This legislation, and certainly the amendments, ought not to go through.”
“The land in our case has never been developed; it is ancient woodland that has never been touched, ever, but is is now under threat from the development at Huntwick Grange in Featherstone. Will the Minister reflect on the ecological impact? Only a couple of weeks ago, when the United Nations discussed biodiversity, the Secretary-General, in a very striking phase, said that humanity is in danger of becoming “a weapon of mass extinction.” What are we doing? We are building on sites where there are species that are under threat, and that may well become extinct in due course. Some species now have a very fragile hold on existence. Can we really say that our planning policies should just ignore threats to our biodiversity? I think not.”
“That survey discovered on the site to be developed 26 or 28 separate species of birds, mammals or other forms of life that are protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, or birds that are on the Red List. Nobody had done that work, yet all of these species are protected, as far as I can see. There ought to be no development that destroys their habitats, yet that is what is being threatened. It is a curious situation, because there is legal protection, but no attempt was made to identify which species were threatened by the development. It seems to me that the Minister could helpfully go away to the Department and discuss that point. Every time we build on green belt, rare species of flora and fauna are threatened.”
“The loss of amenities matters a lot: they should be not for just the middle classes, but for everybody, and yet we are seeing incursions that I think are a disgrace. The main point that I want to finish on—it will take me one or two seconds—is that there is no obligation on planners, developers, councils or anybody else to do an analysis of the ecological impact of a development before it has been approved. In my view, that is completely wrong. We have one development that could be 4,000 or 5,000 houses, if they get away with it. I commissioned, because nobody else did, an ecological survey by the reputable West Yorkshire Ecological Service.”
“She is unclear whether she will be applying the new rules as they come into place, or whether she is now obliged to work according to rules that are no longer extant, or will no longer be very shortly. Some guidance on that question would be helpful. The green belt is very important. I want to focus on one single aspect of it, or maybe two, because other Members will develop other arguments in favour of it. First, I represent many old miners. If a person lives in poverty and perhaps has a bad chest, as many of those old men do, they should not be deprived of access to the countryside, but the more we build up, the fewer amenities will be available. That is what is happening throughout all the villages I represent, every one of which was a mining village.”
“The Government, the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State have made statements about preferring brownfield development, and a “Dear colleague” letter has come from the Secretary of State that indicates—it uses the present tense, rather than the future tense—that he has issued orders about preferring to move away from green-belt development. Now, an inspector is looking at our local authority’s plans, and I have spoken at those hearings. That inspector started her inspection prior to the new legislation that the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills has referred to, and prior to the issuing of that “Dear colleague” letter and, apparently, some changes to the way in which the planning frameworks operate.”
“and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), say that he is going to bring back control for local communities, and I think some rhetoric about the same principle has been heard from the Government as well. If we are going to develop villages that need development, that should be done from the bottom up, not from the top down—that is my central point. Green-belt incursions should be a last resort, not the easy resort. I am asking for a presumption against green-belt land and in favour of brownfield land, and I think the Government have said that there will be one. Does the Minister have time to reply, or else to write to us, about the following point?”
“The coal was taken out by rail, so roads that would carry large amounts of traffic were never built, because people lived in the village where they worked, and they went to the local pub, club, football club or whatever social activity, and to the local school. Our roads are not built to carry the amount of traffic that is being generated by increasing numbers of vehicles, particularly now that there is no work in our communities either, but the highways engineers seem prepared to approve almost anything as long as it is going to deliver housing targets that have been imposed from above. I was so pleased to hear our leader, my right hon.”
“Secondly, to some extent, it is greedy of developers to want green-belt land, which is often easier to develop than brownfield land, particularly in a mining community such as mine where much of the brownfield land has been polluted and needs to be cleaned up. There are three sites in my constituency, all in the green belt; a lot of people want to speak, so I am not going to go into detail, but Springvale Rise, Highfield Road and Huntwick Grange are all under threat of development at the moment. The first thing to say about my constituency is that these villages were mining communities.”
