WEST Devon and Torridge MP Geoffrey Cox recently visited the headquarters and workshop of a Plymouth-based organisation, Pluss, which provides training and employment opportunities to the disabled in West Devon.

The organisation currently supports 100 people in the area. Mr Cox met the managing director, Martin Davies, and discussed the acute need the MP said he had seen in his advice surgeries for additional specialist employment services for the disabled.

Mr Cox said Pluss was immensely successful in helping disabled people into employment and he was impressed with their determination that no-one should be written off from being able to work if they wished to.

'By pioneering relationships with employers, and by providing preparatory training so that the workplace is not an unfamiliar environment when they arrive, many people who have previously thought they could not ever get a job have proved that they can do it,' he said.

The MP said he had written to the Devon Partnership Trust and to the county council urging them to recognise the urgent need for local specialist employment services for the disabled such as those Pluss provides.