Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps the Government is taking to improve job opportunities for young people with employment access needs.
Answered by Guy Opperman - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
Jobcentre Plus partnership and employer adviser teams work closely with national and local employers to help address their labour market needs by recruiting suitable claimants.
To promote opportunities for young people with access needs, Jobcentre Plus offers additional support to employers who are committed to helping these young people succeed in the labour market. Through the Disability Confident scheme, for example, DWP is providing advice and support to help employers feel more confident about employing disabled people. This in turn helps to promote the skills, talents and abilities of people with disabilities and health conditions.
As part of the DWP Youth Offer, Youth Employability Coaches work alongside Disability Employment Advisers to support claimants who have a disability or health condition to enter and stay in employment. Some Youth Hubs also offer mental health support and services, alongside skills, training, and employment provision.
There are a range of initiatives businesses can get involved in to give opportunities and experience to young people, including apprenticeships, traineeships, mentoring circles, and work experience. In addition, Access to Work and the Access to Work Mental Health Support Service provide personalised support to enable disabled people and those with a health condition to move into or keep employment.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much money has been spent under section 22 of the Family Law Act 1996 on (a) the provision of marriage support services, (b) research into the causes of marital breakdown and (c) research into ways of preventing marital breakdown in each financial year since the Act came into force.
Answered by Will Quince
As policy responsibility for relationship issues has moved between departments several times since 1996, the information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.
The policy responsibility for relationship issues currently sits with DWP. DWP does not make grants under section 22 of the Family Law Act (1996), however we have funded a range of work to help couples (including those who are married) to improve the quality of their relationships.
Since responsibility for this area moved to DWP, we have spent the following in each financial year:
2014/15 - £7.5m
2015/16 - £11.2m
2016/17 - £6.3m
2017/18 - £5.24m
2018/19 - £15.85m
2019/20 current forecast - £10.2m
Currently, these services are focused on the specific issue of parental conflict, and are delivered through our Reducing Parental Conflict programme.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans she has to increase the financial support parents receive for raising children with disabilities.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson
Child Disability Living Allowance (DLA) is a benefit for children under the age of 16 who, due to a disability or health condition, have mobility issues and/or require substantially more care, attention and supervision than children their age normally would. Parents of disabled children may be also able to claim Carer’s Allowance.
The government is committed to protecting and supporting the most vulnerable in society. It is for that reason the government has continued to uprate disability and carer benefits by inflation, including the disability elements of tax credits.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans her Department has to increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson
The Government is committed to reducing the disability employment gap and seeing a million more disabled people in work by 2027.
We help disabled people return to and stay in work through programmes including the Work and Health Programme, the new Intensive Personalised Employment Support Programme, Access to Work and Disability Confident.
There were 4.2 million working age disabled people in employment in the UK in Q3 2019. This was an increase of 354,000 since last year (Q3 2018), and an overall increase of 1.3 million since Q3 2013, the earliest comparable figure.
We will publish a National Strategy for Disabled People before the end of 2020. This will look at ways to improve the benefits system, opportunities and access for disabled people in terms of housing, education, transport and jobs
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much funding the Government has allocated under section 22 of the Family Law Act 1996 to (a) the provision of marriage support services and (b) research into (i) the causes of and (ii) preventing marital breakdown in each year since 2010.
Answered by Will Quince
Responsibility for delivering relationship support services moved to the Department for Work and Pensions in 2013. Although DWP does not make grants under s22 of the Family Law Act (1996), we have funded a range of services to support families to improve the quality of their relationships – including those who are married.
DWP is currently delivering the Reducing Parental Conflict programme, which is backed by up to £39m and aims to encourage local authorities and their partners across England to integrate services which address parental conflict into local provision for families. Around a third of this budget is being used to test eight face-to-face interventions, which evidence shows have the potential to be effective at reducing parental conflict.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what research her Department has conducted on life for people with Down's Syndrome in the 21st century.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson
This department undertakes research into people’s experience of support into work schemes, including the experiences of disabled people. The Department has not conducted or commissioned research on life experiences for people with Down’s Syndrome in the 21st Century.
