Improving Lives: Green Paper

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister for repeating the Statement, although it is a Statement that is, frankly, thinner than we would have hoped.

We support the ambition to halve the disability employment gap, the clear pathway to its attainment, and the proposition that we have debated on endless occasions that there should be work for those who can, support for those who could and care for those who cannot. That has characterised labour market approaches from several Governments over recent times. I found on my shelf a booklet entitled Improving Health and Work: Changing Lives, from 2008, at about the time the Minister was an adviser to the then Labour Government. We have a shared ambition and recognition of those issues. The challenge is to convert the intent into policy and the policy into action that can be delivered. That needs resourcing. I do not think the Minister said much about the cost of his proposals; it would be good if he could give us an indication.

There was a suggestion that too many people were taken off the books, as I think was the expression, in 2010, but that does not give proper credit to the work undertaken at that time. There was a gradual realisation of the importance of the Waddell and Burton thesis, which characterised much of the work of the Labour Government, the coalition Government and this Government.

So far as the welfare measures are concerned, we have not seen the detail, but we can see the innate merit of a personalised support package for disabled people. As for community partners, can we know the basis on which they are likely to be allocated across jobcentres? I think the figure was 200 of them; I guess they would be spread fairly thinly across those centres. The Minister said there is to be a consultation on further reforms to the WCA. Can we hear a little more about the thrust of this consultation and what it will entail?

So far as health is concerned, we had a revolution announced—a new era: there will be some joint working between the Department of Health and the DWP. Of course, that is to be welcomed. The idea of ingraining the concepts of work and health in training is something that again we can see the merits of and would support. We certainly would need to understand the basis of any review of SSP and the fit note, which has had a patchy existence since it was changed from the sick note, but the underlying concept that it should focus on what can be done, rather than on what cannot, is right and something we would support.

The Minister asserted that universal credit always makes work pay. Would he care to write to us on that proposition with the evidence, taking account of the work of the Resolution Foundation and its recent pronouncements on it, and the cuts to the work allowance? Universal credit started life with a very clear ambition to do exactly what the Minister said. Successive cuts to the programme have certainly impaired that ambition and that outcome. We should be clear on the basis of the Government’s assertion that work will always pay.

Finally, the Disability Confident business leaders’ group seems a worthwhile development. We need to understand how it would be funded and the extent to which individuals would engage.

We see in the Statement a good deal of consultation, further work and quite proper engagement with a range of people, particularly disabled people themselves and their carers, but that is a long way from having a clear, funded policy to make a real difference to the lives of the people we are talking about today.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. We on these Benches are pleased to finally see this Green Paper. It has been delayed time and again and many of us were wondering whether it would ever see the light of day.

Reducing the disability employment gap is a worthy aim. There are many people with disabilities whose skills and talents are not utilised. Working with employers to ensure that they recognise the benefits to their businesses of employing disabled people is vital for both the health and well-being of those disabled people who are able to work, and for our economy as a whole.

The move to reform the work capability assessment is an overdue step in the right direction. However, at its heart the structure of the WCA remains fatally flawed. This is in part because of a failure to assess what types of jobs may be available to claimants, and whether they can find such jobs within their skill set and in their local area. I therefore ask the Minister whether, in reforming the system, he will look to create a process that assesses not just whether a claimant is fit to look for a job but whether the jobs available are fit for the claimant.

I also impress upon the Minister the importance of conducting a fundamental overhaul of the system. Tweaking at the edges is unhelpful. Sick and disabled people have little confidence in the WCA, rendering it unworkable. This is particularly important given the incredible mental pressure that the lack of trust in the system puts on claimants, many of whom already suffer from mental ill health. I suggest the Minister seeks to restore confidence as a priority.

On the Government’s plans for helping those disabled people who can work back into work, we welcome the creation of a business leaders group. However, will the Minister look at rewarding the best practice of businesses that are good employers of people with disabilities? For example, Liberal Democrats have proposed that those employers who meet a strengthened version of the two-tick system for mindful employers of employees with mental health conditions are able speedily to access funding, such as Access to Work. It is important that those employers who have a good track record are given a facilitated route to employing more people who may need additional support.

Finally, will the Minister explain why a proper analysis of the failings of personal independence payments is not included in the Green Paper? This has affected people’s ability to lead independent working lives. Will the Government look again at the demands of many in this House, not least my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester, on the 50-metre rule and its inappropriateness in assessing mobility? The impact of disability varies greatly between rural and urban areas, and PIP as a supposedly personalised benefit should assess these barriers.

All in all, the Green Paper is welcome, but until the Government address these myriad other problems we will still fall well short of providing the support that people with disabilities should be able to expect.

[Lord Freud]

I thank both noble Lords for their very thoughtful contributions and for their general welcome, with maybe a little complaint in one case about thinness. I take the point.

Both noble Lords made the point, in different ways, about the level of engagement going on now with this Green Paper. We make no apology for that. We need a process that fully brings on board the disabled groups, so that they have full impact. We want to take the time necessary to do that properly. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, looked at the health and work relationship; it is confined to the area that it is because the process is not about PIP at this stage. There will be other times to look at PIP but it is not part of this consultation.

As the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, pointed out, fundamental here is the Waddell and Burton report of September 2006. It was very valuable for me when I was writing my first piece of work on what to do with the benefits system. It turned on its head the traditional relationship between the benefits system and work when it said that work, particularly good work, is good for people. It is not one of the problems; it is one of the solutions. It has been really hard to move and change a system that is designed to protect people from work, which made sense when there was heavy industry. It now changes at every level.

We all feel that this is taking a long time, but there is a good reason for it. We are transforming a system that put people in a silo of disability and did not let them back into work. Transforming that requires universal credit as a fundamental base where you do not just have those different groupings; you have everyone able to do what they want, with their pay adjusted accordingly. That is the answer to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, about universal credit: it makes work pay.

If you make a comparison between what somebody who had been in the system would have got and what universal credit does, you come up with different figures. Once you are in the universal credit system, the reality is that you are incentivised to work. That will have a behavioural effect, which we are already seeing in the way that universal credit operates. It helps and encourages people to work more. While we do not yet have many numbers of those who are disabled in the system, there are some and they are going in. Within universal credit we will build evidence as to how best for them to do so. As noble Lords appreciate, we are building the universal credit system very carefully with a “test and learn”, and it is still one of the areas about which to learn a lot.

This is a new era, of joint working. I said it, as did the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. It is joint working not just between the two departments, which is pretty tough, but also with employers. Getting all that to work well is one of the reasons why we are taking time over our consultation. Clearly we are looking at building on the three types. We now have three tiers of employers in the new two-tick system that was relaunched in July, with the top tier being the leaders. In response to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, about whether there will be the demonstration employer—and we all know individual employers who really have put huge effort into supporting people—I can say that we are setting that up with tiers where the leaders will support others.

On the question from the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, on statutory sick pay and the fit note, that is clearly at the heart of getting the relationship between health and work and the employment system in the DWP to work better. That is why consultation in this area is so important. One of the most important things is to get the health system seeing employment as one of the therapeutic outcomes for which it is looking. We have already taken that step, and it takes us a long way. I cannot at this stage tell the noble Lord what the allocation of the community partners will be, but we will work on that.

With that, I think that I have dealt with the first level of questions and would enjoy some more.