Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you. We will now, if we may, engage you with some questions. We turn to Kate Green for the first set of questions.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Q44 1 Good afternoon and thank you for coming. I want to start by asking you if you support the change that the Government are proposing in relation to support for mortgage interest, and if you agree with their contention that the cost of the existing scheme has become unsustainable?

Paul Smee: Lenders have taken the view that the mortgage interest scheme has worked well in the past. We appreciate, particularly at a time of rising house prices, that the need to reflect on how that support is provided becomes important. Lenders can understand the rationale behind the decision to move to a loan-based system.

Paul Broadhead: I would echo what Paul said. I think it is a vital part of the safety net, as it has proven to be in the past few years of the financial crisis. One area about which we have some concerns is the change of the waiting period from 13 weeks back to 39, but we are relatively supportive of making it a loan.

[Kate Green]

Q 2 Why is there a problem around the 39 weeks?

Paul Broadhead: What we have seen over the past few years, in terms of the 13-week waiting period, is that the earlier people can engage with their lender, the more tools there are at the lender’s disposal to help them. A waiting period of 39 weeks seemed a bit odd once. If it has been moved off the Government’s balance sheet and the Government expect that they will get 75% of it back, it also seems odd to give the double-whammy of moving the support from 13 weeks back out to 39. Clearly, there may well be the situation after 39 weeks that somebody has missed nine months of mortgage payments, which have been added to their debt. There are far fewer tools available at that time than at 13 weeks, so we believe that 13 weeks is the right time to engage people with this process.

[Kate Green]

Q 3 That is very helpful. Thank you. One of the things we are obviously concerned about is the way in which, after somebody has taken advantage of such a loan, the Government are eventually repaid. Obviously, that would not be required while the person is not working. It would be when they return to work or when the asset is sold. Do you have any observations on whether there is a risk to people’s ability to retain their homes, given the model that the Government are proposing?

[The Chair]

Just before you answer that, one or two of us older folk are having a bit of trouble hearing, and we are told that they cannot turn the sound up. Could you speak directly into the microphone and be as clear as you can? It is not your fault at all; it is the age of some of us at this end.

[The Chair]

My apologies.

Paul Smee: And the age of some of us at this end, too. Sorry, I lost the thread after that intervention. Would you mind repeating the question?

[Kate Green]

Q 4 The question is about the way in which the Government seek to restructure their ability to recoup loans made. One way they could do that is when the house is disposed of. Do you have any concerns about people’s ability to keep their house? Is there a risk of repossession, and what analysis have you made of that?

Paul Smee: From what we see at the moment—we have not yet seen the entire detail of how the Government will go about recouping the loan once somebody returns to work—the charge that the lender has over the property will remain in place. Incidentally, during all times, when somebody goes into arrears, they will be handled in accordance with usual practice and they will be given the sort of support that lenders offer to anybody who is behind in their mortgage payments.

We will want to look very closely at how payments will be recouped. I do not believe the intention is that it will be done in such a way that the continued ability of the householder to make mortgage payments will be jeopardised, so I think there will be some planning around that.

[Kate Green]

Q 5 I did not hear that, Paul. I beg your pardon.

Paul Smee: I do not believe that there is any intention that the way in which loan payments are recouped will impact on somebody’s ability to keep up with their mortgage once they are back in work. That will be taken into account, but we will be looking at the detail of that very closely.

Paul Broadhead: Very briefly, the mortgage lenders charter remains in place and remains prior to any security of this loan. In the current market, if a borrower has a second-charge loan, which is how this will be structured as we understand it, repossession can be instigated by the second-charge lender, and the first-charge lender will have the remainder. For this to threaten people’s ability to remain in their homes, it would require the Government to commence repossession proceedings, not the first-charge lender. As long as the Government do not do that, the first-charge lender will deal with it in accordance with the way they do today.

[Kate Green]

Q 6 May I ask one last question? It has been suggested that some people who do not return to work—perhaps people who are on long-term sickness or disability benefits and do not become well enough to return to work—will never make repayments of the loan as a result of returning to employment, but will be able to do so when the house is sold. For some of those people, the sale is likely to take place at the point when they become so disabled that they need to make adaptations and perhaps downsize to release equity to do so. How will the market respond and what are the risks of those people being unable to fund a move to more suitable supportive housing?

