Disability Employment Gap — House of Commons, 2016-06-08
Topic: Labor
Neil Charles Gray (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): 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.