Welfare Reform Bill

I shall speak also to Amendment 21. I thank noble Lords who have added their names—unbidden by me, I hasten to add—to these amendments. To their support I can add that of 27 other organisations from outside this Committee, including Leonard Cheshire Disability, Age Concern, the National AIDS Trust, RNID, Macmillan Cancer Support, Mind and, of course, the charity of which I am president, Mencap. I hope that at the end of this short debate, the Minister will add his name to that list as well. In a nutshell, the effect of these amendments would be to monitor the impact of these reforms by category of disability. "Category of disability" is a rather clumsy phrase, but it is what I have been told to say. The provision of these data will allow the Government to track and evaluate how well the reforms will assist the different categories of people with disability into work. The amendments will ensure that this new benefits system works for everyone, no matter what their type of disability. It will guard against any group being left behind on the equality agenda. Support for the aim of these amendments is not limited to the charity sector. A report from the Work and Pensions Committee, published in April this year, recommended that, ""the Government monitors progress [in employment] by physical impairment, mental illness and learning disability … to ascertain whether more progress is being made in some groups of disabled people than in others"." This monitoring and evaluating is essential in order to assess whether the reforms are working accurately and appropriately for all different types of disability, including those furthest from the labour market, such as those with a learning disability. The Minister’s department’s report on the disability equality duty, published in December last year, acknowledges that, ""Although there has been an overall improvement in the employment rate of disabled people, there remains a wide variation in employment rates for different impairment types. In particular, the employment rate of people with learning difficulties remains low"." As I said at Second Reading, Mencap estimates that this employment rate for people with a learning disability is as low as 17 per cent. That compares to 49 per cent for all disabled people and 74 per cent for the population as a whole. The last decade has seen no improvement in these figures. This is despite the fact that 65 per cent of people with a learning disability want to work. With the inclusion of these amendments I have put forward today, the Bill gives the Government power truly to tackle this injustice. Those opposed to these amendments—I cannot believe that that relates to anyone present—say that we are asking the Government to micromanage providers. They are mistaken; we are simply asking that their payment and contracts model recognises the fact that people with different impairments experience particular types of barriers to equal participation. There has been very effective progress in other fields of equality, such as race, on identifying priorities for action by focusing on sub-group categorisations. The same approach must be taken for disability. I have every reason to think that the Minister and his colleagues in the DWP are supportive of these amendments. Indeed, at the launch of the White Paper that preceded the Bill, the then Secretary of State confirmed that this new system would monitor the impact of these reforms by category of disability. Of course, the Minister kindly organised a meeting for me with the Bill team to discuss these amendments only a few weeks ago. I was delighted to be told that they were considering putting forward an amendment on this very issue at Report stage. When the Minister responds, perhaps he will be able to elaborate further on his intentions. We need a commitment to this monitoring in the Bill. As we heard at Second Reading, the number of references to regulations in the Bill is already at an alarming 387, and adding yet another when this amendment can be neatly fitted into the Bill should not be considered. The weight of demand for these amendments to stand as part of the Bill is immense. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively. I beg to move.