I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak and to share the experience of what it is like for disabled jobseekers interacting with current labour activation measures. I represent the Disability Federation of Ireland, DFI, which represents more than 120 member organisations. We have been very active in looking at policy on activation, in particular the comprehensive employment strategy for people with disabilities, which is a ten-year strategy designed to support people with disabilities into work. Although I will focus on this strategy, it does not belie the need for all activation measures to be accessible for people with disabilities. We must avoid the trap of "othering" people with disabilities and assuming they cannot walk through the Intreo system or other support systems like everybody else.
Two years into the comprehensive employment strategy, there has been no impact on the employment rates of people with disabilities. At the height of the boom, when long-term unemployment was at an all-time low, the percentage of people with disabilities in employment was only half of that for those without disabilities. As far back as 2008, the OECD expressed concern that Ireland was parking people with disabilities on the sidelines of Irish life and that hiding unemployment in the wrong welfare system was a failed and costly strategy. Today, little has changed. The numbers in work have not changed significantly and the numbers in receipt of disability allowance are increasing year on year. Yesterday's edition of the Irish Examiner stated that, at the end of 2017, there were 133,929 adults of working age in receipt of disability allowance and that this was rising by approximately 32,000 year on year. This is a means-tested payment for which it is extremely difficult to qualify and people would not choose to live their lives on this. The most recent CSO survey on income and living conditions of December 2017 indicated that consistent poverty was highest amongst those not at work due to illness or disability. This is not a comfortable place for people to be.
Long-term unemployment almost halved between 2013 and 2016 and unemployment in general dropped by 5.3% in the same period but the rate of employment for people with disabilities saw just a 0.4% increase.
Some 71% of adults of working age with a disability are not in work. This figure does not equate to an unemployment rate because people with disabilities are not included in the unemployment figures, hence my point about the OECD.
The Wellbeing of the Nation report launched earlier this month points to much of what Ms Whelan from NUI Maynooth said earlier on the well-being of people with disabilities. Disabled people are more at risk of suffering the negative impacts that are commonly associated with unemployment, for example, reduced financial stability, stress, and lower levels of mental and physical health.
At the same time DFI recognises that work is not for everyone. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, which Ireland has yet to ratify, affords people the right to social protection as well as the right to work. Those who can and want to work should be supported and empowered to do so. Those for whom work is not a viable option should be supported to live the life they choose without, as is happening in the UK, having to repeatedly prove their eligibility for social protection or their incapacity to work. Everybody, regardless of their work status, should be afforded a minimum income that allows them to live with dignity.
What are people with disabilities doing if they are not in work? Based on data from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and the ESRI we know that 56% are interested in some kind of training or education; 56% also state they had previously worked; 13% said they are currently working either part-time or full-time. These results are in line with the Department's administrative estimates which suggest that approximately 10% of all those in receipt of disability allowance are doing some form of work.
The ESRI also found - this is extremely worrying - that many people with disabilities are more likely to exit the labour market than to enter it. Four out of five people with disabilities acquire their disability during working age. The odds of leaving work are twice as high for people with disabilities as they are for others of working age. They are even higher for people with deafness, or learning, psychological or emotional disabilities, including mental illness. This raises many questions for us as a country, not only on how we are supporting people into work through activation but also how we are retaining people in work. There is no point in activating people into jobs which in the long term are unsustainable if we do not address serious issues relating to reasonable accommodation, what we are willing to consider as acceptable around that and also around further engagement with employers.
The current suite of interventions set out in the comprehensive employment strategy consist of many well-meaning activities and programmes that do not add up to increasing the number of people with disabilities in employment nor can it do so. We can discuss this further, but in brief it sits in a policy vacuum quite apart from the realities of the local labour market as presented by our colleagues from Maynooth University, including the precarious nature of work, youth unemployment and underemployment. While I know NESC and others are giving consideration to in-work poverty and jobless households, we are not seeing any effect and no joined-up thinking is going on.
