Mental Health: Access to Work Support Service

Lord German Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord German]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on giving us an opportunity to air this topic in such an interesting but also practical and informative debate in your Lordships’ House today. I shall take a practical approach to my questioning of the Minister and to some of the issues which have been raised.

The gateway to the mental health support service, now run by Remploy, is the Access to Work scheme, so it is essential that that gateway is not only open but welcoming. The focus must be on achieving a greater number of people passing through that gateway and a much greater understanding of what that portal means.

Looking at the literature around this whole area, I have found that some people will conflate—though they may treat them separately—learning disability and mental health issues. Will the Minister make it absolutely clear whether this mental health support service is for mental health issues or includes people with certain forms of learning disability?

The ONS figures with which we have been provided show us that only some 500 people were helped by the scheme in the first nine months of the past financial year. We are told, again by ONS, that the number of people who have mental health conditions could be in the region of one in six of our people. You would expect the number of people helped to approach that one-in-six figure, but 580 is just 0.2% of the total, so there has not been a huge impetus in the programme as it stood at the beginning of the year to get more people with mental health conditions into the programme.

The 2009 evaluation of the Access to Work programme states:

“AtW does not appear to be widely marketed and awareness of the programme seems to be fairly low”.

Liz Sayce, in her report entitled Disability Employment Support Fit for the Future, puts it more succinctly, saying:

“Access to Work should be transformed from being the best kept secret in Government to being a recognised passport to successful employment, doubling the number of people helped”.

My final question to the Minister, which I shall put to him again at the end but say it early enough to give him time to think about an answer is: if I were to ask this question in 12 months’ time, what would my noble friend view as being a measure of success? Would it be doubling the number of people who are helped? Would that be sufficient or would my noble friend wish to go beyond that aspiration? To achieve that, we need to raise awareness of the programme.

I need to say just a word or two about the other part of Remploy’s work, which is of course the Remploy factories, which have also been the subject of discussion and debate. It was interesting that only 6% of the employees of the Remploy factories have mental health conditions, compared to a quarter of the people to whom Remploy employment services are giving assistance, so we are looking at a different range of people here. Can my noble friend tell us—assuming that some of the 6% will not need to be in the programme because co-operatives, mutuals or employee buyouts may mean that some of those factories will continue—what special measures have been put in place for them? Are they being transferred automatically and directly to the Access to Work programme, and are they being given additional support beyond that which we now see within the programme?

The second issue relates not to the factories but to the broader workforce, and has already been mentioned: promotion and development of the Access to Work programme with employers and the broader workforce. It is all about perception, is it not? The National Health Service produced a figure that about one-half of people with mental health conditions would feel uncomfortable about discussing them with their employers. That is a slight improvement over the past decade, but the improvement has been very slow.

What can the Access to Work programme do to help employers and the workforce in general to understand mental health conditions and how they should be treated as an illness like any other? How can increased promotion to both employers and the workforce in general take place? In the notion of having the portal—the gate—open and accessible, it is crucial that awareness is raised.

Finally, I ask my noble friend: apart from numbers as a measure of success, is there anything that he would like to see in 12 months time about the manner in which the whole Access to Work mental health support service has been carried out?