Extract from Lords debate on Covid-19: Economic Recovery - Apr 20

Wednesday, 21 April 2021 07:46

Lord Shinkwin (Con): My Lords, my noble friend the Minister is surely right to describe the pandemic as a grave shock, as is my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft to mention certain groups that have been particularly hard hit. To her list I would add disabled people: 60% of those who died were disabled. The disability employment gap, which currently stands at almost 30%, is growing. It is therefore more important than ever that the Prime Minister is allowed to deliver on his bold and admirable vision of a society in which everyone is enabled to realise their potential. It is why the whole of government needs to get behind his manifesto promise to produce the most ambitious and transformative disability plan in a generation.

I for one question neither his sincerity nor the scale of his ambition. Unlike so many other politicians, the Prime Minister cuts through; he connects with people’s hopes and he thinks big. Now is the time for him to do all three, and his forthcoming national strategy for disabled people is the perfect opportunity for him to do so. Indeed, the success of his levelling-up agenda depends on it. The strategy is its first big test.

Some may ask what disability has got to do with the economy and our recovery from the Covid-induced downturn. I would say: a lot. Just a 5% increase in the number of disabled people in employment is projected to result in a £23 billion increase in GDP, with tax revenue up £6 billion by 2030. The purple pound—the spending power of households with one or more disabled people in them—is estimated to be worth one-quarter of a trillion pounds. I think the PM gets this. To his credit, he has nailed his colours to the mast. Disabled people, in turn, have pinned their hopes to it, but the question hanging in the air is whether all his Cabinet and ministerial colleagues have really thought through just how radical the reset required is, and what it will take for the reality to match the rhetoric.

What is clear is that now is not the time for yet more tokenistic tinkering or tweaks to policy. Rather, now is the time for a radical reset of policy and policy-making that matches the ambition of the PM’s vision. At the heart of that reset must be this simple principle: just as it has been with gender, the lived experience of disability around the boardroom table on merit is central to resetting the conversation. Equally important is an acknowledgement that a different conversation is never going to take place while the same sort of people are leading it—namely, well-intentioned, well-meaning but non-disabled people, in the form of successive Governments—and are telling disabled people what is good for them.

If the Government are serious about wanting the PM’s national strategy for disabled people to land well with its primary stakeholder group—disabled people—they will stop insisting that they have embarked on one of the largest-ever engagement programmes with disabled people when so many disabled people, me included, have been horrified to see what that engagement amounts to. If an online survey that is so offensive and inept that it is currently the subject of a legal challenge by the law firm Bindmans is meant to be a success, then I hate to think what failure looks like.

To ensure the PM’s strategy lands well and to support him, the Government need to listen to the business leaders who recently signed an open letter to the Prime Minister, urging him to show in his strategy that he had given careful consideration to the recommendations of the CSJ Disability Commission, which I was delighted to chair. Signatories to the letter included GSK, Pearson plc, the Post Office Ltd, Schroders, BNY Mellon Investment Management, Coca-Cola, PageGroup, Clifford Chance, Ashurst, Herbert Smith Freehills LLP, COINS, Aviva plc, ITV, Unilever, Clyde & Co LLP, Purplebricks, Stephenson Harwood LLP, Gapsquare and LGBT Great. The list goes on. They all say:

“Disabled people have waited long enough; now is the time for action.”

They are right, which is why the CSJ Disability Commission placed its employment recommendations at the heart of its submission to the PM’s strategy. Those recommendations include: extending mandatory gender employment and pay gap reporting, which a Conservative Government introduced and which Ministers in this Government have said is working, to disability; providing more supported routes into employment; leveraging government procurement, worth some £292 billion, to drive up the number of disabled people in employment; and reforming Disability Confident, which currently does not command the confidence of either business or disabled people, and Access to Work to make those schemes fit for purpose.

The PM has stuck his neck out, which is why I close with this point. I hear that some Ministers continue to argue against mandatory workforce reporting on disability by large firms with 250 or more employees, citing that old chestnut of having a philosophical objection as Conservatives to using the stick, as well as the carrot, to bring about progress. Well, this Conservative has a philosophical objection to failure. Some 26 years have now passed since the Disability Discrimination Act was passed. If the carrot alone was ever going to work, it would have worked by now.

The fact is that the opponents of giving business a level playing field on which to compete transparently and consistently for the best talent, whether disabled or non-disabled—as the extension of mandatory gender pay gap reporting to other protected characteristics, such as disability, would do—are behind the curve. They are in dogmatic denial. They protest that pay gap reporting cannot be done. Meanwhile, some businesses, such as Clifford Chance and EY, are already doing it. To them, I simply say thank you. To the Government, I say, “Please fulfil your responsibility, as the party of business and equality of opportunity, to create the conditions most conducive to fair and open competition”. That means a level playing field and mandatory pay gap reporting. Now is the time to lend the economy, disabled people, businesses and, most of all, the PM our support in ensuring that he can deliver on his promise for the most ambitious and transformative disability plan in a generation.

To read the whole debate, CLICK HERE