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Disability Policy (Economic Downturn)

I agree absolutely. I wrote to my right hon. Friend about the progress since the 1986 Act and I was going to come on to that. It was a little while ago—a whole hairline ago, sadly. One example that I have seen is in Essex. The Essex Coalition of Disabled People provides direct payments administrative services for disabled people, with a contract from Essex council. I think that Southend and part of Cambridgeshire are also involved. That provides disabled people with sustainability of funding, and the funding is also used for other services such as good advocacy and support. With the trailblazers, when we are considering the models, we need to ensure sustainability of funding for good advocacy and support, because if the right to control is to work not just for one year but for all years, that must be in place and it cannot rely on year-to-year, hand-to-mouth funding. It is a central part of delivering successfully. On the point that the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) made, it is important that we involve voluntary groups. We cannot think that the right to control will be there for everyone. We must be wary of people who advocate only one way and who have an ideology in that respect. For the majority of people, the right to control will work, but for some people it will not work, so we do not want all the services to be run in a particular way. That is why, in relation to the trailblazers, where we have funding streams that will become individualised for things such as supported employment, we do not want services to collapse if people withdraw funding. What the initiative will do is change the way in which the power exists at the moment, so rather than disabled people being the passive recipients of what the council, the health service or whoever says, they will have far more power. They will need to be consulted on, and involved in, services. Perhaps that will prevent the issues in local authorities that my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill described arising. A number of hon. Members referred to stigma, hate crime and the discrimination that too many disabled people face. We have made a great deal of progress on that front in recent years, but we need to continue to fight the battle. In some ways, in these years, we are seeing the best and the worst in terms of inclusion. We all remember the fantastic scenes just up the road in Trafalgar square when our Olympians and Paralympians came back from Beijing. They included gold medal winners, and people were celebrating their achievement, not because they had overcome adversity in the way that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West referred to, but because of their sporting prowess. It was a fantastic achievement. Thirteen million people tuned in to the BBC's coverage of the Paralympics. That was more people than in any other country in the world. The Paralympics are a very important force for portraying a positive image of what disabled people can contribute to their country. This is about tackling attitudes, and if we can tackle attitudes, we can tackle behaviour. There is so much work to be done. My right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill mentioned the Equality and Human Rights Commission inquiry into hate crime, which was born out of the most appalling crime that took place some two years ago. Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca were the victims of hate crime, which led to their taking their own lives. The most depressing feature of the case was that Fiona Pilkington had no expectation that anyone would do anything about it. The shame of that is shared by us all. We need to fight such crime. The Olympics in 2012 offer us a huge opportunity to shift attitudes and change behaviour. I have no doubt—I am sure that none of us has any doubt—that we will win medals or that our Olympians and Paralympians will do a fantastic job in representing our country in our capital city and at the other arenas and venues around the UK. However, it is vital that we have a good number of disabled people working and volunteering at the Olympics. I am working closely with my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Olympics and disabled people's organisations to ensure that many thousands of disabled people—4,000 or 5,000—are part of the volunteer work force. We need to look at things such as adjustments so that people who need personal assistants can take part. One can imagine people attending Olympic venues being welcomed and escorted to their seats by a young woman, perhaps with cerebral palsy, and her PA. That is one example, but what would it do to advance attitudes towards disabled people if we multiplied it by thousands? It is very powerful, and it is important that we do not miss a once-in-a-generation opportunity to use the power of the Olympic and Paralympic games. Let me touch on access to work for people with learning disabilities. My right hon. Friend does great work with the all-party group. As hon. Members have said, we have not seen the increases that we would have liked in the number of people with learning disabilities getting employment. Shortly after I completed my social care course, I got my first paid job, as a care worker with people with learning disabilities, so seeing the advancement of this group of people has been a passion of mine. As part of our "Valuing Employment" strategy, the Department recently announced that it would employ 400 people with learning disabilities over the next year or so and work in partnership with our contractors. We will make access to work more flexible not only in terms of physical adaptations, but by making job coaches available. We will build on some of the work that we have undertaken with Project Search, an initiative that works particularly with public sector bodies and hospitals. I recently met students with learning disabilities at the Norwich and Norfolk University hospital who had been given internships and learned about different jobs around the hospital. I was delighted to hear that many of them had secured full-time employment. Indeed, one of their colleagues told me how delighted she was when one of the young men came to her to say that he would be spending the weekend paintballing with colleagues from the hospital. He was taking part in a mainstream exercise, and they were including him as a friend and colleague.