The Inspector

The big disability charities backed Remploy on the basis that it is more fulfilling for disabled people and people with learning disabilities to work in mainstream jobs than in factory ghettos designed just for them. A poll carried out by Community Care's sister title Personnel Today suggested that the majority of employers see eye to eye with Remploy, with 59% claiming to employ people with learning disabilities and more than three-quarters describing the experience as positive.

So why the huge outcry when the factory closures were announced? The answer lies buried beneath the headlines, where it is evident that mainstream employers still have a long way to go before they can genuinely claim to play their part in giving people with learning disabilities A Life Like Any Other, the name of Community Care's new campaign. And the same goes for disabled people generally.

Trade unions described the Remploy factory closures as "shocking", probably to be expected given the dark side of Personnel Today's survey which also showed a clear majority of employers failing to target people with learning disabilities in recruitment, having workplaces unsuited to them, and having managers who couldn't care less. No wonder the government's own figures show that nine out of 10 people in this group are still jobless, though many would love to find work.

But the grim statistics cannot disguise the ostrich-like reaction of the unions, which described the disability charities' support for the closures as "grotesque". The employment debate has been rather like the education debate a couple of years ago, when Baroness Warnock announced her much-publicised volte face on the merits of mainstreaming the education of disabled people. Her 1970s committee had been in no doubt that this was the right course; suddenly, in 2005, she appeared to recant: mainstreaming had been an abject failure and special schools were better after all.

Yet the theory was - and surely still is - that people should be entitled, wherever possible, to ordinary lives, enjoying the support necessary to live, learn and work with everybody else. The crucial word is, of course, "support". It is not the theory of mainstreaming that has failed - either in education or in employment - it is the will and the resources to make it work. Half of the organisations Personnel Today spoke to said that they didn't have the resources to support disabled people, a breathtakingly weak-kneed response when the Disability Discrimination Act which became law more than a decade ago was supposed to have made such troglodytic attitudes unacceptable. How many employers, for example, have heard of the Access to Work scheme which provides grants and support to cover the additional costs of taking on disabled people? Far too many employers - and schools for that matter - have neglected their obligations to disabled people and the vast, untapped reservoir of potential that they represent.