Work and Families Bill [5 Dec 2005]

Mrs. Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab): It is a great honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. McGovern), especially with his story of his father's management of the birth of his sister. Only recently, I had a discussion with my mother, who is 91. I talked about the birth of my younger sister and of overhearing my father saying to his employer over the telephone that he could not come into work because I had been misbehaving. He said that I had been behaving very badly following the birth of my younger sister. I told my mother that I had been shocked to hear that call. I had been given a wonderful present of some whimsies and I thought that I had been behaving well.

At 87, my mother told me rather belatedly, "Good grief, you were not behaving badly. It was just an excuse to get him off work because I needed him at home to look after you. We did not have all this leave in those days and your father had run out of his leave." For years, people had been lying to employers, managing employment situations and falsely creating impressions to manage family responsibilities. It is ludicrous that we lived in that world.

Last night, I watched Ian Hislop, who appeared in a programme about the way in which the role of women in society was changed by the great war, when they were needed to take on jobs and responsibilities because men were at the front. Years of suffrage had not secured women the vote. The experience of seeing how women rose to the challenge of the workplace led to suffrage being extended to women. That extension of suffrage changed British society. I see the Bill as being very much part of another great change that is taking place in British society. We need to recognise that parents and carers are critical to our future, and that as a society we should support them.

We heard from the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) that the Government were trying to force women into the workplace. There is an element of truth in what he said. We have a falling birth rate. We have a falling number of people in the pool of those available to work, because we have high levels of employment. We have an ageing society, and we have an increasing number of people needing care and support. If we are to provide for those who want to work, those who need to work and those whose lifestyles have been limited by poverty, social isolation and caring responsibilities, we must engage in a new way of working. We must engage in a new relationship between society and working people, be they parents or carers of older people. We need to build into our work force regulation both flexibility and choice.

Last week I was in the Chamber debating the Childcare Bill, which recognised the importance of quality-based care for children, parents, employers and Government. Speaker after speaker acknowledged the importance of parents' spending time with their children in the early years. The Bill introduces a change in maternity and adoption pay, which will enable parents to remain at home for 39 weeks by April 2007. The goal of eventually providing a year's maternity leave is one that we should all embrace and welcome.

I ask the Minister, however, to consider a possible change. If we are to support the 61,000 people who adopt children each year, we must ensure that maternity pay and adoption pay are of equal value, recognising that the role that they play as parents is equally important. Statutory maternity pay is currently 90 per cent. of salary for the first six weeks, and £106 a week for the next 20 weeks. Statutory adoption pay is £106 a week for 26 weeks. I should like the first six weeks of statutory adoption pay to be 90 per cent. of salary, which would bring it into line with maternity pay and send adopters a clear message that their financial recognition as parents is equal, like their status in law.

I welcome the change that allows parents, particularly mothers, to return to work for training or appraisals while receiving maternity or adoption pay. For adopters in particular, a placement may be sudden. They and their employers must have time to adapt to their leave to take on child care responsibilities. That flexibility and choice is imperative for natural, birth parents and for adoptive parents.

I do not want to be seen as the Member of Parliament who always quotes from The Western Mail—[Hon. Members: "Oh, go on."] It is too late. Last week, The Western Mail—every Welsh Member's morning reading—reported that, according to the Equal Opportunities Commission in Wales, many women in Wales are still affected by poverty, isolation and exclusion. David Rosser, director of CBI Wales, admitted that women still dominate in child care responsibility, and that until men take equal caring responsibility in society, that will prove difficult to address. In 2005, we are still talking about women having a disproportionate experience of poverty, isolation and exclusion.

Paternity leave was the first step of both Government and society to move towards giving men equal caring responsibilities. I hope that we can introduce changes to make the two weeks' paternity leave more family friendly. Too many fathers are excluded from paternity leave because of the need to give 15 weeks' notice, which employers do not really need. Fathers can take paternity leave up to eight weeks after the birth. However, a father's support and care may be more appropriate later than eight weeks after the birth. The child may become ill. The mother may remain ill in hospital. As we all know, doting grandparents flock in after the birth. It may be more appropriate for the father to be around later on. Perhaps we could look at breaking down the two-week period into two separate one-week opportunities for a break. It would create no additional costs for employers, give employers and families greater flexibility and could be of far greater value to families.

