Neurodivergent People: Employment

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ely and East Cambridgeshire (Charlotte Cane) on securing this incredibly important and well-attended debate.

In my years of campaigning for disability rights, I have found that people are very interested in the difference between the medical system and the social system. The medical model sees people as having an impairment, whereas the social model sees the barriers as the disabling factor to people’s lives. One of the things that I have found so fascinating, inspiring and encouraging about this debate is that so many colleagues have identified that it is the very barriers that are disabling to people who are neurodivergent.

We started the debate with a very eager intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance), who made the strong point that this issue starts in schools. I know that he is tabling a ten-minute rule Bill tomorrow to call for universal screening in schools. I hope that the Government take that Bill very seriously. I put on record my admiration for my hon. Friend for speaking with such courage about his own experience of growing up with dyslexia, and for inspiring people young and old by doing so. I also put on record my admiration for the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean) for talking about his experiences.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke) spoke passionately about the SEND system. My own area of Hertfordshire is also in the f40—the 40 worst funded councils for special educational needs. We see the barriers that that poses to young people, who have huge potential but cannot reach it because there is not the support in place to help them tackle those barriers.

Throughout the debate we have heard from hon. Members from a number of political parties about the work of their local colleges, self-employment initiatives, job centres, businesses and so many other places that are actively going above and beyond to tackle those disabling barriers. It was wonderful to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) about Foxes hotel in Minehead, which is regarded as the Oxbridge of employing people with neurodiversity.

If one thing that has come out from all hon. Members’ contributions, it is that the Access to Work scheme is anything but; it could be considered the “barriers to work” scheme by many people. The phones and the forms themselves are barriers, but delays are also a huge problem. In answer to a written parliamentary question that I tabled a few months ago, it was revealed that one person had waited 393 days—more than a year—for a response to an Access to Work application. How on earth will an individual get into a job or stay in their job, and how on earth can an employer offer a job with confidence, if it takes that long for the Access to Work scheme to work? I hope that the Minister will answer that question in his response to the debate.

We often hear the saying, “All politics is personal,” and that is more relevant to this debate than to many others. I imagine that many of us who have spoken in or attended the debate are here because our loved ones—our friends, family or relatives—our neighbours, or perhaps we ourselves have experienced neurodiversity. Given the age of many of us in this room, it is possible that some grew up in an age in which they were told that they were stupid and they grew up with the stigma, and they are now form-phobic, because they are still struggling with what they were told.

I hope that what people young and old will have taken from the debate is that we in this House consider those people to have superpowers. We recognise that neurodiversity is about creativity and ingenuity. People see the world in a different way, and their way of looking at the world in a different way actually will help businesses to make different, and better, decisions. On that note, I will finish. There have been a number of questions and suggestions, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Member raises a good point. What we will need to do, and what we are committed to doing, is to publish the outcomes from all 42 different programmes so that everybody can see how they are getting on. I am sure that some areas will do better than others, and where there is a problem, we will be able to provide additional support.

[Daisy Cooper]

We would all welcome a framework for monitoring the outcomes and the results, but we have heard today that people face many barriers in trying to access these kinds of schemes. Will the Government consider requiring service level agreements, so that when people apply to the schemes or engage with them, they know what they are going to get, how they are going to get it, and how quickly they are going to get it?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I need to correct myself: there are 47 areas, rather than 42. It will be for each local area to work out how best to engage people and establish the kind of confidence that is needed. I hope Members will watch closely what happens with Connect to Work, because it is a big opportunity.

A number of Members understandably raised Access to Work. There are problems with Access to Work, reflecting the substantial surge in demand for the scheme over the years—I think last year it went up by 30%, and I think it went up by a larger proportion in the year before and the year before that. We have put well over 100 extra staff on to administering the scheme, to try to get on top of the growing delays and waiting lists, but they have continued to grow, so in the “Pathway to Work” Green Paper, published in March, we consulted on the reform of Access to Work. How can we do a better job, hopefully supporting a larger number of people, and certainly without the lengthy delays that people are suffering at the moment? We have set up a collaboration committee, which includes representatives of disabled people’s organisations, to work with us on the proposals. We are currently working on the consultation responses with that committee, and I look forward to bringing forward proposals for reform before too long.

Tailored support is crucial for young people. There are nearly a million people not in education, work or training, which is more than one in eight of all young people. A significant number of them are almost certainly neurodivergent. Our “Get Britain Working” plan includes the new youth guarantee for 18 to 21-year-olds, to ensure that young people can access quality training, apprenticeships or help to find work, and eight trailblazers are testing localised approaches to support young people, including neurodivergent young people who are likely to face additional barriers and who need further support.

A number of Members rightly reminded us of the crucial role of employers in all this, and we heard some great examples of employers committed to providing support for neurodivergent employees. The Government have a range of support in place for that. My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) was absolutely right to make the point that employers can find it difficult to know what they are supposed to do. It can be quite nerve-racking for conscientious employers who want to do the right thing. Our digital offer is support with employee health and disability, and tailored guidance on supporting employees, including how to effectively support those who are neurodivergent or have learning disabilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) rightly highlighted the importance of that support.

I hope we are going to see more job carving, whereby an employer takes an existing role and reshapes it to suit the skills of a particular individual. One example that the Department knows of is a firm that had three vacancies for legal secretaries. It wanted to address the under-representation of disabled and neurodivergent people in its workforce, so it created a new support role across the team for tasks that did not require legal expertise, and that role was filled by an applicant with autism. That person did a great job, and other team members said afterwards said that the initiative made them want to stay with the firm. There is an important point here about the support from employees generally for doing the right thing for neurodivergent employees and would-be employees.

The disability confidence scheme that the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies), referred to encourages employers to create disability inclusive workplaces. I think we can improve it. We need to make the criteria for accreditation more robust, and the Department has been consulting a wide range of stakeholders, organisations and individuals on ideas over the summer. Look out for more on that over the coming months.

In our ambitious programmes of strategic reform—the “Get Britain Working” White Paper, the “Pathways to Work” consultation, the “Keep Britain Working” review and the neurodiversity panel—we are starting to set a new course. We are keen to continue to work across Government—a point rightly raised—as when we jointly provided evidence to the House of Lords special inquiry Committee on the Autism Act 2009 earlier in the year. We all have a part to play—every Department of Government—and I look forward to seeing the report and the recommendations from that Committee on the development of a new strategy later this year.

This subject matters to every single neurodivergent person who has been denied the opportunity to thrive and achieve their best in the past—but it also matters to every one of us, to the whole economy and to our whole society. I hope we see substantial progress in the years to come.