Disability Employment Gap

Michael Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House regrets the Government's lack of progress towards halving the disability employment gap; further regrets that the Government has not yet published its White Paper on improving support for disabled people; notes with concern that commitments made in the Autumn Statement 2015 to help more disabled people through Access to Work and expanding Fit for Work have not materialised; further notes that the Government is reducing funding for specialist support for claimants with health conditions and disabilities through the Work and Health Programme; and calls on the Government to reverse cuts to the work-related activity component of Employment and Support Allowance and Universal Credit work allowances that risk widening the disability employment gap.

In my opinion and that of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition, the Government are failing disabled people in Britain—failing to support them into work and failing to support those unable to work—and they are doing so deliberately, with calculation, care and even premeditation. It was entirely premeditated to go into the election boasting about cutting a further £12 billion from social security but forgetting to mention it would come from disabled people and those on low wages in need of tax credits and universal credit. I would like to say that we do not know why the Government are doing this, but we do know, because the Secretary of State’s predecessor told us in his tearful goodbye:

“we see benefits as a pot of money to cut because they don’t vote for us”.

It still shocks me to repeat that demolition of the Government’s one nation credentials—indicted by their own words.

I welcome the successor Secretary of State to the Dispatch Box, because all too often the last one failed to turn up in the House to accept scrutiny or difficult questions on issues such as this one, the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign or the bedroom tax. I welcome the decision he took on his first day in the job to stop the plans to take personal independence payments away from people unable to dress themselves or use the toilet unaided, and I also welcome the fact that in the same speech he said that there would be “no more welfare cuts”, but I deplore the fact that he must have known, even as he made that statement, that the deepest cuts had already been made. The cuts from disability living allowance to personal independence payments, the cuts to employment support allowance, the cuts to the Work programme, the cuts to universal credit: all those sharp incisions had already been made. The effects were yet to be felt, but now, a few months down the line, the pain is evident, the harm is clear and these things can be measured in the widening gap in employment between disabled people and the wider population.

[Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman take a step back from the rhetoric and have a look at the facts for a second? Does he not welcome the 365,000 more disabled people in work over the past two years, and the 3.3 million in total who are in employment? Will he not welcome those facts?

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[Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate and I congratulate the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) on securing it.

We absolutely agree with the Government’s aim of halving the disability employment gap, but we have serious concerns about the actions they are supposedly taking to achieve it. With just three-and-a-half years in which to achieve their goal, they are failing. The Resolution Foundation estimates that halving the gap by 2020 will require 1.5 million people with disabilities to be supported into work. I agree with what the Resolution Foundation said in yesterday’s report, “Retention deficit”, in which it highlights that work

“is not right for everyone”

and that the Government could damage their aims by pushing work at all costs, but that there is an opportunity in the discussions on health and work.

Opposition Members have said on numerous occasions —during and since the passage of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016—that the Government are doing things in the wrong order and are, as a result, harming their own objectives. They cut off support from ESA WRAG and universal credit work allowance, and we will now be waiting even longer before the replacement system is up and running.

I welcome the reference in the Labour party motion to the frustration over the delay in the publication of the long-promised White Paper. However, while I remain sceptical about the Government’s real intentions in their change of heart, I welcome the announcement of the Green Paper on health and work—assuming that there is a genuine consultation process, a genuine listening on the Government’s part to stakeholders and a genuine investment in the resulting service—but why were those things not done before the cut to ESA WRAG and before the cut to universal credit work allowance?

The now not-so-new Secretary of State must quickly set out a timetable for the Green Paper consultation and for publication. We cannot allow the Green Paper to follow the White Paper. We in the SNP are deeply concerned that valuable time in which to make progress on disability employment is being lost as a result of this delay. The Tories cannot be allowed to kick this into the long grass. The Green Paper should be brought forward urgently, with real engagement with the community and voluntary sector, to shape the new framework. The Secretary of State must formally make a statement of his intentions and lay out a road map for the development of the new programme and time frame.

The Resolution Foundation also said yesterday that benefit off-flows do not always equate to sustained employment and that the Government’s policy is focusing too much on their rhetoric about getting people off benefits, while not supporting people who are currently in employment to keep them in it. The Resolution Foundation has made a number of recommendations, which I hope the Government will read and consider.