In the Childcare Bill debate, I spoke of how families with children with disabilities are one of society's most disadvantaged groups, with 55 per cent. living in poverty, in serious debt and with both parents and children living in loneliness and social isolation. That picture of poverty and isolation can be extended to most people with caring responsibilities. I welcome the Bill's extension of the right to seek flexible working to all carers and adults. However, I believe that that right should be extended to cover all children until they have left school. As all parents know, children need the support of their parents at different stages of their lives. A child could be going through a period of illness, of difficulty at school or that most difficult of periods, adolescence, when they need a parent at home to give them the support and structure to guide them through that difficult process. If we do not have that flexibility, we are not building in the support that families, children and parents need.

There are 6 million carers in the United Kingdom, 3 million of whom are working, who will welcome the opportunity that the Bill provides to tackle the stress, social isolation and, for many, the poverty created by caring. The peak ages for becoming a carer are 45 to 64. Eighty per cent. of carers fall within that working age band. Their experience, skills—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Lady has had her 10 minutes.

Childcare Bill [28 Nov 2005]

Mrs. Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab): As a Welsh Member, it is with pleasure that I carry on the Welsh theme from the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams). Listening to various speakers in the debate—the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), my hon. Friends the Members for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), for Stockport (Ann Coffey), for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) and for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband), the hon. Members for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) and for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson), followed by two speakers from Wales—it is clear that across the country we are united, which is fairly unique in the House, in seeing the Bill as critically important for children. It is their futures, their care and their experience that we are debating. We are deciding how they are to be valued, protected, nurtured and supported. Those issues must be central to all our child care provision.

We are united in agreeing that the Bill is important to parents. There has been agreement that the chance to take up education and training is important for parents. There has been a recognition that child care gives many parents with mental health problems or depression the opportunity to take a break—a point made by the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole. Child care is important for people who need to raise the economic status of their family and, by having two working parents, to tackle the poverty and deprivation that they face.
 
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The hon. Member for Reading, East noted the importance of the Bill to employers. We must recognise that it is impossible for a company to fulfil its potential for growth and quality unless its work force are able to pursue extended education and training and can give a commitment to work, without anxiety about the safety and security of their children.

This week, I read an amazing statement in The Observer magazine. Billy Killington, a 61-year-old porter at Covent Garden said:

"You would have to be mad to be a racist nowadays. What on earth would be the point? It would be like banging your head against a brick wall constantly."

Racism has not disappeared, but Billy was recognising that the world has moved a long way from when racist attitudes were the accepted norm. Similarly, employers are waking up to the fact that addressing child care and work-life balance issues is critical to keeping a loyal, skilled and experienced work force. They are beginning to see that child care responsibilities are no longer a barrier to employing women. I thus look forward to hearing a future Billy voicing a belief that had become equally rooted in our society—that we would have to be mad not to see flexible, quality child care as critical to the future of children, marriages, employers and Governments. We have started some of that debate today and we should feel intensely proud of that.

The Bill is important for government at every level. In Britain, we have the highest employment rate ever and the longest period of uninterrupted growth in modern history. Growth and stability are enjoyed by the majority, not just a few get-rich-quick kids in the City. If we are to build a modern Britain, prepared to face the economic challenges from China, India and America, we need to invest in a society where every citizen matters and where work pays and people are equipped with the skills and support they need to engage fully with our challenging and changing world. That means providing the quality child care that Members have talked about many times today: meeting the needs of parents, children, employers and Government.

Like other Members, I particularly welcome aspects of the Bill. I welcome the responsibilities placed on local authorities, especially to provide child care for working parents on low incomes; to promote the provision of child care generally; to target child care for parents with disabled children; and to inform, advise and assist parents and prospective parents. The lady to whom the hon. Member for Caernarfon referred would thus be able to book her child into the appropriate Welsh language play scheme the minute she found out the result of her pregnancy test.

Thanks to the Government's management of the economy, people in my Bridgend constituency are generally more affluent, more socially and geographically mobile and better educated. Probably only one other Member has read The Western Mail today. A front-page article tells us that the Welsh economy is approaching a boom period, with indicators of continued expansion. That bodes well for my constituency, despite unemployment of a mere 3.8 per cent., with 1,500 people registered unemployed, 800 of whom are women. We have 18,000 women working: 83 per cent. are working between 10 and 44 hours a week, and 44 per cent. work between 35 and 44 hours. There are 6,900 families receiving child and working tax
 
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credits, which has helped many of them out of poverty and into work. I have to admit, however, that the wrap-round, sustainable and affordable child care that is essential if we are to compete for jobs in the promised boom period and face the future as a modern, progressive area is not as widely available as I want.