Paul Smee: I think that any lender would want to talk to the borrower about the circumstances in which they found themselves. There might be ways, using conventional lending instruments of one form or another, to find a way through. Whether the Government at that point decide to exercise their second charge and in effect demand repayment of the loan would be up to them, but I believe the lending industry would want to work with the borrower to come to some sort of acceptable outcome.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Shailesh Vara)]

Q 7 Welcome, gentlemen. It would be the Government’s intention to have comprehensive advice for claimants who are in the position of having interest that is to be converted into a loan—by way of advice on the accrual of interest and on the impact of the second charge. It could be a third or fourth charge depending on how many debts they have. It is our intention to give comprehensive advice. Is there anything that we should be mindful of when considering the advice to give? What would you emphasise that we should make clear to claimants?

Paul Smee: The first point I would make is that the advice that you will be giving will not be regulated advice within the regulatory framework to which my lenders are subject.

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[Corri Wilson]

Thank you.

[Kate Green]

Q 14 I want to follow up on something that was said a moment ago about both existing and, once the legislation is in place, new claimants. I was struck by the statistic that more than half of claimants are in receipt of pension credit, which I suppose means that they are much less likely to achieve repayment by going back to work, as opposed to the eventual disposal of the property. What is your critique of that as commercial lenders, both in the abstract and in relation to SMI?

Paul Smee: Right across the population, we are increasingly seeing people borrowing into later life. The industry is now working on new ways to approach that sort of borrower. There are ways in which the value in a house can be unlocked. It depends on careful advice and helping people to understand the implications of what they are doing, but I think we are going to see more and more people borrowing into retirement, so the industry is getting itself into a position where it can help them to make the right choices. Bearing in mind that at some point people may well want to downsize, or an estate may well dispose of a property, in which case the funds become available.

[Kate Green]

Do you wish to add anything, Paul?

Paul Broadhead: No—I agree with all that. We should remember about the quantum of debt here, and the payments. For most of these people, we are looking at very low levels of debt and very low levels of support—perhaps £20 or £30 a week. There may well be other options for them, rather than taking it as debt. If they are looking at leaving the asset to a family member, it may well be that they will step in and give them the necessary support at the time. In the past, I do not think people considered other options that might be better for them, but this change might focus them on those options.

[Kate Green]

Q 15 Given those drivers and the nature of the case load—the fact that many of them are on pension credit; the likelihood that their borrowing at that point will be quite low so the amount of SMI that they might need to acquire through a loan would be low, and the fact that there are other options for them to repay the loan—do you think that the Government’s anticipated savings of £255 million a year are realistic?

Paul Broadhead: It is difficult to say whether that is realistic. The Government expect to get about three quarters of that back. If that figure is about three quarters of the money that is spent now, that shows you. Clearly the majority of people on pension credit will have lower amounts, but the others have not insignificant amounts of debt because of what we have seen happen to house prices in recent years. It is difficult to say yes or no, but if the Government calculate that they will recoup three quarters, I have no reason to doubt those numbers.

Paul Smee: I suspect that the main driver will be the way in which the Government are able to recoup the loans. That will be the real determinant of the figure. Many people in this position have equity within their houses, so they have a source there.

[Kate Green]

Q 16 Do you expect any customer backlash from people who expected to be able to retire and leave a house to a child? This will be their property. Do you expect any consumer reaction?

Paul Smee: Some of the reaction in other bits of the market has been that it has changed some of the dialogue within families and the conversations about how an older person can be supported by other members of the family. There is a big question about how people view their home and the fact that they can only use the money within it once, as it were. I have no evidence of a backlash, but we have to say that such issues raise emotions within families as well as in society.

[The Chair]

There are no further questions and we are drawing to the conclusion of our half hour, so I thank Mr Smee and Mr Broadhead for some clear and concise answers, which are much appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to give us evidence today.

