Disabled People: Employment

Lord McKenzie of Luton Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, quite a lot of lessons, and those lessons have very much been taken into account. As I have said, the Government are absolutely committed to supporting Remploy employees who may be affected by the changes.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, we support the Access to Work programme—indeed, we developed it —and we support helping disabled people into mainstream employment. Therefore, we support the focus on these programmes. However, why is this being done at the cost of putting 1,500 disabled people out of work at a time when the Government’s own statistics show that disabled people continue to be disadvantaged in the labour market and when we heard just yesterday that unemployment is at its highest rate since 1995?

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, I do not think it is a question of favouring one group over another; it is a matter of targeting the resources better at the whole disabled population. Remploy takes up one-fifth of the entire budget of employment support for disabled people. We feel, and indeed are advised by the Sayce review and the disabled lobby, that this is a more appropriate way to target the resources.