We have been helped by such things as the excellent Sure Start programme at North Cornelly, which has made a huge difference to local families. Cornelly children's centre is a bilingual, integrated centre, which opened last April, although the formal opening will not take place until next year. The head teacher told me that it had made a huge difference to the community. From the baby club for newborn infants, mother and toddler groups, playgroups and the two nursery classes, children have the opportunity for stimulation and education from birth until they join mainstream schooling. Classes also operate to encourage parenting skills and to equip parents for a return to the workplace. The centre will officially open in March 2006, but parents and staff are all agreed that that new resource is already making an impact in an area of social and economic need. Like people in the rest of my constituency, that head teacher will welcome the roll out of Sure Start centres in other communities.

Three common denominators face all parents when they are looking for child care, the first of which is finding it. We have acknowledged today that we must expand provision. That is why the Bill has been introduced—to encourage the growth and development of child care. The second denominator is funding, which, again, has been covered extensively in the debate. There is also the fact that, once one's children are of a certain age, ensuring that the care is acceptable to them can become complex. The parent may want to keep their child in child care, under the supervision and support that they like, but that may not be necessarily what the child wants.

In Bridgend, we have the Genesis project, which promises a new beginning for parents and children. The project will enable 700 parents to overcome barriers in learning new skills or returning to work. It also aims to create 900 additional child care places in two and a half years.

For the older children whom I mentioned earlier, we have 17 before and after school clubs, which support parents who work the traditional 9 to 5 hours. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) talked about the importance of providing child care that support those who work shift patterns. I appreciate the importance of that. Covering Kenfig Hill, Pyle and North Cornelly in my constituency, the wonderful KPCY project, standing for Kenfig Pyle community youth, helps those parents who face the nightmare of finding child care and support outside the 9 to 5 provision. The scheme was recently named as the national lottery's most inspirational project working with young people in the UK. It provides a secure and safe environment—the sort of environment parents dream of.

There are 700 registered members at KPCY, who call in at different times depending on their interests and needs. The majority of those in the project are eight to 16-year-olds, including those at risk, or who have become disaffected and hard to engage. Since its opening, there has been a 60 per cent. cut in crime.
 
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However, that project is due to close in January because, despite the hard work of parents and staff at KPCY, it cannot raise the funds to continue the core funding that will be critical once the project loses its national lottery funding.

We had a meeting at which the local police constable talked to politicians and community leaders about how critical it was that KPCY did not close. She spoke movingly of Helena Porobich, the local lady who set the project up after her child died as a result of a drugs overdose.

The police constable went in one day to see how things were going at the project. She saw Helena go over to a child who had come in, opened his bag, got his school books out and was starting to look at his homework. Helena said, "Have you eaten yet?" The child replied, "No, mum's in work." Helena said, "Well, you're not doing that homework with an empty belly." She went into the kitchen and cooked that child a meal.

That is the sort of flexibility that the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) talked about. That is the sort of flexibility that I have in my constituency and that I am about to lose. I am particularly pleased about the power for local authorities to assist and to make arrangements for the provision of child care. My local authority currently puts no core funding into KPCY. I hope that the Bill will encourage that sort of funding to be made available.

The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that that is exactly what the Genesis project provides. It is expanding across Wales. Let us hope that, for once, we will send the project over the border—over the Dyke, as we say in Wales—to England.

I would like to look at the issue of children with disabilities. Much of what I planned to say has already been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood. Like me, she is aware that families with children with disabilities are one of society's most disadvantaged groups: 55 per cent. live in poverty or are in serious debt. Parents and children suffer loneliness and social isolation.

As hon. Members have said, there are 770,000 disabled children in the UK, and there are 46,500 in Wales. Every day, 75 children are born or diagnosed with disabilities. Having come from a background of working in social care, I am conscious of the fact that, when working with children with disabilities, social services departments and education departments perhaps focused a lot on the disability. What they forgot perhaps was the child's need for fun, for friendship and for normality.
 

The majority of disabled children live at home, yet because of a lack of child care, their mothers are seven times less likely to have paid work, although disabled children cost three times as much to raise. Confined to their homes, disabled children are missing out on opportunities for learning, having fun and making friends.

