Brexit: Disabled People
Lord Addington Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, there are certain debates in which you discover quite happily that someone else has done the heavy lifting for you. I thank my noble friend for that. What strikes me about this debate is that it is not about the big acts of principle because when it comes to disability, this Chamber—and, indeed, the whole British Parliament—handles it pretty well. It is the small things. It is the stream of regulation that we are always struggling with to make those big acts of principle count.
I remember when we were dealing with small concessions in regulations about transport, people from all Benches coming up to me and saying, “It is really inconvenient to make sure that the displays at stations are the right size, that we have the easiest tables to fold down to change a baby on, that the toilets are accessible”—there is always a good reason why not. That gets easier and easier to ignore when you have a smaller machine driving it, when you have people saying, “It is very inconvenient regulation for me”. If you do not have real weight and determination behind it, or an energy, it gets picked off.
People will say, “That is red tape. It gets in the way”. One of the many things I have covered in your Lordships’ House is health and safety. I came to the conclusion that everybody was against health and safety regulations until their child was up a ladder. It will be inconvenient for you until you have a disabled child or a disabled parent who needs that support. We need a clear guide and energy here, with the Government prepared to commit time, resources and, indeed, political capital to standing up to people like that. It is going to get more difficult because the EU is a convenient punchbag, let us face it. We can duck round it and say it is the EU’s fault, not ours—“We have to do it, I’m afraid”. If anybody has not seen that here, I can take them through a few events. I will not do that now because no one has annoyed me quite enough to do it. But that happens and unless the Government are prepared to publicly start taking on the responsibility for those unpopular small decisions with certain sectors, we are going to fall down here.
The Papworth Trust report points out that the drive from Europe means there is a focus. You have to come behind it grumblingly, saying, “Oh, I wouldn’t do this but I appreciate you have problems”. You have to take it on. Unless the Government are prepared to look for a cross-party consensus about how we go about this, we will get into trouble. The disabled are one group but others will suffer as well. We must take on the fact that this unpleasant grind to make sure that things are accessible and easy to use is there. If we do not do that, we will jump from events where we have a big, dramatic event—“We’ll make a change. Oh, that doesn’t work. It’s out of date, we’ll have to go back”. That is inefficient and inconvenient for those who happen to have their lives disrupted in a large way in that process.
Poverty
Lord Addington Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, the first task that falls to me today is to say thank you from these Benches to my noble friend Lady Sharp for all her hard work on behalf of these Benches. I have many an anecdote about working with my noble friend which we do not have time for, but one of my favourites involved a young and bumptious MP telling us what he wanted done, but after leaving the room, he discovered several minutes later what we were going to do. It was a certain MP from the Oxfordshire area whom I hope is still smarting from the experience. But all my anecdotes pale into insignificance next to a comment that was made quietly by my noble friend Lady Northover as she sat beside my noble friend. She said, “You don’t have to go, you know”. Apparently my noble friend is going to go, but she will be missed. We hope that her retirement is as much fun as she thinks it will be, but if she wants to make a comeback—if Frank Sinatra could do it, I am sure that an exception will be made for her.
I scribbled down on a piece of paper what I think was the subtext of the words of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, in opening this debate: work smarter, not harder. That is something I took from his speech. There is a lot of activity around dealing with poverty. The state deals with the containment of the problem and makes an effort to lift people out of it. As noble Lords have been speaking, I gained the clear impression that there is no one cause of poverty; it seems to be more of a cocktail of issues. It is a cocktail that changes slightly for each individual affected by poverty. Several speakers also mentioned education, which leads me into my main contribution.
The fact is that if someone has a hidden disability—I am thinking primarily about dyslexia but it could be many other hidden disabilities: dyscalculia, autism, you name it—they can have a problem engaging properly with the state. It is very difficult to access the benefits that the state can offer. We always think of dyslexia as being a problem primarily in terms of education. That is where the name comes from, so it is obvious. However, my wife would testify to the fact that dyslexics often have incredibly bad short-term memories. In my case it is about getting to appointments and remembering things that are going on. There is no point in writing them down in a diary if you forget to look in the diary.