Examination of Witnesses

Charlotte Pickles, Kirsty McHugh, Octavia Holland and Tony Wilson gave evidence.

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[The Chair]

A warm welcome to our six experts. We have people from Remploy, the Social Market Foundation, the Shaw Trust, Mind, Scope and Parkinson’s UK. Would you please like to read yourselves into the records by telling us who you are?

Sophie Corlett: I’m Sophie Corlett, director of external relations at Mind.

Matt Oakley: Matthew Oakley from the Social Market Foundation.

Gareth Parry: Gareth Parry, director of strategy at Remploy Ltd.

Laura Cockram: Laura Cockram, policy and campaigns manager at Parkinson’s UK.

Roy O'Shaughnessy: Roy O’Shaughnessy, chief exec of Shaw Trust.

Elliot Dunster: Elliot Dunster, group head of policy research and public affairs at Scope.

[Kate Green]

Q 62 I would like to focus my initial questions on the provisions in the Bill that relate to work incentives and the work-related activity group. Some of you may have more of an interest in this issue than others. We heard in the last evidence session—I am not sure if you were able to follow it—that there is international OECD evidence to suggest that there would be a significant work incentive by reducing the amount of payment in the WRAG. What is your comment on the impact on individuals and work incentives of people losing £30 a week? Shall we start with Parkinson’s UK?

[The Chair]

By the way, don’t all feel you have to answer every question, but do chip in if you have something to say.

Sophie Corlett: We have a real concern about that, as far as mental health is concerned. If you have been assessed as being in the WRAG group, you have been assessed as being unfit for work—not that you should be looking for jobs, and not that you are ready to work and are just not in a job yet, but that you are not fit for work and that you are able to do some work-related activity. This is a group of people who it is acknowledged are not ready. It is not acknowledged that they lack motivation. In fact, we know that people with mental health problems are highly motivated to get back into work, so we do not think that the argument about incentives is at all appropriate.

The other thing we know about people in the WRAG group, and certainly people with mental health problems, is that they spend a lot of time in that position, on that benefit. To reduce it to a level that is really just bumping along at the bottom of survival is hugely detrimental to not just their ability to get by but their mental health problem and their ability to have enough in order to recover. We feel it is a massive undermining of their ability to get back into work, rather than the reverse.

Laura Cockram: In terms of people with Parkinson’s, we believe that the Government currently fundamentally misunderstands the term “progressive condition”, which Parkinson’s is, along with a number of other neurological conditions. Putting people into the work-related activity group in the first place, we believe, is not correct, and 30% of people with Parkinson’s have been put into that group since 2008.

In terms of your question, Kate, we do not believe it is an incentive. If people have been found to be unfit for work—particularly with a progressive condition, they will have been found unfit for work by independent assessors and will potentially have been given some information from their neurologist or healthcare physician that they are unwell and not well enough to go into the workplace—we feel it is quite unfair to say that there is some kind of incentive. It is cruel, in some respects. Most people with Parkinson’s would like to or are eager to continue working for as long as they can, and there is evidence that the average length of time people stay in work following a diagnosis of Parkinson’s is between 3.4 and 4.9 years. We know that people want to stay in work, but cannot, potentially, because of their condition.

Elliot Dunster: I would just like to add a few more thoughts from Scope about how we think the change might act as a disincentive. We very much support the Government’s aim of halving the disability employment gap, and we really want measures that will see us progress towards that goal, but we do not think that this will do that, and I will explain a bit more about why.

First, there are half a million disabled people in the WRAG, and there is a very real risk that by making a slightly more binary distinction between jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance, you will create a disincentive for people in the WRAG to move into work, because if they fall out of work—and we know that disabled people are more likely than non-disabled people to fall out of work because of the barriers of their condition—they may fear that they will be reassessed and placed back in the WRAG at a lower financial award. So we have a concern there.

Similarly, in the support group, we are concerned that people in the support group who may want to work may feel that it is a big leap for them to enter the world of work. They may fear that once the change takes place, if they do fall out of work, they will be put back into the work capability assessment and reassessed, and if they are then placed in the WRAG, they will be £30 a week worse off than they were before.

