Disabled People: Personal Assistants

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

One issue that I think noble Lords across the House agree on is a suggestion made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. If we want to make sure that we have the right number of workers, we should improve training over here, but there will clearly be a skills gap in this country and therefore we need to look overseas. Sadly, as I said earlier, under the Home Office rules at the moment, individual employers do not count as sponsors. Officials in the department are having conversations with DWP to look at whether that can be rectified, or whether there is a way to find a trusted sponsor.

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, working-age people with disabilities are virtually prisoners in their own homes. We are not talking about improving skills or having conversations. When disability is supposed to be a subject where people are treated as normal citizens who want and can go out to work with sufficient support, we are looking for some answers from the Government about how they can do so. Why are the Government only having conversations, after 12 years?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The Government have been committed to ensuring that there is equality for disabled people, including plenty of initiatives in other sectors—transport, building new homes and offices, and retrofitting—but the issue of personal assistance is a particularly difficult one in the context of social care having been treated as a Cinderella service for years. Some of the initiatives that we are putting in place, such as the proper qualifications and recruitment from overseas, sadly do not yet apply to personal assistants because of the rules. We are looking at those barriers and hopefully will be able to tackle them.