It is important to note that life today is complicated, which means that people with hidden disabilities are under pressure the whole way through. If someone’s problem is that they cannot understand the written word easily and so they dropped out of the education system early because it was incredibly unfriendly towards them, they are always going to be at a disadvantage. Numerous facts, figures and statistics have been provided for me which show that dyslexics are more prevalent in virtually every area that leads to poverty: homelessness, drug taking—you name it and they are in there. Dyslexics suffer mental health problems because the modern world puts more pressure on them and makes it difficult for them to operate.
How do we deal with this? I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Empey, who said that if we get education right by identifying individuals and providing them with strategies which help them, we will start to reduce the burden. I am glad that the Carter review of teacher training recognises that teachers should be better trained in this area—an approach very like that taken in my Private Member’s Bill, which is going through the legislative process at the moment. I wonder if the two are connected, but I suspect not. If we try to intervene at the primary stage, it will be decades before we feel the benefit and there will always be people who are missed. So is the rest of the system—everything from the DWP to local government—better capable of dealing with people who cannot handle forms, whether they arrive online or in a letter? A quick mental calculation is made and the conclusion is, “Oh! You’re dyspraxic”. Are we actually qualified to help those groups?
Dyslexics are not the only people who have problems with literacy. If we take that group as an example, some 10% of the population—a huge number—are overrepresented in the groups we are trying to deal with. We should train people to deal with these groups, because then we will stand a chance of getting them access to the help that is being offered elsewhere. We are currently providing help they cannot get to. We are wasting effort on both fronts: work smarter, not harder. If someone cannot access the form or cannot understand what time to go in, they will not get the help, even for adult literacy. If we do not know how to market to these groups—to say to an adult who was something of a nightmare at school, “Come in and do a literacy course”, and explain that we will be sympathetic to them and teach them correctly—they are not going to turn up.
If, when it comes to the workplace, we do not allow people to access the written word through the technology which is so readily available now—I must declare an interest as a user of this technology, as well as my business interests—we will compound the problems. We have the ability to change the situation; we merely have to open our minds just enough to allow it to happen.
Apprenticeships
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, my involvement with apprenticeships started with the noble Lord, Lord Young, a good few years ago when the Bill went through. At that time it was pointed out to me that everybody had to pass an English and maths test, and the language was, “Give the employers what they want. They want good English and maths”. I stood up and said, “What about dyslexics?”. Noble Lords said, “Of course, we do not want to remove anybody from employment here”, and I went away. I made a huge mistake that day because initially the Act stated that everybody needed English and maths, and that was seen to be the priority. It was decided that this overrode the Equality Act—wrongly and illegally—and we got ourselves into a horrible mess, which was resolved only three and a half years later during the course of a Bill. I just point out that anything, no matter how well intentioned, can go wrong, and apprenticeships are right there with everything else. Nobody intended it to happen, but then officials decided, “This is what we had said and we defended it”. Most politicians saw the mistake and said, “That cannot be right”, and then we had to fight our way—more or less machete our way—through the levels of resistance. I take a big slice of the blame pie for not coming back to the noble Lord, Lord Young, at a later stage in that Bill to demand an explanation of what should happen, but I could not quite believe that anybody would do anything that dumb. My naivety, after nearly three decades here, still surprises me.
Where are we now? We have the apprenticeship system, which takes over most of the further education training in this country. Everything is being drawn towards the apprenticeship system. Yet how are hidden disabilities and disabilities generally being dealt with in this system? People with dyslexia are the biggest group; I do not think anyone has argued about that. It is reckoned to be about 10% to 20% in certain parts of the state, but we use 10%. We still have a problem in that we have only just got the examination system to take on board that reasonable adjustments should be made to the online test to use technology that is well established in higher education. We have only just got that in. There are increasingly worrying signs that the trainers and providers within the colleges do not know what they are doing with the dyslexic in the classroom. Therefore, neither do colleges and their support work. Can my noble friend give me some idea of how this has developed over time and what pressure will be exerted to make sure that colleges, employers and trainers all understand this vast array of difficulties that they will encounter?
