12
Examination of witnesses
Dr Paula Holland, Fazilet Hadi and Pippa Stacey.
Q85 The Chair: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this second session of the Home-based Working Committee. A very warm welcome to our three witnesses. When you speak for the first time, I will ask you each to introduce yourself and to say what organisation you are from and what your work is. Again, thank you for coming. We are being broadcast; this will also be accessible on the website. A transcript will be taken and, in a few days, we will send you a copy of that to check for accuracy.
Without further ado, I come to the first question, which is probably for Dr Holland primarily. What data exists on the prevalence of remote and hybrid working among people with disabilities and long-term health conditions? How does this compare with the population overall?
Dr Paula Holland: Thank you. I am a senior lecturer in public health at Lancaster University. My research is about disabled peoples’ experiences of employment and the barriers to employment. For the past two years, I have been leading the Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study.
In terms of data, the ONS has produced two publications on the profile of remote workers and hybrid workers in the past couple of years. They are based on analysis of the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey. Unfortunately, the hybrid workers’ publication did not refer to disabled people, but the report on people who work only from home found comparable rates between disabled people and non-disabled people: 18% of disabled people and 16% of non-disabled people were working mainly from home. My colleague, Rebecca Florisson from the Work Foundation—she is our data analyst on the Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study—has analysed the Annual Population Survey. The question there is around the proportion of people who work mainly from home. Again, she found comparable rates between disabled people and non-disabled people, at around 20%.
This comparability between remote and hybrid rates for disabled and non-disabled people is partly good news. We know that disabled people are less likely to work in remote and hybrid jobs. Because we have increased availability for remote and hybrid working jobs, it seems as though disabled people may have disproportionately benefited from this increased availability. On the other hand, the similarity between the rates for disabled and non-disabled people is a bit disappointing, because we know that many disabled people need that flexibility to stay in the labour market. The fact that they have comparable rates to non-disabled people seems to indicate that they do not have greater access to it and that there is likely to be unmet demand for it.
Importantly, in our survey of over 1,200 disabled people, we found that one in three were not working at home as much as they wanted to and that those who wanted to work at home more than they could indicated higher rates of mental distress. It is vital that we see continued expansion of remote and hybrid jobs to help disabled people stay in work and get back to work.
The Chair: This may have been somewhere in what you said but I did not pick it up: are more people with disabilities and long-term health conditions working than pre pandemic?
Dr Paula Holland: Yes.
The Chair: Are more of them working longer hours—that is, going from part time to full time? Do you have anything on that?
Dr Paula Holland: I do not know but the ONS reports that I mentioned before showed that disabled people’s employment has been going up steadily. Of course, we know that disabled people suffered greater employment losses during the pandemic; those rates have not gone back to pre-pandemic levels. We still have this stubborn disability employment gap of 27 percentage points, which is larger than a lot of European countries, so something is obviously going wrong.
Q86 Baroness Nye: It would be helpful for the committee to understand better the benefits that remote working offers people with disabilities or long-term health conditions. Is remote working the same as hybrid working, or are the benefits and challenges presented different between remote and hybrid? Anybody can answer.
Fazilet Hadi: Hi, everyone. I am the head of policy at Disability Rights UK. We are a charity trying to influence and promote disability equality and inclusion. We are led by disabled people, which means that the majority of our trustees and staff are disabled people.
Having said all that, I have almost forgotten the question. I have been thinking about this issue in advance of this committee. There are three big benefits; they will be experienced differently depending on your impairment or health condition. This is particularly in relation to not having to go into the workplace at all or as often. Travel—not having to do the journey—is pretty big for a lot of disabled people. For someone with a fluctuating condition or an energy-limiting condition, taking a difficult route to work and back again could lead to exhaustion. You could say, “If you’re going to work, why not stay at home and save your energy for that work rather than for your journey?”
For others—I am visually impaired—it may be that I can do the train journey but it is a bit more stressful. Having personal assistance and a walk at the end of it are just a bit more challenging for me than for a non-disabled person doing the same journey. It is also about the hours in a day: it may take some disabled people a lot longer because they may be slower and have mobility impairment. There is a range of ways in which cutting out travel could really help people.
The second area is around managing your own condition. Do you need access to the toilet more? Do you need the workroom set up in a particular way that suits you? Do you need to take medication? Do you need to lie down occasionally? Do you need regular therapy or treatment that you can fit around your day better from home, so still doing the hours but managing them more flexibly? There are all sorts of different issues around managing your own health condition.
