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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

Yes, indeed. I look forward to accepting my hon. Friend’s invitation. I hope that he is aware that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform is due to visit his constituency—tomorrow, I believe, but either way she is on her way to South Wales. That is my first decision. When we came into office in 1997—[Interruption.] Conservative Members are huffing and puffing because they do not like to hear what we have been doing. This debate was apparently motivated by a concern that the Government have been doing nothing on welfare reform. I am simply trying to set the record straight. When we came into office in 1997, there was something that we wanted to put right. I am sorry to say that, having had 18 years to try to get it right, the Conservatives spectacularly failed to do so, despite 14 attempts to produce legislation. Only the most blatant forms of direct discrimination against disabled people had been outlawed. Sadly, there was still no protection for disabled employees in small firms or for disabled pupils and students. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 lounged—that is the only description for it—on the statute book. It fell significantly short of its potential and provided no champion to help people to enforce their rights or to give employers advice and guidance on how to meet their legal obligations. In March this year—again, before the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea returned to this House, so he might not be aware of it—the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 completed the most far-reaching programme of disability rights legislation that any European country has put in place. It fulfilled our manifesto commitment to deliver enforceable and comprehensive civil rights for disabled people, and represented a major landmark on the road to a world in which disabled people can be empowered to live independently and be respected as equal members of society. The right hon. and learned Gentleman mentioned the new deal. Our new deal for disabled people has seen nearly 75,000 job entries since its launch in 2001, with 200,000 disabled people helped into work through our total package of new deal programmes. We are seeing very encouraging early results from our pathways to work pilots, which bring together Jobcentre Plus, the health service, GPs and employers to improve the package of support that we offer to people on incapacity benefit. In the first year of the pilots, the number of recorded job entries for people with a health condition or disability had almost doubled compared with the same period in the previous year. I hope that the right hon. and learned Gentleman will think that that is a step in the right direction. Their continued success has driven a significant increase in the proportion of people leaving incapacity benefit in the first six months of their claim, compared with non-pilot areas. We are now achieving progress in helping people off incapacity benefit, with new cases now down by a third since 1997 and the first falls in the total count, which is down by 41,000 in the year to May 2005.