Specialist Disability Employment

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Tuesday 10th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that disabled people have extra costs of living and extra costs for working. We are committed to reforming the disability living allowance into the personal independence payment, to ensure that we continue to recognise those costs, but in a more targeted way. We are also putting £15 million extra into Access to Work to provide the sort of flexibility he describes.

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I have a number of concerns about the bidding process for the Remploy sites under threat of closure, but will the Minister confirm that the assessment panel was given only three days over a weekend to consider all 65 bids? Does she consider that extraordinarily short time scale to be sufficient for proper scrutiny of those bids?

[Maria Miller]

What I know is that proper scrutiny has taken place, and that we need to ensure the programme makes good progress so that we can ensure that the people affected are informed in a timely manner.