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IN TOUCH – Disability Strategy and Employment

TX:Ìý 17.08.2021Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý We hear a lot about inclusion when talking about disability these days and surely one aspect of life that can provide the greatest sense of inclusion is having a job.Ìý Economic independence of course, but also a sense of being of value to society and a feeling of belonging.Ìý Yet the proportion of visually impaired people, of working age, in a job, has consistently been very low and despite huge social changes, has hardly risen over the past 50 or 60 years.

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Well, two recent reports have put employment firmly back on the agenda.Ìý The government has produced its Disability Strategy, which deals with many aspects of life but has a major section on employment.Ìý And the sight loss charity, the Vision Foundation, has a produced a report called See My Skills, which shows that it’s still the case that only just over one in four visually impaired people of working age, are in a job.Ìý Well, we’ll be talking to the Vision Foundation, to visually impaired people looking for work and to Lord Blunkett, who, amongst many other things, has been both Secretary of State for Employment and Work and Pensions.

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But first, I’ve been talking to the Minister for Disabled People, Justin Tomlinson.Ìý I reminded him of the government’s declared aim, back in 2017, of putting one million extra disabled people into work by 2027 and the claim that they had already added 800,000 disabled people to the workforce and yet the proportion of visually impaired people, of working age, in jobs still stood at just over 27% compared to 51% of disabled people generally and 75% of those without disabilities.Ìý Didn’t that suggest visually impaired people were being failed by the system?

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Tomlinson

Well, first of all, I’m very proud that as a government we’ve delivered record disability employment and you are right – we have a firm commitment for a million more disabled people in work by 2027.Ìý And despite the unprecedented challenges of covid that ambition is no less great today as it is at any other point.Ìý And you are right to highlight that pan-disability, that is our target, but within that, as you look at specific characteristics there are further challenges.Ìý And that’s why we are consulting further to see what more can be done to help on recruitment, retention and also career progression.Ìý So, there’s three different important strands. ÌýNow in some cases, it is about focusing the minds of employers who we have seen in recent years have continued to increase the numbers of pan-disabled people but what more can be done in that area.Ìý How better can we use technology?Ìý How better can we promote our Access to Work scheme?Ìý And later on this year we will be actually testing Access to Work passports, where we will be targeting different groups of disabled people ahead of needing to use Access to Work, so they are aware.Ìý We can fill in as much of the information as possible and therefore we can see whether that will help increase the numbers benefitting from that scheme, which also currently has record numbers using it.

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White

But the fact of the matter is that although your numbers have gone up on disability generally, they’ve not gone up on vision impairment, which suggests that whatever methods you’re using they’re not working.

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Tomlinson

Well, we need to work harder with employers.Ìý We will also be piloting further around disability reporting for employers, initially of larger employers but again looking to see what lessons can we learn from that and then brought forward.Ìý One in five people in this country have a disability or a long-term health condition of which the vast majority will get that during their working age and we lose around 300,000 people a year from the workplace because of a disability or a changing health condition.Ìý So, we need to get much better at supporting employers to make sure that we aren’t losing so many people from the workplace.

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White

Two more figures from that Vision Foundation report.Ìý Twenty three percent of employers said they wouldn’t make adaptations to employ a visually impaired person, 90% said they’d find it very hard to employ blind or partially sighted people in their companies.Ìý What can you do about that?

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Tomlinson

Well, first of all, I mean I’m disappointed at that first figure because employers – and I say this as somebody who has employed disabled people – with the right support and confidence employers can benefit from that huge wealth of talent that is available, particularly filling in – you know I often talk to businesses saying they’re struggling to fill their skills gap, so they just need to have that confidence to make reasonable adjustments. ÌýThat second figure, I think, that’s a fair challenge and that is – that highlights exactly why we’ve got to improve awareness of the Access to Work scheme, of the various support and guidance that is available, not just around recruitment but about the retention and then ultimately the career progression.Ìý We’ve all, collectively, got to do better in this area if we are going to move those figures up.

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White

I still don’t think you’ve told me why that visual impairment figure is so stubbornly low and fixed and I want to make a suggestion to you why it might be.Ìý One thing that seems to have happened over the years is that we’ve lost people in the jobs business, including government people, who specialise in visual impairment.Ìý There used to be people known as blind persons’ resettlement officers, whose sole job was to get blind and partially sighted people into work.Ìý Are we making a mistake by so often talking about disability generally, which is what you’ve been doing, when often they’re very different things, you know, sensory disability, physical disability, learning disability, psychiatric disability – they’re four very different things aren’t they?