Why is it important here? It is because dyslexics should be overrepresented in something that uses practical skills. At the moment, in higher education you are fine; we have a very well established system there with the DSA. I declare an interest in that from one of my outside activities. However, in the further education sector we do not have that culture. It is there to an extent in schools but it is still hit and miss. If you are to get into that tough-to-reach 20%—the 20% who were not getting five GCSEs—you must be prepared to deal with these groups. You must have a very well established SEN structure that knows how to deal with young adults. If we are talking particularly about the young, we are talking about somebody who has already failed within the classroom and for whom this is a bad experience and a bad place to be. If you do more of the same, you will fail again.
What are we going to do about this? We have to try to get in here. I never wanted to become the person who has to stand up and make the same speech, or a variation on the same speech, every time we talk about apprenticeships. I am sure I could bore your Lordships’ House on other subjects with equal vigour. But we need a structure here that goes on. We have established for colleges, trainers and employers an incentive to go on, because they can get them, finally, through the exam. I deliberately concentrate on that because that was the model we went through in schools for getting through O-levels when they started and now for GCSEs, A-levels and degrees. If you have a reason to get the person through and they can pass, or stand a realistic chance of passing, suddenly everybody can buy in. That process will be quicker and easier if we insist on having decent training in that process.
We are starting on a process. The entrance-level qualifications are probably very important to this group I am talking about, so I think that level 2 has a place for getting people at least involved in their training. However, unless you can ensure that the experience of receiving training is there, you will not maximise it and get the people involved. I look forward to hearing what progress will be made, because we cannot ignore this, and dyslexics are only one group within a very large group.
Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, the whole experience of the committee was one in which I found myself looking with a critical eye at something about which I cared passionately and had always supported. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Harris, provided a very good hand on the tiller, particularly as he admitted that he was not in love with the idea of sports. That provided a nice, sane stabiliser.
We were looking at a huge project that had huge energy and focus. As the noble Lord pointed out, we had a finite time to deliver. This meant that the political class got its act together and got on with it. It said, “We will not tolerate anything going wrong”, and made sure that those they were talking to were told that they were not going to tolerate things going wrong. That proved that if you have focus, you can achieve.
Historical examples of such things happening are there in abundance, but the new thing was legacy. As the noble Lord pointed out, the one legacy that we knew about and had experience of—because we had got it wrong in the past—concerned the facilities themselves, which seem to have turned out to be a success. We have function, in that the stadium will be used and facilities have been reinvented. We are going to get rid of the stuff that we do not need and leave the hard core that is useful. That is a very good idea. Remember Wembley Stadium and Pickett’s Lock? Remember the disasters? Remember the places that did work? Principally, they were for the Manchester Commonwealth Games.
When we came to a sporting legacy, we had an idea—an idea to take what we do, inspire and support the concept of being involved, taking part and creating an elite and going forward with it. To expect us to get things absolutely right first time was probably asking too much. Indeed, I remember on several occasions saying to various people that the people who would experience our legacy model best would probably be those at the next Games. We should remember that this is an international organisation and many of the examples that we used, about how not to have white elephants, waste money or go over budget, were taken from those who went before us, particularly at the Sydney Games and the Athens Games.
Taking on the idea of the legacy in terms of sporting achievement and going forward was always going to be something that we would be taking the first steps on. The most important first step is the fact that we are still discussing it now. I have received briefing from the RFU about the Rugby World Cup, which is desperate to ensure that it has a legacy. It is probably easier for a single sport. Indeed, when rugby league had its world cup, it also tried that. In a single sport you have a focus and you can encourage structures to get involved, recruit players, get better pathways, and make sure that you are there to receive them. I will let noble Lords into a little secret. This is merely an extension of what they should have been doing anyway to build their sports. All sports should have been doing that.
On youth involvement, to go back to rugby union again, I had the great privilege of finding myself at lunch the other day with the chap who invented mini rugby. For those who do not know it, that is the junior, short version of the game that was created for rugby union so that when young children play the game they do not find themselves having an exercise in boredom waiting for the ball to come to them. They receive it and are allowed to play. This is something that has been taken on by all sports—you create something small that people can get involved in. It can be shorter-term activity such as short tennis, kwik cricket and shorter terms of football. All of them take this on board.
