Blind and Partially Sighted People: Employment Support

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)]

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I too congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) on securing this important and illuminating debate, and on the way she introduced it. She has a very deep commitment to this issue, as I know from her long-term work on the all-party parliamentary group. I commend her for that, and I also commend RNIB and the Thomas Pocklington Trust, which support that group by providing the secretariat.

It was welcome to hear hon. Members share their personal experiences. The hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) was absolutely right to remind us of the continuing problem of discrimination in work. It has not gone away and still needs to be addressed. It was great to hear about Julie’s experience of skiing—my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) made his point very powerfully. I visited the Paralympics in Paris for a couple for a couple of days in the summer, and it was inspiring to see the accomplishments of people who are disabled and how much potential they have to contribute. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to do more to realise that potential in our economy and our society.

We all know about RNIB, and I am also familiar with the work of the Thomas Pocklington Trust thanks to my former constituent Helen Mitchell, who is one of its trustees. She arranged for me to pay a very useful and informative visit to its headquarters last year. I pay tribute to it for its work.

As the hon. Member for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger) said, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions set out, in a speech in Barnsley in July, our plans to reform the Department for Work and Pensions: rather than being the Department for welfare, it will be the Department for work. Our ambition is an 80% rate of employment, which would be the highest we have ever achieved in the UK. The hon. Member for East Wiltshire is absolutely right to remind us that the current rate of economic activity is still less than it was before the pandemic, so we still have a good deal of ground to make up.

To achieve that ambition, we have to do much better at supporting disabled people, including blind and partially sighted people, into work. We will not achieve our ambition without that. We want people with visual impairments, who, as we have been reminded, have great skills and talents to offer, to have equal chances to enter and thrive in the labour market. We cannot continue with the 40% visual impairment employment gap, which my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea mentioned, and is spelled out in the APPG report. We will collaborate with visually impaired people and organisations advocating for them to work out how we can meet their needs and support them better.

We do not want people with visual impairments to have to give up work, as is too often the case. The hon. Member for Torbay helpfully told us about the experiences of people he was at college with in the 1980s. We want people to be able to stay in work and not have to give it up. If they lose their job, they should be able to get back into work. Having gone into work, they should be able to progress and do well.

As announced in the King’s Speech in July, in the Equality (Race and Disability) Bill we will fulfil our manifesto commitment to tackle the disability pay gap, which my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea highlighted and which other Members also referred to. Additionally, our “Get Britain Working” White Paper, which will indeed be published soon, will announce crucial reforms to employment support. We will change the way that we measure success. For example, we will focus not simply on getting people into a job, but on ensuring that they can stay in work and can progress to higher earnings in the future. We want to support people in the longer term.

We will also overhaul jobcentres. My hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme made an interesting point about the importance of assistive technology in jobcentres. We will introduce a new youth guarantee, so that in future nobody will be left on the scrapheap when they are young.

My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea was absolutely right to point out that to achieve all that, we need healthy and inclusive workplaces. There are many employers who excel at creating inclusive workplaces in relation to health and disability, and it was very good to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme about his wife’s positive experiences with her employers. However, the APPG’s report points out that many other employers recognise the value of providing an inclusive workplace and would like to provide one, but they need support to do so; at the moment, they do not feel in a position to do so.

Consequently, we are considering what more we can do to help, because preventing people from leaving the workforce and enabling more people to return to work after absences is a good thing. It is definitely good for the individuals concerned; it is good for their mental health and their sense of fulfilment, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes and Mid Fife (Richard Baker), and the hon. Members for Torbay and for East Wiltshire, reminded us. However, it is also good for businesses and wider society.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes and Mid Fife referred to the work of Lord Shinkwin for the Institute for Directors. I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of that work and I look forward to meeting Lord Shinkwin and discussing some of these issues with him in the near future.

The Disability Confident scheme, which has been referred to in the debate, is a very important resource that we already have. It featured in Lord Shinkwin’s report, my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes and Mid Fife mentioned it, and the hon. Member for Torbay dedicated a good part of his speech to it. That scheme provides a strong platform, with more than 19,000 employers participating in it. It promotes good, inclusive employment and recruitment practices. It supports employers to deliver them and to become able to attract, recruit, retain and develop disabled people.

My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea was absolutely right to underline the importance of accessible recruitment processes in making sure that people are not barred from applying for jobs in the first place. In the Disability Confident scheme, there are many committed employers who are enthusiastic about making recruitment processes accessible and who are determined to do well in that regard. However, I agree with my hon. Friend and with the hon. Member for Torbay that the Disability Confident scheme can do more. I have had some encouraging recent conversations about that, for example, with the Business Disability Forum. Working with both employers and disabled people, we will examine how we can make the Disability Confident scheme more robust and how it can achieve more of its potential. I am convinced that potential is there, but we must realise more of it in future.

