Disabled People

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Low, for introducing the debate and look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Fellowes, who is two down the list from me.

This debate has taken on a tone to which all those on the government Benches must listen carefully. People are very worried at the moment. Probably the most inept thing we have heard is that the Equality Act is regarded as red tape. I do not know whether I would support it if I were told that it was red tape. Let us put it this way, I would have to be convinced that it was either that or killing the firstborn. A good few of my colleagues would be with me on that one. The Government must explain that more clearly. Most of what has been done all around this House for a long time has been working towards one solid body of law which allows us to defend the rights of minorities. I do not know who described it as red tape, but whoever it is should be made to come to explain to us why. It will lead to fear. Fear does not lead to rational debate.

The continuity of approach should be recognised. The previous Government worked hard to try to get the disabled into work. They tried initiatives; they pumped money in; but they had limited success. The implementation of that policy proved to be difficult. The interface between those we were trying to help and the government machine proved extremely difficult to manage. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, who is not taking part in this debate, demonstrated a continuity of approach at Question Time today on the matter of pensions. In this area there is a degree of continuity of thought. The previous Government said that they would train people to do undertake the interviews: the one-stop shop. That was a good idea. They said that people would get hours and hours more help. I said, “Will you train them sufficiently to know when they should back down and bring in an expert?”. “We’ll get more training”, they said. Unless we get people sufficiently trained, with authority to bring in the expert, when they are dealing with people with very individual, complicated needs, there will be mistakes. The real problem is making mistakes and missing the target. Unless we can address that in more depth, we will continue to make mistakes. Giving people unnecessary problems leads to costs further down the line. That is a well-known fact. If we do not pick it up here, we pick it up in the health service.

With that in mind, I turn to something which I can thank Ministers for addressing. Let us say that it was a Treasury Bench cock-up, which started under the previous Government, reached a peak under this Government and has been dealt with by them. The National Apprenticeship Service was convinced that dyslexics should not be able to take apprenticeships because they could not pass part of the communication test, which was a written test. Both current government parties raised that in opposition and got what we thought were assurances. I then discovered, through casework which I occasionally found myself doing, that people were being denied, which was in direct contradiction of the Equality Act and the Disability Discrimination Act before it. Somebody thought, perhaps, “We’re business. We’re different. We’re applying for business services”, and so the Act did not apply to them.

Dyslexics are allowed to take degrees, by the way. I must declare an interest here. I am chairman of a company that provides computer software and support to allow people to use voice-to-text and text-to-voice technology. That is fairly old technology, but it is improving. It is being polished. We have been doing that for years. They can do that, but people who work practically with their hands outside, where literacy problems should be less of a burden, were being excluded. The noble Lord, Lord Low, led the charge, not particularly on the part of dyslexics but on that of others in the field. He got there in front of me. I am getting used to the view of the back of the noble Lord’s head as he charges into these fields. We intervened. John Hayes, who is a Minister in a different department from the one that the noble Lord usually deals with, said to me in a meeting on Tuesday, “This is ridiculous. Let’s sort it out”. I cleared with him that I could say that today.

This matter cuts across all departments and we must get into it as a government-wide project. Unless we do, we will make problems worse. We must make sure we target access across government. We must make sure that Parliament is vigilant and that the legislation we pass is implemented. There is enough legislation now. After years of trying, we have done enough. We have to get into the system and say, “You are not an exception. The defence of reasonableness does not mean that you can say it is inconvenient for you to implement the legislation. You have to do it as a duty”.

Any change leads to fear. The Government have a duty to make sure that people have a degree of confidence that overall the change will be for the better. If we do not do that, no matter what we do, we will fail to achieve at the right level. That has probably been true for a long time for all government initiatives. We have to be prepared to explain what effort, time and indeed even money, even in these circumstances, are being expended to get the best out of these changes. If we do not do that, we will end up with more ridiculous situations like the one that I have just described, where people are worried about going through processes because they are unable to get from them the necessary rewards, and we will end up going nowhere.

All of us in this House and in another place have a duty to honour the undertakings that we have made. I hope that the noble Lord will be able to assure me that the red tape idea will not filter down and affect the basic laws that we have passed to protect the disabled.