It’s not funny, to cut SEND money

by stevebroach

I have shamelessly stolen the title for this blog post from Milo, a young man involved in the successful campaigning on SEN cuts in Hackney. Milo chose a donation from me to the fund to help save the Kids playground in Hackney as the price of this theft. Milo explained why as follows: ‘I am choosing the Kids adventure playground because I like it and it’s really cool to play in because disabled children can play there with their brothers and sisters.’ Please support the playground if you can.

So local authorities across England have now set their budgets for 2018-19 or will do so in the coming weeks. Some have taken every possible step to protect the services that matter to disabled children, young people and their families. Others, not so much. This blog post highlights some points of interest for all concerned with saving these vital services and challenging cuts.

First, I’m taking part in a webinar with Contact and Alex Rook from  Irwin Mitchell solicitors on ‘Using the law to challenge cuts’. The webinar is now fully subscribed but will be available to view through Contact online after the event – details tbc. If you can’t attend the webinar but have questions for us please either leave comments here or tweet me (@stevebroach). There is also very helpful advance reading in a guest blog from Alex’s colleague Mathieu Culverhouse dealing with the practicalities of using the law to challenge cuts.

Alex was the solicitor for the amazing families in #NascotLawnJR. In the unlikely event that there is anyone reading this blog who doesn’t already know, this case involved a number of families whose children have complex health needs who came together and fought the decision by their Clinical Commissioning Group (the local NHS) to pull funding for an overnight short break centre. The CCG’s funding decision has now been held unlawful and quashed by the court not once, but twice.

The outcome of Nascot Lawn is powerful evidence that judicial review can achieve real benefits for disabled children, young people and families – ensuring cuts cannot be made unless and until a lawful process has been adopted. It is important to emphasise that even ‘process’ challenges – for example concerning a failure to consult lawfully or to discharge the ‘public sector equality duty’ – can have real and lasting benefits. Where a cut is quashed because it was adopted following an unlawful process it routinely happens that the public body do not remake the decision but instead find the necessary savings another way. This is supported by excellent research from the Public Law Project which found that ‘Claimants for JR gained a wide range of tangible benefits: the most common of which were conferment or retention of a service by a public body…’.

However in relation to the coming round of cuts it may well be possible to go beyond the typical ‘process’ challenges in judicial review. In fact Nascot Lawn itself was more than a ‘process’ challenge – the CCG’s funding decision was held to be unlawful in substance as the CCG had failed to appreciate that Nascot Lawn was a ‘health service’ under the NHS Act. As this blog post explains, services for disabled children, young people and families are supported by a range of ‘specific’, ‘sufficiency; and ‘due regard’ duties. It may well be that some of the proposed cuts are unlawful in substance because they will result in the local authority (or CCG) breaching one or more of these duties. This will not then just be a question of the decision being quashed and the local authority or CCG being required to think again – if any of these kinds of challenges succeed then the cut would not be able to be made at , or at least not in the form held to be unlawful by the court.

Of course local challenges will only be able to do so much in the current context. Local authorities cannot magic up sufficient money to replace the central government funds they have lost. This is why campaigning efforts towards central government such as this petition by the Disabled Children’s Partnership are so important. It is only through work like this that we can move away from making sure that cuts are lawful to a focus on the kind of investment and expansion in services and support that families really need to see.

A final point – I wanted to emphasise that cuts are a human rights issue. The ‘socio-economic’ rights under the UN Conventions on children’s rights and disabled people’s rights all require ‘progressive realisation’ – as the Disability Convention states (Article 4(2)), the government has undertaken to ‘take measures to the maximum of its available resources…with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of these rights’. In simple terms that there should be ongoing progress towards achieving the rights to education, health, independent living and so on for disabled children and young people. This is why the UN Committee, in its General Comment on the right to education, states that ‘any deliberately retrogressive measures’ on education funding ‘must not disproportionately target learners with disabilities at any level of education’. In my view the same must hold true for health, social care and all other areas of public life which matter to disabled children and young people (i.e. everything).

If this post leads you to want to consider challenging cuts in your area, you may want to contact a specialist solicitor – and you will need to move quickly, as if funding is to be restored a judicial review would need to be heard within a matter of weeks if at all possible.