My Lords, I add my support to the opening remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. She said that she was somewhat disappointed by the Minister’s response to these amendments in Committee. She is right. He founded his response on a defence that these statistics are already available if you know where to find them and that they will continue to be published. That is only half the story. There is a case to be made for looking at more qualitatively based, specific disability-related data that are not available. It would not cost a great deal of money. The DWP has a capable resource department. Over a period of years, a lot of small but very important disability employment issues could be explored and the trends chased down and studied.
I give the example of the change as we move to universal credit, using work coaches rather than disability advisers. I understand that and I am very supportive of that new environment, but the work coaches are not dedicated specialists. They will have access to people, but I would love to watch how that works—if it does—as universal credit is rolled out. If it does not, we will need to change the setup, as I am sure the Minister will agree. I would like to see that kind of thing in gremio of the other suggestions for the reporting requirement from the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. I support her in observing the need for what does not currently exist. With a bit of good will, working with the disability communities, we could have better sight of some of these problems.
My second point is that a contract of employment takes two people: you need an employer as well. We must not forget the employers. They try to do the best they can. As was said, physical disability is in some ways easier to address because the solutions are more obvious. Potential employees who suffer from any kind of intermittent condition—it is mainly, but not just, mental illness—are in a different category altogether. I remember feeling sympathy for the Minister when he got into trouble for saying that people with disabilities were not worth the money, or something—I am sure he never said it and that he did not mean it even if he did. However, he is right, in that the one risk that a potential employer fears—if I can put it that way—with regard to a very good candidate with intermittent conditions is that they cannot control their ability to turn up at key moments. Therefore, we need flexible working and to compensate for or take account of that, to reassure employers. You could do it by mitigating NI contributions, for example. We are not yet engaging in sufficient outreach with employers who might otherwise be willing to address this gap.
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When all is said and done, this is still a saving measure. According to the briefing I received from the department, £640 million will be saved by 2020, which
is a huge amount of money. Of course, we look forward with interest to the Green Paper, through which we will get an extra £100 million a year, which is very welcome. However, if the gap is not addressed by 2020 I, for one, will say—if I do not, the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, will get there before me—“There is half a billion pounds of savings here”. If we cannot tackle this issue with the money allocated in the Green Paper, we should go back to central Government, or the next Government, and say, “You have saved a lot of money out of this. However, we are still not doing the job with the money and resources that are available, so we want more assistance to get to where we all want to be: to seriously address this gap”.