We hear at Scope some examples of that happening already in the existing system. I can think of a lady I spoke to recently who had fought quite hard for her further education and had got a master’s degree. She was in the support group and receiving employment and support allowance. She had been offered a full-time job for a fixed period, and she came to us because she was concerned about what taking the job for the first time—a full-time, paid job—and then falling out of work again might mean for her, and whether she might end up being placed in the WRAG. If that happened, although financially she would be in the same situation as she was at that time, she would be subject to some of the conditionality that is placed on people in the WRAG. We know that that is happening a bit at the moment, and we fear that this change might exacerbate some of that.

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[Hannah Bardell]

Or, indeed, not cutting them at all.

Sophie Corlett: Yes, definitely. The Work programme is not successful for people with mental health problems: 8% of people with mental health problems are helped back into work through the Work programme; that is not a great result. Other methods that people use include IPS—individual placement and support—which is a voluntary scheme. It works with people on their aspirations. In a very key way, it looks at what the other barriers are that stop them getting to work, and it works with employers to help them to overcome the stigma of employing people with mental health problems, because employers are not keen to take people on. It looks at all these things. It works with people in a voluntary way, without all the threat of sanctions, which can be very worrying for people.

If you have really good systems, people who want to get back into work can get back into work, but to have a system that is both punitive on people as if it is their fault and then does not actually help them is grossly unfair.

Gareth Parry: The Department did lead a pretty comprehensive review in 2013, when it produced the disability and health employment strategy. There is quite a lot of good content in that strategy, but it does seem to have lost the focus a little bit over the last 18 months. Our organisation would recommend going back to that strategy and seeing what was in there that could still be progressed, because that was sort of the review you are talking about.

Matt Oakley: I was there for a speech the Secretary of State made a couple of weeks back, and it seemed very much to be the start of a new discussion about how we can help disabled people and people with illnesses first of all to stay in work where that is appropriate, and secondly, when they leave work, to get back in more quickly—when they are out of work, to get back to work. I would be a huge advocate of significant changes to the Work programme to make sure it is putting more money into those people who need the greatest help. At the moment, it is not targeted enough; it is not personalised enough. We need to make sure we are targeting as much money as possible at those people furthest away from the labour market, of which this is one of those groups.

[Kate Green]

Q 66 The Government had hoped that the number of people on long-term incapacity benefit and employment and support allowance would be reducing. In fact, it has been increasing, and particularly the numbers in the support group have been increasing. What is your analysis of the impact of a very sharp distinction between the level of benefit that you will receive in the support group and the level of benefit that you will receive if you are not in the support group? Is there any incentive, perhaps, to present yourself as more severely unwell or disabled, and therefore having to go into the support group?

Elliot Dunster: We have to look at the confidence in the WCA as well. The speech that the Secretary of State made a few weeks ago, which has been mentioned already, talked a little bit about that. Disabled people are concerned about the WCA and how accurate it is. In Scope’s view, this will mean that people will continue to appeal those decisions because of this slightly more binary distinction.

We agree with the Secretary of State’s assessment that it is not very helpful to think about people being fit for work or not fit for work. That is not a particularly helpful way of looking at things, but of course we have an assessment in which we have to try to draw lines, effectively, about what support people receive. We would like to see the WCA reformed along a number of principles that we have submitted to the Committee, which would make it much more about back-to-work support. However, we think that making a slightly binary distinction between jobseeker’s allowance and ESA will make people more likely to appeal decisions if they think they should have been awarded the support group rather than the work-related activity group, because there is a financial incentive for them to appeal.

[Emily Thornberry]

Q 67 Eighty-five per cent. Islington Law Centre has an 85% success rate for people who are appealing ESA assessments, when they take them to tribunal. That means that people who are assessed as being fit for work are then being reassessed by the tribunal as not being fit for work, or are put into an employment support group. Would it not be important for the Government to iron out clearly unfair decisions in the work assessment before changing the goalposts?

