§ Mr. Thorpeasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will make a statement on the progress of identifying and registering severely disabled people in the county of Devon and the city of Manchester, respectively, since Section 1 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act was given operative effect on 1st October 1971; and if he will indicate the numbers of such people registered by each of the two local authorities in 1970 and at the latest date for which figures are available.
§ Mr. Alfred MorrisThe information required is as follows:
will include in his reply a comparison of expenditure for the purposes of the section by the same two local authorities.
§ Mr. Alfred MorrisFigures for the year ending 31st March 1976, the most recent ones available, for the services specified below are as follows:
would be of the order of £2,000 million by estimating the numbers, by age group, who would fall into each band of that scheme; and if he will make a further statement.
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§ Mr. Alfred MorrisThe figure of £2,000 million in the paper to which my hon. Friend refers is a broad estimate of the cost of extending the existing industrial injuries scheme to cover all compensatable impairments. Estimates of the impaired population can be derived from the 1968–69 Government survey, from information about people in residential care and from studies of the incidence of "disablement" among children; but none of this information is concerned with "impairment" as defined for industrial injuries purposes. There is no totally reliable means of estimating the distribution of the general population by age according to the impairment bands into which they would fall under an industrial injuries system of assessment. Thus, while it is possible to say that the cost of a universal scheme, providing compensation for all impairments, on industrial injuries lines, could hardly be less than £2,000 million, further refinement of that particular estimate would, I think, neither be of much value nor help to my hon. Friend.