Disability History Month

Anna Dixon Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Stephen Timms]

It was a very good event. I made some rather poor efforts to address the group in British Sign Language—my first attempt. I know that she will be pleased—I am sure the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Alison Griffiths) will be as well—to know that we are committed to supporting the British Sign Language advisory board, which was set up in the wake of Rosie Cooper’s British Sign Language Act 2022. It is the UK Government’s first dual-language board focusing on key issues that affect deaf people. We are committed to promoting and supporting British Sign Language and we will shortly be publishing the 2023-24 British Sign Language annual report.

I am pleased to join my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North in congratulating the Royal School for the Deaf Derby on the accolades that it has received from Ofsted, and I very much agree with the important points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) about the importance of what is being provided to ensure that people’s hearing is well looked after and supported.

I need to work closely with ministerial colleagues and with other Departments right across Government to ensure that disabled people get the support they need to overcome the daily barriers that they face. The commitment that I am setting out today on behalf of the Government needs to be a whole of Government endeavour, so I was very pleased about and grateful for what Members said in the debate about my announcement last week of a lead Minister for disability in every Department to represent the interests of disabled people and to champion disability inclusion and accessibility in their Department. I will chair regular meetings with the members of that group and encourage them to engage directly with disabled people and their representative organisations as they work on their departmental priorities. I am looking forward to the group’s first meeting next week, and I can give my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock the assurance that she is looking for about our shared aims and what that group will be working towards.

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

It is fantastic to hear about all that the Government are doing on disability. My right hon. Friend the Minister will know that many disabled people rely on family and friends to provide care and support to enable them to have a full life—to participate in work, school and other things that they enjoy—so will he reassure me and others that, in taking a cross-departmental approach to disability, he will be considering the important role of family carers?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her point and can certainly give her the assurance that she seeks. As she knows, in the Budget we made an important improvement to the arrangements for carer’s allowance through the commitment that the earnings threshold for carer’s allowance will be increased to 16 hours a week at the national living wage rate. That will be a permanent link with the national living wage and, we hope, will overcome the problem that a lot of carers have run into over the last few years, whereby they get a bit of a pay rise that tips them above the threshold and therefore inadvertently receive an overpayment of carer’s allowance. We hope that the change will help, and we know that the increase itself will bring about 60,000 more family carers into eligibility for carer’s allowance.

As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in the Budget, we will also be looking at the possibility of a new taper arrangement for carer’s allowance, in order to move away from the current cliff edge, which has always been there. That will require quite substantial IT development; it will not be ready overnight, but I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Anna Dixon) will agree that it is quite a promising idea to improve support for unpaid carers in the future.

My focus is primarily on domestic disability policy, but I also oversee UK implementation of the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and represent domestic disability-related policy on international platforms, so in October I attended the first ever G7 disability inclusion summit, which was hosted by the Italian presidency and held just outside Assisi, where I and my G7 counterparts and Ministers from several other countries all signed up to the Solfagnano charter. That sets out a collective agreement to advance work in eight key areas, among which is:

“Inclusion as a priority issue in the political agenda of all countries”.

It is a useful document, focusing specifically on disability inclusion all the way through. We have also worked to extend the UN convention to a number of UK overseas territories. We recently extended the treaty to Bermuda—the first British overseas territory to which it has been extended. I can confirm that we are committed to protecting and promoting the rights of disabled people around the world as well as in the UK.

A great perk of my job was to attend the Paralympic games in Paris in August. The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) was right to draw attention to the huge improvement that was the London 2012 Paralympic games, which took the Paralympics movement to a new level. I visited the athletes’ village in August, and it was most interesting to see how it had been laid out to be accessible to everybody. There were ramps everywhere and electrical devices at the bottom of every slope that people could clip on to their wheelchair to help them up it. It is worth making the point that in those games, we came second in the medals table, ahead of the United States and all the other European countries and behind only China. The games attracted unprecedented support and audiences, with the venues full of enthusiastic —and, I must say, highly partisan—French audiences. It was good to hear everybody highlighting the importance of UK leadership in not just starting the games at Stoke Mandeville, but hosting the groundbreaking 2012 games. The unique contribution of Channel 4 in 2012, and ever since, has clearly been deeply appreciated around the world in the Paralympics movement.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich was absolutely right to draw attention to the importance of disabled people being able to be physically active. There is a problem in the benefits system, because too often people fear that being physically active could lead to them losing their benefits. We need to address that challenge of reforming the system in our Green Paper, when it is published in the spring.

Disability History Month reminds us that progress is a shared endeavour. Working together across Government, across the House and with the wider community, we can build a society in which everyone can participate fully and equally. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) rightly raised the question of the extent to which I am working with Ministers in Northern Ireland, in Scotland and in Wales. I met Minister Lyons from Northern Ireland when he came to London, and the Minister for Transformation, my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western), also met him on his recent visit to Northern Ireland. The hon. Member for Strangford is right to underline the importance of us working together across the United Kingdom on these priorities.

Let us honour the courage and contributions of disabled people, past and present, by reaffirming our commitment to not just a month of reflection, but a permanent springboard for lasting change and a more inclusive future.