Remploy

Baroness Sharples Excerpts

Wednesday 5th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we are aiming to support disabled people in employment, and we have to do that in the most cost-effective way that we can find. There is a remarkable difference emerging between the support to get disabled people into mainstream employment, which, when Remploy Employment Services does it, costs £3,600 a time on a one-off basis—the company is now getting 20,000 people in a year—and the cost of more than £25,000, year on year on year, to keep them employed in the factory services.

[Baroness Sharples]

Will the Minister tell us what Remploy produces now? I am lucky; I have a torn ligament and I have a super belt for it that came from Remploy.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, Remploy has about 54 different factory outlets doing various things, including packaging, logistics and CCTV—a wide variety of endeavours. That is exactly the point: what a Remploy factory operation needs to be successful is to be run as a profitable entrepreneurial unit. At the moment many of them are loss-making, and indeed across the piece only 50 per cent of people are doing productive work.