Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Baroness Campbell of Surbiton

Monday 10th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Campbell of Surbiton]

My Lords, I would like briefly to support this amendment by reminding Members of what happened when there was an assault on savings of disabled people who are reliant on social care. Over the past 10 years, one who is in receipt of social care support has significantly not been able to retain savings above and beyond £14,000. The consequence is that these people have not been able to develop their careers, buy a house, buy a car, save for a family and feel an equal member of society to a non-disabled member. I think we sometimes forget how the inability to save beyond £14,000 can erode one’s sense of self and of equality. I therefore support this amendment; I think it is admirable, and I will continue to raise the issue in the area of social care. Andrew Dilnot raised this in his recent commission report as being one of the greatest barriers to the life chances of people who rely on benefits, especially social care benefits and support, so I am very pleased that this has been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, and I support it.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend’s amendment, which was so impressively and eloquently moved. I thought she had an unarguable case, but we will see in a moment whether the Minister thinks differently. The Minister has been very responsive, rightly in my view, not only to the issue of rewarding the move into work but to the issue of reducing the risk of moving into work. One thing I must welcome about universal credit is precisely that it takes into account the risk for people on very low and narrow incomes. I do not doubt we shall come back to the very high risks that people on very low incomes face when trying to manage on a frankly very tiny budget when we discuss an amendment on payment methods tabled by my noble friend Lady Lister.

There is another risk. You are in work, you may be receiving tax credits or may be self-employed, and you try to build up savings, through ISAs or whatever, because you need to replace a white van for your business to move things or because you are a self-employed carpenter with tools because you can no longer get a job as an employee, or because you are associated with a garden centre and are taking stuff around; or you might need a car, particularly one that is big enough to take your elderly parents out from their residential care, and that will cost you substantial savings; or, as my noble friend mentioned, you might be an older person in your 40s or 50s, with children approaching university age, who has been saving hard to make it possible for them to go to university without facing a massive fear of subsequent debt.

All these are expenditures which I am sure the Minister would regard as reasonable, and all require saving—in some cases, if possible, beyond the £16,000 figure. You may have several demands. A rollercoaster of demands might hit you, and you have over the years providently built up your savings to £20,000, £25,000, or whatever, so that you can lay off that risk. I know the Minister understands the point about risk if one is going from benefit to work.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Baroness Campbell of Surbiton

Thursday 6th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Campbell of Surbiton]

My Lords, I would also like to support Lord MacKenzie’s amendment and add something to this particular area. Can I ask the Minister to reflect on what happens when a disability assessment process, or an assessment process regarding a disabled person, is not properly developed and constructed in co-production with those who understand in detail what it is to live as a disabled person; that is, disabled people themselves? I know I am getting a bit of a reputation for banging on about involving disabled people in the issues that concern us. However, I understand from the disability charities and NGOs that I have consulted, as well as from the countless disabled individuals who have written to me over the past few months, that the universal credit assessment process, with particular reference to the work capability assessment process, is still deeply flawed due partly to disabled people’s lack of involvement.

This morning, I telephoned the chief executive of the Royal Association for Disability Rights, Liz Sayce. Many of you will know her because recently she conducted the Government’s disability employment support services review. She is very assiduous and capable. With a worrying example, she demonstrated where we are in danger of going wrong with one of the universal credit assessment processes, the work capability assessment. She told me about a woman who lives in the north-west and has end-stage multiple sclerosis. She can now move only one eyelid and murmur inaudible words. She was telephoned at home by Atos. They told her husband that she needed to attend a work capability assessment. When he explained that this was not possible, they said that they must speak to her on the telephone and read out a statement. When her husband explained that she could not speak, they asked him to hold the telephone so that they could read it out to her, so he put the speaker phone on. They said:

“This assessment is necessary and mandatory. If it does not go ahead, there will be consequences”.

The woman, of course, found this very distressing and scary. They continued, refusing to take into consideration that the woman was not able to be interviewed. They were working from a script in which there is no flexibility and no requirement on assessors to apply themselves to real-life situations or to take a different approach to different disabilities or health conditions.

This example, and I know that there are others, shows that the Government must develop a different approach to the universal credit assessment process. I know Professor Harrington has attempted to make this happen in his work; I have met him myself. He listens and he is a good man. He tries to understand and this is reflected in some of his recommendations, but the whole process has not been intelligently and systematically co-produced in any substantive way with disabled people and disabled experts. We have done it. It was and is being done through the Government’s Right to Control programme. Can we not do the same with this? The assessment process must not be driven by a script. It must allow for sensitivity and assessor judgment—personal judgment—as to when it is appropriate to change their behaviour and respond to a disabled person’s condition and situation. Can the Minister assure us that a more co-productive and intelligent approach to all the assessment processes for universal credit will happen, and happen more effectively?

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly in support of my noble friend’s amendment for two reasons. First, I was rather appalled by statements from the Prime Minister that the Government were for the first time tackling the issue of people who should be, but currently were not, in work. Really, that comes into the category of Boris-type statements, which are an imaginative reconstruction of events that did not occur. All parties—I am sure that I also speak for the Cross Benches on this—agree that we want to seek to help people into work, and we have been doing it.

When we came into Government in 1997, we had found that, particularly during the 1980s, thousands of people with some mild disability had been moved off unemployment benefit into what was then invalidity benefit, the precursor for incapacity benefit, in order to massage the unemployment figures. On behalf of the previous Government I took Bills to your Lordships’ House that brought in proposals for the New Deal for all sorts of claimant groups. It was never a problem, as it had never been a problem of trying to help the unemployed into work. They are always anxious and keen to do so. The problem has always been those who, for too long, have been economically inactive and marginalised from the labour market.

