Allergy Awareness in Schools

Jo Platt Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jo Swinson]

I certainly will. I praise the change to the regulations, which is a positive thing. It would be great if schools had some help with the cost of the injectors, because they go out of date; they typically last from a year to 18 months before they have to be replaced, and they can cost from £30 to £100 each, but the change is very helpful.

The hon. Lady is right about the training element. I was scared about using my own EpiPen. I carried it for years before I used it, and I used to go to hospital if something happened because I was petrified about what would happen if I used it. The first time I used it, I was on a parliamentary trip looking at human rights issues in Chechnya, and it was not safe to go to hospital because we had to go everywhere under armed guard. I was in a situation where I had to use the EpiPen, and I was really scared. Nicole, a wonderful woman from the human rights group who was with me, held my hand. We read the instructions and we did it together.

It started to work really quickly, and the relief and the experience of doing it have made me say to other people with EpiPens, “If you’re experiencing your reaction, use it. Then go to hospital, absolutely, but use that EpiPen, because it starts to work right away and delay can be fatal.” I know the experience I had is probably shared by others, but it is not the best medical advice. The more we can train and encourage people that it is a positive thing to do and will bring relief to someone who is having that kind of reaction is important.

[Jo Platt (Leigh) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Lady for introducing today’s debate. I too declare an interest, because my 15-year-old son has a severe peanut allergy. We have gone through life having to manage it since he was seven. I have only praise for my son’s primary school, which managed the medications and the out-of-date medications when the date was coming up. My worry and concern, not just for my son but for others in the same position, is secondary school, because things completely change. There are 1,000-plus pupils in the school, including teenagers who are difficult to manage and seem to think, “It’s okay, we can manage this.” My son’s reaction is so severe that if somebody else in the room has a bag of peanuts he reacts and needs his medication. I will get to the point: we need to inform other pupils and teachers of the seriousness of this.

[Jo Swinson]

I absolutely concur. That is why this wider awareness is important. Of course individuals need to have the information to manage their own condition, but particularly in those teenage years it can be more difficult for people. They feel a bit more awkward when they are eating out, because they might be perceived to be making a fuss. It is not making a fuss, but that is how it can feel in a group negotiating all sorts of adolescent relationships. For others to understand the seriousness of this is incredibly important.

There is not always a blanket ban on allergens. Schools make their own decisions. Some schools in East Dunbartonshire have become a nut-free zone, but that does not have to be the approach that is always taken—it depends on the specific risk being managed. However, reporting in the media is an important part of how we look at allergies, and food allergy and food intolerance are often conflated. Food intolerance, in particular, can get a pretty bad press.

We know that it is an issue at the school gates and on play dates, where parents of children with allergies can be viewed as neurotic or over-protective. Eating out can be a minefield. Improvements have been made in food labelling over the years, thanks largely to the European Union, which has driven that. Now the key allergens are listed in bold on the back of packets—they are very clearly marked. Indeed, since the 2014 regulations came in, we have the right to that information when eating out, about what food ingredients are going into what we are about to eat.

Restaurants, however, can easily become complacent. We had a prosecution, thankfully, which showed at least that the criminal justice system would take this seriously. An Indian restaurant owner, who had a cavalier attitude to safety, was jailed for manslaughter after a customer died from a nut allergy, because the restaurant had taken the liberty of swapping almond powder for a cheaper one containing peanuts and had not included that information on the menu.

Just a few months ago, top chef Raymond Blanc was at the BBC Good Food Show. He said:

“We are a kitchen not a hospital. Of course, now, if you don’t have an allergy, you’re nobody… It’s a very great fashion to have a food intolerance.”

I really think we do not need comments like that. They rather undermine his other claims to take diners with allergies seriously.

That attitude is really familiar to people with allergies. There is either the excessive response: “Well, you’ve got an allergy. We cannot possibly serve you, because we can’t guarantee anything, so, frankly, just go away and never eat out.” Or there is the response, equivalent to that eye-roll, which assumes that someone is making a fuss about nothing, and then people do not check the ingredients properly and that is when fatalities can happen. Many hon. Members will be aware of the case of Amy May Shead who, in 2014, was left with permanent brain damage when she suffered anaphylactic shock and cardiac arrest after consuming a dish that contained nuts in a restaurant when she was on holiday.

I have also raised the issue of parents of children with allergies being afraid when flying abroad, because they are worried about an allergic reaction happening in the air. I raised that at Transport questions and recently met campaigners and the Minister for aviation to discuss how to take that forward. Part of this is about the airlines getting their act together, but it is also about the air hostesses and air hosts on the plane having a wider understanding of allergies, so that they do not have the kind of really insensitive reactions that were reported by some parents. In one case, somebody made requests for an announcement to be made and had been deemed to be an over-protective parent. When the child and his mum got off the flight, the air host said, “See, we didn’t kill you, did we?” When we hear stories like that, we realise how far we have to go in raising awareness. This is quite a difficult issue to categorise. There are issues around health, education, transport and media, so it requires cross-governmental working.

