Ealing, London's third largest borough, has one respite centre, Heller House for 10 - ­18 year old children with special needs. These young people are often very challenging with severe learning needs and their parents and carers suffer from total exhaustion, with many feeling excluded from much of society.

You can be one of the many voices for parents, siblings and carers who at the moment have virtually NO voice. They need and deserve your support.

Ealing, because of its budget cuts, is looking at closing Heller House and farming these children with very challenging behaviour (many of whom are severely autistic) out to other boroughs. Another vague possibility is to revamp Heller House at a cost of £3 million. It is highly unlikely that this investment will be agreed.

We need your support to make Ealing look at a third option, which is to ­have a private developer build a state-of-the-art respite centre in exchange for a portion of the site which would be used for redevelopment.

This would be a WIN WIN situation where those with severe and demanding needs could have easy access to respite and their carers and siblings given time to recuperate and have some "normal" family space and much needed sleep.

These children deserve and need to be in the comfort of a home setting which they are familiar with, with support workers and key workers whom they learn to know and feel safe with. They need consistency.

This need not cost Ealing any money, in fact it could save money. Please sign this petition and share it with your friends and family as a decision is to be made by Ealing Council Cabinet on 16 February. We need your help now!

My own son with special needs never needed this facility but I have friends who do and they say their families would have been torn apart without regular access to respite at Heller House and their children would have needed very expensive residential care without this in-­borough support.

One parent with two severely autistic teenagers said "The only thing that gets you through is the love. But you wonder how long you can do it for. Heller House has been a lifeline for us".

Another commented "Knowing that you can get into bed and he is happy, is pure heaven".