How do we work this in? How do we build it in? It has to find a home in the education process. There is disappointment about the government response. All political parties have this problem. Sport is great when you are cheering from the sidelines, but would we all not rather be talking about English pass rates or how maths is in decline? I am afraid it is there. There are far too many people involved—although I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, is now a convert—who gave up sport at the age of 14, when they could fake their mother’s signature and join the politics society. It happens. If noble Lords have not seen that, I will take them on a guided tour. We have to try to ensure that involvement is consistently there and that we take it on. Unless we make it a central focus of what we are doing, youth involvement and early involvement will fail.
The previous Government took some interesting steps, but the idea remained that something had to be done, and that idea was probably already within the current Government—in both parties. That something had to be done and that there was a row about it was probably a good thing. Maybe the scheme was great, maybe it was not, maybe it had flaws, but the idea going forward is the important thing. That is what we must try to encourage. It may not be perfect, but the idea is there.
Carrying on from that, one area that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, brought forward is the “No Compromise” approach for elite-level sports. We dealt with the problems of Atlanta in 1996. I hope that we have killed that dragon, or at least given it a good thump and driven it off the field of play. We have to look at something that develops our sporting base. We need more in sports aspiring to be at the top. Great as it may be to cheer people winning in rowing and cycling—the Australian joke is that we are great at sports where we sit down—we have to try to expand. We need more people competing in more sports and challenging. We can do it. British amateur boxing is now a dominant force. Maybe that was under this system, but it was on the grounds of one person winning a medal at one Games. I am afraid that the “No Compromise” approach is vulnerable to one person having a bad day—two training accidents and somebody having food poisoning at a competition. That makes you vulnerable to losing your base and your future. We must get the idea that we have to go further and bigger. We have won this: do not refer back. Try to go on and get something out there.
Basketball has already been mentioned. It is a sport that has huge potential, especially in areas of urban deprivation. It does not require that much infrastructure —a hard surface and a hoop, and teams of five that are interchangeable. It is non-contact—supposedly. It can involve people. It is a sport that eternally struggles to make it through to the next stage. What we know about mass participation is that it is incredibly helped by having elite-level sport to look up to. Children like heroes.
Unless we can tie everything together with focus and unity, at least within government—and I hope across the political parties—we will all always bump into “Wouldn’t we rather do something different?”. Unless we decide that we must have a way of trying to get those groups and sports outside who are not having instant success, and tolerate some failure, although not eternal tolerance, we will miss opportunities. We have done well and come far, but we must not peter out or flatline: we must think creatively. We may have to offend the rest of the world by saying, “You must change to do this”.
Children: Sport
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, in the two minutes and 59 seconds available to us, it is difficult to add much to this debate, other than to say, like my noble friend Lord Moynihan, that when you ask government to get involved in this you are asking all of government to get involved, and to reorganise in a way that government seems to find extremely difficult to do. Under any colour we have seen so far in government, departments do not like to co-operate. Simply to make a change that will help the country’s youth to take part in sport, you have to cover half of Whitehall. I was just doodling here and have written down Health, Education, DCMS and Ministry of Justice; all these departments have an input into some of the introductory schemes that virtually all sports take part in. The noble Baroness mentioned Chance to Shine, but there are dozens of schemes, involving virtually all sports. They have worked out that, if you offer an introductory package, it allows people to get involved in a sport.
I do not like the use of the term “non-competitive”, because sport is basically a physical competition. Whether or not you record the scores on a board that sits there forever, or in a pile of books that become dusty, along with photographs of people with—shall we say—outmoded haircuts and unfashionable shorts, the essence of what is happening is competition. The idea that you get a ball past somebody or move it into a space where somebody else picks it up and moves it up is the essence—but I probably did not have time for that little bit of semantics today.