The Secretary of State rightly said he wanted to turn the discussion on social security away from statistics and towards the people involved, and I have some people who desperately want to be listened to and who have agreed to have their cases raised today. These people highlight the issues being faced by disabled people throughout the social security, access-to-employment and workplace processes. Their stories highlight how they are being let down.

At the end of last year, I was contacted by a young woman with autism, who was being forced through round after round of assessment, form-filling and evidence-offering. She was in receipt of PIP and had only recently taken part in the assessment process for it when she was told she would need to go through a work capability assessment and to submit evidence to receive ESA, which she was being cut from. She had to compile and submit all the same evidence a few short months after the same Government Department had requested it. She had to go through very similar and, for her, equally traumatic assessment processes for the same Department for which she had done it a few short months prior. For anyone, that would be an upheaval and an unnecessary burden, and it would result in increased anxiety, but for someone with autism, it is painfully traumatic.

Most galling for me, however, was that my constituent’s placement was put at risk by the decision over ESA. She would not be able to continue if she failed the WCA and was forced back on to JSA. That is why removing ESA WRAG is so damaging to the prospects of those who are on the cusp of finding employment, but who need that extra support and additional resource to get there—in the case of someone with autism, for instance, so that they can finance a familiar taxi, rather than use the daunting, potentially dangerous and unknown world of public transport—and to stay on a training placement, which builds their confidence towards the workplace.

The National Autistic Society has said that its research shows that only 15% of autistic adults are in full-time paid employment. It says the Government cannot rely on an improving economy alone to ensure that disabled people, including autistic people, share the same employment opportunities.

[Michael Tomlinson]

The hon. Gentleman is citing some good cases, as he always does when this issue comes up for debate, but does he not agree that the underlying problem with ESA was that only 1% of those on the programme actually went into work, when 60% or more wanted to find work? The programme simply was not working. Does he recognise that?

[Neil Gray]

Absolutely, but I also recognise that cutting off support cuts off the access to work available to some people, including the constituent I described, and puts the cart before the horse.

The changed system should have been put before the House for debate and scrutiny before the cuts to ESA and universal credit were applied. That was simply ludicrous, and I suspect that we are now going to pay the price. Mencap estimates that

“less than two in ten people with a learning disability are in employment”,

despite, in its estimation,

“eight out of ten being able to work with the right support”,

and a majority wanting to work. The key phrase is

“being able to work with the right support”.

Mencap’s criticism is that the

“support is often not available or those giving that support often do not understand learning disability.”

My nephew and his parents have been through the wringer to get support for him for almost all his life. He is approaching his 17th birthday and is sitting his GCSEs in Lancashire—I wish him well as he goes through that. He has cerebral palsy, which limits his mobility but has not limited his communication skills—far from it. Getting the right wheelchairs, accessing school transport and getting additional support when he needs it at school has been a constant fight for the family, and now he is anxious about what happens as he transitions from school into work. This is what he said to me when I asked him, ahead of this debate, about entering the employment market:

“I’m not sure what I can ask of an employer, for example, if I want to work at an Apple Store but all the tables are too high for me to reach can I ask the employer to make the tables accessible to me? I also sometimes worry that employers may choose another applicant for a position because they believe it would be easier to employ them, even if I am the best person for the job. I would however like to say that when I went for the interview for my apprenticeship my school were very supportive, but that may be because they already know me and I’ve been there for the past five years.”

That tells me of the lack of confidence that many disabled people have about entering the employment market. My nephew is the most gregarious, confident and engaging young man you could wish to meet, yet he feels he will be held back at work. He feels—unsurprisingly because of the way he has had to fight for support throughout his life—that he will have to ask employers for help: that he will be a burden on his future employers because of his disability, and that that will lead to him losing out.

That tells me, and it should ring loud and clear to the Government, that for the employment gap to be halved and for people with disabilities get fair access to employment we need to address how we treat them in all areas of social security support. Making them feel as though they have to fight for help and support that should be their right and expectation damages their long-term prospects and confidence to enter the employment market.