It is for that reason that I and my noble friend Lord McKenzie continued to follow these policies when he came into the department: to ensure that new deals into work for disabled people, lone parents and for the over-50s were brought in to help people who for some time had been at some distance from the labour market. I am delighted that, insofar as the decent supportive activity of the previous Government may be pursued by the current Administration, we should welcome it. Some horror stories are now coming through about Atos, and we should be joining our disabled colleagues in protesting about that deforming of what should be a decent policy.

Secondly, my noble friend’s amendment says that it is about supporting work for those who can provide security for those who cannot. I would like to spend a second to almost verbally amend it. Help into work those who can, provide security for those who cannot and support those who care; because those who care are left out of the equation. I do not doubt that the Minister’s intentions are as decent as those of any Member around the table in the Committee. However, one of our concerns is that of the 6 million carers, about 400,000 to 500,000 receive carers allowance, which is a passported benefit from what is currently the disability living allowance based on hours worked and the level of care needed.

We are still awaiting what will happen to PIP and the number of disabled people currently on DLA who will receive the higher or lower element of PIP and whether the carers benefit will be passported from the higher rate or from both rates. Until that happens, not just disabled people, but thousands of carers are worried, anxious and distraught that they may lose the carer’s benefit that they currently enjoy. I know that the Minister is engaged with this issue and I am not pretending it is a simple one, but I would be very grateful if he would, acknowledge first, the work done by the previous Administration in bringing those who are economically inactive back into the labour market, and secondly, that we all share a concern for the position of carers and if he could give us some idea as to when we will know what their situation is.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Baroness Campbell of Surbiton

Tuesday 4th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Campbell of Surbiton]

My Lords, I do not wish to comment on the overarching universal credit and associated issues, but I commend the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, on raising the issue of language. Language is absolutely essential not only to the dignity and self-worth of people who receive benefits, but also to what our message is to the world about those who survive because of the support they receive from what will be these welfare reforms. I remember writing about three years ago a very important article entitled Sticks and Stones, But Words are Hurting! It was about the issue of language as it pertains to disabled people. I remind noble Lords that disabled people have spent the last 25 years trying to get away from welfare and talk about rights. I would like us to think about this as we go forward.

I, too, will be raising the issue of language when we come to personal independence payments. Noble Lords will recall from the Second Reading debate that I have questioned the term, because it does not fit with what we perceive to be the original and, what we thought would be the enduring, intention of disability living allowance. So language is important and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for raising the issue at this point. Welfare versus rights is something that we disabled people talk about all the time.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, like others, I thank the Minister and his Bill team for being so accessible and helpful; I genuinely congratulate them. When we can get the material in hardcover rather than on e-mail, I shall be even more enthusiastic and enduring in singing the Minister’s praises, which I am sure we all want to do.

I want to make two points, both of them triggered by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and my noble friend Lord McKenzie, which I thought were spot on. First, the main thing is to talk about language. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, is exactly right. Until recently, when we introduced a Bill like this, it would not have been a welfare reform Bill; it would have been a social security Bill. The gap between social security and welfare is precisely the gap between entitlement and stigma. We forget, when using words like “welfare reform”, what is the structure of who pays and who gains in our welfare state. We all know that a very substantial part of “benefit expenditure” is actually a redistribution of resources through people’s lifetimes, particularly from the working years to retirement. Our pension work falls into that.

A second key group of redistribution is what we would call the category benefits. They go to children and to disabled people. There are more methods of redistribution than merely from rich to poor. Instead, they go from those without children to those with children; they go from those who are in good health to those in poor health. That is something that all civilised societies would sign up to. Only the third category of benefits, those which are means tested, reflect a straightforward redistribution from rich to poor. They have been allowed to dominate and cloud the language and to stereotype claimants in ways that portray them as dependent on handouts and the goodwill of others. We should return instead to the more appropriate, all-inclusive language of social security. Apart from the very lucky few, who are probably white millionaires, male and in very good health indeed, all the rest of us will need recourse to the welfare state, to the social security state. We should all hold that firmly in mind and refuse to engage, wherever it is spoken, in language that seeks to make distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor—or, as the Victorians would have said, God’s poor, poor devils and the devil’s poor.

The second point I want to make, which follows that, is the point made rightly by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. I strongly support the principles and much of the structure of the Bill, although, like others, I have real concerns about what I regard as the pressure points. In dealing with the Bill, we must not only be concerned with the question of language, but we must encourage the Minister to respond to those adjustments we need to make, particularly where the language of the amendments run by the Minister, or his replies, may suggest what I call the econometric model of the Treasury, which is that people have to be pained or punished into work, because the only stimulus that they will respond to is an economic one.

What many of us said in our Second Reading speeches, and what I hope we will all remember, is that when we ask people to move from being on benefit to coming into work, whether they have a disability, whether they have been a lone parent, whether they have struggled for a long time with being chronically unemployed because of the demography and the economic structure of their region, the issue for them is not just about whether they are better off; it is primarily about risk. Unless people understand—and I fear that too often the Treasury does not—the issue of risk and the abatement of risk that needs to go on, we are not going to make a success of the Bill. I think that the Minister understands this perfectly well. I think and I hope that he will accept arguments and that where, in future amendments, we seek to abate risk as well as reward work, he will understand that this is in order to make a philosophy that so many of us sign up to to work today.