Health: Migraines

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I will certainly reflect upon that and take it away, but I have given some idea as to the work we are doing with employers and—I say again—it is an incredibly important issue for all employers, particularly small businesses. There are 5.4 million or so of those in this country, for which there is little access to occupational health—something I could talk about another time—where advice needed for employees who suffer is better given.

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest. I have had well-controlled chronic migraine, which was not managed until I was able to access a specialist. It was welcome that NICE recently approved a new drug for acute migraine and noted that the condition affects every aspect of life. Currently, when triptan is ineffective, there is no further standard treatment and people are advised to see a specialist. However, there is a significant shortage of access to those specialists and long waiting lists. I return to the question from the other side of the Chamber. What can we do to improve access to those specialists, get more migraines under control and those people back into the workplace? What would the Minister’s response be to the provision of something like migraine hubs such as those we have for musculoskeletal conditions?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Indeed. Just to echo what my noble friend said, as she will know, migraine treatments include painkillers such as ibruprofen and paracetamol, medicines called triptans, to which she referred, and medicines including anti-emetics which stop one feeling sick. More than that, I allude to the NHS national workforce plan, whereby we have a long-term vision for the training required and individuals that we need to help deal with this difficult affliction.

Disability Employment Gap

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I am going to make a bit more progress and may give way in a minute.

Let us talk about ESA. Here is what the experts, not MPs, think about the cuts to the WRAG under ESA and how they will affect employability. Parkinson’s UK says:

“The cut to the WRAG will push people…even further from the workplace.”

Muscular Dystrophy UK states that the cut

“will widen the disability employment gap rather than reduce it.”

Mind’s chief executive, Paul Farmer, said

“Implying that ill and disabled people will be motivated into work if their benefits are cut is misguided and insulting.”

I could not agree more. It is grossly insulting to disabled people. I know that many Government Back Benchers feel the same way, because that is why they were so loth to give their votes to the Government on the ESA cut. In fact, many of them—[Interruption.] I am going to finish this point. Many of them did so explicitly because the Government promised to beef up support for disabled people. Let me quote a few Government Members and then I will give way to the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer).

I will first quote the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen), who said before abstaining on the vote:

“To secure my trust, I need to believe in the White Paper and that the £100 million will go some way to help those people. That is my warning shot to the Government.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2016; Vol. 606, c. 215.]

The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) said that the

“White Paper is incredibly important to the matter we are discussing, because it is the replacement for what the Government are proposing to remove.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2016; Vol. 606, c. 222.]

The hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) said

“I was about to vote against ESA cuts when he”—

the previous Secretary of State—

“sought me out - he personally and angrily begged me not to”

and that he

“Promised me he was introducing a white paper which guaranteed enhanced and more easily accessible benefits for the seriously disabled”

in this country.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Owen Smith]

I will give way to the hon. Lady and then to the hon. Member for Sherwood.

[Nicola Blackwood]

The shadow Secretary of State mentioned experts and then descended into partisanship, so I thought I might try to bring him back to the experts. He has not yet mentioned the Sayce report, so what are his views on that? It discussed many aspects of employment support for disabled people and highlighted the positive aspects of the Access to Work programme, stating that it

“should be transformed from being the best kept secret in Government to being a recognised passport to successful employment”

and that the Government should double the number of people who are helped. Does he agree with that? How would he propose that the Government go about achieving it?

[Owen Smith]

I agree with lots of it, but the truth, as I have been describing, is that we have seen nothing but cuts. The shift from the Work programme to the Work and Health programme involves an 80% cut in support. Access to Work is dealing with fewer people this year than last year: 31,000 versus 34,000. Those are the facts, and the Government really need to check them. When the Secretary of State was the Secretary of State for Wales, he welcomed the Fit for Work scheme, but he has now scrapped it in my constituency. It is another scheme that is meant to be helping people, as Liz Sayce described, but it is being cut on the Government’s watch. That is the truth of the matter.

Where is this fabled White Paper? Where is it, the one that we have been waiting for all these months? Perhaps the hon. Member for Sherwood knows where the Government have it hidden and can tell us all about it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I am clear, as is my whole ministerial team at the Department, that the challenge of mental health is enormous and profound. We must do far more to understand it and its interaction with employment. We will be spending tens of millions of pounds in the coming years on pilots to try to understand what interventions can make a positive difference for people with mental health conditions, and I can assure my hon. Friend that we are determined to see positive change in that regard.

We are expanding Access to Work, so that 25,000 more disabled people by 2021 will be helped with the additional costs they face from working. We are ensuring that disabled people are part of our plans to increase apprenticeships, with an accessible apprenticeship task force which is providing advice on how potential apprentices with learning disabilities and other hidden impairments can take these up.