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Tomlinson

Yeah, no you’re right, you’re absolutely right and this is very much why, if you look at the National Disability Strategy, chapter two is dedicated to improving the data and the evidence that we have to be able to create more personalised, more tailored responses because the range of both challenges and opportunities is very diverse as you look pan-disability.Ìý So, you’re absolutely right, and we agree with you but there isn’t, as it stands, sufficient data always for us to be able to scale up what is the right support that is done.Ìý So, one, we’re going to get more data; two, we’re making sure those with real lived experience are at the heart of the policy development as we go forward.Ìý As we set these ambitious targets around disability employment, we know that we’ve all got to collectively do more and to do that we have to work together.

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White

That’s the Minister for Disabled People, Justin Tomlinson.

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Well, listening to that are two people with direct experiences of looking for work and trying to get appropriate adaptations when they’re in work.Ìý Krupali Parshotam, you’re a qualified science teacher, what kind of assumptions are made about you, you know when you’ve had placements and had jobs, what is it that people assume that perhaps make you feel uncomfortable?

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Parshotam

I think it’s just maybe the fear of asking questions, that they should just ask.Ìý I know I’ve been in interviews where I know they want to ask me questions like how would you manage 30 kids when you don’t see their faces, how would you know if a child is misbehaving when you don’t know.Ìý Even though there is a small part of the interview process where I do have to do a lesson, but I’ve made it quite clear that I need a support worker within the lesson to provide me with visual cues.Ìý So, just to tell me where the kids are at, what they’re doing.

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White

So, you would rather they ask those tough questions, you want to be asked those questions and you say they’re sort of shying away from asking them?

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Parshotam

Yeah, it’s – if I’m going to be working in that school, I’m going to be part of their team, a part of the science team, a part of the whole school community and it’s best that they’re just straight up and just ask me what they need to ask me.Ìý So, I have had some interviews where they’ve gone quite well and they’ve understood what my needs are, whereas in some situations you can tell there’s sort of hesitancy or it doesn’t meet the ethos of the school or it doesn’t meet how things are run.Ìý I guess some schools are strict on how they want things to be.Ìý So, I think people just need to be educated a bit more, I guess employers need to just – need to know a bit more about disabilities, know about the technology people use, how they work, how they learn to adapt things on a day-to-day basis, I think it’s just a lack of knowing and understanding.Ìý And I guess from my perspective from a school, you’re going to have a variety of students with a variety of disabilities or additional needs and if you’re not prepared within the school environment to deal with your students then it makes you wonder how they’re going to be prepared for someone who’s a member of staff.

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White

Right, let me bring in Emilia Okoye.Ìý I understand you’re currently in employment and your problem is more when you’ve asked for adaptations, which would help you do the job, I mean give me some examples of the kinds of things that you’ve had problems with.

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Okoye

I’ve had a situation where I’ve needed reasonable adjustments to be made, whilst I was actually working for an organisation.Ìý I was in the office and I was also working on reception.Ìý So, in the office my computer screen was very large, it was adapted but because I was also on reception duties as well, I needed the computer monitor to be – it needed to be big.Ìý But my manager said no, because we have to think of everybody else, it’s not just me who’s going to be at reception, my colleague would be there as well, so we have to think of them.Ìý And then I then struggled to do my job because those adaptations wasn’t put in place, so I didn’t struggle because I couldn’t do the job, I struggled because how can I see what I’m doing when you’re not put in the adaptations in place.Ìý She made it seem as if I was being a nuisance.Ìý At that time, it really affected my confidence, it really made me feel very low, like maybe there’s a problem with me, maybe – I just thought I was the problem.Ìý It feels like, at times, where you tell them that you have a visual impairment, they’re fine with it but then when it gets to doing assessments or when it gets to doing the training, it then becomes a whole load of problems, they don’t want to make those adjustments.Ìý They think that oh visual impairment people, that everybody has the same issues, so if I’ve supported one person like this, everybody else should be supported like this.

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White

Emelia, thank you very much indeed.

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Let me bring in Olivia Curno, who’s the Chief Executive of the Vision Foundation which published the See My Skills report.Ìý Now we’ve already heard a number of your report’s findings and I put them to the minister, what do you regard as its most important conclusions?

