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The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Sarah Newton)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I add my warm congratulations on securing the debate to all those expressed by other hon. Members towards my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham). This is one of those rare occasions in Parliament when we have much agreement. My hon. Friend did a splendid job of outlining the Government’s achievements and had obviously done a huge amount of homework to understand and describe all the data, so I am not even going to bother. He can consider himself as knowledgeable as the Minister on all the statistics and data.
I do not have much time and will not be able to respond to everyone’s suggestions in as much detail as I would like, so I will write to everyone who took part in the debate to respond in more detail. However, as there have been really good suggestions and some concerns raised, I will, in the few minutes available to me, talk about those.
First, on the scale of our ambition, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister could not have made it clearer that she believes in a country that must work for everyone, not just the privileged few. For our nation to be successful, we need to build on all the talents of all our citizens, which includes people with disabilities and health conditions. We are very ambitious to ensure that people who are disabled or have health conditions can play their full part in society, which of course includes employment, to the extent that they can, so we are determined to do everything that we can to build on the progress that we have seen. We have heard today about the hundreds of thousands of people now in employment who were not previously. Just in the past few years, we have made a significant improvement, but we are ambitious to do more. We have set ourselves a target of 1 million, which is a really good starting point, but like my hon. Friend, I believe that targets are there to be busted—to be exceeded. We will all be celebrating when we get past that point.
“Improving Lives: the future of work, health and disability” sets out a very comprehensive strategy for delivering on our ambitions. We have firm plans, which are detailed in that document. We are taking action across three settings: in welfare, with the work that the DWP does; in the workplace, in partnership with employers; and, very importantly, in the health system. For the first time, we have a joint unit between the DWP and the Department of Health and Social Care. Colleagues have rightly made much today of the importance of different parts of Government working together. That joint unit is a step in the right direction. In addition, I will be chairing a meeting of Ministers across Government to ensure that we are doing everything we can in each Department. We have heard about the work that we need to do with the Department of Health and Social Care and with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. I see the industrial strategy, clearly setting out that we want to see growth right across our country, as a key part of enabling me to deliver on my targets. We will be setting out very clearly how we can work with employers to create healthy, inclusive workplaces where people can thrive. Part of the problem is not just getting people into work—most people will acquire their disability during their life—but enabling adaptations to be made in the workplace, so that people can stay in work. That is probably more important with mental health than anything else. “Improving Lives” was our response to the Stevenson-Farmer review, where we adopted all of the recommendations that were made. We are encouraging employers to look carefully at what more they can do to support people with mental health issues.
The key part of our plan is to improve access to occupational health. For too long, occupational health services have been the Cinderella services of the NHS. Our joint unit with the Department of Health and Social Care will bring real focus to that. The plans that we have set out will require a lot of innovation. We are building a very robust evidence-making framework, so that we are sure we are capturing information about what works.
Some questions were raised around the House about the possible negative impacts of devolution. I want to reassure hon. Members that this is a UK-wide ambition and a UK-wide scheme. We work very constructively in Scotland. I want to give some examples. We have recruited 24 community partners with lived experience of disability to work in our job centres. We have appointed 12 new small employer advisers. We have implemented more than 11 peer support job clubs. That is just in the first few months. I hope that is reassuring that our ambition is for this to be a UK-wide scheme.
Of course, this is about establishing strong partnerships with employers and listening to their concerns. We have heard about some of those concerns today. I want to point out that we now have 5,357 companies signed up to Disability Confident. The vast majority—67%—are SMEs, with 46% being microbusinesses where people employ just one or two employees. We are getting to those small employers, but we accept that there is more work to be done. Those barriers, which have been articulated so well today, exist in a lot of employers’ minds. What are we doing about that? We are very actively promoting Access to Work. We are doing that through working with networks of organisations, such as the chambers of commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and the local enterprise partnerships—businesses themselves.
Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)
It has always occurred to me that Access to Work is a great tool when someone has their job, but a bit like a journey, they need petrol to put in the car to get to the journey. There should be access to work experience and job interviews. What does the Minister think about expanding the scheme to cover those as well?