Elliot Dunster: I have probably covered most of that in my previous answer. We do think that the WCA should be reformed, and it feels like there is starting to be more of a consensus around that. It seemed as though the Secretary of State was talking along those lines as well. Yes; it needs to be reformed, more accurate and more focused on what someone can do. At the moment it is too medical, and that is where it feels like those decisions have not been made in the right way. Whether someone can pick up a pound coin is not necessarily a good indicator of whether they can do a job or not.

Laura Cockram: On the work capability assessment, we would echo the comments from Elliot and Sophie about it not being fit for purpose. The assessment is a snapshot on a particular day. You have mentioned the success rate of appeals. I believe that the figure is that 38% of all fit for work decisions have been appealed across the UK from 2008 to 2013—that is the June 2015 figure from the DWP—and 51% of decisions from January to March last year were overturned. That is a good demonstration that we are putting unwell people through unnecessary assessments and tests. If they are not well enough to work, they should not be forced or, potentially, bullied back into work, which these kinds of assessments are doing.

Gareth Parry: It is hugely difficult to generalise on so many things. We could ask ourselves, “What is work in the 21st century?” Technology has made a difference—people can work from home now, and do flexible working and different hours. There are so many different interpretations of what work constitutes that to have a relatively black-and-white regime around benefits is not flexible enough. If we have a direction of travel, the right way must be to have a direction of travel that is more of an assessment of needs-based support as opposed to labelling people with a particular benefit. The labour market is so versatile and changeable these days that there is no simple threshold at which you say somebody is fit for work or not fit for work. The world does not work like that any more.

Sophie Corlett: Could I just add a really important point? That is absolutely true, but if you are assessed as being fit for work because you could do a very particular type of work in a very particular setting, the person who works with you to find that job needs to be aware of that very particular need of yours. And there is no real link in terms of your assessment and how you are then helped to get a job; you might be expected to get just any job, when you have very specific needs.

Gareth Parry: We completely agree with that; personalised employment support needs to link in to a needs-based assessment. The problem at the moment is that everybody focuses on the benefits infrastructure rather than on the objective of attaining and sustaining employment.

[Kate Green]

Q 68 We have slightly lost sight now of the effect that you think cutting £30 a week will have on people’s propensity to go into work and on the disability employment gap.

Sophie Corlett: I can answer some of that. I think there is a complete misunderstanding of what keeps people with mental health problems out of work. It is not that they find it financially beneficial; it is that if they are in the ESA group—the WRAG or the support group—they have been found not fit for work. They are not well enough for work; the money is neither here nor there. Having less money will merely make you more likely to be debt-ridden, and depressed and stressed and unwell.

Elliot Dunster: I have been quite clear from Scope’s perspective that we think it will be a disincentive, for the reasons that I have already explained. Also, building on what Sophie said, we know that disabled people have less financial resilience than non-disabled people; we know, for example, that disabled people have on average over £100,000 less in savings and assets than non-disabled people. So they are less able to cope with big financial shocks and long periods of time out of work. Because of the lower financial resilience of disabled people, a long period of time on a very low income will have a very serious effect, which we are concerned about.

[Helen Whately]

Q 69 Mental health is a particular issue of interest or concern to me. In my constituency, I recently visited the local Mind and I saw really effective delivery of parts of the Work programme by it. I joined in a session and spoke to one client who told me very openly how enormously helpful she found Mind’s support, even though she was clearly some way off being able to get back into work. So, because I think the conversation about the support for people with mental health problems has been relatively negative, I just wondered whether there are any positive experiences you could talk about regarding the support that people are receiving.

Sophie Corlett: There are some very successful mechanisms for supporting people to get back into work. Some of our local Minds are involved in individual placement and support, which is quite different from the Work programme. Individual placement and support works with people on a voluntary basis, so it starts from the point of view that you want to get back into work, which, in fact, is the case. So it works with people; it is not saying, “We’re sanctioning you because we’re assuming you don’t want to get back into work.”

IPS works with the flow of where people are going; it encourages them to aspire to work. So, as Gareth said earlier, it is about helping people to boost their confidence, rather than assuming they do not want to get back into work and actually undermining their confidence. It is working with people, working with their aspirations and helping them unravel the things that are stopping them getting to work, whether that is transport, debt, caring responsibilities or other things going on in their life. It helps them to get those things in order, which might be very difficult if they are not well and cannot really organise those sorts of things.

