Access to Work Scheme

[Carolyn Harris in the Chair]

I remind hon. Members that they may only make a speech with the prior permission of the Member in charge of the debate and the Minister. As is the convention for 30-minute debates, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up. The debate will end by 5.40 pm.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Access to Work scheme.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. A disability can happen to any one of us at any time. That was a lesson that I learned the hard way, when I became fully paralysed by Guillain-Barré syndrome aged 22. I was unable to walk for five months, and it took me more than two years to walk steadily on my feet again. I remember feeling utterly exhausted and I worried about how I would ever work again. I am grateful to have made a near full recovery, but not everyone does. For many disabled people, the greatest barrier to work is whether the right support will be in place to make work possible and sustainable for them.

The Access to Work scheme should enable disabled people to enter work, to stay in work and to contribute fully to their communities and to our economy. Disabled people can have complex needs, but achieve remarkable things despite them. The scheme enables more than 74,000 disabled people to work by providing support such as specialist equipment, support workers and specialist job coaches. A study commissioned by the Royal National Institute of Blind People found a £1.48 return for every £1 spent on the Access to Work scheme, so it is excellent value for money.

I have mentioned previously in the House that some of my constituents have been waiting more than nine months just for an assessment of their needs. Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. The waiting list has grown to 66,000 people, an increase of 4,000, and 32,000 payments are now outstanding. Applicants are being told that they may wait up to 37 weeks just for a decision, and some, in particular the self-employed, for more than a year. Let us be clear what that means. It means that someone offered a job cannot take it, that someone already in work cannot do the job properly and, in too many cases, that jobs are being lost unnecessarily.

Megan was offered 15 hours of employment through an internship with Silver Lining in Ilminster, which was fully funded by Access to Work, but the scheme only offered funding for three hours. Megan now has to claim universal credit as she cannot find accessible employment. Does my hon. Friend agree that such funding decisions are totally senseless and are keeping disabled people out of work and from contributing to our economy?

I agree wholeheartedly that that is a great waste of the undoubted talent that Megan has and should be able to bring to the table.

Demand for the scheme has risen sharply. That should be welcomed, because it shows that people want to work and want to get back into work, but the system has not kept up with their demands. Backlogs are growing, processing times are getting longer and confidence in the scheme is falling away.

I met the Disability Poverty Campaign Group, which points to the fact that in recent years average support has fallen sharply and, as a result, job retention has dropped from 88% to 43%. That is fewer people in work as a result of the broken system the hon. Gentleman describes. That is counterintuitive when we want to strengthen our economy and ensure that people are in work.

The hon. Member is right to focus on retention, which is an equally important part of the scheme.

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this debate to the Chamber. He is right to underline the issues for people who are disabled and want to get into work. Many employers wish to ensure that those people have the opportunity, but they are unable to expedite the system, through no fault of theirs. They want to employ people, but they cannot because the Government are falling short. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there has to be a better arrangement and better co-operation in relation to not just those who want to work, but those who want to give them jobs?

Yes. The hon. Member is right to mention how everyone can benefit from people getting back into work—both employers and disabled people looking for work can benefit—but the system is not enabling that to happen. Self-employed individuals, in particular, are losing their businesses, and employers—in particular smaller employers—are being left with costs and uncertainty. A scheme designed to support work is, in its current state, preventing it.

Alongside the delays, there are growing concerns about how the scheme operates in practice. My constituents report being forced to reapply from scratch at renewal, even when nothing has changed. We know that we have the technology to deal with that problem. They face long reconsideration processes, struggle to contact caseworkers and in some instances cannot even access the system properly, because of their needs. This does not sound like a system working with people; it feels like one that they are having to fight to get through.

There are also serious concerns about funding decisions. I have been made aware of cases in which support has been cut significantly, not because needs have changed, but because funding is benchmarked against generic regional job market rates, which will punish people living longer, particularly in Wales, where we have lower than average salaries. That misunderstands the entire purpose of the scheme.

We are seeing a convergence of problems: delays getting into the system, barriers to navigating it and reductions in support once people are in it. The result is clear: people are being kept out of work because the Government’s system is not working for them. That creates a fundamental contradiction: the Government want more disabled people in work, and disabled people have plenty to offer, but encouragement without support does not represent opportunity.

