General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

For him, the move has seemed inevitable since the day, four years ago, when he visited Remploy's Birkenhead textile factory, which eventually closed last year.

"For a variety of reasons, they had lost their contracts, and there were 30 or 40 people sitting there doing absolutely nothing," Matthews recalls. "They had no work to do and had not had any work for some time.

"Later, I went down the road to the Birkenhead branch of Remploy Employment Services (Res), which had not been open very long, and learned that they had placed more than 40 people in work in six months. That was quite a contrast: 40 people sitting around doing nothing in our factory against 40 people in productive jobs in the local economy. Which was the right model for supporting disabled people in the 21st century?"

Critics accuse Matthews and Remploy's senior management of having done little to win new business for the factories, which numbered 83 as recently as 2007. Twenty-nine of those were closed the following year under the Labour government – something for which Peter Hain, who was work and pensions secretary and the MP for Neath, in south Wales, continues to be vilified in some quarters.

In 2008, Matthews, a former leading NHS executive, was recruited to try to make a go of the remaining 54 factories, while developing Res, under a modernisation plan that was given £555m of government funding over five years. But the economic recession hit that same year and the rapid move to outsourcing of public-sector services meant that councils, the health service and other government bodies were placing fewer contracts with Remploy – despite exhortations by ministers, notably then prime minister Gordon Brown who was a strong supporter of the organisation.

Matthews thinks it might have been possible to save a core group of factories if he had been allowed to make further closures and refocus product lines. But the issue had become too hot a potato for Labour, which was by then dogged by vociferous protests by Remploy workers .

The coalition government commissioned a report on the future of disability employment and training from a review team led by Liz Sayce, chief executive of disability charity Radar (now Disability Rights UK) and a known critic of sheltered factories. The report recommended winding down support for segregated employment, saying that each of the 2,800 Remploy factory workers was subsidised by an average £25,000 a year that could be better spent.

Extract from here,

Remploy