Then it is working with the employer, which is very important from the point of view of mental health problems, both to unravel the employer’s potentially discriminatory attitudes and to support the employer if the employee is not necessarily going to be working at full throttle initially. So you can say to the employer, “It’s all right. We’ll work with you and we’ll stick with you, so that if things aren’t good initially we will still be there to help you.” So, very importantly with IPS, the support carries on.

Some of our local Mind projects have a 32% rate of getting people back into work, which is phenomenal. I think that 82% or 85% of people are still in work after six months, which is a very good success rate. So there are ways of doing that, but importantly they are individually tailored, they understand mental health, they work with the employer and they work on the positive model, not the negative one.

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[Kate Green]

Q 81 I thought we were going on for hours yet. Sorry, Mr Streeter.

I want to ask about something entirely different that has not come up at all today. It relates to the disability employment gap. Ministers have spoken positively about self-employment as an important opportunity for disabled people. Others have also said that that could be seen as lacking ambition for disabled people and that self-employment is a disguise for something of quite poor quality in some cases. Can you reflect on the role of self-employment for disabled people in reducing the disability employment gap? We could perhaps start with Roy, because I see that you are taking a bit of interest in this question.

Roy O’Shaughnessy: Wherever there are legitimate opportunities for a person to be self-employed, that is fantastic. We have been leaning more towards a social enterprise model for individuals who, because of their particular challenges, may not fit into certain types of work. We could create a national social enterprise structure with 50,000 or 100,000 people running local coffee shops, for example, but with all the support services provided behind that. We need a couple more years to see how self-employment develops.

We know that most small businesses struggle with financial planning, book work, tax things and all of that, so we are looking to create an entity for individuals with a particular skill who have a disability and who want to work. It would almost be like a franchise model that could be replicated exponentially with some serious structures around it. We believe that that is the future for creating new jobs above and beyond what the economy can create in a normal way.

[Kate Green]

Q 82 How can the Government support that?

Roy O'Shaughnessy: We have been having some discussions. First, the Government could support it by being unequivocal in our joint commitment to halving the disability unemployment rate. Secondly, they must be realistic about the challenges that many of the individuals face when dealing with their life situations and circumstances while they are moving into that journey of employment. We like this model, because whether you can work three or four hours a week or whether you can only work a day a week, this allows us to structure something that is fair and equitable that would hopefully bridge the gap of the four to five hours’ decrease in the benefits in a way that would work.

This is us just putting our thinking caps on and saying, “Hey, how can we contribute to this debate?” We will have to put some significant funding into it, but we also believe that business and Government will come together to help us get a disability-confident approach. We completely agree that making Disability Confident much more centre to this whole discussion about halving the unemployment rate for disabled individuals is the way to go.

Gareth Parry: Just a brief point. Our experience is like everything that Roy said. Self-employment is a really important tool, particularly for people who have fluctuating or episodic conditions, who may be able to work more on some days, weeks or months than they are on other days, weeks and months. It gives them control over when they are able to work. Self-employment is a really important part of the overall solution.

Elliot Dunster: Self-employment can absolutely be brilliant for some disabled people, particularly those with fluctuating conditions, but it is also worth reflecting on some thoughts about the health benefits of work. We know that good jobs are good for people’s health and that poor jobs are not very good for people’s health, particularly disabled people’s health. We also know that disabled people are more likely to take up lower-paid and more insecure jobs. Let us think about how we can progress disabled people when they are in work, so that they are in good, secure, stable jobs.

I would add one other word of caution, about the danger of isolation. I do not think that we would want to self-employment to mean isolation. One of the great things about going to work, and one of the big health benefits, is the fact that you work alongside colleagues, you are out of the house and you are participating fully. There is a danger that lots of disabled people working at home in isolation would not necessarily be a good outcome for all disabled people.

