King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vallance of Balham, and my noble friend Lord Petitgas on their powerful maiden speeches.

Democracy means that the voter is never wrong. My party has just been served a very generous helping of humble pie by His Majesty’s electorate. It may taste foul, but I sense that they expect us to eat it, and to do so gracefully. Notwithstanding the low proportion of vote share and thus the shallowness of the mandate granted to government, the appetite for change was unavoidably clear—I suspect not so much because of what we did but because of what we failed to do.

Immigration aside, nowhere is this perhaps more apparent than in the field of disability employment. The opportunity afforded by 14 years in government to close the disability employment gap was squandered. It remains at around 30%. Of course there are myriad reasons, but one of them was undoubtedly that my party, sadly, dropped the ball on disability. Indeed, by actually making it more difficult for disability rights to be enforced, we effectively disowned the jewel in our social justice crown, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. For me, as someone who was born with a disability and who chose to be a Conservative precisely because equality of opportunity was and always should be an article of faith for any Conservative Government, the failure to apply that principle to disabled people in practice was completely counterintuitive.

So I for one do not regret the commitment in the most gracious Speech to publish a draft equality (race and disability) Bill and specifically to introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay-gap reporting for large employers. My only regret is that some in my party still give the impression that they believe this is woke nonsense. Nothing could be further from the truth. Transparency is a good thing, and mandatory pay-gap reporting is in line with recommendations made by the CSJ Disability Commission, which I chaired, the IoD commission on “The Future of Business: Harnessing Diverse Talent for Success”, which I also chair as per my entry in the register, and, of course, the Disability Employment Charter, the brainchild of Professor Kim Hoque. I congratulate him and the charter’s founding members on their success in securing around 200 signatories, including companies such as Adecco, Schroders, PageGroup and McDonald’s.

In conclusion, I hope very much that the Government will take into account the support of business leaders such as Steve Ingham, the former and very successful chief executive of PageGroup and now chair of the Business Disability Forum, for mandatory disability pay gap and employment reporting, and that this draft Bill will create a supportive policy environment for employers who want to do the right thing for their business by recruiting and promoting diverse talent, but on a transparent, level playing field.