We also support employers with a digital information service and in increasing access to occupational health services, which the previous Government rightly recognised was important.

[Jim Shannon]

In my contribution, I outlined some of the things that we are doing in Northern Ireland. Obviously, that was to help the Minister with ideas that could be used here on the mainland. The Minister has outlined a number of things that are happening here. Does he intend to contact the relevant body in the Northern Ireland Assembly to ensure that we can work better together, share ideas, do things better and make life better for the people we are here for?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I certainly welcome opportunities to do that. We need to learn from all the devolved Governments in the UK. There are interesting things happening in Scotland, for example, on social security, and in Northern Ireland, so I am grateful to the hon. Member for drawing my attention to a number of those. I am keen to pursue that further.

Disabled people and those with health conditions are a diverse group. The right work and health support in the right place at the right time is key. The contribution of Jobcentre Plus work coaches and disability employment advisers, who play an important role in jobcentres, is vital to this topic. I pay tribute to the dedication of those who are working on this at Jobcentre Plus. We will join up health and employment support around the individual. That will be through, for example, employment advisers in NHS talking therapies—seeing the NHS increasingly embrace the importance of supporting people into work—and individual placement and support in primary care.

My hon. Friends the Members for Battersea and for Glenrothes and Mid Fife, and the hon. Members for Torbay, for Strangford and for East Wiltshire, all spoke about Access to Work, rightly reflecting its crucial importance. The scheme provides grants for workplace adjustments beyond what is provided by the employer. Let us be clear that Access to Work does not replace an employer’s duty under the Equality Act to make reasonable adjustments, as the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) pointed out in his intervention. There are clear statutory obligations here that need to be delivered. Access to Work, however, can provide funding for support workers, specialist aids and equipment, personalised support and workplace assessments, travel to or in work, and mental health support.

The hon. Member for Torbay referred to it as one of the best kept secrets, but demand for Access to Work has been growing fast. The hon. Member for East Wiltshire rightly reported that nearly 68,000 people had Access to Work support approved in the last financial year, an increase of almost a third on the previous year. It is now growing rapidly. As he said, it supported 3,850 people who reported their primary medical condition as difficulty in seeing. That is about 8% of the people who are supported by the scheme. Customers with difficulty seeing as their primary medical condition received a bigger proportion—13% or £33 million—of the total expenditure. Access to Work is making an important contribution.

We are committed to reducing the waiting times for Access to Work. Delivery of the support has been streamlined. We have more staff processing the claims. Customers starting a job within four weeks are prioritised to ensure that they get help in time. Since April, as the hon. Member for East Wiltshire pointed out, all the core parts of the scheme are now online. However, I agree that more needs to be done. I welcome the engagement of all Members who have taken part in the debate and their continuing pressure to ensure that Access to Work delivers on its potential.

As has been highlighted, the APPG report rightly referred to the importance of technology in enabling visually impaired people to be in work. The report specifically mentioned text-to-speech software. Last week I visited Sense College Loughborough, a facility originally developed by RNIB. A visually impaired student there showed me the ZoomText application—which I was not aware of previously—using it to magnify the text he was looking at on a screen, and to manage a document over two screens. He commended its helpfulness to me.

My hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme is absolutely right to point out just how big a game changer AI can be. We must realise that opportunity.

Access to Work can help provide assistive tech, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea pointed out in her intervention, suppliers such as Apple and Microsoft are increasingly bundling assistive tech with their standard products, partly because, as she said, it helps all users and makes the products easier to use for everybody. The technology is coming on in leaps and bounds. It is moving very fast, and we need to make sure that people have access to it. I am looking at what the Government can do in this area to make the technology better known, because a lot of people who have it on their devices do not know that it is there; to make assistive technology more readily available, where it is not bundled in with the standard product; and, maybe on occasion, to commission research to tackle a specific accessibility problem. We are thinking about this, and I welcome ideas and suggestions from Members about what more we can do.

My hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme and others are absolutely right to point out how much more we need to do to support blind and partially sighted people into employment to enable them both to achieve their aspirations and to make their full contribution to our society and economy. That is in their interest and in all our interest. I am encouraged by what the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for East Wiltshire, said about this. I hope that, when hon. Members read the “Get Britain Working” White Paper, as they will soon be able to do, they will agree that we are taking the right steps towards reaching that goal.