Families with disabled children have higher costs but lower incomes than other families. Contact a Family research shows that the extra cost relating to a child’s condition could be £300 or more every month, with 84 per cent of families with disabled children having gone without leisure and days out. For over 40 years, the Family Fund’s main function has been to help redress the balance by distributing public money across the UK in the form of grants to low-income families with sick and disabled children, with families able to apply for an average £500 grant annually. Welsh Government funding to 2015-16 was £2.64 million, almost all distributed directly to 5,429 low-income families with disabled children across Wales.
The administrations in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland have all maintained their financial support for the Family Fund at 2015-16 rates. However, since 2016, the Welsh Government has chosen to cut their contribution by £5.5 million, as we heard, over three years, meaning that, over 4,000 families each year across Wales will be unable to receive this support. In contrast, the UK Department for Education confirmed this week that it will maintain its £27.3 million annual Family Fund funding for three years up to 2020—£81.9 million in total—ensuring that tens of thousands of families in England will be able to rely on this extra support.
As the UK Minister of State for Vulnerable Children and Families, Edward Timpson MP, said,
No child, regardless of the obstacles they face, should miss out on vital life experiences’.
I therefore move amendment 2, which notes that the Governments of Northern Ireland, Scotland and England have all maintained their funding for the Family Fund.
Although policy in Wales has diverged since devolution, this funding continued, because it was a highly valued and cost-effective way of supporting families with disabled children. This position only changed in April 2016 when the Welsh Government decided to require the Family Fund to apply for its funding from the sustainable social services third sector grant scheme. It wasn’t sustainable. They do not appear to have published any analysis of the impacts such a substantial withdrawal of funding would have on the families affected. Welsh Government funding in 2016-17 fell to £900,000, including a one-off £400,000, and next year falls to just £499,000, reducing support to just an estimated 875 families.
Further, families in Wales are now only able to apply for a grant once every four years, whilst families in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland can apply every year, and they face restrictions on the type of support a grant can be used for in Wales. Insanely, these cuts will increase the financial burden on local authority and NHS budgets and run counter to the principles set out in the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014.
The Welsh Government has made a decision that will have detrimental effects on the very families they claim their policies are designed to support. By continuing to deflect the issue on to general funding for the voluntary sector, they are failing to acknowledge the direct negative impact their £5.5 million cut in funding is having. The charities Carers Wales, Contact a Family Cymru and Learning Disability Wales have expressed disappointment that the Welsh Government amendment fails to acknowledge or address the direct financial impact on low-income families with disabled and seriously ill children across Wales—the over 4,000 families in Wales now unable to access an annual grant. I think ‘disappointment’ is an understatement of the despair felt. As they state, this massive cut to low-income families with disabled children,
was an entirely predictable consequence of the decision to merge the Family Fund allocation into the Sustainable Social Services grant back in December 2015…a fact which the Equality Impact Assessment undertaken at the time completely failed to notice.’
They also point out that both the Families First programme and the annual funding for Citizens Advice Cymru, referred to in the Welsh Government amendment, pre-existed the decision to cut the Family Fund and that the Welsh Government has not reallocated an equivalent sum to support families with disabled children.
As one constituent told me:
My six-year-old is disabled and without the family fund, we wouldn’t have been able to make him safe in our garden nor offer him a tablet to help him with his disability’.
Well, a mature Welsh Government would stop doing things just to be different and start doing them better—stop doing things to people and start doing things with them.