Access to Jobs: Disabled People

Mike Kane Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian C. Lucas) on securing this important debate, and I pay tribute to him for the powerful personal testimony he gave about his constituent, who will feel very well represented tonight. I thank all Members who have contributed, including the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who also gave powerful personal testimony—I would not want to pass by his contribution.

I grew up in a household in Wythenshawe where I saw a parent with progressive multiple sclerosis move from being in hard-working employment all her life to being on benefit. That was what really inspired me into public life. My recruiting sergeant was a certain Lord Alf Morris, who was my constituency Member of Parliament at the time. He introduced the absolutely groundbreaking Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, which revolutionised the way we looked at disabled people. It was about their rights, rather than what we gave them, and about how they could aspire to a better life. He also became the world’s first Minister for the disabled. I still get calls to my office asking if Alf is the Minister for disabled people in the Government today. I follow in the footsteps of giants, but I am prepared to do my best.

I also want to mention my predecessor, Paul Goggins. I worked with him when I was a local councillor in 2007 and the first threat to the Remploy factory in Wythenshawe came up. We lobbied the then Member for Neath, who was the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Paul did amazing things. He got on board with JCB and with the Authentic Food Company in my constituency. We brought together a whole host of businesses. He really turned things around—it went from having a £200,000 turnover to having a £600,000 turnover. It did not help in the end, and unfortunately the factory was shut in 2012.

I do not want to make a particularly party political point, even though 20 people lost their jobs. The hardest thing for my predecessor and for me at the time was not just those people losing their jobs—following on from what my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) said, a lot of them have not gone on to find new work—but the fact that during the time we ran the campaign, 500 people got into employment through the work that we did. It was a solid way for disabled people to build skills and confidence and get into the workplace. It was measurable, attainable, smart and specific. It was a really good campaign.

I want to press the Minister by comparing and contrasting what Remploy did with what the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys said about Disability Confident. Because of my personal passion, I am a supporter of any scheme that helps disabled people get into employment. I was therefore pleased to be asked by the DWP to get involved with a Disability Confident event in south Manchester. I worked with my next-door neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who is just as passionate about the subject and who held the post of shadow Minister for disabled people in the last Parliament.

We attracted 80 employers to the event, representing nearly 100,000 people around south Manchester. It included Manchester airport, Wythenshawe hospital and British Gas, which is in my neighbour’s constituency, and we had an extraordinarily good event. It was hosted by Vodafone—I asked it to host—which also sponsored the event, and I want to place on record my thanks to it for doing so. We had Cherylee Houston from “Coronation Street”—the disabled actress—who provided extraordinarily powerful testimony about her life and how she struggled to get into employment and into the acting industry. People from ITV talked about the company as an employer and about the changes and adaptations that it had made to make sure that she could play an important role in that TV series. I pay tribute to her and to ITV for providing role models of disabled people on our TV sets day in, day out.

I want to press the Minister on Disability Confident and how I think it should be improved. The event relied extraordinarily heavily on the contacts of the local MPs. That is an important point. Really it was the MPs, with their business contacts, who brought businesses to the event. That is a good thing, but the administration had to be done in the MPs’ offices, along with all the other things. It placed an inordinate strain on my extraordinarily hard-working staff and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston, but we did it. The DWP lacked co-ordination and leadership. It wanted us to lead as MPs, but things were extraordinarily difficult on the ground. I do not want to criticise DWP officials—far from it. They were well intentioned and worked hard, but there was a lack of a joined-up approach between various parts of the DWP and the agencies that it brought in to help. That needs to be looked at.

We know from our feedback surveys that the companies found the event extraordinarily informative. Many of them went away and implemented the good practices that we had showcased there. That involved companies, chief executive officers, human resources directors and the disabled people working in those companies—we had a number of disabled people there. However, as a politician and policy maker, I like to see numbers and outcomes. It was the lack of follow-up that was so difficult to understand—I am talking about getting all those companies in and understanding how they implemented the good practice. How many disabled people did we put in touch with them for pre-employment and employment opportunities? I just do not know those figures, and I find that quite frustrating as a Member of Parliament.

There is a strong narrative about getting disabled people into work, and we are trying to show leadership as local Members, but we need some resources from the DWP so that we can accurately measure the outcomes of such events—what we have achieved—and then plan further ahead by looking at the areas and expertise that we need to develop in order to go forward. I would like to run a similar event in the next year or two, but until I get substantive data about what we were able to achieve with the first events, that will be quite difficult.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Tomlinson]

That is perfect timing because later in my speech I will highlight our drop-in event for parliamentarians. We are also producing a pack, which I will discuss later, and I would be delighted if my hon. Friend engaged with this because I know that he has done a huge amount of work engaging with employers, particularly with apprentices and at jobs fairs. We definitely need to recruit him to the campaign.