The third benefit is accessibility. You might need a quieter setting because you cannot hear that well or you are autistic and you get overwhelmed by too much noise and the sensory overload in a busy office. You might be blind, like me, so it is handy to know how to use the coffee machine and not have to ask someone to do it for you. The third big issue—it will play out differently—is accessibility.
Q87 Lord Farmer: On the other side of it, are there benefits for disabled people to going into an office? You mentioned earlier that, pre Covid, there was a growing presence of disabled people in the workplace. For instance, people with Down’s syndrome or something can work quite efficiently in an office and have the benefits of those relationships and of being outside the home. Have you looked into the benefits of disabled people being in the office?
Fazilet Hadi: We have not looked into it in a scientific way, but I absolutely agree with you. There are 16 million disabled people. We are 24% of the workforce. Our impairments and health conditions are not going to lead us all to want to be at home. A lot of jobs, particularly for young disabled people, might be in retail, leisure, hospitality, gyms, railways or whatever. They do not want jobs where they sit at home and work mainly on papers and meetings online, through email and so on. I am not evangelical; it is about having jobs in the economy that suit a range of non-disabled and disabled people. Some of us will also have temperaments that are more attuned to one or the other, never mind our disabilities and impairments. I absolutely think that those jobs should be made accessible as well.
Pippa Stacey: First, I am from a charity, Astriid. We support talented people with long-term health conditions to find meaningful work. We also work directly with employers to help them become more inclusive in their workplace practices. I echo what has been said: it is very condition-specific a lot of the time, but it is also down to individual preference.
Of the people we support, the majority have energy-limiting conditions. For this community, it is non-negotiable. Working from home is the only option they have because it is not sustainable for them to commute to a workplace and to be in that environment day after day, not just because it is difficult in the moment but because of the toll it can take afterwards.
As much as we need to champion individual choice and empower people to have those discussions with employers, there is definitely a need for more fully remote roles if we want to engage more people with energy-limiting conditions—that is, those of them who can work, because that is not the case for everybody. We definitely need more fully remote roles for those people as well so that they can show their skills.
Q88 Baroness Manzoor: I am really interested, Dr Holland, in what you said about one in three people who can work not working from home. Fazilet, you kindly answered the question about the challenges as well as the benefits. Can I ask a different question related to employers? What are the challenges that employers face to ensure that more disabled people and people with other health-related conditions can work from home?
Dr Paula Holland: The statistic was that one in three of our disabled people wanted to work from home more than they were able to. It was a measure of unmet need. In terms of implications for employers, what came out from both sets of data—from disabled workers and from employers—was the need to consult staff on their needs and preferences.
We had a ‘natural experiment’ with the pandemic. It offered a lot of people a first taste of remote working. In our study, people overwhelmingly reported benefits for their health and well-being, their work outcomes, their productivity, and so on. A lot of the employers also echoed that: they agreed that, in their organisations, it either increased productivity or at least did not lead to a decline in productivity. They also noted that it reduced sickness absence, for example. In terms of implications for employers, they need to consult employees.
On the challenges, a lot of organisations have reduced their office space—particularly if they have introduced hybrid working—which now means that people are increasingly hot-desking. That is really difficult for disabled people—especially those with physical workplace adjustments in place, such as particular equipment, sit-stand desks and ergonomic chairs. Several people in our sample in the interviews explained the difficulty of hot-desking. Say you have equipment given to you by Access to Work. If you have been working from home for a couple of days, coming into the office and finding that it has been tampered with by colleagues is so difficult. There have been tribunal cases where the judgment has gone in favour of the disabled person because they have had their equipment tampered with by colleagues and they then cannot adapt it back to how they need it. Employers need to think about opting disabled people out of hot-desking and giving them certainty on where they are going to sit.
The other challenge for employers is that, in our sample, we had employers who had gone fully remote; employers who had implemented flexible hybrid and said, “We don’t care where you work, just get the work done”; and a group of employers who had mandated office days. They were finding it difficult to bring people along with them. As I say, we had this natural experiment where people could work at home. Some organisations have belatedly introduced mandated office days. We did not find any disabled people who had been presented with evidence from their organisation that office days were important for either well-being, profit or productivity. There was no evidence presented.
