View from Bridport
A lot of what goes on in Parliament is technically open to inspection, but actually is hidden from view. You can read it in Hansard if you are odd enough to read Hansard, and you can watch it on the box if you are unusual enough to subscribe to the Parliamentary channel; but otherwise it goes entirely unnoticed.
In the last couple of weeks, there have been two important and related debates in Parliament – the first on the Autism Bill, and the second on a committee report about adults with learning disabilities.
I would wager that the number of people who have followed either of these debates is to be counted on the fingers of not very many hands.
But, in years to come, I suspect there will be many people who feel the effects of the discussions that are now going on.
As any parent with a child who has learning difficulties or who suffers from one of the disorders on the so-called autism spectrum will know, there is a considerable amount of help and support available for children who have these disabilities. Even then, as I am all too well aware from my own post bag in West Dorset, there are lots of things that can go wrong – and there is nobody more desperately in need of help than a parent who has a child suffering from one of these problems, and who can’t get the assistance required.
But, whatever the problems for children with these conditions and for their parents while they are children, matters get much more difficult when the child grows up. We just don’t have a system in place that caters fully for adults with these difficulties.
This was a large part of what we were discussing in Parliament during these two important debates – and I think I can say that the result of the two debates is likely to be a significant improvement.
The Autism Bill got enough people voting for it to force the Government to take it through to the committee stage. If it gets through that stage and comes out the other end as an Act eventually, it will create a new duty for local authorities to collect information and to prepare proper plans for the care of autistic people. And the discussion of the Select Committee report made it clear that the Government was also taking further steps to help adults with learning disabilities.
But, in addition to these practical advances, the debates showed Parliament at its best – an assembly capable of a serious discussion of serious and delicate topics, largely on a non-partisan basis. Pity it was invisible.