Life Chances Strategy

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on securing this important debate. I thank him very much for the opportunity it gives me to put on record how heartened I was by the Prime Minister’s speech on life chances, to which other noble Lords have already referred. I particularly welcome the Prime Minister’s declaration that we need to think big, opening ourselves up to new thinking.

As someone with a severe disability, I would encourage those developing the strategy not just to include disabled people within it but also to think big about disability, especially on how we challenge the enduring, institutional prejudice which all too often makes disabled people victims of low expectations—both society’s and their own. In short, the strategy needs to be inclusive, because, as we all know, disability remains a major cause of disadvantage. An effective life chances strategy therefore has to include measures for how the life chances of the UK’s 11 million disabled people, particularly younger disabled people, can be improved.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Prime Minister that seeing through our long-term plan is not optional, because, for me, reducing the deficit is about protecting the long-term sustainability of the support on which many disabled people’s life chances depend. I think of schemes such as Access to Work, on which the Government currently spend around £100 million a year and through which approaching 40,000 disabled people are now helped through, for example, payments towards equipment needed at work. I welcome the fact that the recent spending review awarded a real-terms increase over the course of this Parliament to 25,000 new customers—almost 10,000 of them in the 18 to 34 age group.

It is that age group that I am particularly interested in because they are the ones who need to be helped to break the attitudinal glass ceiling which frequently holds them back. So often, disability is seen as synonymous with dependence; I dream of a time when, for those disabled people with the intellectual aptitude and potential, disability is seen as synonymous with excellence. Yes, Access to Work is crucial in the workplace, but so is thinking big on how we help ensure that talented young disabled graduates can take the practical steps necessary to live close enough to work and to get to work.

So my questions, not so much for my noble friend the Minister but for those drafting the life chances strategy, include: will the strategy include a package of cost-effective measures to empower disabled graduates to realise their professional and earning potential and their contribution to the economy and society? Will it identify non-workplace related barriers, such as parking outside their place of work in central London—an issue that local authorities could do so much to address?

The Prime Minister rightly argued that,

“children thrive on high expectations: it is how they grow in school and beyond”.

Talented disabled children are no different, but they need to be identified early on so that they can be given support and encouragement to excel as early as possible.

The Prime Minister touched on the important issue of equality when he said that a part of the strategy,

“must be to make opportunity more equal”.

But for that to happen, life chances must mean that babies, non-disabled and disabled, are given an equal opportunity, an equal chance to live. I ask my noble friend the Minister to read Dominic Lawson’s powerful article in Monday’s Daily Mail about his daughter who has Down’s syndrome and to urge her colleagues, who are currently considering whether to make it even easier for children with Down’s to be denied the chance to live, to read his article as well.