Organising sport so that people can come in, try it and get accustomed to it has to be done in conjunction with government and, as my noble friend has already said, local government. Leaving this to a voluntary choice is bound to leave it squeezed whenever times are at all hard or whenever you get somebody who simply does not regard sport as a top priority. My noble friend is, of course, right. Unless government takes on the responsibility for encouraging people to access the great amount of voluntary help outside and co-ordinate across the entirety of it, sport will ultimately always have these peaks and troughs. Our challenge is to make sure that when times are bad progress is not lost and that we do slightly better than stand still. That is effectively all we can hope for—to make it very difficult for somebody to say, “No, that is not important”, because every time you do, you end up paying for it somewhere else, usually in the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health.
Disability Services
Lord Addington Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Addington
My Lords, when I originally saw the debate I was not going to speak, but then I had a little thought. I am dyslexic and have talked in this Chamber about dyslexia probably far too often. Vested and self-interests have been declared so often. One thing that people who are dyslexic have in common is the great difficulty we have in accessing forms and form-based information on benefits and access to the next point. That is what drew me in, because 10% of the population are dyslexic, a percentage of whom come from black and ethnic minorities. Suddenly there is a group with a double whammy.
If we have to access something by filling out a form, which is how we do it, we are in trouble if we cannot do it. If people do not get the help that is offered—and let us face it, we can all agree that Governments rarely offer money or support services for any length of time if there is no demand or need—we will have problems. If we do not fulfil these needs, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said, those who need them most will not get them.
An expression that I am far too fond of using, which I shall use again now, is that if you are a disabled person it is generally reckoned that you will do okay if you select your parents correctly. Articulate people who know how to play the system, have good English written skills and can express themselves well in consultations get through well, on average, thanks to the work that has gone on in this place over time. We have embedded culturally the fact that help should be given and have given it legal backing. That is one of the truths of the system. Hence dyslexia is the middle-class disease. Middle-class people who are dyslexic spot it, and decide to do something about the problem. When they cannot get help from the state they usually buy it from elsewhere. Other disability groups have similar stories at certain levels.
We then get to a group that cannot do that. The problems multiply and we end up paying for that in other places. There is low economic activity and a higher prison population in the case of people with dyslexia, for example. Other groups—the hidden disability groups—share this problem, and the group of people whom we are discussing are all paying for the failure to get them out there. Indeed, it has been suggested that there are more mental problems among people in this group. If we take another group, part of which is in this one, and add the fact that someone cannot communicate well in either spoken or written English, should we be surprised that there is an extra problem when trying to access help that society has decided is beneficial to society as well as the individual? The answer is, of course, no.
The only debate that I had with myself is whether this is an individual cocktail or layers of difficulty each time. That is about as far as it has gone. It is a case of how we get through and how we access help. I am sure that the current Government will not say that we do not want people to access this as it would cost money in the medium term if not the short term, and would be against all principles of fairness. But how will we do it? Translation services are clearly vital to many of these groups, particularly if someone is a new arrival and cannot access the language, either written or spoken. There may be a case for not having translations of every document for everybody.
I would be much more reassured if I heard today that the Government will encourage small, user-led groups to do this work. If cultural awareness and sensitivity are there, they may well do a very good job. Other reports, not even in the pack provided by the Library, show a misunderstanding of what is available and what benefits are supposed to do. Incredibly well entrenched in some of those groups were misunderstandings about benefits, such as: we are not supposed to get them; they are not for us; they will do everything for us; and so on. If that can start to be addressed by using voluntary sectors or the smaller groups referred to, we will start to address the problem reasonably.
We are calling on volunteers to help us on this occasion, but if we can ensure that the Government guarantee that this takes place we will solve many of these problems of communication by making sure that help is there for those who need it and that they get it. This problem is not, of course, totally confined to this group, although the evidence suggests that it is more intense here. Making sure that we identify and bring information to those who need it is very important.
My second point, which will be my last one, is on the Government’s language and the briefing that came from Scope—not the report itself—and the fact that people are very worried about “red-tape equality assessments”, and so on. When sitting on the Benches in front of where the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, sits now, I had to deal with health and safety issues for my party. I came to the conclusion that everybody was against red tape in health and safety until their child was up the ladder. That might be slightly cynical but only slightly.