[Nicola Blackwood]

The Secretary of State is generous in giving way. On Access to Work and the fact that we are increasing spending on it, that increased spending will be of little value if it remains, as Liz Sayce said, the “best kept secret” in the DWP. How can we ensure that the most vulnerable and the smallest businesses, which would benefit most from it, hear about it and can gain the full value of that scheme?

[Stephen Crabb]

The slightly glib answer that I could give is that there is a role for all of us in this House to promote Access to Work in our communities and constituencies, but there is a broader challenge for the Department and for the Ministers as to how we get that information out. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, who has responsibility for disabled people, is taking the lead on that and will refer to it in his closing remarks.

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

T6. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to introducing a yellow card system for sanctions, but does he agree that we also need to ensure that claimants with mental health problems are placed in the right group in the first place? Will he reaffirm the commitment that I received from his predecessor, following a tragic constituency case, to improve mental health training for assessors and decision makers?

[Justin Tomlinson]

This is an important area, in which the Government have rightly invested an extra £1.25 billion in the March 2015 Budget. We have rolled out a £43 million series of pilots to provide face-to-face, group, online and telephone support. We also have mental health and wellbeing partnership managers and disability employment advisers right across the jobcentre network. We will continue to push further training, as this is an important issue.

AEA Technology Pension Scheme

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend has made his point cogently. I will return to the matter of compensation later in my speech.

Once part of the new scheme, members were encouraged to transfer all accrued pension service from the UKAEA scheme, by a leaflet presented as impartial advice from the Government Actuary’s Department; it has recently been found that the leaflet was changed several times at the request of the UKAEA to remove references to risks involved in the transfer. Scheme members were assured that their pension would be safe. As both schemes were based on final salary, the decision by scheme members on whether to transfer service to the new scheme or to freeze it in the UKAEA scheme was based on a judgment of what would happen to their own salary in future years. They could not make the decision based on whether the new scheme contained more risk, since they had not been warned of any.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

The AEA Technology staff are nuclear physicists accustomed to identifying risk and weighing cost-benefit. If they could not identify risk within the GAD advice, who could have?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend makes a really potent point, which I will come on to later in my speech.

People had not been warned of the risks by the official leaflets that they received. The AEA Technology pension scheme received an initial injection of cash from its mother scheme, the UKAEA scheme, based on the accrued service and pension entitlements of the transferred members. The mother scheme was operating with a notional surplus at the time, but none of that surplus was passed to the new scheme, giving the Treasury an increased windfall. Since the AEA Technology pension scheme ran into deficit because of changes in actuarial valuations, it has now become apparent that insufficient funds were transferred into it when it was set up. Moreover, no written agreements appear to have been made to cover such an eventuality. In other words, either the Government have a continuing moral, and possibly legal, duty to those transferred members or they cannot have fully discharged their responsibility under the Atomic Energy Authority Act.

The Department for Work and Pensions has suggested the requirements of the Act may have been fulfilled because when it was launched the benefits from the new scheme matched those of the mother scheme. However, none of the transferring scheme members—my hon. Friend has made the very good point that they were extremely bright and able people—were eligible to draw benefits at the time, because none of them were retired, so the DWP’s claim cannot be true. The Act’s intention must have been that the new pension scheme would not change in future years if the UKAEA one did not, meaning the benefits were secure.

It is now proposed that the AEA Technology pension scheme be transferred to the Pension Protection Fund, where index-linking of benefits would be removed and replaced by an inflationary allowance, capped at a maximum of 2.5% for service from April 1997 onwards. That covers almost all post-privatisation service. It would further mean that all index-linking would be removed from service prior to that date—that is, from all service transferred from the Government sector, which the scheme members were told was secure. In addition, all members below retirement age would suffer a further 10% drop in their pension. The overall effect is a greatly diminished pension that is far less than the benefits that would have been due from the UKAEA scheme. It would not be equivalent, as was specified in the Atomic Energy Authority Act.

Inherited Social Housing Tenancies

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

The money is obviously in the forecast; I mentioned that we put £20 million in place for local authorities but they did not need it—they needed only £13 million—and so that will come into play. As I also said, we all need to get the housing issues for people across the country right, and we are dealing with them in a way that is fair and proportionate.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

I was surprised to read today in my local paper, The Oxford Times, that Oxford city council has spent only two thirds of its discretionary housing funds for 2013-14, leaving £200,000 meant for the most vulnerable unspent. May I therefore ask for the Minister’s guidance on how this fund can be better applied to inherited social housing tenancies and others?

[Mr Speaker]

An exceptionally interesting question, but its relationship with the urgent question tabled is, to put it kindly, tangential. However, let us hear the Minister as the product of her grey cells may prove me wrong.

