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Disability Policy (Economic Downturn)

The hon. Gentleman is right. He cautions us about one thing in particular. We spend a lot of time talking about those disabled people who are not working and what we need to do to give them help and support to get into work. The other side of that equation is ensuring that employers understand that the reasonable adjustments that they might have to make to employ someone with a physical disability, a mental health or fluctuating condition or, as the right hon. Gentleman said, people with learning disabilities, are often not that great. By making some relatively modest changes, we can ensure that such people have the opportunity to work and make a contribution and, equally, employers can take that into account in respect of people in the existing work force who develop a disability. There cannot be an employer of any size that does not have someone on its staff with a mental health problem, for example, given that one in four of us will have one at some point in our life. An employer may not know that they have employees with mental health problems, but I am sure that they do have such employees. It is about encouraging employers to make changes to keep those people in work and help them to remain effective. Perhaps that is one of the gaps. There are some good employers. The Employers' Forum on Disability has some good members who do excellent work. Perhaps that knowledge is not widely shared. That is a challenge not just for the Government, but for Members of Parliament when talking to employers in their constituencies. I always try to do that when talking to employers in mine. I ask them what they do to employ disabled people. Do they think about that? Do they think about their recruitment practices? We can all do that. All the campaigning groups, a number of which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, campaign on that all the time. When talking about getting disabled people into work, we must look at what the Government can do. The statistics on disabled people employed in the public and private sectors show that the public sector as a whole has a pretty good record, although it could do better, and that it employs a significant number of disabled people. The Minister will not be surprised, because he and I have had this little joust before, that central Government are not impressive at hiring disabled people. His Department has been working on that matter and he may say something about it in his speech: he has led some initiatives and employs someone with a learning disability in his private office, which is welcome. However, only 3.6 per cent. of employees in the two central departments of the Department for Work and Pensions—corporate services and shared services—have a known disability. That figure is not high enough: it is not as good as other Departments. Given that the DWP is the Department with the Minister for Disabled People, it ought to be doing better. The Minister has started work on that and whoever forms the next Government needs to continue doing it and taking it further.