Something is red tape only when you do not think that you need it—it is just something to deal with. On occasions all Governments tick-box things and all Governments must fight against it. However, if an essential duty is being fulfilled by what is put forward, tick-boxing is necessary. That bit of red tape is needed to hold the bundle together. Unless we can make sure when we talk about this that the regulations are necessary and as simple and as straightforward as possible, we are in trouble.
I am hearing from the disability community an increasing worry about certain statements, such as, “We are going to get rid of these unnecessary regulations”. Can we make sure that we get rid of unnecessary regulations but not the legal duty that is there? That is what we are interested in. We can rewrite and make the regulations simpler and easier to understand, but let us not for one minute suggest that we are getting rid of the legal duty that is required and which most of us agree is essential for ensuring that we have a civilised and fair society.
Disabled People’s Right to Control (Pilot Scheme) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2012
Lord Addington Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Addington
My Lords, I have listened to what has been said. It is very nice to discuss the continuation under this Government of a good idea that originated with the previous Government. Clearly, the political class has reached a degree of understanding on this issue. We should all applaud that. Most of the points that I was going to make have already been made. Indeed, the principal one has just been made by the noble Lord, Lord Low, which concerns what we are going to use the information for outside the immediate study area. People often say yes to something in a certain area but forget that it will apply across to something else. This information will be held not only within the subsets of a particular department but will be passed across departments. That often takes a great deal of time. I hope that in responding my noble friend will give us some idea of how the information will be used and will give a guarantee that it will be used not only throughout the relevant department but throughout the Government, or at least that it will be made available to all government departments. I would be very relieved if that were the case because this information is used to allow people to function independently. At the very least it should be brought forward to the start of the assessment process and not just kept for when a decision is implemented.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am very grateful to noble Lords for their contributions. I am particularly grateful for the support that has been expressed by the noble Lords, Lord McKenzie and Lord Low, and my noble friend Lord Addington. This is an important matter and, as has been pointed out, it achieved cross-party support when it was first put forward a couple of years ago. It is heartening to know that that support continues.
I shall try to deal systematically with some of the points that have been made. The noble Lords, Lord McKenzie and Lord Low, asked what the Government’s view is on whether they will be able to roll out Right to Control nationally. Obviously, because we are continuing this pilot, we do not currently have a view on whether Right to Control should be rolled out, because there is insufficient evidence to make a firm decision on its future. But the very fact that we are continuing this pilot and want to gain more evidence and information, because as a principle this is something that we support, I hope provides some confidence to all noble Lords.
The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked how the pilots will be monitored during the extension period. The process will continue to include monthly reports and management information submitted by the trailblazers to DWP, monthly meetings between the project managers and DWP’s Right to Control project team, six-monthly reviews of individual trailblazers by the team and, of course, monitoring and support given to them by the team back at DWP.
The noble Lord also asked about awareness. After highlighting, as he did, the good things that had come out of the interim evaluation and the advantages that had been delivered by Right to Control so far, he went on to summarise some of the things that were perhaps less encouraging. He asked whether people were aware of this opportunity and what efforts we were going to make to raise further awareness. The legislation requires that, once it has been decided that a person is eligible for a Right to Control service, the responsible authority must inform them that they have a right to control—telling them which services are included and the likely monetary value of the support for which they are eligible—and about organisations that can provide advice and information about Right to Control and what it involves. The trailblazers also have a programme of awareness training for staff, and in the department the Right to Control team has facilitated the delivery of events for practitioners from all funding streams where learning and good practice in delivery has been, and will continue to be, shared.
