Government must drop ‘economic burden’ narrative and sanctions, MPs are told

The government needs to change its “extremely damaging” narrative that suggests disabled people are an “economic burden”, and move away from threats and sanctions, if it wants to increase disability employment, MPs have been told.

Disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) told members of the Commons work and pensions committee yesterday (Wednesday) that the government needed to listen to DPOs on how to reduce the disability employment gap.

One DPO told the MPs that the under-fire Access to Work programme “needs rescuing”, with its lengthy backlogs and a refusal by ministers to accept that support packages are being cut.

Michelle de Oude, co-chair of Greater Manchester Disabled People’s Panel (GMDPP), told the committee that the government’s frequent use of the term “economic inactivity” to describe disabled people who were not in paid work wrongly implied that they are “not contributing to the economy” and are “an economic burden to the rest of us in society who are working”.

She said this “extremely damaging” narrative failed to recognise that many disabled people volunteer with charities or contribute to their community in other ways, and it failed to recognise the work of unpaid carers.

If these groups suddenly withdrew their labour, she said, it would cause a huge economic cost to the country.

And she said that all disabled people contribute to their local economy by buying services, and most of them spend money online, and are therefore “economically active”.

She awarded the government “two or three out of 10” for its record on disability employment because of its “narrative” that disabled people “are a problem because we are not employed or we’re not employed enough, or we are not doing enough to get employed”, which ministers claim is costing the country money.

She said that GMDPP was trying to challenge this narrative.

De Oude said a key issue the government needed to address was the lack of expertise among work coaches in how to support disabled people to negotiate with an employer on reasonable adjustments.

Currently, she said, disabled people and employers are not given the opportunity to test out what adjustments could work.

She said it was important for disabled people to understand that they have a right to reasonable adjustments in the workplace and are shown how to ask for them.

She said: “If you support them to ask for the right reasonable adjustments in the right way, and you support the employer to understand that ask and to implement it in the right way, then you’ll really start to tackle the employment gap [between disabled and non-disabled people].”

She told the committee that Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) employment support programmes treat disabled people as if they are being put through a “sausage machine”.

De Oude also said the government should ask DPOs how they would spend money to support disabled people to access jobs and persuade employers to remove barriers, rather than endlessly repeating the failed policies of successive governments over the last 30 or 40 years.

She said DPOs would instead focus on disabled people’s expertise and individual knowledge and work with employers to remove barriers and “explore things and try things”.

Geoff Fimister, head of policy for Inclusion Barnet and spokesperson for the Campaign for Disability Justice, highlighted the harm caused by conditions and sanctions imposed on disabled people by DWP.

He said that “as long as the system is backed up by the threat of work-related conditionality and sanctions, I think there’ll be a lack of trust, and getting that trust and engagement from disabled people is crucial.

“Moving away from pressure and towards support is where we need to be going.

“There needs to be a confidence that what is on offer will actually lead to employment, and decent employment, and is not backed up by the threat of loss of income.”

De Oude added: “If conditionality worked, if threatening people worked, then all of the conditionality that had ever been in place would have worked, wouldn’t it, [and] the employment gap would have reduced.

“The fact of the matter is it doesn’t work because what you’re… doing is penalising disabled people for the fact that there are consistent, persistent barriers across the employment market.”

Fimister said good quality employment support was important, but the readiness of employers to employ disabled people was “key”.

But he said that the specialist knowledge of work coaches was “very patchy, very variable”.

He also told the committee that the Access to Work disability employment scheme was “very important” but “needs rescuing”, because of its backlogs and “unofficial cutting back” of support.

He said: “People are finding when they have their packages reassessed, they’re getting much less than they were getting before.

“The DWP denies that this is happening. They say that they’re just trying to stick to the original policy objective, so we’re having some very surreal conversations.

“It’s like looking out the window and saying, ‘It’s raining,’ and the DWP saying, ‘Well, the policy intention is that it’s not raining.’

“That won’t do. Access to Work is in need of rescue.”

Conor D’Arcy, deputy chief executive of Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, told the committee that his organisation had asked its research community of 5,000 people with mental health conditions “whether they had felt like the support that they’d got from DWP had ever got them into a job that had actually understood and was suitable for their mental health, and only nine per cent said yes”.

And Evan John, policy and public affairs adviser for the disability charity Sense, said there was a lack of understanding within jobcentres of the support requirements of disabled people with “complex needs”, which can “leave them feeling discouraged and distrusted”.

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