Interview: Mark Harper

With just six months to the next General Election, Able magazine’s Paul F Cockburn spoke with Mark Harper, the Conservatives’ Shadow Minister for Disabled People.

It’s fair to say that Mark Harper, Conservative Member of Parliament for Forest of Dean, was surprised when David Cameron appointed him Shadow Minister for Disabled People back in July 2007.

Very quickly, however, Mark Harper realised that, with disability issues, he’d been given a ‘very interesting job’…

WHAT ARE THE FRUSTRATIONS OF OPPOSITION?

All you can actually do is talk about things; you can say what you’d like to do, challenge the Government on issues, and try to nudge policy in the right direction. But you can’t actually do anything yourself. The big challenge for us, in the time we have left before the General Election, is to demonstrate what we’d do with the opportunity of government so that people are more likely to give us that opportunity.

WHAT IS THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY’S POSITION ON THE EQUALITY BILL?

A lot of the Bill, it’s fair to say, we actually very much support. A lot of it just takes existing legislation and puts it into a consistent framework, tidying up some of the loose ends. We don’t support the Government’s attempt to bolt on this socio-economic duty which, frankly, was put in as an afterthought for political reasons. We wanted the Government to take the Bill away, get rid of the bits that didn’t have cross-party agreement and bring it back in better shape. They chose not to do that, and we’ve been debating the details of those areas where we disagree during the Committee stage.

WILL IT BECOME LAW BEFORE THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION?

I suspect it will not have completed its passage when the Prime Minister seeks a dissolution of Parliament. If it’s one of the Bills the Government wants to keep, we’ve been quite clear that we’d expect them to take the bits out that we don’t like. We would like to see the bulk of it on the statute book before the General Election, and we will try to make that happen.

HOW WELL HAS LABOUR BUILT ON THE DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION ACT 1995?

A lot of people forget that we did bring in the original DDA, because Labour does try to give the impression that no one before them actually did anything on disability legislation. Not that the DDA was perfect. Labour have clearly built upon it, and the disability equality duty – the biggest change in the 2005 Act, which put an onus on the public sector to think about whether their services were properly inclusive for disabled people at an early stage – has been effective in some areas, not effective in others.

The original Act and the extension have made a positive difference, but I think there’s probably more we could do – by just thinking practically about how we make the change happen in reality.

WHAT’S YOUR VIEW ON THE FUTURE OF CARE SERVICES IN ENGLAND?

The Government’s Green Paper was a bit of a missed opportunity, because it only talked about changes in how care was delivered for older people, and changes need to be made to how care works for younger people. A big concern is the way that Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance and other disability benefits are effectively up for grabs by local authorities to fund care services. It’s going in the opposite direction from more personalisation, individual budgets and giving disabled people more control over the money that’s spent on them.

Labour ran pilot schemes in 2005-07. Those gave very clear results, particularly for younger disabled people and those with learning disabilities – giving them more control over the money had unequivocally better outcomes. It’s very disappointing that two years after the pilots finished, we haven’t really seen much of that being rolled out. There are 1.7 million people who could be eligible for an individual budget who get some sort of social care, and there are still only around 10,000-12,000 who actually have an individual budget.

LABOUR AIMS TO ACHIEVE ‘FULL EQUALITY’ FOR DISABLED PEOPLE BY 2025; IS THAT ACHIEVABLE?

Clearly, the big challenge is for the Government to look at the barriers that prevent disabled people living independently, fulfilling their aspirations and achieving what they want to achieve.

The single most important barrier that we’d want to pay attention to will be around enabling a lot of disabled people who are able to work, and want to work, but need help and support to enable them to do so. Moving into work is the best way of fixing the issue of disabled people being poorer than other people, and it opens up a whole raft of opportunities, including all the social benefits that everybody else gets by going to work.

There has been some progress, but I would contend that over a period when we had consistent economic growth, it’s disappointing that progress has been relatively small. The challenge for us, if we are given the chance, is trying to make progress when the economy isn’t in a very robust state of health, but that’s no reason for not redoubling our efforts to try and make progress.

DO CARERS STILL GET A RAW DEAL, CONSIDERING THE MONEY THEY SAVE THE GOVERNMENT?

The tragedy is that, even with the benefits that currently exist, £740 million a year is unclaimed. Clearly, the Government needs to make sure that the benefits that currently exist are being properly taken up by people so that they do get the help. I think that one of the things we could do better – and that we’ve said we will do – is make sure every carer has the right to have flexible working hours, so people can better balance their caring responsibilities with their careers and their jobs. If their caring responsibilities mean people have got to give up a full time job, there’s no way the State is ever going to make up financially for that difference. So, I think one of the real challenges is to make it more possible for somebody to remain in work and manage their caring responsibilities at the same time.

If you make care services more flexible and more personalised, the better it is for both the person receiving the care and the unpaid carer or family member to balance the caring they do with their other responsibilities. I think all of those things are very important and I think we could do a better job on those for people who do caring.

ARE THE CONSERVATIVES NOT THE NATURAL FRIEND OF DISABLED PEOPLE?

Over the period of the last 30 years, I think governments of both parties have made some progress; lots of people will argue it’s not been fast enough under either party, but we introduced the DDA in 1995, we brought in direct payments in 1996 and I think there’s a clear view that both of those were fairly significant steps forward. I just think that simple line, most often wheeled out by our political opponents, doesn’t stand up to a moment’s analysis.