State Pension Reform

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

I think I have already dealt with that point. Pension ages are changing, and they will not be the same for men and women until 2018. If we have a system based on pension age, it will be different for men and women by definition until they are equalised. It seems to me that the only way to run a system is to base it on people’s actual state pension age—rather than have an actual state pension age and then bring single tier in on a different day for a set of people born in different periods. That would introduce extra complexity, which we are trying to stop.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

I welcome this statement, as the problems of complexity and inequality that have been identified are all too familiar to my constituents, and they have without doubt undermined this country’s savings culture. Will the Minister explain, however, how the new proposals would affect carers in my constituency? Can he guarantee that his commitment to simplicity would go all the way down to user level?

[Steve Webb]

I am grateful. Carers receive the carer’s allowance, and there are other sorts of carer’s credits. Carers will thus end up with credits for the full £144—or whatever the final rate ends up being—so this has the potential to be a significant benefit to them. The hon. Lady is absolutely right that it is all very well for us to talk about simplicity, but people need to experience simplicity. That is why the White Paper provides an example of a pension statement. It is a single piece of paper saying, “You have built this amount up; if you do this many more years, you will get the full pension.” Everybody will know the rate: it will be a standard figure, and much harder for future Governments to tinker with.

Universal Credit and Welfare Reform

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Charlie Elphicke]

Just because they do not have that capability today does not mean that we should write them off for all time. It does not mean that we should be pessimistic or defeatist, as the previous Government too often were.

Let us look at the facts. Some 75% of people in work today are paid monthly and if someone is going to go back into the workplace, they need to get used to monthly payments. When the previous Government moved from weekly to fortnightly payments, all the usual customers, suspects and groups popped up and said that it would be a disaster, but what actually happened? People managed. If we trust people, they often step up to the plate. We need to accept that people are able and responsible and have the ability to be successful in taking responsibility for their lives.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s point about the need to trust people as well as the need to move towards monthly payments and increase people’s capacity to go back into the workplace. I understand that the DWP is considering which individuals might need exemptions and support for certain aspects of universal credit, and does he agree that there are certain circumstances in which exemptions and support might be necessary? I am thinking in particular of joint payments in circumstances where individuals might be at risk of domestic abuse, in which case joint payments might present a barrier to a safe exit.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I am sure that the Minister will deal with that point when he winds up the debate, but I heard my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State say from a sedentary position that the Government are dealing with that. It is important.

Of course, there will always be cases where people are unable to use computers at all, because they have severe dyslexia or other such conditions, and we need to be understanding of that. I draw a lot of comfort from the fact that we are hearing from the DWP that jobcentres will help to lead people through the process to ensure that they can access modern technology and be up for using it. Surely that is right, because we want people in the workplace to be able to access and use the most modern technology. That is why we should not write people off.

Surely the more that people are using the internet, the more that they are used to monthly payments and monthly budgeting and the more they are used to paying their rent like everyone else who is not on benefits, the better. I urge the Opposition to consider a change of heart about trusting people, to think that people can take responsibility for their lives and to take a more optimistic viewpoint. We will then be able to send a clear message to people that we believe in them, that they have a role to play in the future success of the country and that more of them should be able to be in work and play their part in making this country great again.

Pensioners and Winter Fuel Payments

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dodds]

Interventions have an uncanny knack of happening at the precise moment when one is coming on to deal with the very issue that they raise. I will deal with the issue that the hon. Lady has raised. Of course there are other measures aimed at dealing with fuel poverty and coldness-related illness among elderly people. There are the cold weather payments, to which I referred, which some may argue are more specifically targeted. I will come on to that in a moment.

There is also the warm home discount. Recently, the Northern Ireland Assembly unanimously passed an appeal to the Government to think again on this issue, and when the Minister replied he referred to, among other things, the warm home discount scheme. However, the scheme applies only in Great Britain, because the legislation did not apply to Northern Ireland. Half a million pensioners benefit from that scheme in Great Britain, but pensioners in Northern Ireland do not. I am sure that the Minister will address that point.

There are also other measures. On the practical health side, there is the flu vaccination scheme. Northern Ireland has its own warm homes scheme, which I am glad to say was introduced under devolution by a Democratic Unionist party Minister. It has helped 80,000 households and has received widespread support in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland also has a boiler replacement scheme and the social protection fund, which the Executive have brought forward. I understand that discussions are under way to address the specific issue of fuel poverty and the elderly in Northern Ireland. So yes, there are a range of measures, and we need to keep investing in such things as energy efficiency and home insulation to prevent fuel poverty in the long term.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Dodds]

In a moment.

