Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis), who speaks with real personal experience in this area. Although we may not agree on the treatment for the diagnosis, I have huge respect for the insights he brings to the Chamber on this issue. I do not think this particular motion should be controversial. I think it should be welcomed across the House that there is a desire to bring down the welfare bill among working-age people, because that is a compassionate position to take, and I will set out why I think that is compassionate. The opposite position lacks the compassion we should be showing those people who want to be establishing their working lives, who want to be contributing, and who want to have that independence and that ownership, because this all comes as part of the social contract that forms part of our society. General taxation is there for the benefit of the whole of society, whether that is funding our police forces, our defence and the NHS, or supporting those who are vulnerable through the welfare state, but it is essential that the process is fair. The welfare system should be seen as a form of societal insurance and not a form of charity. It does not benefit anyone if we make them dependent upon a system opposed to enabling them to participate as fully as they can in our wider society. The fact that the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that the total expenditure for working-age benefits will breach £220 billion by 2030-31 should be a matter of great concern to us all, as is the fact that the number of people not in education, employment or training has broken the 1 million barrier and has increased by some 60,000 since the start of this Parliament. The Fonagy report, which has been referred to, provided some interesting statistics, particularly the fact that the population prevalence of conditions such as ADHD and other neurodiverse conditions has not increased in the last few years. What has happened, however, is there has been a much greater administrative prevalence of those conditions, and we have to ask questions about why that is the case. There is also a legitimate conversation to be had about medicalising or over-medicalising neurodiversity. There are, of course, those individuals who suffer neurodiverse disorders to such an extent that they are unable to work and will be unable to work throughout their lives, but neurodiversity is actually a variance of human nature. We are not all built the same; we vary in our skillsets and our personalities. Neurodiversity is part of that picture, and we should be harnessing it to enable those young people to get into the workplace. There is also an argument of fairness, because those who pay into the system want to know that it is being spent in a fair and equitable way—it is taxpayers’ money after all. Nobody begrudges those who genuinely need support from having it, but what they do begrudge is a situation—I have encountered this when speaking to young people in my constituency—in which young people have gone out and worked, and they have friends who were on the same university course, for example, who have then gone on to benefits and are financially in a better position than them. That is not the way we should be supporting our young people. It does not allow them to grow or establish the full lives that we all want them to have. It also deeply damages that social contract with the wider public, because if an increasing number of people feel that the system no longer adequately distributes wealth and does not represent the importance of paying in and supporting those who belong in it, we will find that there will be a growing resentment—not against those who are unable to work, but against those who can work but choose not to do so. That fundamentally damages the reciprocity of the social contract of this country.