Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 1 and 42. I will not repeat what I said in Committee or what has already been said today. However, I want to emphasise why the reporting duty needs to report on different groups, particularly people with learning disabilities, people with autism and people with mental health problems. The Work Programme and Work Choice just have not worked for people with learning disabilities. The disability employment gap is approaching 70% for people who would like to work but cannot find work and need specialist support to enable them to do that. That is why we need to look specifically and carefully at some groups quite separately from each other. Therefore, I support these amendments.

[Baroness Afshar (CB)]

My Lords, I support the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. In the case of minorities, mental disability is regarded as a dishonour or as a great failure for the family, and only within the formal context of education, and at early stages, is it possible to intervene. Furthermore, because the intervention adjusts a young person to the requirements of the British community, with which the minority communities are not very familiar, it is essential to bring in these potential talents by catching them early and helping them.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. I thank the Minister for meeting some of us last week to talk about why we felt that this amendment was so important. I shall outline the four key themes from my perspective. I agree that we need consistency of approach, as outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Low. We need to monitor and evaluate progress on the target. This is the Government’s target and it is laudable and very welcome. However, do they really not want to measure it and evaluate improvement? One could perhaps think that the Government do not want to measure progress towards the target, and consider that it is easier to pick off low-hanging fruit than to assess the great variations in disability and tackle those, so that more people enter employment. As has already been said, this measure is not costly and will certainly help to identify the support that employers need to help people with disabilities.