Wheelchair and Community Equipment Strategy

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, it is great honour to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, and to have enjoyed a small sample of the immense knowledge that she will bring to this House. It is, however, somewhat ironic that I am asked to talk about her in a time-limited debate when it is clear it is possible to fill a whole hour with her public achievements and contributions to public life.

As we heard, the noble Baroness qualified as a doctor in 1983 and trained in psychiatry in the Maudsley and Bethlem and then as a GP in south London. Her career has consistently sat at the intersection of general practice and mental health, including addiction, gambling harm and, critically, the well-being of the healthcare workforce itself.

From 2008 to 2022, the noble Baroness founded and led the NHS Practitioner Health Service. It is now the largest confidential mental health and addiction service for health professionals in the world, supporting nearly 50,000 clinicians across England and Scotland. From 2019 to 2025, she co-chaired the NHS Assembly, helping to bridge policy and patient experience at a national level. Ever the entrepreneur, she co-developed eConsult, now used by around a third of GP practices. She continues to lead the Primary Care Gambling Service and serves as patron of Doctors in Distress. As if all this was not enough, she has been chair and president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, only the second woman to hold both roles.

Before I end, I must mention perhaps the noble Baroness’s most remarkable career high: her stint as a stand-up comedienne in the show that she co-wrote, “Fifty Minutes to Save the NHS”. This should have been a clue to how effective she would be in a time-limited debate on an important subject. The noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, brings not only deep knowledge but wit to this House. I have no doubt that she will make an important and exceptional contribution.

We often file wheelchair and community equipment services under “health” or “social care”. In reality, they ought to be part of our national employment infrastructure. When those services fail, people lose not just mobility but their ability to contribute. The numbers tell the story starkly. Only around 53% of working-age disabled people in the UK are in employment, compared with 82% of non-disabled people. It is even wider for young disabled people, as a recent House of Lords report on the transition to work made clear. Some 1.2 million people rely on a wheelchair and many more rely on other equipment. When these systems fail, we are not talking about just inconvenience but large parts of the labour market losing the tools that make work possible.

For many disabled people, daily life and work depend on reliable access to the right equipment—wheelchairs, seating, mobility aids, home adaptations, assistive tech. When systems slip, when assessments take months and repairs take weeks, the consequences are immediate. Parliamentary inquiries have described these failures as “systemic”, as we have heard. Charities report people stuck at home with unsafe chairs or unable to start new jobs because their equipment simply has not arrived. Services designed to enable independence become gatekeepers to one’s ability to work.

This has an economic cost that we rarely acknowledge. If someone is unable to work purely because essential equipment is delayed or incorrect, the ripple effect hits every public budget. They are less likely to earn, pay tax or progress in their career. They are more likely to draw on welfare and to need avoidable support. Independent assessments show that timely wheelchair provision produces substantial net fiscal benefits over a lifetime. This is not charity. It is investment in people, productivity and public finances.

What can we do? The private sector has a bigger role than it realises. Many employers have disability inclusion strategies, but too often the effort stops at the workplace door. Rarely do companies engage with the upstream systems that determine whether someone can physically get to work or access equipment and the responsiveness of service providers and the basic accessibility of buildings and bathrooms.

Employers can change that. They can partner with local social care services and use procurement to demand guaranteed repair times, loan equipment or minimum quality standards. They can appoint a senior sponsor for end-to-end online accessibility, responsible for everything from recruitment to evacuation plans. They can embed requirements for accessibility and rapid occupational therapy assessments in their HR processes. They can also use their data to track how many dates slip because equipment is not in place, how many job offers fall away and how many days of work are lost to broken or missing equipment. They can work with unions and disabled staff networks to design no-detriment policies when external equipment failures prevent people from working.

Government and commissioners must stop treating equipment services as a marginal welfare line. They are essential economic infrastructure. Outcomes should be judged not just clinically but in terms of employment, education and participation. Services should publish transparent data on waiting times for assessment, delivery and repair, broken down by age, region and employment status. As a minimum we must know how many working-age disabled people are delayed or denied work because of delays to equipment. Access to work should be fully integrated with NHS wheelchair and community equipment pathways. Leaders such as Sara Weller, a non-exec at BT, have long been arguing that disability inclusion must mean more than good intentions. It means designing systems that work from end to end.

This is the core point. Mobility, accessibility and equipment are not optional extras. For many disabled people, they are the foundation that makes employment possible. I learned this the hard way when I was in a wheelchair for a year. However, before my own experience, I learned from another Lane-Fox, who terrorised the halls of this building in her electric wheelchair—my great-aunt, Felicity Lane-Fox. If we are serious about closing the disability employment gap, boosting productivity and unlocking talent, we must put disability equipment services in our growth strategy, not have it marooned on the edge of the health system.