Chamber and committees

We will hear from employer representatives in the next few weeks.

Yes. That is reflected in the Institute for Public Policy Research report that was recently published. I will come to Oxana MacGregor-Gunn with the same question about how you feel the delivery model with “No one left behind” and the LEPs is working.

Could I come back to why we are undertaking this inquiry? The Government has a commitment to halve the disability employment gap by 2038. We know that some progress is being made. Are you confident that we are on track to meet that target? According to some of the evidence that we were provided with, if we focus just on education and have disabled people reaching the same standard of education as non-disabled people, that will close the gap by 4 percentage points. If we do something significant about structural barriers, that will close the gap by 28 percentage points. Do you think that we have a clear path to 2038 and that the target will be met?

Do you think that the “No one left behind” funding and model of delivery is sufficient or is informed enough on what the structural barriers and the challenges are to help us get there? Do we need to look more closely at how that is being delivered? Do the local authority partnerships recognise where you have the biggest challenges in closing the gap?

Before we close, I have a question about supported workplaces. When we went to Dundee last year, we visited Enable and also Dovetail Enterprises. This morning, we have talked more about employers and people being supported into employment, but does anyone want to say anything about the role of supported workplaces, such as Dovetail? As other people have said, we visited the Push reuse centre and the Giraffe cafe in Perth, which are workplaces whose purpose, in part, is the provision of that support. Do you understand the distinction that I am making?

David Cameron, you may come in first, because you represent supported employment. Does that include supported workplaces and supported employment?

Do you find that there are different abilities or challenges that people face within a group of disabled people? Do you find that there are groups of people that it is harder to make progress with and that we need to focus more on them?

Philip Ritchie is here from City of Edinburgh Council, representing the Edinburgh local employability partnership. I put the same question to you, Philip. Where do you think there has been progress? Are we on target to meet the Government’s commitment to close the disability employment gap?

Alasdair Scott is here from Scottish Borders Council. To build on the questions we have had so far, some of the research that has been done by the Fraser of Allander Institute says that, although the Government is making progress on closing the gap, progress is slower for people with neurodivergent conditions and people with learning disabilities and there are more difficulties in getting them into work. Does the Scottish Borders strategy focus on that area or does it take a broader approach to the issue?

I now come to Dave McCallum. The original question was about the barriers that are faced by disabled people in accessing and retaining mainstream employment. Can you reflect on that? Do you feel that Government policy and measures are on the right path? Are the policy interventions that the Government is bringing in the right ones and are there enough?

Before I bring in Maggie Chapman, I want to ask about data, which Colin Beattie has referred to. It feels as if, in Scotland, we are sometimes good at starting initiatives but we are not really sure which ones are working so we do not know where to focus our resources or where to make the best progress, especially when we are trying to tackle something as difficult as the disability employment gap. As organisations, how do you define and measure what is successful? The Scottish Government recently established the employability shared measurement framework. Do you feed information into that framework?