Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the effect of the current funding cap of £42,100 on the (a) number of people from the deaf community accessing the access to work scheme and (b) levels of funding available for members of the deaf community; and whether he has plans to change the level of that cap.

Officials have regular discussions with a wide variety of groups representing scheme customers and suppliers. In recent years such organisations representing deaf customers' issues have included:

• Royal Association of Deaf people
• Action on Hearing Loss
• British Deaf Association
• Signature
• Deaf AtW
• UK Council on Deafness
• Association of Sign Language Interpreters
• National Union of British Sign Language Interpreters
• Scottish Association of Sign Language Interpreters

In addition Access to Work officials have had many more discussions with organisations who represent the deaf community’s interests as part of a broader agenda as well as presenting updates to the department’s operational stakeholder engagement forum (OSEF) which acts as a broader forum for Access to Work to engage with various groups of stakeholders.

In May 2015 the Government published an Equality Analysis of the impact of the reforms to Access to Work, which may be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/426416/future-of-access-to-work-equality-analysis.pdf

From April this year the Cap is set at £42,100 per annum, calculated at one-and-a-half times the prevailing annual average earnings figure. There are no plans to alter the current uprating mechanism. We will be reflecting on Access to Work as we continue our work stemming from the recent Green Paper.