So we found a high level of cynicism, which is not good for well-being. People were told, “Right, you’ve had your chance at remote working. Now we want you back in the office”, and they were saying, “It’s because the employers have an expensive building that they need to populate”, or, “It’s politically driven”. There was a lot of cynicism and anxiety. If people had not been given remote working as a reasonable adjustment under the Equality Act, they were very worried about these return to office mandates being discussed in the media. If their organisation did not already have one, they were worried that it may change. There was a lot of anxiety around the implications of being forced back to office working for their job retention, sickness absence, and health and well-being.
Q89 Baroness Manzoor: Looking at inequality, do you think that employers are perhaps embedding inequality, whether it is to do with race or gender, by not enabling hybrid working? Is there any evidence of that? Is there any evidence of racial inequality? We have heard previous witnesses say that there was an element of that; I wonder whether, through your research, you have any evidence of that.
Dr Paula Holland: I must admit that white people were overrepresented in our survey, but we did find a few interesting things. For example, black and minority-ethnic people are much more likely to work without reasonable adjustments in place. Disabled women, disabled carers, people with multiple conditions and people with conditions that severely affected their daily activities were more likely to say, “I absolutely want to work from home all the time”. If you have return to office mandates, those groups will be disadvantaged so it will of course introduce inequity.
Another avenue of inequity that we found was what we call the “line manager lottery”. You might have an organisation that says, “Okay, this is our policy. You must be in the office two days a week”, or something. Within that organisation, you might have manager A saying, “Do you know what? I don’t care where you work, just get the work done”; manager B saying, “Nope, I want you in as our organisation policy says”; and manager C doing something completely different, such as having people in the office more than the organisation says. You might have three different managers doing completely different things; that is another example of inequity. For disabled people and non-disabled people, it depends on whom you work for in the same organisation as to where you would work.
Fazilet Hadi: We know that the disability pay gap exists, so we know that disabled people are more likely to be in lower-paid jobs and do not progress in the same way. The Government recently announced that they are consulting on disability pay gap monitoring in the same way as gender pay gap monitoring, on the basis of ethnic origin and race, so we are moving in that direction to make all this more visible.
Picking up Paula’s point on line management, having worked as a disabled person for many years, I think that line management is of course important. However, the most important thing is the leadership, such as the chief executive or the management team, and the tone they set; this includes whether they make it culturally clear to the organisation that diversity and equality are non-negotiable and that they must find creative ways of involving difference in their organisation and teams. If it does not come from the top, you will get what Paula has highlighted: differential implementation of policies.
The other problem with it not coming from the top is that, if I am a disabled worker and my manager is pretty much just being nice and flexible, it will not be an organisation where I, in my role and working from home, am made visible in communications. It could be an organisation where I am marginalised or I do not have access to development and training opportunities. It could be an organisation where I find myself unable to progress because my line manager is being nice to me—great—but the organisation is not on that pathway so I am isolated. You must have a whole-organisation approach to get the best out of your workforce. I agree that line management is important but, without that corporate culture from the top, I do not think it will work.
Q90 Lord Fink: Some of my question has already been dealt with by Baroness Manzoor; I will focus on part of it. We are concerned about the implications for employers, which are not necessarily the main grounds of your research. How does this concept of remote and hybrid working affect recruitment, particularly that of disabled people, and the level of reasonable adjustments that people expect and should be entitled to?
Pippa Stacey: We recommend incorporating remote and hybrid working wherever possible into the job design of opportunities before they even go out. If that has been thought about in the first instance, it means that, if somebody comes along and they are the right candidate and they need to work from home, it is much easier to implement those adjustments. The other benefit of that is that it attracts more diverse talent to apply for the role to start with. We know anecdotally, from the people we work with, that there are so many talented people with long-term health conditions who want to work and are able to work in some capacity. It is the lack of fully remote opportunities that are the big barrier at the minute. If we can implement more of those opportunities, there will be a positive effect on the growth of the labour force, in our experience.
Dr Paula Holland: If I can jump in, in our employer sample, we interviewed 45 employers. They had overwhelmingly introduced remote or hybrid to some degree—either fully remote, flexible hybrid or hybrid with mandated office days. The reason why they had introduced and retained remote and hybrid is that they had seen benefits for the workforce and their organisation in the pandemic and they did not want to return to office working fully. Retention and recruitment came up a lot. They talked about a wider talent pool and how looking like a good employer was important. They talked about the general public not wanting to go back to the way things were. They thought that, by advertising themselves as making flexible working or remote and hybrid working available, it would not only be good for workforce well-being and retention but get new recruits on board.
