Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the (a) quality (b) availability and (c) funding of social care services for disabled children.

The provision of services for disabled children rests with local authorities, who are best placed to assess the needs and priorities of the disabled children in their area.

The 2015 Spending Review made available more than £200 billion until 2020 for councils to deliver the local services their communities want to see, including social care services for disabled children.

The government is conducting a review of the relative needs and resources of local authorities that will develop a robust, up-to-date approach to distributing funding across all local authorities in England at Local Government Finance Settlements, including for children’s services. To inform the review, the Department for Education and the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government have jointly-commissioned a data research and collection project on cost and demand pressures for children’s services, to understand local authorities’ relative funding needs. We are working towards implementation in 2020/21, while keeping this date under review as our work progresses.