“I can look from the top of our village down into Pontefract; it is creeping closer and closer, and there are plans to develop more of those fields. The village I live in is a rural community, with its own identity. We do not want to be part of Pontefract, and the same applies to all the other 22 villages that I represent. At the present time, we have three developments, all in the green belt and all for housing. I want to say two things about that: first, it is lazy for planners to simply draw lines on maps that look tidy without first having thought about the social, economic and environmental consequences.”
“I represent a rural community of 23 separate villages. It is important for Members who represent urban communities to understand the importance of the independence of a local community, its local identity and local culture. Ribbon development, which gradually takes one field, then another and then another, results in the bringing together of communities that historically were often rivals, or certainly have different identities that they want to retain. Take the village that I live in, which is a Quaker village in a mining community. We are now two fields away from Pontefract. If we go back far enough—back to the civil war—we stood for Parliament and Pontefract stood for the Crown. That is some time in the past now, but we get the point.”
“I think it is the second time this week that you have guided us through a Westminster Hall debate that I have attended, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on securing the debate and on her comments, which resonated with some of the problems we face in my area. Obviously the country has a housing problem as our population increases and household size falls, but it seems to me that, as the right hon. Lady just said, a large amount of brownfield land in the country remains undeveloped. There are also large numbers of planning consents in land banks held by developers that are sitting on their assets and allowing them to grow while seeking further planning consents, on which they will probably sit as well. It is time to think carefully about our green belt.”
“Has my hon. Friend had a similar experience to ours, where the houses built on the green belt are often not accessible financially to local people? It adds insult to the injury of losing green belt land when their children or grandchildren cannot afford to live in the houses that are being built.”
“Given the social and economic division created by the Government over 13 years, the announcement of levelling up led to a reasonable expectation that money would be directed to the areas of greatest deprivation. Having listened to several debates on the subject this week, I now have doubts that that is the case. Will the Minister confirm that the single criterion for the direction of funds will be based on deprivation? Will he publish the details?”
“I represent a rural community with 23 separate villages, and there are 24,000 people in households with no access to a motorised vehicle. We are totally dependent on public transport, so yesterday’s announcement in the media by the bus companies—which was not discussed first with me, as the local MP—that they intend to again cut services in Rthe communities I represent will send a shudder of fear through all those villages. Does the Leader of the House agree that the deregulation of buses has been a disastrous mistake for rural communities such as mine and many others throughout our country? Can we have a debate in Government time to see whether we can find a different way of operating public transport services, and particularly buses, in the future?”
“That is the problem Conservative Members face: how do they reconcile their embrace of austerity with the fact that their constituents are now suffering because the austerity has bitten deeper and deeper? Their answer is to say, “Well, it’s the formula that’s wrong.” But the truth is that the aggregate sums available for policing and local government are the problem; austerity itself is the cause of the problem. I have now heard two speeches from the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) in which he made similar points about the formula.”
“Listening to this debate and the earlier one on the police grant—I have been in the Chamber for several hours listening—has been a fascinating exercise in politics. Those on the Government Front Bench have made valiant efforts to claim that the aggregate made available for policing and local government has been splendid, while almost every single Back-Bencher on the Government side made a different argument, that the formula is not working. That argument was first made in quite a crude way by the right hon. Member who is now the Prime Minister, when he said they were going to stop money being shovelling into deprived areas—that was the expression he used—in order to look after places such as the one where was speaking, Royal Tunbridge Wells.”
“I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but let me put a point to him first. Does he agree that the aggregate amount of money made available to local government is simply inadequate to meet the needs of the communities that he and I represent?”