You mentioned reasonable adjustments. I just want to put something really important to the committee: only 53% of our disabled sample who had asked for reasonable adjustments had had them implemented in full, which means that the rest of them were working without adequate support and equipment in place. Of course, this puts them at risk of stress, injury and illness. For example, going back to hybrid workers, sometimes that meant they were working in one location or both without reasonable adjustments in place. This is one of the things we recommend: that the committee puts pressure on employers, no matter what the job, whether it is remote, hybrid or in the office, that reasonable adjustments absolutely must be implemented—and very swiftly.
Fazilet Hadi: That will not just affect recruitment and new people coming into the organisation. As Liz Kendall mentioned a couple of weeks ago, 300,000 people a year are falling out of the labour market, probably because they are acquiring disabilities and impairments later in life—in their 40s, 50s and 60s. Unless employers are creative enough to think about how to retain that talent through reasonable adjustment, flexibility and fitting work around their expertise, that drain will just continue.
Q91 The Chair: Can you help us with something that has struck us? In every session we have had, we have been told about the benefits for retention and recruitment, yet we have also heard that only 12% of jobs that are being advertised are being advertised as offering flexible working. You will see that we are a bit perplexed as to why employers are not advertising jobs as being flexible if that flexibility is such a good tool for retention and recruitment. What do you think is going on here?
Dr Paula Holland: I would like to know that as well. Our Work Foundation colleagues on the study analysed the DWP jobs portal’s advertised jobs in January and December. They found an even worse statistic than the one you just quoted: only 3% were advertised as hybrid and only 0.6% were advertised as remote. I do not know what is going on. We have heard anecdotally from some disabled people that, on paper, the advert might say that remote and hybrid are available but, once they get to appointment, they are suddenly not available. One of our recommendations is that the Government put pressure on employers, first, to consider whether any new post can be done remotely and hybrid because, if not, we need to see the business case as to why office working five days a week is imperative; and, secondly, to make more jobs available in a remote and hybrid format.
Fazilet Hadi: I wonder whether the people at the top of organisations are just very used to how they have always done things, with bums on seats and people in front of them. We have heard a lot recently about employers saying, “You must come back to the office for three days a week”. The Government themselves said that to their workforce, I think. There is a bit of a lag between what we are doing as employees and what the higher-ups are doing in the boardroom.
I also think that successive Governments are pushing on the flexibility door. The Conservative Government took us to the right to request flexibility from day one, and the Employment Rights Bill going through now will basically say, “You can work flexibly. It’s for the employer to show that you can’t work flexibly, not the other way round”. Obviously, the Government think that there is a need to push employers in that direction if they are not going to go willingly.
Q92 Lord Farmer: It seems to me that there is a lot of ignorance here. To begin with, a lot of employers will not have had that much experience of having disabled people working for them, yet there is quite an advantage if they understand that many disabled people could work well for them. Is there not a case for a campaign here, with government and organisations such as yourselves, to educate the public—in particular, employers—on the advantages of having disabled people working either at home, hybrid or in the office?
Dr Paula Holland: Undoubtedly. Some 23% of the working-age population are disabled. Organisations probably do employ disabled people but just are not aware of it. In our sample, we had people with fluctuating conditions, stable conditions, invisible conditions and visible conditions. I imagine that, if 23% of working-age people are disabled, organisations of small, medium and large sizes will already have them in their workforce. We do not refer to ‘disclosing’ any more; whether they have informed the organisation is another issue.
Fazilet Hadi: A good example of that is the NHS, which—hats off to it—has done disability workforce monitoring for years. Interestingly, on its employment record, under 5% of its 1.4 million employees identify as disabled, but, in its staff survey, which it does every year, 24% identify as disabled. I wonder whether, in the employers’ minds or the general public’s mind, someone who is disabled has a white stick or uses a wheelchair. People just do not think about the whole range, from learning disabilities and autism to fluctuating conditions—all sorts of things that are visible and invisible.
Awareness campaigns are a great idea. The issue is that it costs a lot of money to do them properly. We saw in the early 2000s a big campaign on mental health; it went on for five years and cost £5 million a year. We, as disability rights organisations, certainly do not have the money to mount that kind of campaign. Perhaps the Government will, as they say that their big priority is to get disabled people into work.