Again, Bridgend is leading the way. I invite hon. Members to come to see our Y Bont project. I promise them that they will be amazed. It is a model of best practice in the provision of care and support for children from the age of six weeks to pre-school. Y Bont provides support and information to parents and carers and high quality training to staff and to local playgroups catering for children with disabilities, with which it shares its toy library facilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) spoke of the provision of toy library facilities.

Y Bont is a registered charity and survives thanks to rigorous fundraising and local commitment to its invaluable service. We know the quality that we have. We are desperate to keep it, but it provides for only 12 children. It needs to be expanded and I hope that the Bill will allow for that.

We have said that local authorities must be flexible in their provision of child care. Child care must be looked at holistically, so that there is provision for different working patterns and provision that ensures that, for example, if a disabled child needs to attend school both before and after normal school hours, the transport arrangements and child support arrangements are in place. Many children with disabilities are restricted in the activities that they can engage in after school because the paid, one-to-one support that they have during the school day is removed the minute the school ends. They cannot then engage in the social activities that are critical to their having the normality that their school peers enjoy.

Transport arrangements must be not only flexible but secure. When tendering for school transport, my local authority circulated to more than 100 taxi companies the names, addresses and pick-up times of disabled children in my constituency of Bridgend and in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies), placing numerous children at risk. When making child care arrangements, local authorities must be mindful of the need to ensure that all aspects of the care have in-built flexibility and meet the most rigorous child protection standards. My local authority certainly failed to do that. If we are to build in flexibility, there must be guidance for local authorities on tendering for school transport.

Access to information can be a barrier to good-quality child care, and we know that access to information is most difficult for those living in poverty. In areas where children are most likely to live in poverty, parents are least likely to have paid work and, consequently, have the least assistance to get out of poverty.

Bridgend county borough council's children information service is excellent. I invite hon. Members to look at its website. It has a specific area for child care and children's issues. There are leaflets and other very good attempts to engage with communities. I attended two excellent fun days held in the recreation centre.
 
Families were bussed in from outlying areas to spend time meeting and talking to representatives of the whole gamut of child care provision that is available throughout the county borough. We need such practices to be rolled out throughout the country.

One of the most important aspects of which we must be aware today is the great expectations that are being raised by the Bill. As politicians, we must be aware of the danger of a gap developing between the promises that we make and the expectations that people will have outside the House. The commitments laid out in legislation must meet the day-to-day reality faced by parents and children. Parents' expectations following the Bill will be high. We cannot fail them or their children.

The clear message of the Bill to parents, children, employers and all levels of government must be that children are vulnerable unique individuals for whom only the best will be good enough. The Bill places a responsibility on local authorities to spearhead the growth in the availability of child care.

I shall conclude with a reference to the Genesis project, which I mentioned earlier, and its aims. The project will work alongside parents to help them to explore long-forgotten hopes and aspirations and to provide guidance and support to help them to achieve their hopes and build a brighter future together. That is what I see the Bill offering throughout the United Kingdom. I commend it to the House.

14 June 2005 

National Lottery Bill

Mrs. Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab): I share with the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Mr. Horwood) a background of working in Alzheimer's disease societies and with people with dementia. Like him, I recognise the problems in accessing money faced by that Cinderella sector. Equally, however, as I have sat here today and listened to the various speakers, I have been aware that my experience in Bridgend is not the same as that of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May); it is much more like that of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant).

Bridgend, it is acknowledged on the lottery webpage, has not received its fair share of lottery funding, with lower than average funding coming to projects in my constituency. Indeed, I am informed that we have the third lowest lottery funding. I can assure Members that Bridgend is eager to get its sticky little mitts on lottery money. Over the past couple of days, I have sought to examine why Bridgend is so far down the funding stream and how the proposals before us today will help my constituency to begin the fight back and climb the league of successful applicants.

I can assure the House that Bridgend is a community in need of that investment. It is in need of the lottery money that is available to it. Bridgend is not readily recognised as a deprived area, but we have pockets of severe social deprivation. Although there is inward growth in housing and new business, some of our leisure and community services have lacked investment for a number of years and are, to say the least, down at heel and frayed at the collar. The one thing that we are rich in is our commitment to our communities and our willingness to fight and work for them.

