Clause 8
Welfare Reform Bill
11:15 am
Jim Murphy (Minister of State (Work), Department for Work and Pensions; East Renfrewshire, Labour)
I would like to make some progress before I give way.
I was asked specifically about autism, which is another example of what we are talking about, although there are many others. We will all have come across such examples as constituency Members of Parliament and in preparing for these deliberations and we will all have met people and listened to their experiences. Entirely fairly, the National Autism Society put it me that a personal adviser who does not have knowledge or experience of supporting people with autism could mistake a customer with autism for someone who was being unco-operative or even belligerent, and think that they were failing to participate. We will ensure that that important point and others that are made to us feed through the process. Indeed, that is why, in preparing for the revised public consultation, I and the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs. McGuire), ensured that autism groups could join some of the technical working groups in which they had not taken part before. We did that to ensure that we were sensitive to the autism spectrum.