Q93 Lord Monks: I have a question in my mind. In a sense, we are aware that there seems to be a trend of getting people back to the office, at least on a hybrid basis—often but sometimes not—but we also see a few employers going the other way and increasing it. With the vulnerability of many disabled people, are you conscious that that community is under particular pressure at the moment to come back to work?
Fazilet Hadi: Definitely. They were put under huge pressure two weeks ago with the Green Paper on welfare reform, which implied that, if you cut people’s benefits enough, they will find their way back to work. There is absolutely no evidence for that; pushing people deeper into poverty does not incentivise people to go into the workplace.
You could argue that, if the Government want disabled people in work, there is quite a lot that they could do to make that happen. Cutting their benefits is pretty low down the list. They could fix social care. They could fix NHS waiting lists. They could make education better for kids with special educational needs. They could have personalised support in jobcentres and involve disabled people in being peer mentors. They could outsource some of their employment programmes to disability organisations, which understand the barriers that disabled people face. They could invest in Access to Work. There is a lot that the Government could do but are not doing; instead, they are pretty much threatening millions of disabled people with loss of income.
Dr Paula Holland: I completely agree with what Fazilet just said. Last week, a British Medical Journal editorial was published; I recommend that every single Minister and policymaker reads it. It talks about the impacts of austerity, sanctions and withdrawing benefits from disabled people on their poverty, their health and their life expectancy, as well as the poverty and health of their children. The evidence is the complete reverse: as Fazilet said, it pushes people further away from the labour market. We want disabled people to be work-ready if they can work, but sanctions and withdrawing benefits increases their anxiety and makes them less work-ready.
Instead, we need to look at the other side of the relationship. Employers need to be mandated to consider flexible working in all roles, not just remote and hybrid roles. We know that not all occupations can be done from home, so it is about looking for flexibility wherever possible. That does not just help disabled people stay in work and get back to work; it also helps parents, carers and anybody else who needs flexibility.
Pippa Stacey: To add to that, even if somebody was working fully remotely full time, it does not necessarily take away the fact that there are still so many extra costs associated with being disabled. One should not be used to justify the other. A great point was made about Access to Work; it is worth flagging that in this context because Access to Work is so key to working successfully when you are remote or hybrid.
There are a lot of difficulties with the Access to Work system at the minute. There is a nine-month waiting list for new applicants. Even for people who currently have an award, there is a 30-week delay in getting payments processed. Even among those of us who have an existing award, lots of people’s awards and support are being cut at the minute. That needs to be taken in account in any conversations about remote and hybrid working.
Dr Paula Holland: Access to Work is an absolutely critical service. We know that lots of disabled people say that, if it were not for that, they would not be in work. It needs scaling up, not scaling down; that is the quick answer.
Lord Monks: The Government have bet their future—their house, actually—on achieving a growth agenda and economic growth. I am interested in how you three think these concerns, which you have expressed very well, can be fed into the Government’s growth agenda: “If you want people, including disabled people, back in the workplace, you need to do A, B and C”. To what extent are you thinking in that way? That is my sense of where the Government are more likely to be, rather than hearing all the horrible, hard-luck stories and experiences of people at the present time.
Fazilet Hadi: I think that disability organisations would express and articulate growth in a very different way to the approach the Government are taking. What we say would grow the country—in terms of quality of life, quality of lived experience and richness of life—is investing in people through public services. People grow when they have the right input, such as the right healthcare, social care and education; they can then contribute.
A lot of people who are not in formal work contribute all the time. They volunteer, they support their families, and so on. The Government’s idea of growth seems to be slightly different: you cut back on welfare payments and public services and you invest in infrastructure, trade, business and so on. That will grow the economy but it will very much leave some of us behind.
Lord Monks: What I am pressing here is: is there some way in which your concerns can be channelled more positively? If I were a Government Minister looking for means of growth, is there a plan for how you can develop economic growth by involving more people who are marginalised by the system at the moment? That seems to me a more productive way of putting it, in terms of lobbying, than the way you do it at the moment.
Fazilet Hadi: Of course—if we are consulted or engaged with, which we are often not. We will contribute to the “Keep Britain Working” review; to the disability panel that the Government say they will create under the Get Britain Working White Paper; and to the social care commission.
We will also contribute to the Great British Rail consultation because, as that is all about, how we even get out the door and across to work if we cannot use the railways? We cannot set the political weather, unfortunately, but we will be there ready to engage. Housing is a good example. The Government have committed to 1.5 million new homes but they have not committed to them being made to accessibility standards. We are always there, trying to make their growth agenda more inclusive, but I would not say that we are having a great deal of success at the moment.
