Graeme Morrice: Legislation change is ideal remedy for worried parents

Hundreds of vulnerable families are being penalised by benefit rules which punish them when their child is in hospital, says Graeme Morrice

When a child has to stay in a hospital or other medical setting, their parents will naturally want to spend as much time as possible supporting them. Parents are often experts in their child's care and are sometimes required to continue carrying out the same, if not increased, levels of care while their child is in hospital.

Health professionals also recognise that the presence of a parent is important for the child's wellbeing and can help their recovery.

However, hundreds of the UK's most severely disabled and sick children and their families are currently being denied much-needed financial assistance when they have to spend prolonged periods of time in hospital.

This is because current rules result in the disability living allowance (DLA) being suspended for children aged under 16 who spend more than 84 days in hospital or another medical setting.

This does not have to be 84 days in one stay because several stays in hospital are sometimes added up, so children who are in and out of hospital because they are so poorly are at high risk of having their DLA payments stopped.

The extra financial burdens for a family when a child is in a hospital or other medical setting can include loss of earnings, travel for family members, parking costs, meals at hospital and childcare for siblings. As the suspension of the child's DLA means that the parent's carers allowance is also stopped, this rule seriously impacts on the financial problems that families can experience during what is obviously already a very difficult time.

In short, this can be financially devastating to vulnerable families who find themselves penalised for being with their child in hospital. As one parent commented: "It makes a desperate situation dire."

Earlier this year, I tabled Early Day Motion (EDM) 1520 in parliament to highlight this issue. It outlines the problems faced by families hit by this rule and congratulates two charities, Contact a Family and the Children's Trust, for their Stop the DLA Takeaway campaign to restore DLA payments for the children affected. More details about the campaign can be found at www.cafamily.org.uk/dlatakeaway, or www.thechildrenstrust.org.uk/dlatakeaway

The charities estimate that there are up to 500 reported cases of children and their families affected by these rules each year, but the cost to the UK government to scrap them would be only between 2.5 million and 3.1m per year.

Furthermore, part of this amount would be offset by savings made in reducing the administrative costs of stopping and restarting families' payments.Scrapping the DLA rules for children aged 0-15 would ensure that the welfare system was simpler, fairer and working for the most vulnerable children and families when they need it most.

Families facing the stress of a child spending a lengthy period in hospital deserve to have some peace of mind about the extra costs that this entails, rather than facing extra worries about how to make ends meet.

At a time when the Conservative-led government is coming under fire for rushing through wholesale reforms of the welfare system at breakneck speed, this is one issue on which it can easily make a huge difference to some of the most vulnerable families in the UK, for very little cost.

I will continue to make the case for this change and hope that on this occasion at least, the government will listen and do the right thing.

• The Labour Party's Graeme Morrice is MP for the Livingston constituency