Severe Disability Premium: Transfer to Universal Credit

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, as I have already said, Ministers are considering the judgment in detail and will make a decision about their response in due course. When designing universal credit, it was important to provide a simpler system, and a conscious choice was made not to replicate every aspect of disability provision in the legacy system, which contains seven different disability payments. These are difficult to deliver and prone to error, and they can be confusing for claimants. Therefore, we are replacing those seven complex and overlapping disability benefits.

Under the legacy benefit system, 500,000 disabled people did not claim what they were entitled to. Therefore, in terms of families losing out, about £2.4 billion of benefits went unclaimed in the legacy system as a whole. We have now moved to a much fairer system. For example, the rate per month under UC for claimants determined as having limited capability for work and work-related activity is more than twice the amount payable through the equivalent support group component of ESA. Under universal credit, it is now £336.20 per month per household, compared with £167.05 per month through the equivalent ESA support group. This means that around 1 million disabled households will gain an average of £100 more per month on universal credit than on legacy benefits.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Answer. She said that the Government are considering their options and whether the regulations will have to be rewritten. What about the 10,000 people who are still waiting for the lump-sum payments that they were promised? They will have to wait much longer unless the Government separate the payment regulations from the rest of the managed migration pilot regulations so that the lump-sum payment can be made as soon as possible. Being disabled is very expensive and I expect that people have racked up quite a lot of debt because of this problem. Will the Government undertake a thorough process of evaluation of the effect of universal credit on disabled people?

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I make it clear that current severe disability premium claimants will receive transitional protection as part of the managed migration process. We now have transitional payments in place for severe disability premium claimants who have moved on to universal credit. As the noble Baroness well knows, we are now spending over £50 billion a year on benefits to support disabled people and those with health conditions, which is over £4 billion more than in 2010. We continue to evaluate the impact of our policies on this system. As the lead Minister for research at the Department for Work and Pensions, I am very clear that we make it our business to evaluate all the policies that we put in place.