Children’s Services

Jo Platt Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Onasanya]

I absolutely agree. The fact that we are cutting vital funds to local authorities has a direct impact on the services that can be provided, and those whose families are from an impoverished background are disproportionately affected.

[Jo Platt (Leigh) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing the debate. Does she agree that it is not just children who are in crisis, but families? The cuts to early intervention and prevention grants in my area of Leigh have led to a rise in drugs and alcohol abuse, homelessness and mental health issues, which affect both children and adults.

[Fiona Onasanya]

I agree. When we talk about funding for children, we have to look at the whole family, or at the whole child, so to speak. A child is not there in and of themselves—they come from a family. When looking at prevention, we need to look at how the child got into that position in the first place and what steps can be taken to support families, to ensure that they can be the support network that the child so vitally needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Children and Families (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Peterborough (Fiona Onasanya) on securing this important debate. I was pleased to meet her briefly yesterday for the first time to discuss today’s topic, and I appreciated the passion and eloquence with which she argued her points, but although we may agree on the analysis of the problem, the solutions may not be as simple as she thinks.

I am sure we both agree that local authorities are tasked with providing some of our most important public services. Very clearly, we also agree that some of the most critical are the services that they provide to protect and support our most vulnerable children. That is a varied and complex responsibility, ranging from proactive and preventive early help to support children and families who are struggling to manage, to the critical end of the spectrum, as we have heard, where there is a real risk—a live risk—to young people, and where social workers are tasked with making tough decisions that protect lives and transform outcomes.

Right now, two thirds of our most vulnerable children live in local authorities where service provision is less than good. Although 89% of our schools are good or outstanding, only 36% of children’s services received the same rating. My Department works tenaciously to address that, but it is not an acceptable state of affairs. We are engaging with our colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government on the questions that the hon. Lady raises about funding, but we must be realistic. Quality is not only dependent on money. High-quality services need excellent leadership, a skilled and experienced workforce, and rigorous, evidence-based practice. Since I started this job six months ago, I have been impressed by how much of that good work is already out there and how much my Department has already done to spread it more widely.

Our reform agenda was set in 2016 and put into legislation earlier this year. The far-reaching suite of reforms set out a deeply ambitious approach to tackling the challenges within the system. It was intended not only to implement short-term interventions that would create better outcomes for children within the system now, but to lay the foundations for the future, ensuring that in years to come local authorities were equipped to deliver high-quality provision to future generations of vulnerable young people.

As part of that, over the past few years we have launched a major programme of reform to expand the numbers and quality of those entering social work. Frontline and Step Up are now well established entry-level schemes attracting high-performing graduates and older career changers into the profession, to bolster some of the excellent teams already out there. Meanwhile, the national assessment and accreditation system, due to launch in July, will raise the professional status of child and family social workers, providing a clear career path, as well as ensuring that these critical public servants have the knowledge and skills they need to practise effectively.

Our ambition is to create a truly evidence-based learning system for the sector, and the work is already well under way. This autumn, I was pleased to announce the two organisations that would establish the world’s first What Works centre for children’s social care. That vital piece of the reform jigsaw puzzle has now begun its incubation and I am excited that, not long from now, that fabulous resource will be used daily by policy makers, commissioners and practitioners, supporting them to make informed decisions, based on a rigorous catalogue of evidence that lets them know in an easy and accessible manner what interventions work.

That will be bolstered by the developing evidence from the children’s social care innovation programme, which since 2013 has injected £200 million into the sector to support nearly 100 innovative projects designed to improve outcomes for children across the country. The hon. Lady will know that her own constituency has benefited greatly from two such initiatives. Peterborough has received funding of up to £1.2 million over three years to support the commissioning of its fostering, adoption and permanency services to the Adolescent and Children’s Trust, a non-profit organisation committed to securing better and more permanent outcomes for all children and young people in care. Peterborough is also one of the four local authorities that is replicating the successful Hertfordshire innovation project. With funding from the first bidding round of the innovation programme, Hertfordshire has seen great results for children and their families with their family safeguarding model of social work. We are excited to see how the scale and spread of that model to Peterborough, Luton, Bracknell Forest and West Berkshire will replicate similar results for families in those areas.

[Jo Platt]

Does the Minister agree that what he is talking about is the higher end and most costly element of children’s services, which is our looked-after children and our children in care? What we need to do is to put that resource in at the earlier stages with children, before they go into crisis.

[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I visited the Pause programme in south London, which works with women who may become pregnant and have their children taken into care regularly, to break the cycle that makes life so difficult for them and, of course, for the children who have to be taken into care. It is an innovation that saves money. I was told that for every £1 invested in the programme in Greenwich, they save £5 in other interventions. Life is much better for those women. I met a number of women who had been involved in the project.

That is not to say that the system is delivering across the board or that we have achieved success in achieving our vision of a country where all children are protected from harm. There are still too many examples of young people and their families being let down by poor-quality services. My Department continues to take action to intervene where performance is not good enough.