Oral Answers to Questions Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDavid Cairns
Main Page: David Cairns (Labour - Inverclyde)Department Debates - View all David Cairns's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(13 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend is absolutely right. One of the central goals of our work over the next 12 to 18 months is to start a process of ensuring that far more people with long-term health problems and disabilities have the opportunity to get into the workplace. We will take whatever steps are necessary, primarily through Jobcentre Plus, to ensure that those people are handled effectively, and are steered to the right support through the Work programme. The aim is to achieve a goal that we all want, which is to allow as many of them as possible to find jobs.
The Minister is aware that a map of where incapacity benefit is most taken up would look like a map of Britain’s industrial heritage. In former shipbuilding constituencies such as mine, people do genuinely have long-term incapacity, which is associated with the work that they did. He will agree, of course, that that does not mean that they cannot work ever again. Is he absolutely fixed on what the question actually asks? It asks what support the Government can give to help people on incapacity benefit to move to work. I would like to hear him outline that support, rather than talking about the stick of benefit cuts.
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I am sure that he would agree that one of the great failings of the past 13 years has been the fact that we have consistently had 2.5 million people on incapacity benefit, and the previous Government did absolutely nothing to help them to get back into work, which is a terrible tragedy and a huge waste. We intend to change that. The Work programme will deliver tailored, specialised support for those people—support that is relevant to them, and designed not in Whitehall but by the people working with them on the front line. We intend to make a difference to those people in a way that the previous Government did not.