A comment was made about the role of the media and role models. I am doing a huge amount of work on that because it makes a big difference. The hon. Members for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) and for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) covered relatively similar points regarding the ESA work-related activity group. Let us not forget that only 1% of people in the ESA work-related activity group were coming off that benefit each month. Rightly, it was highlighted that people want to get into work. Clearly that system was not doing that right. We can discuss in another debate how it will be done.

We will be spending an extra £60 million providing support this year, rising to £100 million by 2020. We should remember that no existing claimants will lose out on the cash. The proportion of people in relative poverty who live in a family in which someone is disabled has fallen since 2010. Without opening up a debate on disability living allowance and the personal independence payment, let us not forget that under DLA, 16% of claimants were on the highest level of benefit whereas, under PIP, the figure is 22.5%.

I turn to the issue of Remploy before moving to the broader issues. In March 2012, the Government confirmed that it accepted the Sayce review’s recommendations to focus support on individuals through services such as Access to Work, and away from specific workplaces or facilities such as Remploy in order to significantly increase the number of people who could be supported to access the labour market—it is that point about being in the mainstream. I understand that that is not what Margaret wishes to hear but I will come to more specific points.

The background to the case is that the 54 Remploy factories operated at a loss of £49.5 million, amounting to about £22,500 a year to support each disabled person working in a Remploy factory. That is in contrast to the average Access to Work award to support a disabled person in mainstream employment at £3,100. I understand that it is a lot more complicated than that. That debate took place in 2011 and 2012, and there was clearly a disagreement on what should happen. Following that, all disabled Remploy staff affected by the exit of Remploy factories had access to tailored support from an £8 million people help and support package for up to 18 months to help with the transition.

The final statistics of 21 August 2015 confirmed that just over 1,500 former disabled employees had received support through personal caseworkers, 867 were in work and a total of 1,182 jobs had been found. I accept that the point is what has happened since then. I do not know whether I can find that information but I will look into it.

In broader terms, ultimately we want as many people as possible to have the opportunity go into work. The Prime Minister personally committed the Government to halving the disability employment gap, and that was widely welcomed by all. In the past two years, there has been significant progress with 339,000 more people with disabilities going into work. A number of strands will help to make the aim a reality.

First, many Members have mentioned Access to Work. There is roughly a £100 million budget at the moment helping a near record 37,000 people. We have had four years of growth. Following the spending review, by the end of this Parliament we are looking to spend about £123 million and we would expect a further 25,000 people to be supported through that. We now have record numbers of people with learning disabilities, people with a mental health condition, and young people.

We have more specialist teams providing specific advice, including the visual impairments team, and other teams for hearing impairments, self-employment, large employers, and the hidden impairments specialists. Broader unique opportunities are also presented. We are looking at further ways to improve Access to Work, particularly raising awareness among small and medium-sized businesses, which would most benefit and could remove the most barriers. We are also looking into how we can simply provide more advice through that service. A number of speakers said that employers would be worried about whether they had the skillset to support somebody with a disability. Access to Work could be an opportunity to provide that.

Today we had our first Disability Confident taskforce. The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) has rightly asked what more we can do to push that. We had a number of the great and the good from a huge wealth of backgrounds including recruitment agencies and groups that support people with disabilities to get into work, including the Federation of Small Businesses, Clear Company, the Business Disability Forum, the Shaw Trust and a number of others. There was a collective brilliance around that table. I told them that I am very much in listening mode and I want them to challenge us and to identify ways in which we can take advantage of the Chancellor increasing the funding.

The whole point is to make more businesses aware of the huge wealth of talent out there. That is being underpinned through our Disability Confident campaign, which is there to share best practice, bust myths and signpost businesses and potential employees to the help and support that exists. Underlying all this is ensuring that people understand that it is a positive benefit. We are not asking businesses to do something that is not right, but to take advantage, often through making small changes, having greater recognition or understanding that a huge network of support is available. We will push that, with a real emphasis on small and medium-sized businesses.

[Mike Kane]

The Minister is making a good case for Disability Confident. Does he agree that we need measurable outcomes for those events?

[Justin Tomlinson]

Absolutely. I am coming to that, and we will be having that further meeting.

More than 300 organisations are signed up but that is not enough, which is why we will be doing a lot more promotion this year. The digital sign is now up and we are keeping more records of that. We will go back and challenge, particularly those larger businesses, to find out what more they can do with their supply chains and what further questions can be asked. That point was raised as well.