Tristan Osborne

The day after the change of control of the council, party political auditors came in. There has been a communications exercise highlighting the SEND transport budget for cuts, but we do not know what those cuts will be, and there has been no communication with residents, causing fear to spread about whether their children will be affected. This is not just about my hon. Friend’s constituents in Ashford, but about residents in Margate, Maidstone and Tonbridge—the problem is manifest across the entire county. A number of solutions have been proposed, so I would like to ask the Minister a series of questions about them. As the Government have now created three-year budget cycles, can something similar be done to secure long-term funding for councils, so that we do not have to rely on the safety valve going forward? Although I agree that students need to be in an appropriate landscape, private provision for SEND is sometimes 10 times more expensive for each child, which is not sustainable when the budget is going up by so much. What could we do to transfer those children and bolster mainstream schools? I know some excellent examples of that, such as at Bradfields academy in my constituency, which is receiving Building Schools for the Future funding under this Government. How can we expand that principle into other mainstream schools, so that we can provide specialist autism and ADHD units? How do we align services regionally? In my area, child and adolescent mental health services are fundamentally failing and we have had to transfer them back in-house to the Kent mental health trust. How can we ensure that CAMHS is really working? Finally, the appeals system is failing across some counties, so how can we ensure it is fit for purpose and does not cost councils millions of pounds to sustain? These are my questions and I hope the Minister can answer them.