debates/debates2025-03-17c conversation_15
Source: hansard.parliament.uk (2025-03-17)

UK Parliament Hansard data: debates/debates2025-03-17c conversation_15

Jessica Toale:If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities. \p Liz Kendall: This week is Sign Language Week, and my right hon. Friend the Minister for Social Security and Disability will be speaking in the Backbench Business debate to mark Sign Language Week on Thursday.

This week is also Neurodiversity Celebration Week. Neurodivergent people face particular barriers to employment, with less than one in three in work. Everyone deserves the chance to fulfil their potential, so we recently launched a new independent panel to advise us on these issues. The experts on the panel, including neurodivergent people themselves, will present their recommendations to us later this year, and I very much look forward to their findings. \p Jessica Toale: Last week I visited the Crumbs project in my constituency. Crumbs provides training for people with disabilities and mental health conditions to get the professional skills they need to go into the hospitality industry, and the personal skills they need to live independently, and 90% of its trainees move into employment. Given the Secretary of State’s commitment to bringing people with long-term health conditions and disabilities back into work, what more support can she give to successful programmes such as Crumbs? \p Liz Kendall: I welcome the work that Crumbs is doing in my hon. Friend’s constituency. I want to ensure not only that we overhaul our jobcentres, have a new youth guarantee, and join up work, health and skills support through our “Get Britain Working” plan; but, crucially, that our jobcentres and others work closely with organisations such as Crumbs, because only by working together will we get the right support to help people on the pathway to work and to success. \p Lindsay Hoyle: I call the shadow Secretary of State. \p Helen Whately: We heard yesterday that the Cabinet had not yet seen the welfare plan that the right hon. Lady is apparently due to announce tomorrow. Given all the media briefings, the apprehension of disabled people and the growing number of people not working, none of us would want to see that delayed. Can she assure us that she has got collective agreement so that she can announce her plan here in this Chamber tomorrow? \p Liz Kendall: The hon. Lady will have to show a little patience. She talks about plans, but we have seen her and the shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), making claims in various newspapers about their plan—but there never was a plan. The former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt), actually admitted that during the election when he said that the numbers had already been scored. The only thing that the previous Government ever put forward was ruled illegal by the courts. They had 14 years to put this right; this Government will act. \p Helen Whately: I listened hard to the right hon. Lady’s answer but, given everything I heard, I still do not think she has the support of Cabinet colleagues, with less than 24 hours to go. It was a no.

There is never a good time for millions of people to be out of work, but as the world gets more dangerous we can afford neither the benefits bill nor the waste of human potential. Given the opposition of the right hon. Lady’s party to welfare reform, can she assure me that her planned reforms will grasp the nettle and bring the benefits bill down? \p Liz Kendall: That from a member of a Government who left one in 10 working-age people on a sickness and disability benefit, one in eight young people not in education, employment or training, and 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness. That was terrible for them—for their life chances, incomes and health—and terrible for taxpayers who are paying for an ever-spiralling bill for the cost of failure. Unlike the Conservative Government, who wrote people off and  then blamed them to get a cheap headline, we will take decisive action, get people into work and get this country on a pathway to success.