However, I say to the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) and the House that those other measures do not mean that we can cut the winter fuel payment to such a massive extent. It goes directly to our senior citizens and is an important tool. It is not the only tool—it goes only to senior citizens but, as I have said, they are disproportionately affected—but it is an invaluable tool in helping to tackle fuel poverty among the elderly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Webb]

I do not doubt for a second the point that the hon. Lady, for whom I have a great deal of respect, makes. Obviously, as a GB Minister, I am responsible for these matters in Great Britain. Fuel poverty is a devolved matter, although my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, who will respond to the debate, was in Northern Ireland last week. Yesterday I spoke to the Northern Ireland Minister for Social Development to discuss with him these issues as they affect Northern Ireland. He was keen to stress some of the measures that the Executive are taking—for example, the double glazing of social housing.

That comes back to the point I was making, which was that this is partly about 98p a week on the winter fuel payment, which is what we are discussing, but far more about stopping people having highly energy-inefficient homes and giving them a decent, dignified standard of living. If hon. Members think about the difference that we are going to make through the triple lock on the basic pension, it swamps the 98p that we are talking about today and will make a real impact on the living standard of pensioners over decades to come.

[Nicola Blackwood]

On energy efficiency and insulation, proposals have come from the Government, including the green deal. My concern relates to my hon. Friend’s comments about pension credit and uptake by the most vulnerable groups. Have any discussions taken place with the Department of Energy and Climate Change about how to improve uptake by those groups, who would benefit most from the proposals?

[Steve Webb]

My hon. Friend raises the important issue of take-up. Clearly, benefits such as cold weather payments and the warm home discount, which is the £120 off fuel bills in Great Britain, as I mentioned in the letter that I sent, are contingent on receiving an income-related benefit. That is a challenge that we always face. We want to target those who are most vulnerable, but if some of those who are vulnerable miss out on the passported benefits, how do we get that money through without spending it on everyone, resulting in it being spread much more thinly? That is a permanent trade-off and why we are looking at ways of improving the take-up of these benefits and having a mixed strategy—a mix of a universal winter fuel payment that goes to everyone regardless of whether they claim, and targeted help for those most in need.

As a Department we are working with organisations such as Age UK to try to make sure that pension credit materials are provided to them. Those organisations have responded positively to make sure that the literature we provide is easy to understand and reaches the people who need it. I entirely take my hon. Friend’s point that there will always be gaps, and we need to address that. My view in the long run is that if we can have state pension reform that guarantees a state pension above the basic means test, that will go a long way to addressing some of these issues, but perhaps that is for another day.

I do not want to go on too long but I will mention, briefly, the warm home discount. This is important because it is the subject of negotiation between the Government and the big six energy companies in Great Britain that will give £120 off the electricity bills of 600,000 of the poorest pensioners. That will make a real contribution. We do it through electricity bills because pretty much everybody has an electricity bill, not because we think the price of electricity has necessarily gone up more, but it does not apply in Northern Ireland.

There is an interesting question about the negotiations or discussions between the Northern Ireland Executive and Power NI, for example, about whether the Northern Ireland providers could be asked to do the same sort of thing. If the big six are doing it in Great Britain, I cannot immediately see why the same should not benefit pensioners in Northern Ireland. Perhaps right hon. and hon. Members could take that back and challenge their own power suppliers to do more.

Clearly, we need to make people aware not just of the means-tested benefits they can get, but of the help with insulation, cavity walls and so on. Further in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), we as a Government are sending letters to about 4 million of the most vulnerable energy customers, letting them know that they have access to heavily discounted insulation for their lofts and cavity walls. Even when we write directly to people, we do not always get the results that we want, but we are aiming to target people directly.

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

14. What his policy is on the provision of support for people who are unable to work as a result of disability.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

15. What his policy is on the provision of support for people who are unable to work as a result of disability.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

I refer my hon. Friends to the answer I gave my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) earlier.

[Maria Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. He is right that the Vassall centre plays a pivotal role in Gloucestershire in bringing together many different organisations, which provide support for some of the disabled people most in need of it. As I said previously, the Work programme will offer such organisations the opportunity to bring local expertise and knowledge to supporting disabled people into employment or in other ways. I also hope that, through other specialist programmes, we can continue to harness that expertise.

[Nicola Blackwood]

As the Under-Secretary knows, many people with disabilities depend heavily on carers. During a visit in carers week to the Oxfordshire carers forum, it became abundantly obvious that, despite the drunken spending spree to which the Secretary of State referred, carers remain chronically under-supported. Will the Under-Secretary please comment on the Government’s plans to improve support for carers and to reduce the bureaucracy, which too often prevents them from accessing the help that is available?

[Maria Miller]

I am also delighted to support in carers week the work that carers do. I am particularly looking forward to visiting Barnet carers centre on Thursday as part of that. Obviously, carers receive benefits through carer’s allowance, and important support through Jobcentre Plus in partnership management. However, I reassure my hon. Friend that the Government are committed to widening the support available to family carers, and will establish an independent commission on funding long-term care this year.