Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

The Minister must go further than general reporting, which will not identify very complicated disability issues. He needs to set a challenge across government to report accurately on the barriers faced by millions of disabled people who want nothing more than a worthwhile occupation, personal status and a financial reward for working. If the Minister does not accept my arguments, I hope that he can present this House with a credible alternative strategy and not simply tell us again that it will be reported generally and will be highlighted in a White Paper. I am afraid that that generic approach will not work for disabled people—we simply do not fit the generic lexicon. I beg to move.

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment, which my noble friend Lady Campbell moved with great eloquence. After her speech, there is not really a lot that I can add but I will summarise the points that I want to make.

The Conservative Party manifesto set this ambitious aim to halve the disability employment gap by 2020. As we have heard from my noble friend Lady Campbell, this gap has been intractable over many years. It is quite structural and it will not be easy to reduce it substantially, let alone halve it. There is a real concern that, unless the Government actively measure, and are required to report regularly on, progress towards attaining this goal, it may not be achieved and a crucial opportunity to deliver on disability employment will be lost. This is a wonderful opportunity. The Government are much to be congratulated on setting this goal but it will take a lot of work to achieve it. Having targets specific to this objective and reporting regularly on them will be necessary if we are to monitor the progress desired and to take remedial action if required.

There are three other specific reasons why I think we should support the amendment. The first is simply consistency of approach. The Bill introduces reporting requirements on the Government’s pledges to achieve full employment and fund 3 million new apprenticeships but there is no similar reporting requirement on halving the disability employment gap. So simply from the point of view of consistency of approach, it would seem to make sense to have a specific reporting requirement for this objective as well.

Secondly, disability employment presents very specific problems which are not well understood across government, and that is part of the reason why the employment gap has proved so intractable over so many years. The DWP is getting on top of it but I do not think the same can be said of government departments generally. It would provide a departmental and cross-governmental focus on disability employment and reducing the disability employment gap, and help to embed this in the organisational culture, if there were specific reporting requirements in relation to this.

Thirdly, simply from the point of view of targeting support, introducing clear reporting on how many disabled people are in employment, separate from scrutiny of other employment statistics, will allow better analysis of how current support arrangements are working and help the Government to better target resources and support where they are most needed. It will also enable data to be disaggregated by such things as learning disabilities, autism, mental health problems, visual impairment, deafness and hearing problems—things such as are mentioned in the amendment.

On all these grounds—consistency of approach, providing an incentive for action across government and targeting support where it is most needed—my noble friend Lady Campbell has made a very strong case for the amendment, and I wholeheartedly support it.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support this amendment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, has said, in Committee, the Minister said that the amendment is not necessary because a report on progress will be included in the annual report on full employment. However, my concern is that although the Government are very good at proposing big ideas and related targets, they seldom back them up with clear and unambiguous plans as to how they will achieve them. Halving the disability employment gap is a prime example of this.

Amendment 1 will guarantee that the Government must report to Parliament on progress and sets out clearly the form that this reporting should take. It will enable proper public and parliamentary scrutiny, and will provide consistent and thorough data which will give the Government the information that they need to measure the impact and progress of their policies, year on year.

I know from a number of my disabled friends of the enormous barriers that they have to climb through in trying to find a job: being invited to interviews just to ensure that employers can tick a “disability” box; losing out, time and again, to candidates far less qualified than they are to do the job for which they are being interviewed; receiving rejection letters giving reasons for their rejection that simply do not add up; and the heartache of knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, that the real reason they did not get the job is simply because they are disabled. This is all because employers, particularly SMEs, do not understand that somebody who is blind can be every bit as good as, if not better than—at IT, for example—somebody who is able to see properly. These employers running small companies have no idea of the specialist equipment that is available to disabled people. So although they are generally sympathetic, they are just not willing to take a step into the unknown by employing disabled people.

I am very grateful to the Minister that in his letter following Committee stage he answered the questions I had posed to him about the steps the Government were taking to support more disabled people into work. At the moment, the Bill is quite silent on that. I look forward to seeing what the White Paper will say on how the Government plan to improve support for disabled people. However, to significantly close the employment gap, we need to begin now and to raise the game of all government departments on meeting the target. This can be achieved only by giving the exercise a much higher priority.

At a time when so much is happening, a separate reporting amendment will provide cross-governmental focus on the laudable aim of halving the disability employment gap. Placing this requirement in the Bill will demonstrate the commitment the Government have made to improve the employment rate for disabled people. It will also clearly demonstrate to Parliament and the public the priority and importance that the Government place on this goal and ensure efforts to deliver it.