Queen’s Speech

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this Queen’s Speech. Some noble Lords may lampoon levelling up; I do not. Some in the Westminster bubble may deride the Prime Minister for his vision, but the people of the West Midlands do not, as Andy Street’s fantastic victory demonstrates. One way in which, to his huge credit, the Prime Minister is personally leading the charge is in his national disability strategy that he has promised will be

“the most ambitious and transformative disability plan in a generation.”

The Prime Minister should be lauded, rather than ridiculed, for nailing his colours to the equality of opportunity mast. Many disabled people are pinning their hopes on it, and I am one of them. We have got one shot at this; we need to get it right.

That is why I was delighted to chair the CSJ Disability Commission and to recruit my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson, as well as other distinguished individuals from business, academia and the voluntary sector, to serve on it. We recently published our submission to the Prime Minister’s forthcoming strategy. Covering education, housing, transport, access to goods and services and, of course, employment, the submission is appropriately titled Now is the Time. For, more than a quarter of a century after your Lordships’ House passed the Disability Discrimination Act into law, and five years since its ad hoc Select Committee conducted its authoritative inquiry on the Equality Act 2010 and disabled people, the time for warm words—for non-disabled people to tell disabled people what is good for them—is over. I believe the PM gets this, and appreciates both the scale of the challenge and the urgency of meeting it with tangible, visible proof of how his levelling-up agenda will make a difference to people’s lives.

I appreciate that some may ask why now should be different. After all, we have been here before. As many noble Lords will know, this is not the first strategy for disabled people—but the difference, I believe, is in the business appetite for change. Nowhere was that more evident than in the amazing list of business leaders who signed the open letter to the Prime Minister in the Times last month, welcoming the launch of the commission’s submission to his strategy and urging him to show in his strategy that he has given careful consideration to its recommendations.

Time does not allow me to list the blue chip companies that signed the letter, as I did in the debate on the economic recovery on 20 April, at col. 298 of the Grand Committee, but I will touch on some of the commission’s employment recommendations. They include extending mandatory gender employment and pay gap reporting—which a Conservative Government introduced and which Ministers in this Government have said is working —to disability and other protected characteristics; creating more supported routes into employment through supported internships; leveraging government procurement, worth some £292 billion, to drive up the number of disabled people in employment; and reforming both Disability Confident and Access to Work to make them fit for purpose. The signatories were clear in their message to the PM. They said that

“Disabled people have waited long enough; now is the time for action”.


They are right.

In conclusion, equality of opportunity is a business imperative, so let us unleash the power of business to level up through enterprise, talent, and equality of opportunity. That is the way to make the Prime Minister’s promise a reality.