Covid-19: Children

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for giving your Lordships’ House the opportunity to debate such a crucial issue. I agree with her that now is the time to optimise the life chances of children, especially disabled children, and to level up opportunity to ensure equality for their future. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds reminded us, we will all benefit if that happens, and we will all pay if it does not.

That is why it is vital that the Prime Minister’s practical commitment to his levelling-up agenda is commensurate with the scale of the challenge. I am thinking in particular of his pledge that his Government would publish

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

I chaired the CSJ Disability Commission, which published the blueprint of an oven-ready disability strategy earlier this year, and I thank Oliver Large at the CSJ for his invaluable assistance. The Prime Minister has been good enough to describe the commission’s Now is the Time report as a “tremendous contribution.” In his letter to me, he says,

“You may be reassured of my determination that the National Strategy shall be transformative.”


I regret to say that a subsequent Zoom call with the Minister for Disabled People, in which we discussed aspects of the forthcoming strategy relating to life chances and equality of opportunity in employment, was far less reassuring. Indeed, I do not recall him using the word “transformative” once. There were plenty of references to “very exciting pilot projects”, but nothing about ambitious and transformative change. On the commission’s recommendations, I heard very little to reassure me. Instead, the clear impression was of a department preoccupied with carrying on business as usual, repackaged as a strategy in name only.

I worry that the DWP either does not get it or has not bought into the PM’s vision, because what I heard from the Minister could not have been more different in tone from what the PM is saying. I believe the Prime Minister gets it but, the fact is that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, made clear, the life-chances legacy of the pandemic challenge makes his disability plan even more central to the credibility and success of his levelling-up agenda. Indeed, ComRes polling shows that the strategy is viewed by the public as a key test of whether the Prime Minister’s levelling-up agenda is more than just words.

Disabled people have watched successive Governments produce Green Papers, White Papers and consultations with little to no tangible outcomes, repeating the same work time and time again without any transformation. That is why we have got to seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to get it right because getting the PM’s national strategy for disabled people wrong, as I sadly believe is in danger of happening, would hole his levelling-up agenda below the waterline. I want to reassure the Prime Minister that I will not blame him—indeed, I will thank him—if he delays the disability strategy until he can be confident of its landing well with its primary stakeholder group, disabled people and disabled children.

The Government need to understand that it is we as disabled people who will tell them when we believe we have been listened to, not the other way round. It is vital that the PM’s levelling-up agenda and his promise of equality of opportunity is regarded by disabled people in ways that they can see for themselves as truly delivering on his promise of levelling up.