Sarah Newton
I appreciate that intervention because I can clarify that that already exists. Access to Work can be used in all of those circumstances. Perhaps in the past not all of the job coaches in all of the jobcentres knew about that. We have made a massive investment in training our job coaches so that they are fully aware of all of these opportunities, and we have trained additional specialist disability advisors in the jobcentres, as well as our community partners, with their lived experience.
The amount of training and information from the job coaches goes to the heart of some of the points that were extremely well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez), who spoke about her constituent Drew. His journey is one that I am sure we all recognise from our constituency casework with young people and their parents. The parents are really worried about what happens to their child, particularly if they have learning difficulties—autism was the case quoted with Drew. When they leave education, they want to work, they have a passion to work, but they can find it very challenging to navigate the system. That should not be the case now. His job coach in the jobcentre will have access to all these different support services. Our innovation and our vision is about putting the person at the centre of their journey to work and fitting the support and the services around them. Access to Work is the key part of that, but other things are available as well, such as tailor-made support packages depending on the level of support that people need.
I want to reassure everyone that Access to Work is a demand-led funding pot. As the demand grows, so does the funding. Year after year we put more money into that pot. The amount of money one can have every year goes well over £40,000, so it is a considerable amount of money to enable people into work and to stay in work. Under the Equalities Act 2010 employers have responsibilities to make reasonable adjustments. A key part of the role of the Access to Work team in the Department is to have those conversations. It is a three-way conversation between the person seeking work or wanting to stay in work, the employer and ensuring those services are funded through Access to Work. We have people from the DWP present today, from Disability Confident and Access to Work. I am sure they will be really pleased to hear hon. Members compliment their work. Certainly in my time as a Minister I have seen what an extraordinarily dedicated team of people we have, not only on the frontline in our jobcentres, but in the Department. I hope they have received those comments and will take them back to their colleagues.
What more can we do for SMEs? In our plans we recognise the valuable contributions that have been made by, for example, the Shaw Trust, which has advocated for a portal. We are now actively looking at designing a portal so that employers have a one-stop shop to see all of the benefits and supports that are available. That will be live this year. We are also looking at what more we can do for incentives. This has come up a bit today. There were suggestions about using some of the lessons from apprenticeships. Again, we have committed to look at what incentives would work for employers. I am very engaged with large, small and medium-sized businesses. I am fortunate to have a great leadership group of people from businesses of all sizes and all different sectors working with me, to really help get this right for employers. For example, we have committed to looking at whether a national insurance holiday would be an incentive to help businesses employ more people with disabilities.
A couple of other questions were raised about the quality assurance of the programme. Just to reassure hon. Members, if an organisation reaches level 3, it has to be independently audited. Somebody goes into those organisations to make sure they are actually delivering on what they say they are doing. It gives me great pride to say that every Government Department has now reached level 3. Just before Christmas I attended quite a scary meeting of all the permanent secretaries—these are truly the people that run our country—to give them their level 3 certificates. I have set them a very clear challenge for this year: to use their leverage with supply chains—Government are a huge purchaser of services—and to have a discussion when they are commissioning or purchasing services about whether they are working with Disability Confident employers. All of those permanent secretaries work with a lot of arm’s length bodies. They have committed to me to work with those organisations. People expect us to lead from the front in Government and they expect public services to be a leading example. I am working to ensure we will do that.
It remains for me to touch on one final issue, going back to young people, which various hon. Members raised: why do we not do more about supported work experience and apprenticeships? I can reassure hon. Members that the Government have put a lot of money— a lot more than in the past—into enabling more apprenticeships for disabled people, to ensure they are properly supported, and have put a considerable amount of extra money into supported internships. I recently visited companies that were taking on many more young people as a result.
I want to praise everybody who has taken up this opportunity, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), whose work is inspirational. We have set up a meeting, which all hon. Members have been invited to, to learn how to become Disability Confident and how to set up the inspirational sort of meeting that we have heard about today. I thank everyone for what they have done and ask that they please come to this meeting, so that they can all be part of the change that we all want to see.