“Well, we will let people read the record and see what conclusions they arrive at. The hon. Gentleman’s case was based on rurality. I represent a rural constituency with 23 villages. The problem for my constituency, and perhaps for his as well—I listened to what he said, but it is not for me to say—is not rurality but deprivation. That is the core problem. The Prime Minister let the cat out of the bag when he said, “We’re going to stop shovelling money”—to use his expression—“into deprived communities and put it elsewhere”. That was the truth, and it is what the Minister and all his Back-Bench colleagues are valiantly trying to avoid addressing by developing arguments about their constituencies all being special cases. The truth is that our services have been radically underfunded.”
“Huge amounts of money—tens of billions of pounds—have been taken out of local government across the whole country, in all communities, and Tory MPs are no doubt finding the squeeze as tough as it has been in our areas for the last 13 years and beyond.”
“Although I was the leader of the great city of Leeds for a number of years—under Mrs Thatcher—let me refer to the situation in Wakefield, which is my home council. Local government was difficult in those days; it is almost intolerable to be part of it now—I speak with experience. Wakefield Council, which is a great Labour council led by Councillor Denise Jeffery, has had major cuts. I think £2 in every £5 has been cut since 2015, in a community on its knees. I will illustrate that point in a moment or two. This year, it looks as if there will be another £14 million of cuts. How is that for a Minister who is trying to celebrate the amount of money that he says he is giving to local government? In the meantime, we will have to raise council tax. If I remember to, I will make a point about raising council tax in a moment or two.”
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We need indices that reflect the need that communities experience. Those indices should then be translated into a formula that provides some kind of social justice. I represent a rural community in what was once the mighty Yorkshire coalfield, which heated, lit and provided power for our country. It helped to create the wealth that is now in the hands of a very few corporations and rich individuals. The hard-working people in that community were brought to their knees by a Government decision that left us in a really deprived position. It is not our normal practice to get up and whinge, and that is not what I want to do today. I want to make the political case that we have got this wrong; that the Government are wrong.”
“When they hear the now Prime Minister saying, in a swaggering tone, “On behalf of prosperity, and in the face of deprivation, we have shovelled money into communities like mine”, they think it is unfair, unjust, cruel and untrue. I predict this: when the local elections come in May, people are not going to believe it is the Labour council’s fault that the council tax has gone up. They will know where the responsibility lies. It lies with this Government, and mark my words they will pay a price in May this year.”
“We have heard people across the House talking about their constituencies, as I have partly done about mine, and then trying to make a special case. I do not want to make a special case; I want to say that the Government’s indices are wrong. It is true that the formula is incorrect, but the bottom line is that we have underprovided for social services, public services, education and all the other services that councils should provide. The aggregate is too small, and the Government should accept that. It would be better to hear that than what we are hearing now as some sort of good news. My final point is this. I can speak on behalf of my constituency: in two weeks, I will have been first elected 27 years ago. I know what my people think.”
“The final link in this chain is social mobility. If a large population is not achieving its full potential because of underinvestment in education, social mobility begins to collapse. The hon. Member for West Dorset was talking about social mobility in his constituency. The Government created a mobility index, which shows that of the 533 seats in England, mine is the 529th least socially mobile. How can it be that statistically a child born today in my constituency will die younger than those elsewhere, live in poverty and be very unlikely to make it up the so-called social ladder? There is a continuum of effects from underinvestment in a community that has been suffering from deprivation for a long time. The situation is this: austerity has gone too far and too deep, and it is impacting on communities.”
“The number of people in my constituency with NVQ level 4 or higher is 22%; in the Prime Minister’s constituency, it is 42% and in London it is 59%. There is massive educational underachievement in some communities across the country, including the one I represent. Yet there are these cuts. What happens with a community that has underachieved educationally? I will tell the House: wages are in decline. I refer again to my constituency, but I am making a general, national point: the average wage there is £495 a week—£12,000 a year less than the average worker earns in London, or £5,000 a year less than the average across the nation as a whole. That is a consequence of underinvestment in education because of the cuts. Funding cuts feed through to poor education results and then to low wages and underinvestment in business.”
