It’s neurodiversity celebration week this week. A favourite time of the year for David Jones, an employment lawyer I know.
David loves it for the amusement of watching his LinkedIn feed fill with posts from companies about how they embrace neurodiversity – when he, a neurodivergent man, has experience of suing the same organisations because they badly failed his autistic clients or ADHD-ers, often refusing to offer them even the most basic or inexpensive of adjustments.
Today the Government has announced that, as predicted, it has taken steps to make it harder to get personal independent payments and other benefits for those who are out of work. It has been widely reported that the new thresholds exclude, among others, many autistic people, those with ADHD and mental health difficulties.
Happy neurodiversity week from the Labour Government, you big bunch of skivers!
Not that you will see the Prime Minister explain it this way. He is framing it as a moral move, designed to free neurodivergent people from a life of dependency. This way he will wean autistic people, only 30 per cent of whom are in any type of work (full or part time), off the universal credit that disincentivises them from getting a job.
But this misses a crucial point, which is that it’s often not the case that autistic people don’t want to work; it’s that the world of work doesn’t want autistic people.
In a previous life I worked for an autism charity. For one project we needed to find autistic people who could tell us about their difficulties in finding a job despite having good academic qualifications.
It was the easiest gig ever. One social media post and the emails came thick and fast – people did not stop getting in contact for days. Several people sent us spreadsheets revealing the hundreds of jobs a year they had applied for, to no avail.
This is often down to the interview. You would be hard-pressed to design a mechanism more effective at screening out autistic people.
To be invited somewhere new for a meeting either without structure (or at least a known structure), and where you may be asked ambiguous questions is a textbook example of how to increase autistic anxiety.
Rules don’t always make sense: you have to ask a question at the end, even if you don’t want to; you are asked what your weakness is, but you don’t understand they are really asking for a humble brag. You are actually being judged not so much on your job skills but on the neurotypical social skills you have struggled with your whole life, and which you probably have been bullied at school for lacking.
square BEN KENTISH
It increasingly looks like there's a new 'nasty party' in Downing Street
Read MoreThere is one positive, however. A panel has been assembled to look at this and other issues preventing neurodivergent people from working, led by Sir Stephen Timms, and involving Professor Amanda Kirby, a person who is respected in the neurodivergent community. But it is hard at this point to have full confidence that the panel will lead to real change.
Sir Robert Buckland, the former justice secretary, last year did a very thorough job on a similar topic. He published the Review of Autism Employment, and Buckland must be wondering why, in light of this, another review has been needed. He made 20 very sensible recommendations. Care to guess how many of his 20 recommendations have been implemented? Not one.
Were the Government to say: we will spend three years getting businesses sorted and implementing the recommendations we have received so they don’t screen out neurodivergent employees or sack them (according to US research, ADHD people are 60 per cent more likely to be sacked) and only then will we take the benefits away, then I would think: fair enough.
But instead we’re left wondering if the new panel will do any good and fearing the worst of all worlds is about to happen: the safety net removed and businesses only vaguely told to improve.
Trust us, the Government says, as it demonstrates time after time that it hasn’t even grasped the basics.
I predict the amusement of David, the employment lawyer, will only continue as the gulf between what companies say and do widens, at least in the near future.
Forcing disabled people to jump when they may land in a heap on the floor, is neither moral, nor in their best interests.
Jessie Hewitson is Contributing Money Editor at The i Paper, a director of NeuroUniverse, providing training for companies to understand neurodivergent employees, and the author of Autism: How to Raise a Happy Autistic Child
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