Wings Over Scotland

In a week that will end with the finals of the incredible wheelchair tennis at Wimbledon, it was perhaps understandable that people might not have noticed the UK government sneaking out the announcement that the five remaining Remploy factories in Scotland are to be closed as part of its reform of welfare provision.

(The minister involved, Esther McVey, made very clear that welfare provision was how the government saw the factories, rather than legitimate businesses which happened to be subsidised by the taxpayer, like the UK’s railway companies and banks.)

If only we had a Labour administration at Westminster to protect them, eh?

Remploy is a state-funded organisation dedicated to finding employment for disabled people. It was established in 1945 under the terms of the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944 in order to provide work to disabled servicemen returning from WW2, and opened its first factory in Bridgend, Wales, in 1946.

Over the following decades it established a network of factories across the UK, which by 2007 numbered 83 sites, making everything from wheelchairs and surgical footwear to nurses’ uniforms, chemical and biological warfare suits for the MoD, toiletries, car parts and furniture. There are factories that recycle white goods, as well as assembling electronic units and binding books.

The five factories to be cut in Scotland are part of the planned nine factories to close throughout the UK and represent the entire remaining Remploy workforce north of the border. More than 230 disabled people across the UK face redundancy, with 137 of those redundancies (60%) at the Scots plants.

Gordon Brown entered the debate by branding the decision “shameful”, adding:

“The factories at Leven and Cowdenbeath have a full order book and could easily expand their workload given the demand for their product.”

Anne McGuire MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Disabled People, concurred:

“This Government’s record on disability employment is nothing short of a disgrace. The vast majority of the disabled workers this Government has already sacked from Remploy are still out of work, and disability unemployment is still higher than in May 2010.

Yet today, just one week after we learned disabled people are three times more likely to find work if we do nothing than if they take part in the Government’s so-called ‘Work Programme’,  David Cameron is throwing yet more disabled people out of a job.

We have had three years of failure and contempt from this Government on disability employment. What we need now is serious action to get disabled people into work – not just dumped on the dole.” 

It’s difficult to argue with that sentiment. But readers with longer memories might recall that Ms McGuire’s party was in power at Westminster until recently. Presumably, then, Labour must have strenuously and diligently protected ventures like Remploy?

In May 2007 the UK was at the height of an economic boom – the government had access to easy cheap credit, Gordon Brown was still the Chancellor, and he was responsible for deciding where funding would be applied to all government departments and quangos.

These were still times before austerity, and as such there was no driving ethos of cuts to reduce spending – any cuts were where services were surplus to requirements, rather than unaffordable. It was in that month that Brown signed off on the closure of 29 UK Remploy factories (35% of sites), including five in Scotland.

The main decision makers in the matter were Gordon Brown, Peter Hain (Work and Pensions Secretary) and Anne McGuire (minister for disabled people). In 2008 the GMB Union branded the job losses a ‘betrayal’ of the disabled by (now Prime Minister) Brown’s government. Pleas to Brown to halt the closures were dismissed and the Remploy ‘modernisation’ program went ahead, costing nearly half of the workforce their jobs – almost 2,500 disabled people. But things were about to get even worse.

In 2010 the UK General Election resulted in a hung parliament. David Cameron became Prime Minister of the first peacetime coalition, and the Labour ‘modernisation’ programme that had closed a third of the Remploy factories gave way to a Conservative/Liberal Democrat ‘rationalisation’ programme with a different name but very similar aims.

In early 2012 the UK government submitted a report in which it proposed to close 36 of the 54 remaining factories, though protests eventually saw the number slightly reduced to 34 with the loss of 1,752 jobs (1,518 of which were held by disabled workers).

At the time an article on LabourList noted:

“Remploy fulfilled a very important role in society. It played the very role our coalition government endlessly claims they value the most. It placed some of the most disadvantaged, most vulnerable disabled people in work. More than that, in many cases, it provided work that disabled people could do.

Often giving structure and social value to the lives of people with learning difficulties or severe mental health problems, the sad truth is that many of these workers would not have been employed elsewhere.

In an ideal world, there would be no need for Remploy. All disabled people would be able to compete on a level playing field, finding work to suit their skills and abilities. They would be embraced in the workplace, supported where they have additional needs and helped to achieve their full potential.

Anyone who thinks that this is possible in 2012 is simply living in a fantasy land. In the worst recession since the 30s, at a time of the highest unemployment we have seen for a generation, at a time when young, fit, degree students cannot find work, what hope is there for Remploy workers? The government claim that there will be transitional help. Maria Miller, Minister for Disabled People claimed,

“The Government will reduce its current subsidy to Remploy from the beginning of the new financial year so that we cease funding factories which make significant losses year after year and restrict funding to those factories which might have a prospect of a viable future without Government subsidy.”

And there’s the rub. Some of our most disadvantaged workers were not financially ‘viable’. No matter that Remploy made them socially viable. No matter that Remploy was often the only chance for profoundly disabled people to be independently viable.

In the language of fascism, these people should have made more profit.

1,752 people not relying on benefits. 1,752 people paying tax. 1,752 people given the chance to be the best that they can be. Did anyone do the maths? Did anyone work out exactly how much the scheme saved or did they simply look at a balance sheet, simply take a company performing a role that no-one else would do and judge it against Tesco and Asda?

Again, disabled people are told they are ‘not viable’. Does this language not strike fear into the coldest heart? Does it not make us pause for a moment and wonder what the alternative to ‘non-viable’ is? We are not viable as ‘claimant stock’, not viable as ‘super-users’ of the NHS, not viable as taxpayers, not viable as profit-turners, as creators of wealth. And that is the only form of ‘viable’ this Government seems to understand.”

The latest round of closures will see the total number of Remploy factories assisting the disabled fall to a grand total of 11 sites. It took six decades to build up Remploy to 83 sites which at their peak were providing work to over 10,000 disabled people. It has taken successive Labour and Tory/Lib Dem governments just six years to close almost 90% of those sites and throw the workers on the dole.

Remploy demonstrates that the social gains made in Britain as a society since 1945 can be swept away at dazzling speed. Totemic social institutions like the NHS, the welfare state, the Royal Mail and countless others will be unrecognisable by the end of the current administration from the entities of which the county was once proud.

But as we’ve seen, a lack of compassion for the vulnerable is not the exclusive preserve of the Conservatives. Labour laid the building blocks for almost all of the coalition’s “reforms” in those fields, and wreaked havoc on Remploy even in times of growth. They may offer different justifications and rationales for their attacks on the UK’s social fabric, but the results are much the same.