Minister casts fresh doubt on Kendall’s ‘I’ll send work coaches into mental health wards’ claim

A minister has cast fresh doubt on claims by work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall that she is planning to send work coaches onto mental health wards to push people in severe mental distress off benefits and into work.

The response by employment minister Alison McGovern to a written parliamentary question appears to quash claims made in a BBC interview by Kendall, which caused anger and concern among disabled activists last week.

Kendall told the BBC – although some of her comments were later removed from the article – that the roll-out of existing projects which already see work coaches sent into mental health hospitals would form part of her drive to cut spending on disability benefits, and that existing schemes had produced “dramatic results”.

Following the BBC article, and the anger that followed, Labour’s Clive Lewis asked Kendall in a written question to “publish the evidential basis supporting her statement that trials of employment advisers giving CV and interview advice in hospitals has produced dramatic results”.

In a written response on Tuesday, McGovern pointed to evidence on the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) scheme, which provides “intensive, individually tailored support to help people to choose and find the right job, with ongoing support for the employer and employee to help ensure the person sustain their employment”.

McGovern made no mention of IPS schemes sending work coaches into hospitals, and she claimed that “people who receive Individual Placement Support show employment rates of 30-40 per cent compared to rates in the control group of 10-12 per cent”.

She said the government’s “severe mental illness Individual Placement Support programme aims to support an additional 140,000 people living with severe mental illness to access the services by 2028-29”.

It is believed that Kendall was referring in her BBC interview to South London and Maudsley (SLAM) NHS Foundation Trust’s Work Well scheme*.

The trust has confirmed that its Work Well employment specialists never initiate contact with inpatients and only work with inpatients who specifically request employment support as part of their treatment plan.

Disability News Service also understands that most of those who receive support through the scheme are outpatients and live in the community, and that Work Well employment specialists rarely if ever visit a ward, and would only ever do so if they had specifically been asked to make such a visit by an inpatient.

Meanwhile, research last year by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cast doubt on the effectiveness of IPS schemes.

As Disability News Service (DNS) reported 14 months ago, reports on two IPS-type trials showed they had had “no discernible impact” on helping people with “mild-to-moderate mental and physical health conditions” into work.

The research found that the intensive support provided through the scheme had no impact on employment or earnings for those who began the programme out of work, and concluded that – despite the intensive support – those who took part “continued to face major barriers to finding work”.

These barriers included persistent health problems “which continued to be challenging in a work context and which respondents did not always feel were helped by being in work”.

The research also found that – contrary to DWP’s expectations – those who took part did not experience work “as a therapeutic outcome”.

DWP declined to add to McGovern’s written response.

*The original version of this story mistakenly referred to a different Work Well scheme, which ended in 2020. That scheme was not run on IPS principles. Confusingly, the trust’s current programme is also called Work Well, but most of the support it offers is either delivered according to the IPS model or follows it closely 

Picture of Liz Kendall by Lauren Hurley/No 10 Downing Street

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