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Curno

There are a number and I think a huge part of this comes down to public perception and employer perception.Ìý That statistic, the 90% of employers think it would be difficult or impossible to employ a blind or partially sighted people, was so shocking to us.Ìý So, that 90% is critical and it echoes a different statistic from the Vision Foundation.Ìý We surveyed 2,000 working members of the public and in that survey 94% of respondents said that a blind person could not do their job.Ìý So, across the general public, there is an assumption about what people can and can’t do, rather than a reality.Ìý So, there’s a gap between people’s perception and the reality and I think we, as a sector, but also government, if it wants to make a real difference here, has to start by addressing that perception.Ìý Then some really basic structural barriers.Ìý So, Access to Work, as the minister acknowledged, it’s cumbersome, it’s very slow, you need to have a pretty committed and understanding employer to wait the two or three months before it kicks in.Ìý And until very recently, and still for many people, you can’t access Access to Work claims and provision without sighted support which is laughably ironic really.Ìý So, we know that there are around 450,000 working age people who are visually impaired but we know that only 5,000 received support from Access to Work last year.Ìý And just, you know, reflecting back on the minister’s own statistics – seven million disabled people in the UK of working age and only 35,000 claimed Access to Work support, that’s 0.5%.Ìý So, it’s a very best kept secret, it really needs to be out there and employers just don’t realise that all of those adjustments will be fully funded.Ìý

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So, off the back of our report we’ve launched a fund.Ìý So, we’ve launched a funding pot for projects which address perception but also deliver specific support services for individuals on their journey.Ìý We’re also launching a digital campaign called hashtagseemyskills, the report is called See My Skills, in October, which is all about a digital approach to affecting employer perception.Ìý And we’re also delivering webinars to HR professionals.Ìý

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What’s been heartening about the response we’ve had since launching the See My Skills report is how many companies have actually reached out to us, saying we want to get better, we want to do better.

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White

Olivia Curno, thank you very much indeed.Ìý And also our thanks to Emelia and Krupali.

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Well listening to all of that has been Lord Blunkett, who, as well as being the current Vice-President of the Vision Foundation, has been both Secretary of State for Employment and for Work and Pensions.

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David, that was quite a long time ago, and yet it sounds as if not much has changed.

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Blunkett

I found that both depressing and challenging.Ìý It takes a lot, these days, to shake me but I was shaken by those statistics – the 90% and the 94% of employers and the general public and their attitudinal failure to understand and to be able to give people the chance to prove what they know they can do.Ìý I’ve often said this to you, Peter, that I wouldn’t try and become a bus driver or an airline pilot and it’s a great relief to most people listening but I do know what I can do and that’s true of all blind people – we are aware of, within our own ambitions, what we can achieve and we should be given the clear opportunity and support to be able to do it.

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White

There’s a lot of blame there for employers and yet aren’t we expecting them to know things that it appears very few of the public understand, i.e., the range of things that blind people can do, people don’t get it so why should employers be any different?

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Blunkett

I think to change those attitudes we need the kind of examples that you’ve had on your programme.Ìý I think to bring about change, in the way that the Vision Foundation are describing, firstly we need all the organisations that are of and representing blind and partially sighted people to join together, so there’s a joined up campaign.Ìý Secondly, we need to ensure that really good examples – and you’ve had them on your programme but there are so many blind and partially sighted people who are doing fantastic things out there – and we need to get those up in lights, so that people can actually see that it can be done.Ìý My disappointment is that I thought, until I read the Vision Foundation report, that I might have had some impact myself by being a very high-profile blind person in jobs which by any standards were challenging, it’s pretty clear that individual examples such as my own don’t really cut it.Ìý So, we’ve got to have a much more sophisticated approach to getting those messages across, not just nationally but at every local level as well.

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White

But why is it so hard for governments to do it and I’m not just making the point of the present government because, of course, your own party was in power for 13 years, these figures have stayed the same for the last 50?

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Blunkett

Yes, it’s 16 years since I was at Work and Pensions and when I entered the department there was a proposal to actually cut, would you believe, Access to Work, which I obviously reversed immediately.Ìý I thought that Access to Work, what are now called job coaches, and a lot of money’s been put in because of covid into job coaches and enabling them to specialise and therefore to advocate Access to Work and to make it much more flexible and personalised, would actually make a difference and I still believe that.Ìý I think that the money that the government have put in to the DWP on the back of the covid crisis, could be used creatively by specialises.Ìý And that was a point that really came out in the programme this evening that it’s no good just talking about disability in the round, included in that seven million figure are people who have long-term health challenges that are not specifically a defined disability.Ìý When people have a job it’s really critical to help them to hold on to it rather than losing it at a time when maybe their sight decreases and they can’t manage in the way that they had previously.Ìý So, that and progression within work, so that once you’ve got a job, you’re given the opportunity to break that glass ceiling and to actually be able to progress is really important.

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White

Lord Blunkett, thank you very much indeed.

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That’s it for today.Ìý Of course, we want your views and experiences of work and visual impairment and we also still want your questions for Ofcom about the current provisions of audio description.Ìý You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk, you can go to our website at bbc.co.uk/intouch, where you can download tonight’s and previous editions of the programme.

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From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings and studio managers Mike Smith and Jonathan Esp, goodbye.