Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Doocey and Lord Low of Dalston

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment, which my noble friend Lady Campbell moved with great eloquence. After her speech, there is not really a lot that I can add but I will summarise the points that I want to make.

The Conservative Party manifesto set this ambitious aim to halve the disability employment gap by 2020. As we have heard from my noble friend Lady Campbell, this gap has been intractable over many years. It is quite structural and it will not be easy to reduce it substantially, let alone halve it. There is a real concern that, unless the Government actively measure, and are required to report regularly on, progress towards attaining this goal, it may not be achieved and a crucial opportunity to deliver on disability employment will be lost. This is a wonderful opportunity. The Government are much to be congratulated on setting this goal but it will take a lot of work to achieve it. Having targets specific to this objective and reporting regularly on them will be necessary if we are to monitor the progress desired and to take remedial action if required.

There are three other specific reasons why I think we should support the amendment. The first is simply consistency of approach. The Bill introduces reporting requirements on the Government’s pledges to achieve full employment and fund 3 million new apprenticeships but there is no similar reporting requirement on halving the disability employment gap. So simply from the point of view of consistency of approach, it would seem to make sense to have a specific reporting requirement for this objective as well.

Secondly, disability employment presents very specific problems which are not well understood across government, and that is part of the reason why the employment gap has proved so intractable over so many years. The DWP is getting on top of it but I do not think the same can be said of government departments generally. It would provide a departmental and cross-governmental focus on disability employment and reducing the disability employment gap, and help to embed this in the organisational culture, if there were specific reporting requirements in relation to this.

Thirdly, simply from the point of view of targeting support, introducing clear reporting on how many disabled people are in employment, separate from scrutiny of other employment statistics, will allow better analysis of how current support arrangements are working and help the Government to better target resources and support where they are most needed. It will also enable data to be disaggregated by such things as learning disabilities, autism, mental health problems, visual impairment, deafness and hearing problems—things such as are mentioned in the amendment.

On all these grounds—consistency of approach, providing an incentive for action across government and targeting support where it is most needed—my noble friend Lady Campbell has made a very strong case for the amendment, and I wholeheartedly support it.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support this amendment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, has said, in Committee, the Minister said that the amendment is not necessary because a report on progress will be included in the annual report on full employment. However, my concern is that although the Government are very good at proposing big ideas and related targets, they seldom back them up with clear and unambiguous plans as to how they will achieve them. Halving the disability employment gap is a prime example of this.

Amendment 1 will guarantee that the Government must report to Parliament on progress and sets out clearly the form that this reporting should take. It will enable proper public and parliamentary scrutiny, and will provide consistent and thorough data which will give the Government the information that they need to measure the impact and progress of their policies, year on year.

I know from a number of my disabled friends of the enormous barriers that they have to climb through in trying to find a job: being invited to interviews just to ensure that employers can tick a “disability” box; losing out, time and again, to candidates far less qualified than they are to do the job for which they are being interviewed; receiving rejection letters giving reasons for their rejection that simply do not add up; and the heartache of knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, that the real reason they did not get the job is simply because they are disabled. This is all because employers, particularly SMEs, do not understand that somebody who is blind can be every bit as good as, if not better than—at IT, for example—somebody who is able to see properly. These employers running small companies have no idea of the specialist equipment that is available to disabled people. So although they are generally sympathetic, they are just not willing to take a step into the unknown by employing disabled people.

I am very grateful to the Minister that in his letter following Committee stage he answered the questions I had posed to him about the steps the Government were taking to support more disabled people into work. At the moment, the Bill is quite silent on that. I look forward to seeing what the White Paper will say on how the Government plan to improve support for disabled people. However, to significantly close the employment gap, we need to begin now and to raise the game of all government departments on meeting the target. This can be achieved only by giving the exercise a much higher priority.

At a time when so much is happening, a separate reporting amendment will provide cross-governmental focus on the laudable aim of halving the disability employment gap. Placing this requirement in the Bill will demonstrate the commitment the Government have made to improve the employment rate for disabled people. It will also clearly demonstrate to Parliament and the public the priority and importance that the Government place on this goal and ensure efforts to deliver it.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Baroness Doocey and Lord Low of Dalston

Monday 23rd April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord. We are in a happy state of accord. He agrees with everything that I say and I agree with everything that he has said. I do not wish to suggest that the Speaker in the other place acts in any way other than objectively. I do not think that the Speaker brings any kind of subjective judgment to bear on these matters; he just rules on these cases. However, it stretches credulity to suggest that forces other than the Speaker—to whit, the Government—may not have a role in raising the matters about which the Speaker has to remind the House. That is all that I meant to say.