The noble Lord also asked how many people have benefited from Right to Control. As I said in my opening remarks, until June 2012, over 34,000 disabled people have exercised their right; the latest management information for the period to the end of September, which is currently being evaluated, indicates that at least 37,000 now stand to have benefited.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, sought further information about how Right to Control is being evaluated. He made an important point, referring me to the fact that “no decision about us should be taken without us”. There are three elements to the independent evaluation; it is quantitative and qualitative, and there is a cost/ benefit analysis. The views and experiences of staff involved in the implementation and delivery of Right to Control will be taken into account, as will those of providers, customers and their carers, and, of course, disabled people’s user-led organisations. So everybody involved will be properly consulted as the evaluation continues.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, also asked about potential conflict between different benefits that someone might be entitled to, and their operation within Right to Control. It is worth making the simple but important point that Right to Control is about services and not benefits. On Access to Work in particular, this is currently part of Right to Control within trailblazing areas, and we will consider the future of Access to Work and Right to Control together.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, raised concerns around the impact of changes in structure in the department and the local authorities, and their effect on the delivery of Right to Control. While it is correct that there have been some inevitable changes in staff in local authorities and the DWP, some staff have also been working on Right to Control throughout. We have tried to ensure that there is best practice and learning both when people are replaced and between the different trailblazing areas. In the same vein, the noble Lord, Lord Low, asked about joined-up working and the efforts we will make to break down some of the institutional barriers. I can confirm that officials in the DWP are in regular contact with their counterparts in other government departments and that they have also facilitated the delivery of events for practitioners from all funding streams where learning and good practice regarding the delivery of Right to Control can be shared.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, also asked about the level of control that people can have over their support. People can choose different degrees of control. For example, they might choose to continue to allow the public authority to arrange support on their behalf, whether it is an existing or a different service. They might choose to receive a direct payment or might prefer, as some people surely would, a mixed approach, with some funding taken as a direct payment while continuing to use some services arranged by the authority.
My noble friend Lord Addington asked whether any local authorities act as control sites for the purposes of evaluation. I can tell him that seven local authorities have agreed to be matched as comparison sites for the trailblazers. The outcomes of deserving people and their Right to Control trailblazer areas will be compared with a group of disabled people who are eligible for services included in the Right to Control pilot scheme but who do not live in the trailblazer areas. These individuals will be drawn from the matched comparison areas that have been selected because they are similar to the trailblazer areas. That information will be used when considering the final decision along with the formal evaluation.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, asked whether I would meet disabled people’s organisations to discuss choice and control more generally. Of course, I would be delighted to do so and I am sure that my honourable friend Esther McVeigh, who is the Minister responsible for disabled people, is in regular contact. I would happily join her in meeting representatives of organisations to hear more from them and to see what more we can do. As I said at the beginning, the principle of Right to Control is one that we can support, and I hope to see an extension of the pilots and to receive a full and comprehensive evaluation of something that might be part of the future. On the basis that I have addressed all the points raised, I beg to move.
Future of Specialist Disability Employment
Lord Addington Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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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.
Occupational Health Services
Lord Addington Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, I share the noble Lord’s concern about having adequate physiotherapy services. We are making quite a lot of strides in the combination of helping people to stay in work and getting them back to work and good health. There have been a lot of pilots, which I could go through if there were time. A lot of work has been done on this and it is right at the forefront of our concerns. We will be trying to optimise the position as we look at our response to the sickness absence review.
Lord Addington
My Lords, my noble friend spoke about the link between the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions. Will he ask the Department of Health to make sure that if somebody has a soft tissue injury, which is usually what we are talking about, not only are they allowed to see a person who is qualified to assist them with it—usually a physiotherapist—but they are encouraged to do the exercises they will be given? If you think that treating any injury and stopping it becoming chronic can be done by somebody prodding you once a week, you are mistaken.
Lord Freud
I will not talk about the prodding too much, my Lords, although we get plenty of that here. One of the most valuable developments has been the self-referral process. There has been a lot of experimentation and piloting in relation to self-referral to physiotherapy and it has all been found to be very valuable. Patients have been empowered and highly satisfied with the results, with a lower level of work absence. The service provision has reduced costs and has substantially reduced the quantity of medicines prescribed as a direct result.
Welfare Reform Bill
Lord Addington Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Addington
The amendment on which mine is the lead name also refers to the autistic spectrum. When the noble Baroness is in the Chamber with us, I always feel as though you are definitely on the end of the passing movement, as opposed to being the play-maker. The noble Baroness knows exactly what she is talking about. At my conference, someone who was talking in a meeting about autism said, “You must understand that autism is a three-dimensional spectrum”. Does that phrase not start to explain why the diversity of people and their reactions are incredibly difficult to understand and always will be? I wish I had thought of that expression myself. The great diversity of needs and different types of behaviour mean that you must have some specific training.