When Access to Work fails, people fall out of employment, businesses miss out on talent, and more people are pushed into economic inactivity. At a time when we must indeed focus on growth, we should be strengthening the system, not allowing it to fall behind. We need urgent steps to tackle the backlog. We need a system that is faster, clearer and accessible. We need funding decisions that reflect the reality of specialist support.

Order. I am very keen to call the Minister by 5.30 pm, so may I ask Members to keep their comments short?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. I wholeheartedly commend the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) for securing today’s debate, for his eloquent description of the problems facing the Access to Work scheme and for allowing me a few minutes to contribute—in support of the views that he expressed.

I wanted to contribute to today’s debate as I am another example of an MP who has personally benefited from the Access to Work programme. My story has remarkable similarities to the hon. Member’s. In 2009, I was hit by a sudden-onset neurological illness. In my case, it was one called POEMS syndrome—POEMS stands for polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal gammopathy, and skin changes—but I am very familiar with GBS, the syndrome that the hon. Member experienced, as I was on the same hospital ward as patients with that condition.

My illness affected my mobility. I was in hospital—the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery on Queen Square—for five months. I was unable to stand, let alone walk, and spent a year using a wheelchair. It was during my five-month stay in hospital that I first learned about the Access to Work scheme. Without my physiotherapists and occupational therapists, I would not even have known that it existed. I worry that patients in other hospitals might not necessarily receive the guidance that I did at the National.

The Access to Work team worked closely with my then employer, making adjustments to my office environment to make it wheelchair friendly and helping to access funding to pay for taxis to and from work and to meetings outside the office. That support was crucial in allowing me to go back to work after my illness. Without it, I do not know what I would be doing now or whether I would have managed to achieve elected office. Recent reports, however, suggest that I was lucky then and even luckier compared with people now trying to join the Access to Work scheme. Stories and personal testimony mount of a scheme increasingly letting customers down, with more than 66,000 applications remaining unprocessed.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) for securing this debate and allowing me time to speak in it.

The National Audit Office report published earlier this year tells a story of a scheme under serious strain. Applications have more than doubled, the number of applications waiting for a decision has almost trebled, and outstanding payment requests have more than quadrupled. The NAO is clear that the backlog will not fall significantly without policy change, yet the scheme has not been substantially updated since 1994.

I want to give two examples from my constituency. The first is a self-employed artist—a young autistic person with selective mutism. She has been awarded support at £15.33 an hour, but the specialist support she needs costs between £25 and £40 an hour. Nobody will provide it at the awarded rate, so her family is stepping in unpaid. Her father can no longer work full time as a result. Not only does that have a knock-on effect on the family finances, but, if translated across the country, it would have a knock-effect on the economy.

The second example is a local business that supports autistic and ADHD adults into work. Many of them are professionals, academics and business owners—people who are very capable and want to work, but who need nuanced, skilled support with communication, executive function and workplace relationships. This business is regulated, VAT-registered, employs staff and maintains proper safeguarding, but it cannot provide services at £15 an hour, so it has had to stop taking on new Access to Work clients. The worry is that when reputable, safeguarded providers that are working with very vulnerable people withdraw from the market, the gap will be filled by those without those protections.

Those cases point to the same conclusion that the NAO reached: without real reform, this scheme will continue to fail the people it exists to serve. Rates must reflect the real cost of support. The comprehensive update the scheme has needed since 1994 cannot wait any longer.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairwomanship, Mrs Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) on securing this important debate and thank him for sharing his personal experience, which is so valuable and helpful when we discuss this type of issue. I know it is not the first time he has raised this matter, and he is right to focus on it.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) for sharing his personal experience. I am delighted that both hon. Members are in the House and were able to use Access to Work to help them in their rehabilitation and return to employment. The Department is looking very carefully at the report my hon. Friend referred to, and we will come back to that. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) and the hon. Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) for their contributions, and, of course, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who brings an interesting perspective to every debate he speaks in.

To be very clear, we want to build on our welfare state. We want it to be a working state, so that everyone has a platform of opportunity as well as a safety net. That is because everybody, regardless of disability or health condition, deserves the chance to make the most of their life. We want to remove unnecessary barriers that hold far too many people back—barriers to accessing, staying in and progressing in work—and of course, we need to reduce the disability employment gap, which at 29.5% remains far too high.