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[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that comment. As you always remind us, Mr Speaker, we are responsible for what we say in the Chamber. My point to the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne was that rather than interrupting my speech, I was more than happy to continue the debate about proper standards of addressing Members in the Chamber after we had completed our speeches. On that note, I think we will move on.

I was touched by what the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) said about his nephew in Lancashire and his perception of engaging in the jobs market. That spoke to me quite a lot because there was a time when I often felt I would be a burden to an employer. An implicit assumption built into how I viewed the world was that, for some reason, employers would somehow not want to touch me with a bargepole, that I would have to be better than the best and that the hurdle would always be that much higher. I very much understand his mindset.

To me, the biggest challenge in trying to overcome the disability employment gap is that some of our assumptions about what will happen to us in the workplace are so low to start with that it is very hard to give people the confidence to engage in the process. One of my concerns—this is partly why I agreed to participate in the review organised by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Disabled People—is my belief that percentages can be a very difficult way to measure what is actually going on. We had a very helpful contribution from the Labour party to the review. I welcome the fact that it felt able to make a submission, and I hope it will do so on the Green Paper as well. The contribution was actually interesting. Again, it focused on percentages—the percentage of people with a disability who are in work or engaging in an apprenticeship—but such figures are always hampered by the fact that those are self-declared disabilities. Many potential applicants simply do not want to acknowledge somewhere on a form that they have a disability in the first place, in case it affects the employer’s perception of how they will be treated during any interview process.

[Michael Tomlinson]

On my hon. Friend’s point about confidence, does he agree that that is not just the confidence of the applicant, although that is absolutely vital, but the confidence of employers to take on disabled people and people with disabilities? As the Secretary of State set out, reverse jobs fairs and such things can help employers to have the confidence to take on employees with disabilities.

[Paul Maynard]

It is very important that we use such opportunities to allow employers a broader range of mechanisms to test whether someone is suitable for a job, over and above a simple face-to-face interview.

I will not go into the findings of our review because they have not yet been agreed or sent to the Minister, but some themes strike me as particularly important. One relates to the very useful occasion when we saw Departments—the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions—working together and, with shared objectives, trying to iron out the differences between them. That alone was very worth while.

It was interesting to see that, despite how much the Government have already changed to improve the situation, employers and potential employees are not aware of what has changed. We may have changed regulations in Parliament, but are we adequately communicating such changes to the outside world so that people know they can take advantage of them?

There is always more that the Government can do in setting a good example. All Departments take on apprentices. I would like something written into each Department’s plans to state what percentage of apprenticeships should go to people with various types of disability. Some important points raised were not about learning or developmental disabilities, but about other hidden impairments such as hearing loss, and I hope that can be built on in any future examination of what goes on.

I welcome the Green Paper, although it is not mentioned in the Opposition motion. For me, the Green Paper is a real opportunity to reset a conversation that I think has gone awry during the years that I have been in this place—surely I am not the only person who is pleased to hear about a fundamental reassessment of the work capability assessment. We set so many hurdles between a disabled person and the job they want that it can make things that much harder. There are two separate assessments—one for ESA, and one for DLA or PIP—and time and again we put hurdles in people’s way. I would far rather try to reduce the number of assessments and make them more about how the state can help the individual. It should be much more personalised, and about acting as a gateway to all the different types of help that should be available.

There is much evidence to show us what works, and supported employment, indented training qualifications and supported internships have by far the best outcomes, although they are also the most costly to deliver per individual. The challenge for the Government is how to square that circle in the medium term. We know what helps to get people into a sustained job—the hon. Member for Workington (Sue Hayman) was right to stress that it needs to be sustained—but often, getting the job is not the challenge; it is about enabling a person to stay in that job and thrive in that place of employment. The Government can do a lot more on that front, and the Green Paper is a chance to reset the clock. I cannot wait to get stuck in and contribute.

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[Debbie Abrahams]

I am sorry, but I will not—I have a lot that I want to say.

The Government set the tone for the culture of society explicitly through their policies and laws, and more subtly through the language they use and what they imply. Collectively, those things tell us who they think is worthy or not. The Government have made their views abundantly clear. Their swingeing cuts to social security support for disabled people—including the recent ESA WRAG cut of £1,500 a year—total nearly £30 billion since 2010 to 3.7 million disabled people.

