Unemployment: Disabled People

Debate between Lord Freud and Baroness Smith of Basildon

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I want to make it absolutely clear: PIP is a better benefit than the DLA it replaces. More people are receiving the top rates of PIP than they are of DLA: 24% in PIP and 15% in DLA. We have other ways of supporting people who are in work and who have some element of disability but are not eligible for PIP, and we are looking very hard at building up the Access to Work system, and to increasing the numbers who can take advantage of it.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm that “disability” also includes those with a learning disability? Secondly, funding for the new work and health programme appears to be just a third of what was available for previous programmes. Can the Minister explain to your Lordships’ House how this funding will be allocated and why the Government consider it adequate?

[Lord Freud]

We are moving the emphasis away from more general support programmes such as the Work Programme towards the work and health programme because many of the people who need support have disability barriers. It is right for the new emphasis to be there. I absolutely accept the noble Baroness’s point about people with learning disabilities. There are some shocking figures on this and it is a key issue. There are some 1.1 million people with learning disabilities and only around 6% of those are getting into work. Clearly, if we want to halve the gap, that is a central group for us to pay attention to.

Welfare Reform

Debate between Lord Freud and Baroness Smith of Basildon

Monday 11th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for concentrating on the important issue of what good health and ill health are, which is extraordinarily difficult to pin down. I am sure that he believes as I do that the well-springs of health are around basic social skills and a sense of meaning and community. When we put people on inactive benefits, we are taking away from them the well-springs of health. It is vital that we help people back into work, which is such an important contributor to their psychosocial well-being. We will watch the WCA very closely to make sure that it does its job, so that we can have the opportunity to get people back to work.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I apologise to the Minister for missing the beginning of this Statement, but I have listened with great care to what he has said in response to questions. I think that all of us in this House will share the objective of supporting back into work those who are able to work. However, all this is predicated on jobs being available. The Minister spoke about 600,000 jobs having been taken out of the economy already. The Government’s own policies, particularly public service expenditure cuts, are destined to lead at a conservative estimate to about half a million jobs being lost, with an equivalent knock-on effect in the private sector. There is some difficulty therefore in encouraging people to go back to work while the Government are taking away the very jobs that they can do. What discussions has the Minister had with ministerial colleagues? What discussions has the Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith, had with his ministerial and Cabinet colleagues not on job cuts, which we know have taken place, but on job creation?

[Lord Freud]

I thank the noble Baroness for that question. The state of the economy is a fluid entity in terms of where jobs are. While jobs may be lost in some areas, new ones are created elsewhere. We have already seen a good pick-up: 280,000 people went back to work in the last quarter. Independent forecasts for the next couple of years from organisations such as the IMF and OBR are for 2 to 2.5 per cent growth. That would create net new jobs. The jobs will be there, but they may be different jobs.