Meeting of the Parliament 13 May 2015
We are here to celebrate the opportunities for people who are going into apprenticeships. I have listened very carefully to other members on areas in which opportunities are perhaps not as equal. There is a perception out there that people with disabilities perhaps cannot achieve the same as those without a disability. However, we have to look at the opportunities that exist.
In my constituency, there is a wide and varied range of opportunities for people in the apprenticeship programmes. To be perfectly honest, the majority of those opportunities would be open and available to people with a disability. I am thinking about the hospitality sector, for instance; there are not many areas of work in the hospitality sector that people with disabilities could not achieve. There are opportunities in the outdoors. I accept that there may be health and safety issues to prevent people, depending on their disability, from doing some work in forestry, but there are opportunities. For instance, the Foxlane social enterprise in my constituency provides opportunities for people in market gardening.
Let us have a conversation with people about what jobs they would like to do. I know that the Royal National Institute of Blind People, for instance, has an employment officer and that it has had people working in different parts of Scotland for many years; in fact, I used to work alongside them prior to coming to Holyrood. Despite that, we still do not seem to get the numbers into employment. Why is that? Is it to do with perception?
I believe that there are opportunities and that there are jobs for people from all sectors and all walks of life. The Scottish Parliament’s apprenticeship programme, for instance, looked very carefully at selection to ensure that people from different socioeconomic backgrounds were given opportunities. People from ethnic or disability backgrounds were considered. Those opportunities exist, but it is up to the employer to make them available and to go through a selection process.
Much has been said about degrees and vocational training. I do not have a degree or vocational training. Mr Gray mentioned his ability to change a plug. My ability to change a plug always depended on the availability of my daughter when she was three to tell me the colours of the wires—thankfully, she knew her colours. It is not that the opportunity was not available for me to do certain things; I simply chose a different pathway.
At one point, I worked in an engineering factory. A health and safety person came in and said, “I’m sorry—actually, we think that it is too dangerous for you to be here.” I believe that there are now measures in certain factories that mean that people who are blind or have different disabilities can work in those sectors. That is fine, but we have not moved a great deal in the past 40-odd years in creating places for people with disabilities.
The cabinet secretary mentioned access to work. Access to work support is available when a person is in work. It becomes available when a person is in employment, but we need to ensure that it is also available while people are looking for work, are going through training or are on an apprenticeship programme. If a person needs a particular piece of kit to ensure that they can do the job just as well as someone else can, that kit should be made available. The person may well be able to do the job, but if they do not have the right facility to enable them to do it, the opportunity will be denied.
It comes down to fundamentals. We are always letting ourselves down because we do not look at the basics, the start, the opportunity and what the barriers are.
Siobhan McMahon was quite right to mention women in work, which is something that we looked at when she and I were on the Equal Opportunities Committee. I was talking recently to one of the construction directors at the new Alford school campus in my constituency, which is still undergoing construction. He told me that he was pulling his hair out because he needs people to come into the construction industry and is offering apprenticeships, but when he goes to schools to speak to young people, none of the girls wants to come and work for him. That is not because he is not a nice guy but because they just do not want to go into the construction industry.
Sometimes the jobs and opportunities are there, but we need to ensure that the right technology is there and that certain perceptions are knocked on the head so that people can go into different types of jobs and get away from the stereotyping that we still seem to have.
16:30