Dr Paula Holland: Can I add a point? On growth, I said a while back that we need to increase the supply of remote and hybrid jobs. In our study, we asked people whether they would consider applying for a job that was not remote or hybrid. Some 85% said that they would not because they absolutely need it. A DWP report published very recently asked people who were not working and who were on health-related benefits. Some 25% of those people said, “Do you know what? I’m not working now but I could do if I could work from home”. There is an opportunity to grow the economy, as well as organisational productivity at the lower level, if the supply of remote and hybrid jobs is expanded.
Pippa Stacey: May I offer one practical thing that I think could make a really big difference? We work specifically with people with long-term and energy-limiting conditions. We strongly recommend mandatory training for employers on those conditions specifically because they are often omitted from broader disability equality training.
In our experience at Astriid, in delivering that training, we find that helping employers and recruiters to understand the “why” behind these adjustments and why they are so essential is one of the things that most motivates them to go away and make that change. It is about having that understanding and going some way to addressing this big knowledge gap that still seems to exist.
Q94 Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: Can you be more specific about what you want the Government to do? One of the things that we hope this committee’s report will do is focus on what the Government can do to achieve some of the aims that we have been talking about.
You have already given me such a long list of things that are wrong, I am slightly nervous about asking you again, but I want to drill down a little. I take the general point about the way in which much of what seems to be current policy is detrimental to the arguments you have been making. We should bank that, I think. We will certainly refer to it; you have convinced the committee, I think, that there are things to be said about that.
It would be really useful if we had some concrete things where changing the current law will effectively provide the returns that Lord Monks was trying to argue for and which we can see happening in future. For example, you talked about the current arrangements under the Equality Act and said that 53% of employees had requested reasonable adjustments but 47% had not got them. Can you point to a bit of legislation that would correct that more in favour of those who are seeking these changes?
Dr Paula Holland: Definitely. Of the people who have not had them implemented in full, it is partly because they are waiting for Access to Work to assess them and to produce the support and equipment. At other times, the organisation just had not ordered it, so there was a big delay. Disabled people are sometimes buying the equipment themselves and bypassing both the employer and Access to Work.
Having disabled people working without reasonable adjustments in place is, quite simply, illegal. Putting more pressure on organisations to implement reasonable adjustments would make it easier for disabled people to report organisations that do not do so, thus avoiding having to go all the way to a tribunal. There should be an easier way to pick up the phone or email and say, “Look, my organisation is not giving me what I need to work and to do my job properly”.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: Can I press you on that? Is it because there is no statutory backing for that?
Fazilet Hadi: There is no process for how reasonable adjustments should work. An employer is not required to give a response within four weeks and there is no appeals process. As Paula said, the Equality Act says that there should be reasonable adjustments but there is nothing around that. The Government could put a clause in the Employment Rights Bill saying, “This is so important to us”. That goes hand in hand with Access to Work because, obviously, employers must make reasonable adjustments; Access to Work then comes in with the adjustments that are over and above reasonable, such as support workers or expensive equipment.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: If we could focus on both of those, that would be helpful.
Fazilet Hadi: You need that combination of a reasonable adjustment process being time-limited and having a route to appeal. Remember, a lot of disabled people do not want to create a bad relationship with their employer. It needs to be neutral: “This is what the law says and let us just follow the process”.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: You said that the Access to Work scheme is working very slowly. Do you want to come back on that?
Pippa Stacey: There is a big wait time at the minute, so a lot of people are without support. Of course, people do not know whether they can submit an application before they have secured a role because they do not know what that role will involve. The other side concerns claiming back costs—for a support worker, for example—even when people are on the system and have support. There are situations at the minute where support workers who have done hours in January still have not been paid for them; this is causing some people to walk away and be left without that support.
It is about figuring out how to get the system to work more efficiently without putting any more of the burden on the individual. As somebody who has Access to Work, I know that it is a lot of admin on top of your job. It takes a lot of exertion, especially for people with energy-limiting conditions. It is about how we can get that working more efficiently and streamline that process a bit better.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: I am sure that the committee would be very grateful if somebody could write to us with a list of that type of thing, where there is already a provision but it is not working. That would be very helpful.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed to the three of you for not just bringing academic rigour to this but adding colour and lived experience from the various organisations you work with. I now bring this session to a close.
