Dai Havard
Main Page: Dai Havard (Labour - Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney)Department Debates - View all Dai Havard's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Nia Griffith
Will the Minister elaborate on exactly what he will do to help those Remploy workers, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), who are currently unable to access work opportunities? Will he also explain why he did not take up the Welsh Government’s offer to try to put things right? Nobody is pretending that everything was perfectly okay with the way that Remploy was run previously. Nobody is saying that. However, there have been opportunities to create social enterprises, but it seems as though the Government have deliberately turned them down—
Mr Dai Havard (in the Chair)
Order. The intervention is a bit too long. I think the Minister has a grasp of the questions.
Mr Harper
I am grateful, Mr Havard. Let me tackle the point about the Welsh Government’s offer, mentioned by the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Islwyn. The offer was not really an offer. The Welsh Government wanted us to carry on subsidising the factories and to carry on spending a significant amount of money—some £25,000 a head—on a small number of disabled people, which would have been at the expense of the programmes that we were running to support a much larger number of disabled people. If the Welsh Government had said that they had a significant amount of money to put on the table, things may have been different, but they did not. They wanted us to continue to subsidise the factories, which was simply unsustainable. The previous Government knew that. I sat in here and listened to the uncomfortable decisions that Ministers in the previous Government took. They were not comfortable decisions, but they were the right decisions. Those Ministers had the support of my party and me when making those decisions, because they were the right thing to do.
The hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) wanted me to cover the support that we have provided to Remploy employees. We put in place the people help and support package, which has been referred to by a number of Members. It was an £8 million package available for individuals to access for up to 18 months after factory closure, and it included access to a personal caseworker and a personal budget. The caseworkers hold meetings and discussions with employees affected to identify suitable support and opportunities, and to signpost or refer them to appropriate provision.
The hon. Member for Wrexham mentioned three individuals. I spotted a report of his meeting with them in the Daily Post, in which he said:
“I saw three Remploy workers last week who are still unemployed and I met them at the Remploy Agency”.
I am happy for him to correct me if I am wrong, but Remploy tells me that of the three individuals whom the hon. Gentleman met, one is in employment at a local cleaning firm, working in a local educational establishment; one has just received his Security Industry Authority licence and has a job offer at a local company; and one does indeed remain out of work, but he has been on a work placement and work trial, and he received a job offer, which he decided to decline. Two of the three are in work or about to start work, which is positive.