“I entirely agree. I am not making a special point about former coalfield communities, but they were treated particularly badly by a previous Conservative Government and have never been allowed to properly get back on their feet. I want to take one council service—education—to illustrate an important point that I would like the Government to think about, although I do not expect particularly progressive decisions from them. In my district, the cuts to school funding over the years have been £400 per pupil—£400 less for every child in my community since the cuts began. People might say, “Well, we’ve all had to take a little bit of austerity”, and we have. But look at the educational results in my constituency—we have also heard about this in Reading, North Durham, Luton and elsewhere.”
“Work had been done, and further work had been carried out not simply by the council but by other officers and by the firm I referred to—it is called Backstage Academy—on the basis of a promise made to this House. What happened, Minister? People in our area know that I am not allowed to say that the Ministers were liars, and I would not dream of saying that, but they are saying that I should say that we were cheated of that money and the opportunities and life chances that we might have had. Those people have grown up in villages that were left devastated all that time ago with the closure of the pits.”
“The average pay on the campus they have set up is more than £40,000, whereas average pay in the village is £18,000. We all recognised that we needed to build a bridge between the deprivation in South Kirkby and the immensely successful private sector development at the top of the hill. They have raised £50 million of investment. We then put in a bid for £20 million, which would have levered in a further £30 million—that could have had a dramatic effect, and it was private-sector led. Apart from the whole process being a disgrace, I feel so annoyed because a Government Minister—of course under a previous Prime Minister, if Members can remember back to last June—told the House that we were getting our £20 million.”
“Areas such as mine have been devastated by successive Tory Governments, starting with the closure of the collieries without a proper industrial strategy. So by any criteria those areas should be gaining access to additional funding if the Government are serious about dealing with deprivation. Notwithstanding my objections, we put together a bid for South Kirkby, one of the poorest areas of my constituency. It was put together with a private sector firm that is quite the most remarkable company I have seen. It was built from nothing. Adrian and Lee are behind it, and they realised that there is big money in the industry of rock and roll. They are producing a series of activities, and the company is unique in Europe—there are only two such companies in the world. We put a bid together with them.”
“I represent a community that is among the most deprived—if we are not careful, we will be into a “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, as we share details of deprivation. We do not want to get into that, and it is not right that that is how the Government have structured the competition for funding. The average weekly wage in my area is £495; in London it is £728—each worker on average pay earns £12,0000 a year more in London. In terms of NVQ level 4, we are at 22%, whereas in the Prime Minister’s constituency it is twice as many people. In terms of professional and managerial jobs, we have half as many as in London, and since 2010, weekly earnings have increased by only 6% in my area, as opposed to 22% in London.”
“Thank you for your guidance, Sir Christopher, and for your generosity in giving us an extra seven minutes. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) for initiating this important debate. I object to the whole process: the Government created the divisions in our society that the levelling-up programme is meant to repair. Those divisions are so deep, and the cuts so vast, particularly in more deprived areas, that the proposed programme is simply a competition among areas of deprivation for crumbs off the Government’s table. It is not acceptable that the Government have set out the programme as they have. If they really want to deal with levelling up—clearly, they do not—they need to change the entire market-led, “Government stand back” approach and make serious interventions.”
“I totally agree. The Prime Minister changed and the politics of the country changed, and they suddenly saw an opportunity to dip their hands into a bag of funds that a previous Prime Minister had created and to use those for their own political purposes. It is a disgrace. We are dealing with the poorest people in the country. Is the Minister aware that women in my constituency are now dying younger than ever before? I think the average is 66 years of healthy life. They are dying before men, which is very unusual, and that number is declining. We need something to be done as a matter of urgency. Will the Minister at least send us a courtesy letter—we have not had one—as to why we were betrayed in the way we were?”
“I say that because I have become aware of large numbers of people over the years whose children have been excluded from school and who subsequently said that they realised that their child had undiagnosed and unaddressed health problems. I have to say that it seemed to be a particular issue in school academies. I wonder whether the Minister has had a look at that and whether she could write to the relevant Committee with any data on that matter.”
