Alan Milburn

They want to work.

They're trying to work.

The people that you meet, I've just met a group here in Islington, you know, they're applying for the job, for jobs, not just like a few jobs, sometimes hundreds of jobs, they never get a response.

Nothing, literally nothing, no response, no.

And it's the silence that kills, right?

Because it dents their confidence, it kills their hope.

This is just now normal.

So it's not that they're not trying, but they are a bit different.

That is undoubtedly true.

What we can't do is just say that because someone has got

i don't know in neurodiverse condition adhd or autism or because they're living with anxiety or depression then somehow or other the health system and the welfare system should automatically catapult them into the world of benefits rather than into the world of work so when i talk to amazon for example you know they are extremely proud and rightly so of their brilliant program that they run for young workers with autism

know so they're recruiting these people they know that they've got to look after them but they're brilliant workers you know they like coming to work and all of that sort of stuff so i think we've just got to get out of this sort of notion about and this is there's a weird debate about this because people want to ask all the time is it over diagnosed or is it over medicalized okay look i'm not a doctor i don't know the answer to that question my question is a different one which is a so what question

So if they have got a diagnosis, why does that mean that they cannot work?

What does the system need to do to enable them to work?

Tens of thousands of disabled people are proving every day that just because you've got a diagnosis doesn't mean that you can't work, providing you get the right level of support.

And that's where the rubber hits the road, because the way that the welfare system works is more geared to income replacement than it is to employment support.

And that's what's going to change.

Yeah, so I think this is really interesting.

And as we move into the next phase of this and sort of think about, okay, so what is it that we actually need to do now that we've sort of diagnosed the nature of the problem?

It's important to get that right, the diagnosis, because otherwise you'll just end up with yet more misplaced solutions, you know?