In preparation for today's debate I have spoken to a number of the people in my constituency for whom lottery money makes the difference, determining the growth, change and survival of services. There have been great successes, and I include here the Kenfig Pyle community youth project and the Bethlem Church projects, which work with young people in communities with few opportunities for leisure and social activities. I made reference to their excellent work in my maiden speech, as those projects have grown out of the communities in which they are based. Their management committees are local people and their commitment to the young people whom they serve is total. They offer alternatives to going to the pub, hanging round street corners and using drugs, which would be the only alternatives without those projects.

The projects were established by local people, not professionals. I urge the Minister to ensure that we do not develop a culture within the Big Lottery Fund that means that the large organisations—the professionals—and not the local communities access the funding and are seen as the experts in what is good for communities and in tackling local problems. I am hopeful that the Bill will be positive for my community.

What we need in Bridgend is continued development of small, sustainable community-led projects that are managed or delivered by local people. Funding must be ongoing. I reiterate the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) that projects must not be left high and dry, having to jump through yet more hoops to access additional funding.

Will the Big Lottery Fund help my constituency? I feel that it will. I welcome the initiatives to restructure the lottery and to make the application process simpler. I welcome especially the plans to ensure that the level of unspent funds is reduced. I welcome the new capacity for the fund to handle non-lottery money to enable spending streams to be joined up. I especially welcome, too, the opportunity to reallocate balances that have not been reduced to other grant-making organisations in the same sector, so that good causes are not left without access to funds.

I think in particular of sports clubs in my constituency that are desperate to do drainage work on their pitches, but are told that there is no money for them to access. An opportunity such as this, to move balances, would ensure that that work could go ahead, so that organisations that, in a week, have 250 people working with Kenfig rugby and football clubs, would have the facilities that they need to offer those youngsters opportunities. We have been debating in the House opportunities for youngsters to engage in sport, and we should remember that the lottery funds opened up opportunities for many youngsters in my community that would not otherwise have been available.

I would like to share with the House some of the concerns and questions discussed with me by those in my constituency who co-ordinate many of our lottery bids. In particular, I thank Ty Jay Dekretser from the Bridgend Association of Voluntary Organisations—with whom I am sure I will have further discussions on the Bill as it proceeds through the House—and various officers from Bridgend county borough council who have shared their expertise and experience. They tell me that in Bridgend we have a particular problem with providing match funding. For example, the Kenfig Pocket Park committee has submitted an application for funding. We have a small dedicated group who have worked for two years putting together the application, but match funding is very limited.

I wonder whether it is possible to consider using some of the underspend and interest money from the lottery funds to help communities where there are good ideas, good projects and people willing and eager to work, but where there are problems in raising match funding, perhaps in some of our more deprived communities. For my local authority that problem has been exacerbated by the fact that European development money has also been available, and much of its match funding has gone to objective 1 projects. We have been accessing some money, but smaller local projects have not gone ahead, which is one reason for our success rate being low.

I welcome the opening of the new fund to take into account the views of the public, but we must not lose the opportunity that the lottery has given us, as a country, to tackle ideas and areas of work that were experimental or contentious. Sometimes that has related to people's perceptions of morality and what they perceive to be wrong. As one person commented to me, awards for lesbian and gay groups became more acceptable, but when those groups related to parenting, public opinion was often split. Some practices, such as advocacy and mentoring, now mainstream in local authority provision and in the public sector generally, were initiated and mainstreamed by the voluntary and community sector, often with no funding but with great determination and conviction. Lottery funding helped those projects to expand. Now, we generally recognise their worth and they are moving into mainstream local authority policy. At their inception those practices were deemed radical; now we are willing to support them.

We must ensure that the Big Lottery Fund, like the Community Fund, which has been a tremendous success, will be prepared to fund new and radical ideas, to take risks and to recognise that one of the most effective ways of supporting communities, either geographically or interest-based, is to fund those new ideas. I have seen nothing in the Bill that suggests that that is not possible; I have merely heard it here today. I would therefore welcome reassurance when the Minister winds up the debate.

From the voluntary sector, I have heard fears that rigid, stifling and directed priorities will damage the voluntary and community sectors and, in doing so, reduce diversity and vibrancy. Those concerns were mentioned by the hon. Member for Cheltenham. I cite as an example the fact that, until three years ago, the United Kingdom had an established, though poorly funded, rape crisis centre network. Across the UK many victims of sexual abuse and rape were supported by volunteers who provided a free professional support and counselling service.

