Future of Specialist Disability Employment

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 10th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we are undertaking quite a major exercise around Access to Work, and one of the areas that we are working on is exactly the noble Viscount’s point about making employers feel comfortable. When Remploy began after the war, manufacturing was a major part of our economy. It is quite hard to be full steam in a steelworks, for instance, if you have a physical disability. As the economy has moved over to the service sector, it is very different, and the idea that many disabled people—certainly physically disabled people, around whom the concept of Remploy was developed—cannot do a whole stream of mainstream jobs is incongruous today. That is what we are talking about in the modernisation process. As I said, there is an issue about mental health. There, we are trying to push Access to Work so that people with mental health issues are pulled in and involved. We have a lot of work still to do about stigma. The Mind campaign has been extraordinary in starting to turn attitudes, and we need to get right behind it. That is a big and important issue to get employers behind.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I shall make a couple of points. First, the point made by my noble friend Lady Browning about reporting back is vital. This is probably the final public step of the process of looking at those with disabilities as individuals as opposed to people who are put away in blocs. I have always felt that the Remploy factories were on a time limit, and the previous Government accepted that. It is never the right time to make that change, and it is particularly unfortunate that it has to be done now, at a time of high unemployment. Can my noble friend assure me that in this process, those who are placing people outwith the specialist teams—normal job centres and secondary support services—are given greater briefing, particularly in the areas where people are being made unemployed? This may well be a useful test case for those who are providing better services overall. Unless we get that process right across the board, we will have merely pockets of good practice, not good practice overall.

[Lord Freud]

I thank my noble friend for that point. As I said, I will outline exactly how we will report back and timings. The more important point is the level of support we are providing in this case, where we have the personal help and support package, which is considerably tailored with consultation at every stage with, most interestingly, a specific caseworker per person, so people’s individual requirements are analysed and taken into account, plus a fund to help people in. In this case, there is a lot of tailored support. One lesson may well be how important individual caseworkers are in helping people.