Public Services: Workforce (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, and her Select Committee on producing the report. Its carefully considered, cross-party conclusions and recommendations surely highlight both the added value which your Lordships’ House brings to the UK’s legislative process and how much would be lost by its abolition.

Time does not allow me to address all 16 recommendations, so I shall focus on seven of them from the perspective of a person with lived experience of disability, as a service user, and as the chair of two commissions—first, the excellent Centre for Social Justice’s disability commission, which reported in 2021, and, more recently, the Institute of Directors’ commission on harnessing diverse talent for success—which recently produced separate but complementary business and policy white papers, both of which are available in the Library.

My noble friend the Minister may not have seen the white papers—I would be delighted to share them with her—but I hope that she would agree with the thrust of our conclusions, perhaps even with all our recommendations, which echo many of the points we are discussing today. Clearly, a powerful precedent has been set in the Government’s positive response to the report—but I must not get carried away. Perhaps the director-general of the IoD, Jonathan Geldart, who chose me deliberately as a person with lived experience as the IoD’s disability commission’s chair, had a premonition of what was in the report. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, thanked the clerks of the Select Committee and her advisers for their help; I know that I was no less reliant on the IoD’s excellent senior policy adviser, Alexandra Hall-Chen.

I welcome this report’s focus on workforce data. This is not woke—this is pure common sense. Data underpins organisational success, whether in the public, private or voluntary sector. I urge the Government to facilitate transparent and consistent workforce data through mandatory reporting. Tom Pursglove, the new Minister for Disabled People in the other place, has recently launched an outline disability action plan. What gets measured gets done, so data will be essential to measurable, credible progress towards equality of opportunity.

I also welcome the report’s emphasis on the importance of engaging with service users and people with lived experience so that—and I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, will forgive me for paraphrasing—an appreciation of such an invaluable resource is embedded within the culture of both service development and delivery. Crucially, as the report rightly makes clear, engagement must be meaningful.

I suspect that my noble friend the Minister, as a former business leader herself, completely gets this. That is also why I imagine she will understand at least the thinking behind the report’s recommendations on partnership with service users and on putting that into practice through the delivery of training and the co-production of strategies—for example, those relating to children’s and family services. I would go one step further. If Tom Pursglove wants to ensure that the disability action plan does not simply become another version of the widely derided National Disability Strategy, he could make a commitment to co-production with disabled people. That would be a very powerful message of equality and respect to send to disabled people, who too often are, sadly, shown neither by the DWP.

I conclude by welcoming the report’s final recommendation on the importance of gathering, promoting and cascading best practice on the development of leadership pipelines. Your Lordships’ House has played a pivotal role in securing anti-discrimination legislation, but disabled people and disabled young people who have benefited—for example, by going through mainstream education—now need to be able to excel so that they can realise their potential and on merit reach the top. The Government have a crucial role in facilitating this.

I thank the Public Services Committee for producing the report, and I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s response.