Disability Employment Gap

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Commons Chamber

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

I congratulate those on the Opposition Front Bench on calling this debate and the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) on leading it earlier. If there is one lesson we can draw from today’s debate, it is that it is much easier to talk about closing the disability employment gap than it is actually to close it. I have lost count of the number of debates we have had in this place over the last few years about the shortcomings of the work capability assessment; the well-documented failures of the Work programme; the devastating impact of the new sanctions regime on people who are found fit for work or work-related activity but cannot then comply with the conditions attached to their employment and support allowance or jobseeker’s allowance; those whose support has been cut in the transition from disability living allowance to the personal independence payment, including thousands who have lost access to their Motability vehicles, in some cases compromising their ability to get to and from work; and most recently, those who are going to receive £30 a week less in employment and support allowance or lose their work allowance.

Disabled people and those with long-term health conditions have borne the brunt of austerity cuts in recent years, yet in that time there has been no tangible improvement in the rate of disabled people’s employment. There has been an assumption on the Government side that the support we have offered to sick and disabled people in the past has discouraged them from seeking work. Last year, the Chancellor went so far as to talk about “perverse incentives” when he was trying to justify cutting the incomes of some of the most disadvantaged people in our communities, but there is absolutely not a shred of evidence that cutting support has helped disabled people to find work. Quite the reverse: I am sure that almost all of us will have encountered sick and disabled constituents who have fallen through the safety net of social security altogether.

I think the Government recognise that their reforms have failed many disabled people and failed to address the barriers to employment faced by many disabled people who could and would work with the right support. We were promised that we would have a White Paper long before now, but here we are in June and still waiting; the proposal has been batted off into the long grass. I am disappointed about the further delays, but I actually welcome the tacit acknowledgement that this whole project needs a lot more reflection. I share the view that we need a lot more input from disabled people, a lot more work with employers, and a very different approach that is centred on individuals. Yet more punitive austerity is not going to cut it; it will just cause yet more misery for disadvantaged people.

The consultations in advance of what is now going to be a Green Paper will provide an opportunity to get disabled people round the table with the wide range of voluntary organisations that represent their interests, so that those organisations can really listen to them. The consultations will also provide a chance to talk to employers about how they can best be supported to recruit and retain a disabled workforce. This will be a chance to do much better, and I really hope that this time round the Government will do things very differently. No one is pretending that this is easy. Part of the challenge is that when we talk about disabled people’s employment, we lump together as a group people who are every bit as diverse as society itself. We need to see the whole person, not the condition. We also need to recognise the wide variations in employment support needs.

We need to recognise that other aspects of a person’s life, such as whether they have qualifications, skills and work experience, will have a significant impact on their job prospects. We also cannot ignore the fact that the wider inequalities in our labour market—such as those associated with gender, age or ethnicity—intersect with and often compound the barriers associated with disability. Perhaps most significantly of all, we cannot ignore wider labour market conditions and the simple availability of work. At a time when insecure, temporary, part-time work is becoming far more prevalent for everyone in low-paid jobs, high-falutin’ talk about sustained employment for disabled people becomes a bit of a moot point.

There is much talk about changing employer attitudes. While I wholeheartedly agree that we can and should be doing much more to help employers take on and retain disabled staff, progress has been painfully slow, and the take-up of schemes such as Disability Confident has been pretty paltry. We have seen some degree of cultural change over recent years in terms of flexible working and not only for disabled people. Some larger employers have led the way in employing disabled people and carers in sustainable ways—it is important to mention that during Carers Week—but we have to be honest about how far cultural change can take us and how greater flexibility poses serious challenges for some sectors and for smaller businesses in particular. If the Government are serious about changing attitudes, that needs to be backed up with resources. We need to make it much easier and affordable for employers to do more to support their disabled staff and to keep them in work.

Like others, I read the Resolution Foundation’s report on retention deficit this week. It contains several useful, practical suggestions that merit much closer attention, including the idea of keeping a person’s job open for up to a year after the start of sickness absence—much like maternity leave—which could help people to stay in work. That could also be of huge benefit to people recovering from serious illness or surgery, but it will work only if employers are recompensed, as is suggested, by reimbursing statutory sick pay costs for firms that support their employees to make a successful return to work. Those things are worth exploring further.

Crucially, the Resolution Foundation also recommended making early referrals to whatever scheme replaces the Work Programme for people who find that they are unlikely to be able to return to their previous job. If we continue to wait until someone has become long-term unemployed before making targeted interventions, we will miss the boat. People often lose confidence and social contact if forced to leave work and can fall further away from the labour market. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that and about incentives for small businesses.

We have heard a different tone from the Government today. That is welcome, but it is hard to reconcile it with the reality of brutal cuts in income and the dehumanising experiences of recent years for disabled people. The Government will have to make a radical change of direction if they are to make any real difference to disabled people’s job prospects and to restore dignity to the whole process.