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Disability Policy (Economic Downturn)

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point when saying that a lot of the money that is spent on things that the disability facilities grant buys is well invested. It often enables people to stay in their own homes, meaning that they do not have to go into expensive residential care. Investing in such things often makes a great deal of sense. The point made by the hon. Gentleman links well to one of the central points made by the right hon. Gentleman, which was that whoever forms the next Government will face a challenging set of public finances and that the vulnerable should not suffer in such circumstances. The right hon. Gentleman put his finger on why that does not need to be so. Even if the Government have to reduce public spending—whoever forms the Government will have to do so—that does not mean that they will have to cut public services. He mentioned some of the changes in the personalisation of social care leading to money being spent in better, more effective and more innovative ways. The public sector has to focus on delivering some of the things that the private sector has delivered over the past few years during this difficult economic period by improving productivity, doing things smarter and doing more for less to ensure that we can still deliver good services to people with good outcomes, even in a challenging situation. In respect of personalisation, the right hon. Gentleman put his finger on the way in which that circle can be squared and where money can be better spent. The points made by both the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Castle Point highlight that, regarding the public finances overall, spending money wisely is smart spending. We need to see more of that. It is worth focusing on one interesting aspect of this recession that is a good thing —this is where I slightly disagree with the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West—which is that the impact on employment for disabled people has not been too bad. Disabled people have not suffered as much as others from the downturn. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission produced a report recently, last July, looking at the impact of the recession on various groups, including disabled people, which said that they had not been disproportionately affected. Clearly, they have been affected just the same as everybody else, but they have not been disproportionately affected. The only caveat to that is that the EHRC said that part of the reason for that was that disabled people were not as employed as everyone else: they started from a relatively low base. However, having said that, it is good that the recession has not had a disproportionate effect on disabled people and that the gains that they have made in terms of getting into work have not been reversed by the recession. That is welcome. It is worth remembering that one of the key reasons that disabled people, before, during and after a recession—several hon. Members made this point, and the right hon. Gentleman also made it when mentioning the excellent Leonard Cheshire report about disability poverty—are poorer is that they are less likely to work. Whoever forms the next Government will have to improve the number of disabled people who get into work. I am happy to say that the Government have made some progress—the employment rate has gone up, as the right hon. Gentleman said, but I think that everyone would agree that it has not increased as much as we hoped. The big challenge for whoever forms the next Government is to make serious inroads on the significant number of people on incapacity benefit and employment and support allowance who still have not been able to get into work. The tragedy is that there are now more disabled people on those two benefits than there were in 1997 when the Government came into power. The figure has increased by a bit—about 13,000—but it still stands at just over 2.6 million people, 800,000 of whom have been on those benefits for more than 10 years, so they have not been helped.