“I wonder whether school academies, which are relatively autonomous and self-governing, have sufficiently strong guidance relating to children and young people who have what is called “challenging behaviour”. It may well be that some of them are challenging, but many of them have undiagnosed neurodivergent issues that need to be addressed. Is the Minister satisfied that there are sufficiently strong processes in place to prevent the exclusion, sometimes from more than one school, of young pupils who are neurodivergent? Eventually they either abscond or truant from school, or are simply kept at home by their parents because they feel that the system is almost abusive to their child.”
“The Government promised that by the end of the strategy in 2026, which is years away, they would have made “demonstrable progress on reducing diagnosis waiting times and improving diagnostic pathways for children, young people and adults across the country.” That is not an ambitious statement. I do not want to be too discordant, because there is agreement on both sides of the House that this problem needs to be addressed and that we can transform lives. I am sure the Minister is fully conscious of that, given her professional background. I will not continue too long, because a number of Members still want to speak, but I want to say that is important that we reflect on school admissions and exclusions.”
“ITN and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism did a careful analysis across the country, and they estimate that the true scale of the SEND funding crisis, the true financial black hole facing councils, is more than £1 billion, which is a staggering amount of money. It would be interesting to know whether the Government have an accurate assessment of how much it would cost to resolve these issues. After all, the Government can make a difference to people’s lives if they choose to act, which is what they should be doing. I looked at the national autism strategy, which was published last year and offered peanuts to try to resolve some of these problems. I understand how difficult this is, and how we have to train skilled professionals; none the less, it offered peanuts.”
“These children would be less likely to develop mental health issues later in life if they are diagnosed early, and the same is true of adults who are awaiting diagnosis. Both sides of the House agree that is clear. I congratulate everyone who signed the petitions asking for Parliament to debate this subject, and I look forward to the Minister’s response. I do not want to strike a discordant note, but two Conservative Members raised the question of money. I am from Yorkshire, and Yorkshiremen and women do not like spending money, although it is occasionally necessary—moths fly out of my purse if I ever manage to take out a £5 note.”
“We have heard these figures before, so I will be brief, but in England alone 120,000 people are currently waiting for an autism assessment, and 100,000 have waited more than three months, which is an important moment because NICE says that people should be seen within three months. That is a huge increase in the number of people waiting for assistance, diagnosis and treatment—a 40% increase in a single year. This problem exploded during the period of lockdown. No doubt there are a number of reasons for that, but these are individual human beings whose lives could be transformed if an early diagnosis was made and treatment recommended. Late diagnosis causes problems for children in school, for the other children, for teachers and for parents and families.”
“The family spent every penny of their savings on home adaptations, and now there is no money left. The mother has had to go on to universal credit. Even if they wanted to go private, they could not afford it, and they should not have to do so. [Dame Angela Eagle in the Chair ] There is a second case, on which I do not want to spend long because it is neither autism nor ADHD—it is dyspraxia, which is a related condition. A daughter was diagnosed and received some support, but the system failed to allow for her transition from school to university, which caused a great crisis in the family. We are seeing problems all over the country but, as I said in my opening remarks, these personal, familial and household crises are brought on by the way in which we organise our country.”
“Of course it is a crisis brought on by the way in which we organise our society, but I will come back to that in a moment. I want first to record the experience of one family, although of course we all have many similar stories. This is a family with a three-year-old son awaiting assessment for autism, sensory processing disorder and ADHD. He is non-verbal at three years old and has high sensory needs; he receives the high rate of disability living allowance. The referral in this three-year-old boy’s case was made in March 2022. As of two weeks ago, he had had no access at all to any support. The family are managing on two to three hours’ sleep a night. The mother felt it was necessary to give up her job to care for the boy—no doubt there are many mothers, fathers and grandparents all over the country doing similar things.”