Supporting Disabled People to Work

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Justin Tomlinson

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

Our support for people with disability benefits is now at £55 billion, up £10 billion in real terms since 2010. That is a record high. The amount that we are spending on employment support for those with disabilities is showing a real-terms increase following the spending review and will continue to do so.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I hope that the Minister would agree that this is a bit of a wake-up call, but what the Government have been doing is not all bad and I welcome some of the moves that are happening. As chair of the Westminster Commission on Autism, may I offer more of a partnership? The neuro-diverse community and people on the autism spectrum are differently abled. We have some wonderful organisations such as AchieveAbility and Genius Within that are going out looking for people who are a bit quirky in their thinking, who think differently. The gig economy and some of the techy areas are looking for these people. They are very valuable assets and we need to encourage them. Will the Minister meet some of these people, whom I can introduce him to?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who has done a huge amount of work in this area. These are the sorts of points that were picked up in the Maynard review. We have worked very closely with a lot of the leading autism charities. They rewrote the training guidance for our frontline staff and fed into the autism toolkit within jobcentres. He is absolutely right: if employers are savvy and look at their skills gaps so that they can match them to the huge amount of talent and potential of people with autism, they will benefit. That is the key message to employers. We are not looking for favours; we are looking for a win-win for the disabled individual and the business.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Justin Tomlinson

Monday 11th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

My hon. Friend has been campaigning on this issue for some time, using his first-hand experience. We are acutely aware of the issue, and I would be happy to meet him to discuss further opportunities.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I do not want to upset anybody on the Labour Front Bench by showing passion and anger about the Government’s failure to tackle unscrupulous employers who give no guarantee of employment, no contract, no certainty and no pension—nothing but zero-hours contracts, with people being hired from agencies—but when will the Government take on these rotten employers?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Justin Tomlinson

Monday 9th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

I gave a crystal clear, comprehensive response in the Westminster Hall debate, and I am sorry that the hon. Lady was obviously somewhat distracted. It is crystal clear that the individual in that film, who acted disgracefully, has rightly been removed. Progress in training and policies is being reviewed weekly. We have zero tolerance of such behaviour.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

10. What steps he is taking to help people with autism find work.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Disabled People (Justin Tomlinson)]

Working with the Autism Alliance, we are training a network of over 1,000 autism leads in Jobcentre Plus and developing an autism passport to record condition details and reasonable adjustments. In addition, Access to Work now has a hidden impairments specialist team to support people better, including those on the autistic spectrum.

[Mr Sheerman]

Will the Minister wake up and shake up his Department, because autistic people have a great deal of talent that gets wasted in this country? Only 15% of children on the autism scale end up working in a full-time job, so is it not about time that we took this seriously? I am a member of the newly formed Autism Commission, and we will help the Government, on a cross-party basis. Let us wake up to this tremendous potential, which is unexploited.

Under-occupancy Penalty

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Justin Tomlinson

Thursday 28th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

That is right. The people in these cases are in receipt of payment, which shows that discretionary housing payments work. It shows that, through flexibility, a co-ordinated approach is possible with the police, social services, medical professionals and other agencies.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Minister wake up? This is a miserable, vindictive little policy and one that, with the ability of housing associations to sell off homes, ducks the real question, which is that we are not building appropriate housing for the people in this country. This is a diversion; get on with the real job.

[Justin Tomlinson]

That is why our £8 billion programme will deliver a further 400,000 affordable housing starts during this Parliament—a stark contrast to the loss of 400,000 homes under the last Labour Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Justin Tomlinson

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

I am aware of the very successful event my hon. Friend organised. I congratulate him on the quality of the speakers he secured—it certainly shows that he is no apprentice. We need employers to see that recruiting and retaining disabled people should be the norm, and that disabled people have a great deal to offer in the workplace. Events such as the Selby summit play a crucial part in our drive to get employers involved.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the Minister agree that an almost hidden element of disability is autism? It is a barrier to so many people gaining employment and a full and confident life.

[Justin Tomlinson]

I have met stakeholder groups, and that message has been made very clear to me. In fact, 42% of disabled people looking for work say that the biggest barrier they face is the attitude of their employer. Through such campaigns as Disability Confident, we hope to inspire more businesses to take on more people with disabilities. We rejoice in the fact that, over the past 12 months, an extra 238,000 disabled people were in work.

National Citizen Service

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Justin Tomlinson

Wednesday 16th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Sheerman]

As the hon. Gentleman said, he works well with me and I hope he can work with me on the much more ambitious programme that I am going to talk about today. Nothing I am going to say today is negative about the existing National Citizen Service programme, but I want to finish my analysis. I believe that we have become a very different country. More and more people are living in cities and towns, with fewer people living in the countryside. There are real problems with the mobility of young people—getting off their estates, travelling, and getting away from their sometimes troubled environments.

I would like to see an open discussion about the possibility of having a much more powerful National Citizen Service, because we are in a time when democracy is under threat. When I asked that particular question of the Prime Minister, the other thing I said was that, 10 days before, only 36% of people voted in the European elections and even fewer voted in the local elections. Interestingly, if we look at Europe, even countries that are so keen on getting democracy had levels of involvement of 19%.

It is worrying for Europe and for our country that there is a disengagement from politics. All of us, when we are out canvassing, or in different parts of the country—in my case, trying to persuade the people of Scotland to stay in the Union—hear too often that the perception is that democracy does not make any difference because we are all the same. I think we need citizenship, because it will get to the root of that kind of attitude.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has my absolute support for his passion on the subject, and I have seen the complete transformation of young people who engage in the NCS programme. They all go on to become constructive and proud members of our local communities.

[Mr Sheerman]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I shall point us to the direction I want to go in. There is complacency about our democracy. From studying history, we know that when we become complacent about our history and learning its lessons, problems emerge—extremist politics of various kinds. If there is a vacuum, there is a danger, historically, that something will fill it.

Perhaps we do not have anything like the extremes of left or right that we had in the Europe in the 1930s, which Michael Oakeshott wrote so vividly about at that time, but we have a serious problem of engagement, and we also have much higher migration than we used to. It is true—it would be nonsense for Opposition Members to deny and not address this fact—that many people come to this country. They want to learn about the country, be good citizens and be absorbed into the culture of this country, and they get very few opportunities to learn.