It also locates people with disabilities in a vacuum and assumes they have only one singular identity. Gender has been mentioned this morning. The comprehensive employment strategy does not acknowledge that some of these people with disabilities are actually women. That might come as a surprise. It also does not take into account any other caring responsibilities, including child-care responsibilities, or the complexity of people's lives. We see fixing the employment problem of disabled people outside of any context, including the family context. We should view it as what the literature would describe as a “wicked” issue which demands an appropriate response to that complexity.
The strategy also focuses on supplying people to a labour force without looking at where the jobs are. This is an ongoing issue and speaks to where the comprehensive employment strategy is located within the Department of Justice and Equality. I wish to read out a tweet that was posted on Twitter yesterday in response to the Irish Examiner report. One gentleman said "I'm back on DA after a year's employment. Really don't want to be on it but it's so hard to find appropriate employment with a disability. The financial stress I'm under is immense and unsustainable." This is the reality of people's lives. The strategy individualises blame on the person who does not succeed rather than creating an employment market that is receptive to and supportive of including all members of Irish society.
We also have concerns over how narrowly work is interpreted by the CES. It is either a vocational support or people need to be professionals and we do not understand the diversity of work in between.
Underlying all that is a serious concern about the capacity of different Departments to work together to support people into work from where they are at. This kind of siloed work has its consequences. For example, it is difficult for school leavers to make life choices based on what they want rather than funding. There are two critical areas in which this is evident. First, school goers are supported throughout their school and college career only to find that once they leave all supports they had are withdrawn as they came from the Department of Education and Skills and do not carry over to a work environment. This includes funding for a personal assistant, assistive technology and any other supports they were getting. They find themselves high and dry looking at a labour market that is unsupportive.
While the education system relies heavily on the rhetoric of choice and opportunities, the literature shows that for students with severe and profound learning difficulties there is no choice. If a school leaver does not fall into the category of needing the level of support offered by a “New Directions” day service, they are not eligible for any funding at present, which means more people are being steered into day services than is desirable or necessary.
We need to look at what we understand as reasonable accommodation in the workplace. We need to overhaul our reasonable accommodation fund to make it fit for the workplace of the 21st century. Research conducted by FreedomTech, a collaboration between DFI and Enable Ireland, indicates that appropriately deployed technologies are effective ways of sustaining people in work yet there is little uptake of the grants available. This implies a complete mismatch between the design of the schemes and the need people have in work.
There are a couple of positives. We hope to see some move on medical card eligibility which has been a huge barrier for people going into the workforce in the past. We have known of people who have had to leave work because they lost their medical cards. We understand that we will hear some news from the Department of Health on this very soon. We also commend the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection on its collaboration with the sector in dealing with the tricky issue of eligibility to Disability Allowance for 16 to 18 year olds. We are working with the Department on this complex issue.
Not only do all activation measures need to be designed to be inclusive from the outset, they must be designed to meet people where they are at. This is not happening at the moment. For example, we have an employability service that very often insists that people be job-ready in order to avail of the service.
At the moment rules begin and end where Departments meet. This is not the space in which people live their lives. Last year the OECD made much comment on this kind of siloed policymaking, which it states is unsuitable for the speed at which 21st century change is occurring. It promotes the use of a systems approach to deal with the complexity. Certainly that applies to an issue such as disability and work.
The focusing on access to and performance of the institutions supporting people into work rather than requiring transformation of those institutions will not result in the inclusion we seek or the employment levels of people with disabilities that we need see. That said, we strongly assert that people with disabilities must not become a new underclass of underpaid, underemployed workers. They must have an adequate income.
To do that we must completely overhaul the comprehensive employment strategy and stitch it back into the mainstream activation programme if we are to become a sustainable economy where the well-being of all is respected and people with disabilities are seen as a cohort of the population who can contribute to the collective and economic well-being of our nation.