I am nearly at the end of this point but I shall go back to the beginning of the quote from Jeff King of University College London. He said:

“The Lords has the clear right not to accept the Commons assertion of privilege without a protest. At risk is the Lords’ future scrutiny of legislation on … the whole of social policy. At the least one hopes the Lords will respond that they do not consent to the Commons’ use of financial privilege on this bill constituting a precedent”.

He was referring to the Welfare Reform Bill on that occasion. As a non-party-political Peer, appointed by the Appointments Commission—if not with a particular mandate, at least on a particular set of understandings—I protest at the blanket use of financial privilege by the Commons to summarily defeat amendments passed in your Lordships’ House. We should not consent to its constituting a precedent, either.

In coming to the substance, I can be fairly brief. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, has set out the case very fully and I do not want to reiterate unduly what he said. However, I underline that this amendment is of enormous significance. The Government’s proposed exclusion from legal aid of the area of welfare benefits is colossal. According to their own impact assessment, removing welfare benefit cases from the scope of legal aid will deny at least 78,000 disabled people specialist legal advice on complex welfare benefit problems. Citizens Advice has estimated that it will amount to 49 per cent of its current legal aid caseload.

Disabled people are particularly disproportionately affected by the removal of welfare benefits from the scope of legal aid. As the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said, 81 per cent of benefits cases heard in the First-tier Tribunal relate to disability benefits. As we know, the Government are undertaking a dramatic overhaul of the welfare benefits system. This will see millions of claimants reassessed and moved on to different benefits. For example, plans to replace disability living allowance with the personal independence payment will affect more than 2 million people. At a time of such unprecedented upheaval in the welfare system, access to legal advice is going to be essential, as inaccurate decisions will be inevitable. Indeed, even after three years of discredited Atos Healthcare assessments of people seeking to transfer from incapacity benefit to employment and support allowance, the success rate of appeals is actually going up. As we have heard, it was 45 per cent at the last count. As the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said, legal advice makes all the difference; it is not just marginal. According to the MoJ’s own figures, you are 78 per cent more likely to win your case if you have had legal advice. Of those appealing against their assessment for ESA, 70 per cent of those who are advised win compared with only 43 per cent of those who are not advised.

The Government are in danger of getting themselves into the position where they are criticised for kicking a man down and then depriving him of the means of getting up again. I think we should give the Commons another chance to avoid that charge.

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 168B. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, that the Government’s concessions are not an adequate substitute for the loss of legal aid.

The Government have acknowledged the fundamental principle that civil liberties are nothing if you cannot enforce them. If you do not have the money or the knowledge to defend your rights then, sadly, these rights become meaningless. That is where the legal aid system is so important, particularly for the many disabled people who depend on welfare benefits in order to survive.

The Government seem to support this principle in theory but not in practice. The Secretary of State’s statement that such legal aid should be available only on a “point of law” offers little in the way of practical help for disabled people appealing against incorrect welfare benefit decisions, the majority of which are then overturned on appeal. The difficulty is that it is completely unrealistic to assume that people with no legal knowledge whatever will be able to understand what a point of law is. I believe that many people will not even bring an appeal because they will not have the knowledge or the confidence to do so without legal advice.

The Government’s belief that their advice services fund is an adequate substitute for legal aid is groundless because it will not mitigate the cuts in legal aid. The fund was hugely oversubscribed, and in this financial year less than a third of the money has been allocated to organisations delivering advice on welfare benefits.

The Government have announced a further £20 million of funding for the next two years, and that is of course most welcome. However, this is likely to be spent plugging the gaps in generalist advice services caused by cuts to other funding sources, leaving specialist welfare benefits advice unfunded. Once legal aid cuts are introduced, the advice sector will lose at least £100 million a year, so the £20 million fund will make only a very small dent in this shortfall.

The inadequacy of the funding is exacerbated by the rising demand for services that most charities are facing. A recent survey carried out by Justice for All found that nearly 90 per cent of advice charities had more people coming to them for help in the last year, yet over 80 per cent of the same charities also predicted that, despite this increase in demand, they will be able to help many fewer people next year.

Discretionary funding is no alternative to retaining legal aid because it imposes no duty on the Government to fund specialist services and will guarantee nothing for advice agencies. Unless welfare benefit advice is retained within the scope of legal aid, it will limit access to justice and the right of people to enforce their freedoms.

The Department for Work and Pensions already reimburses the Ministry of Justice for the cost of running the tribunals, which was necessary after the huge increase in appeals caused by the introduction of employment and support allowance. It is unclear to me why this approach cannot be extended to cover the cost of independent advice to improve the effectiveness of these same tribunals.

We must do everything possible to protect the most vulnerable people in our society. I therefore urge the House to continue to press the Government to give more concrete assurances that disabled people will be able to access legal aid advice when appealing welfare benefit decisions.