During the past three years, that network has been lost in many areas as statutory provision has moved into the field and we have recognised the need for mainstream funding in such work. To allay some of the concerns that have been laid before the House today, we perhaps need to ensure that voluntary sector organisations in such fields continue to have access to some lottery funding so that they can continue to take new initiatives and tackle radical new ideas. We could use that work almost as a testing ground for new and innovative ideas and marry the flexibility of the voluntary sector with the funding streams available to the statutory sector.

Some 30 per cent. of the Big Lottery Fund money will be used for public services. As a local Member, I feel a bit like a piggy in the middle between my local authority, which is desperate to access the money, and the voluntary sector. Lottery funding has been vital in Bridgend in enabling our very underfunded leisure services department to make a number of successful bids, benefiting my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies). Money has been accessed to develop sports facilities, with new sports barns at Cynffig, Ogmore and Ynysawdre comprehensives, as well as a new climbing wall at Pencoed and new pitches in Bryntirion. Our constituents will share use of the new Ynysawdre swimming pool, and my hon. Friend and I hope that money will be found to provide a sauna facility at the new pool.

At the same time, I know that the voluntary sector fears that there will be a reduction in the provision of community-led services and the wider opportunities that they provide to communities. For example, I have discussed with the leader of Wildmill playgroup and with other community playgroups how development of nursery provision in schools has seriously affected voluntary pre-school groups. While the increase in free provision has an economic benefit for families, we must ensure that we do not lose the vital support structures that the voluntary sector brings to parents. I know how vital my own local playgroup and "Meet a mum" association were for me when I stopped working and my son and I found ourselves alone, with all my friends in work and my family miles away, as well as a lack of support and companionship and others from whom to learn the skills of parenting. The playgroup, the "Meet a mum" association and the nursery that my son attended provided me with lasting network support and provided my son with a plethora of social aunties and uncles, as well friends that he has had from birth. We must be careful that, in professionalising services, we do not lose that human dimension that makes so many of the voluntary services work so effectively. I hope that the Big Lottery Fund will help us to ensure that that dimension remains an active part of the funding that will be available.
 

Considering the reasons for the lack of applications for funding in my constituency has led me to look again at the responsibilities that we place on the voluntary sector. In earlier debates on the Licensing Bill, one of the concerns raised was responsibilities for making and managing applications for licences for village halls. I heard the same concerns expressed when church groups that provide sitting and befriending services were required to register as domiciliary care agencies when I worked for the care standards inspectorate in Wales. I stress that we must use the Big Lottery Fund to consider how we can sustain and support the small voluntary groups that are afraid of some of the project management and legislative implications in respect of employment, health and safety; are concerned about preparing accounts; and worried about child and adult protection issues.

For example, the Shaw Trust provided support services for those with disabilities who took advantage of direct payments to manage their own care packages. The task of bearing the huge responsibility placed on those with no experience in such a field was made possible by sharing the burden through the professional support of Shaw Trust officers, who managed the payroll, contracts of employment, health and safety and training issues. The Bridgend Association of Voluntary Organisations provides that work locally, but it is a single organisation. If we are to expand voluntary groups, especially the small ones, that can access lottery funding, more and more such umbrella bodies that support a network of smaller organisations must be able to access the funding. That could allow almost exponential growth among the smaller voluntary organisations.

I hope that we will be able to provide that support work and not leave the smaller groups without the network of support that they need. Without such support, I fear that we may lose good ideas and initiatives, as well as the essential community link that makes projects work. Public policy may also lose that testing ground in respect of the voluntary and charity sector, which often provides initiatives and new thinking and drives services forward.

In conclusion, I welcome the Big Lottery Fund and the proposed change. It is essential that we ensure the survival of the lottery, but I am eager to ensure that Bridgend finally moves on to the ladder of funded schemes that are successful. The need to build in capacity with my local communities to fund and manage lottery bids will be essential if we are to access the funds.

I pay tribute to the hard work of those who spend hours, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham described, preparing and writing lottery applications and managing funds and projects that benefit their local communities.

I hope that the Big Lottery Fund will ensure, through its streamlined application process, that new, creative, innovative and controversial ways of working remain a key part of the lottery role and function, and that yet more will be coming from Bridgend.