[Emily Thornberry]

Q 83 I want to pick up on the point about isolation, but it is also important to bear in mind how completely inappropriate it is for a lot of people with mental health problems to become self-employed. My concern and experience is that I have constituents who have been pushed into self-employment whose mental health is not sufficiently robust to be able to be effectively self-employed, and they get into all sorts of debt as a result. I hate to say this, but I get the impression that the people in the jobcentre are happy that they have been signed off as employed, but it is reckless for these people to be setting up cake-making businesses, or there was another case where someone was supposed to be designing websites. Their mental conditions were such that it was really difficult for them to be able to think through what setting up a business would mean. I suspect that my experience with my constituents is not isolated. I am very concerned about pushing people into self-employment, particularly those with mental health problems. I do not know whether that is right, Sophie.

Sophie Corlett: Yes, I know many people with mental health problems who are self-employed and it is the perfect thing for them, but it depends. I suspect you are talking about people who are perhaps affected by stress or bipolar disorder and so at certain periods do not engage with bills, or who will in certain periods—

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[Kate Green]

Q 84 I have two more questions on two other subjects. First, I would like to explore Disability Confident a little further, because a number of you have been positive about that initiative. Indeed, I am about to experiment with it and host a Disability Confident event myself in a couple of weeks. I am concerned that there currently appears to be no tracking of the effectiveness and impact of the programme. How would you measure its role and contribution to improving disability and employment rates?

Roy O'Shaughnessy: That is a really good question. I suppose that if we did it at the macro level we would tie it in with the goal to halve the disability unemployment rate over the five-year Parliament and come up with a step-by-step, quarter-by-quarter approach, similar to what we are doing with Whizz-Kidz, to assess it. Several of our events have been tied in with that, in the sense of monitoring and evidence-basing what we are doing. In my view, if Disability Confident is used as the central sphere of many of the issues we are discussing, and if there is a really fair, evidence-based reporting mechanism, it will hold us all on track, quarter by quarter and year by year, so that we can celebrate having done it in five years.

Gareth Parry: Part of the question depends on what resources can realistically be made available, but there is something about a journey that an employer goes on. They may start at a point of ignorance—I do not mean that in a critical sense, but they just might not know anything, or there might be fear there. The next point of the journey might be about how you get that employer to a point where they say, “Okay, I’m starting to change my mind and am prepared to give it a go.” How do you then translate that into them starting to access services? How do you translate that into them starting to employ disabled people, becoming advocates and then becoming exemplar employers? There is almost a journey, and if you could measure where various employers were on that journey and the progress they made over a period of time, and relate that to Disability Confident, that might give you a pipeline of how many employers you would take on a process.

One big challenge for Disability Confident—we are all scratching our heads on this—is that it is not so much about when you hold your events, because you often get employers coming along who are already engaged with the agenda, and who are already interested and want to employ disabled people. It is about how we get Disability Confident out to all those other employers who have never heard about it, do not have the interests and do not have the same opinions at this stage. That is the challenge for Disability Confident: how can we break through to those employers that do not know about it?

[Kate Green]

Q 85 I would just like to go back to something that Neil Coyle raised about Access to Work. How important is it and how well is it working by contributing to reducing the disability employment gap?

[The Chair]

Let us have an answer from everybody, and this will be our final flourish.

Sophie Corlett: It is hugely important and much underused in mental health, and it could be much more widely understood as being really useful, particularly if people are able to use it before they apply for a job so that they can take a package with them. That would be the ideal, really, so that they could go to an interview and say, “This is what I can bring with me.” That would be the best use of it.

Matt Oakley: I will defer to delivery colleagues.

Gareth Parry: It is a fantastic programme. I would massively advocate mental health support services, because we deliver one. It is a great programme, which is significantly underused, at creating awareness and promoting not only mental health service support but all of Access to Work. It remains a challenge, but overall it is a fantastic programme. I should declare that I already gave evidence at the Select Committee last year, and I do not want to repeat any of that evidence.

Looking forward, it is probably the one area in the employment arena where personalisation could be looked at to a much greater degree. It is as close as we have got in the employment agenda to personalised budgets. It is not personalised budgets—it is not personalisation as we know it today—but it could be, and it could be a really interesting arena just to take the next step towards giving more choice and control over people’s employment journeys.