Equal rights for disabled people, including people with Down’s Syndrome, are provided for under the reasonable adjustments provisions in the Equality Act and the Public Sector Equality duty. Each Government Department and public authority is under a duty to make adequate provision for disabled people including people with Down’s Syndrome.
Disability in the UK is mainstreamed. This means that every department is ultimately responsible for considering disability in the development and implementation of its policies and services.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Minister for Women and Equalities, whether the Government Equalities Office is taking steps to (a) tackle the 90 per cent termination rate following a prenatal diagnosis of Down's syndrome and (b) assess the effect of that rate on the community of people with Down’s syndrome; and if she will make a statement.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
We recognise the concerns that the introduction of offering non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) could have on the rate of possible terminations following a diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome. However, the key objective of NHS Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme (FASP) is to enable prospective parents to make informed choices, at each step along the screening pathway. The screening guidance and midwife training is very clear that the options should be offered sensitively and prospective parents decisions respected. Counselling is available at all stages of the screening pathway to support people to make informed choices in the event of a fetal abnormality being detected, and the decision to terminate must rest on the judgement of the woman herself and her doctors.
The national introduction of the evaluative roll out of NIPT as a contingent screening test is yet to be implemented into the NHS FASP. Once NIPT is rolled out, data on the choices women make regarding screening and/or diagnosis will be collected. Data will also be collected on the pregnancy outcomes of women who choose to have screening, and about babies born with Down’s syndrome.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether new voluntary sector organisations are eligible to access the £39 million of funding provided by her Department for relationship support services in local communities.
Answered by Kit Malthouse
The Reducing Parental Conflict Programme is funded by up to £39m, and will encourage councils across England to integrate evidence-based services and approaches to addressing parental conflict that work for their local families.
Just over a quarter of the programme budget will be used to build the evidence base for which interventions work to reduce parental conflict, and provide access to face-to-face support to reduce parental conflict in 30 local authorities across England. The procurement process for the delivery of the face-to-face interventions will be open to any interested party as an open competition.
To help potential suppliers to prepare for these opportunities, we recently published a Prior Information Notice which outlined the timescales for the procurement. This notice advised suppliers that we will be launching an opportunity in July for expert organisations to bid to deliver the face-to-face interventions which DWP will be funding, with these contracts in place by January 2019. Full details of this process will be available when the Invitation to Tender is published. Organisations interested in bidding for the face-to-face contracts will be able to access the procurement opportunities on Contracts Finder, and can register their interest on Bravo.
In addition to the procurement of face-to-face services, we have also announced £6m of joint funding with the Department of Health and Social Care, aimed at improving the outcomes of children of alcohol-dependent parents, and we expect that there will be opportunities for voluntary sector organisations to participate in this work.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to which legislation his Department has applied the Family Test, published in August 2014.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The government is committed to supporting families. To achieve this, in 2014 we introduced the Family Test, which aims to ensure that impacts on family relationships and functioning are recognised early on during the process of policy development and help inform the policy decisions made by Minsters. The Family Test was not designed to be a ‘tick-box’ exercise, and as such there is no requirement for departments to publish the results of assessments made under the Family Test.
Asked by: Fiona Bruce (Conservative - Congleton)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 30 November 2017 to Question HL3576, what steps his Department is taking to strengthen families.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families announced our commitment to tackle the damaging levels of parental conflict in workless families. This in response to recent evidence which shows that children exposed to frequent, intense and poorly resolved conflict can suffer a decline in their mental health and experience poorer long term outcomes. Our new Reducing Parental Conflict Programme will provide workless families in a number of local areas across England with face-to-face, evidence based interventions to reduce parental conflict. This provision will be available to workless parents, whether they are together or separated, as when it comes to the critical issue of improving children’s outcomes, the evidence shows that the quality of relationships within a family are more important than family structure. Alongside these face-to-face interventions, we will be working closely with local authorities to raise awareness of the negative impacts of parental conflict on children and families, and to help them embed proven parental conflict support into existing services for families.