When I was approached to put down this amendment, I had a conversation with the NAS. I want to use it as an example of the fact that you always need a certain degree of knowledge to make this type of assessment. I remember that, in years gone by, when the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, spoke for the then Government, our exchanges on the subject of the initial interview process went on and on and developed almost into a ritual dance. “Can we have specific knowledge?”, we would ask the Government. “No, but we will give them lots of training”, they would reply. We have got better, because we always do, but it remains the case that unless you have someone who actually understands the condition which they are assessing and reporting on, they will make mistakes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has already pointed out that mistakes cost “blood and gold” for everybody concerned. You burn up time; you burn up money; you cause suffering. Getting more expertise into assessment, either by taking a better history, or by making sure you have the right person there at the right time, will make life a lot easier and will probably save money in the long term or, indeed, in the medium term. The Minister has been moving forward, although he is pushing water uphill with certain concerns here. I stress that I am looking for clarification on where he is moving to and his thoughts on where this expertise is going to be dragged in. If you have a problem, empower people to say that there is a problem and that someone who understands it needs to be brought in. If you can do that, you will take huge steps forward. You will not get it right all the time but you will get it right more often.
If the Minister can give us some encouragement and some firm guidelines about what is going to happen to encourage people to get it right—not just to get the numbers through—I will be a very much happier man at the end of this.
Lord Touhig
My Lords, I do not intend to detain the House long, because Amendments 50B, 50C and 50D were debated at some length in Committee. I attempted to withdraw Amendment 50A yesterday, but the gremlins crept in and the only thing that has been withdrawn is my name—the amendment still appears on the Marshalled List.
With Amendment 50B, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has once again made a very powerful case in support of the need for properly trained assessors. In particular, all assessors should have an understanding of and training in autism if they are to recognise and understand the complex cases they will have to deal with. It has been said a number of times—I make no apology for repeating it here, because it is important—that when you have seen one person with autism, you have seen one person with autism. This is why the training is so important. A knowledge of autism and possessing the right skills to assess the needs of an autistic person are essential in making any decision about the appropriate level of financial support that that person might need. I believe that the Minister accepts this point of view.
Following the Committee stage, a number of other noble Lords and I had a very useful meeting with the Minister and his colleague Maria Miller MP, and we are grateful for that opportunity to exchange views in a less formal situation. One point from that discussion, which was touched on today by the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, did concern me—the point about the qualifications of the person carrying out the initial assessment. One of the Minister’s officials told us at that meeting that the initial assessments would be carried out by an occupational therapist. Will this be the case? That seems a very narrow skill base from which to draw the expertise for any kind of wider assessment, and it leaves me, for one, with the impression that the assessment is aimed primarily at getting people into work and not at trying to understand and support them if they are not able to work. Such a situation would fly in the face of the well-argued case that assessors should have specific training in all mental, intellectual and cognitive disorders, as advocated by the amendment. I hope the Minister can allay my fears.
I turn to Amendments 50C and 50D, in my name and that of my noble friends Lady Healy of Primrose Hill and Lord Wigley. The amendments concern face-to-face assessment and would, if accepted, exempt certain categories of people from the process of continuous reassessment where sufficient medical and other expert evidence existed to demonstrate that their condition would not improve. I return again to my concerns about people with autism. Autism can be summed up in this way: autism is for life. Any reassessment must accept this fact before progress can be made. The Minister made it clear, at Second Reading and in Committee, that the Government did not believe that a face-to-face assessment would be the right course to follow in all cases.
At our meeting, both the Minister and his colleague, Maria Miller MP, gave a strong impression that the Government would support a tiered approach to assessment in such cases, as advocated by the National Autistic Society and others. In practice, this tiered approach would allow for written assessment from professionals to be considered and a decision to be made, on that basis, about whether a face-to-face assessment was appropriate or necessary. I will not test the patience of the House any longer. I look forward to the Minister’s response and hope he will have something positive to say about a tiered assessment.