Welfare Reform Bill

Yes, that is the process. Crucially, this assessment identifies the specific support required to undertake a particular role. Given this, we believe the amendment is impractical because it is impossible to determine what reasonable adjustment someone might need until you know what job they are going to do. The amendment would have us carry out assessments before someone even begins a work-related activity. For many people, an initial work-related activity might stabilise their home life through their attendance, for instance, at debt management classes or confidence-building sessions. While these first steps may be crucial in an individual’s return to work path, they would tell us little about what work the claimant would want to do in the future. Without knowing exactly what type of work the claimant would like to do, we would not be able to work out what reasonable adjustments would be appropriate. The right adjustments would be different between different types of job—for example, between an administrative job, a sales job or a manufacturing job. What is reasonable will depend on the employer; for instance, what is reasonable for a huge multinational will be different from what is reasonable for a small business. The amendment would add extra bureaucracy as it might mean an additional assessment on top of the ones that I have described. It is right that we ask customers to come to a medical assessment and to come to interviews to help them think about ways of getting back to work, but the amendment would add another meeting and another person to speak to. This could be confusing, especially when the assessments and the interviews we are already carrying out perform many of the same functions. It would add extra costs. Access to work currently reaches around 28,000 people each year and we accept that it should reach more people, a point made very clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, in his opening remarks. This is why we have announced that we are doubling the funding by 2013-14, which the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, acknowledged. However, the additional cost of the amendment would be around three-quarters of a billion pounds and, as discussed earlier, much of it would duplicate existing provision or serve no practical purpose. We do not think that it is right that the Government should have to fund all the costs of reasonable adjustments. The Disability Discrimination Act enshrined the principle that the employer should bear those costs which are reasonable, and we believe that this remains right. Access to work should pick up the costs that the employer would have difficulty in meeting or which are not reasonable. As I have said, we believe the amendment is unnecessary and has a cost problem.