The Government’s overhaul of the work capability assessment manages to be both dehumanising and ineffective, and it has been associated with profound mental health effects, including suicide. Their sanctions policy targets the most vulnerable, bringing people to the brink, and some have died under it. The PIP debacle is making it harder for disabled people to stay in work. There is also the closure of the independent living fund. I could go on and on. This is happening across all Government Departments—Business, Innovation and Skills; housing; Transport; Education; Justice; and Culture, Media and Sport. Disabled people are being completely marginalised.

[Michael Tomlinson]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Debbie Abrahams]

I am sorry, but I will not. As I said, I have a lot to say.

What needs to happen? Addressing these issues, including the disability employment gap, needs political will and leadership. The Labour party’s disability equality roadshow will work with disabled people, their carers, disabled people’s organisations and providers across the UK, listening to them and developing with them policies that address their needs and that will work. However, we will also engage the public at large, providing an alternative to the Government’s negative narrative and casual inaction.

If 90% of disability is acquired, why are we doing so little to help employers retain skilled and experienced employees who may become poorly or disabled? We need practical measures to support disabled people at work, enabling them to thrive, and protecting them from prematurely leaving the labour market. Some disability charities have recommended more flexible leave arrangements, as well as extending the Access to Work programme. Clearly, if the Government increase the 37,000 or so who used Access to Work last year by another 25,000, that will still be only a tiny, tiny proportion of the 1.3 million people who are fit for work.

The Disability Confident scheme needs to be rebooted. The latest revelation that only 40 mainstream private sector employers across the UK have joined it since its inception three years ago shows that it is, to put it mildly, completely inadequate. What measures are in place to measure the scheme’s efficacy? Where employers work hard to recruit and retain disabled employees, how does that apply to their procurement policies and supply chains?

More needs to be done to help disabled people back into work. As we have been arguing for over a year, the work capability assessment needs to be replaced with a more holistic, whole-person assessment. The current system that assesses eligibility for social security support is not fit for purpose and should be completely overhauled. I welcome some of the change in language on disabled people on this matter. That needs to be reflected in departmental and Jobcentre Plus performance indicators that do not just focus on getting people “off flow” as a successful outcome. Since so many of the same people also have PIP assessments, we should also look at how we could bring these together. It is pleasing that the Government say that they are considering this.

Instead of the increasingly punitive sanctions system, more appropriate support needs to be provided. It is essential to maintain and increase specialist disability employment advisers in jobcentres. There is currently one adviser to 600 disabled people, and even if that is doubled to one to 300, that is still a very low ratio for the Government to be working to. I would also like their role to be extended to working with businesses. The current commissioning and payments system for the Work programme and other welfare-to-work programmes also needs rethinking. We need to improve specialist support, looking at what works. Work Choice, while it has better outcomes than other programmes, may not be the only solution. The individual placement and support scheme for people with mental health conditions is another example. As I have said before, there needs to be greater integration between Departments —not just between the DWP and the NHS but with BIS and economic development. For example, if someone who has musculoskeletal conditions or mental health issues has to take time off work, they need appropriate early intervention to help them get back to work. That is not happening at the moment. We need to understand the bottlenecks in the local system that my impact on this. We need to reflect on the drive for “flexible” labour markets and what this means for supporting people with long-term and fluctuating conditions back into work, and most probably out of work and then back into work, and so on.

There are clear geographical variations in the disability employment gap, but also in the strength of local economies and the availability and types of jobs. It is well established that the prevalence and geographical pattern of sick and disabled people reflects the industrial heritage of our country. Contrary to the Government’s “shirkers and scroungers” narrative, incapacity benefit and ESA are recognised as good population health indicators. Local economic conditions, whether the economy is thriving or not, will determine how readily sick and disabled people will be able return to work. Geographical analysis shows that people with equivalent conditions in the economically buoyant London and south-east are more likely to be in work that those in Northern Ireland, Scotland, the north-east, the north-west, and Wales.

It is over 70 years since legislation was first introduced to prohibit employment-related discrimination against disabled people. Sadly, we are still fighting to address this discrimination and the inequality in employment that disabled people still face. Changing attitudes and behaviour needs cultural change and it needs leadership, and we will provide it.