Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Thomas of Winchester and Baroness Campbell of Surbiton

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Campbell of Surbiton]

My Lords, I am happy to put my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. Losing 50 per cent of the support currently provided by the disability element of child tax credit will be extremely difficult for many families who face considerable extra costs as a result of having a disabled child who may not meet the severe disability threshold.

The severity of one’s disability should not be the overall defining factor for eligibility to this financial entitlement. The impairment severity is a highly unreliable measure for financial support needed by families to offset the extra costs of raising these children. All manner of disabled children face the extra costs associated with overcoming socioeconomic and environmental barriers. Medical textbook impairment measures are only part of the picture. For example, according to the textbooks, as a child I was considered to be at the most severe end of the scale—very severe. This is still the case today. A person with moderate autism or cystic fibrosis, however, is deemed much less severe. But if you ask my mother who, in my school class, needed financial support the greatest, she would say without a doubt, “Lorna, Mark and Peter”. All would be deemed to have moderate impairments today. We all came from similar economic backgrounds; working class and money was extremely tight. So why were their needs greater than mine?

My mother explains much better than me—as always. Lorna, because she had a hole in the heart and needed expensive extra warmth, good nutrition and babysitting, as both parents needed to work to survive and no family friend or family members felt confident enough to care for her. They were scared: she had a hole in the heart; she was going to die at any moment. Actually she was not, but that was the assumption. Mark, because he had moderate autism, whose particular behaviours could not be financially accommodated by his disabled mother, who herself needed support financially to raise his other two brothers as well. Finally, Peter, whose asthma meant several emergency admissions to hospital per month making it almost impossible for his single parent mother, with two other young siblings, financially to bear the cost of transportation to the hospital and childminders for the other siblings. None of these children is considered to be textbook severe, yet compared to my family their disability-related financial need was much greater.

I believe the Government’s obsession with aligning certain benefits to be really hazardous—unintentional, of course. Such assumptions are not based on practical evidence, as we realised when the Government attempted to align hospitals with residential care homes when looking for areas to cut the significant DLA budget. Please do not let us make the same mistake again.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has given reams of evidence from various notable NGOs and charities which I do not need to repeat. Before finishing, I did contact the eminent Dame Philippa Russell for advice as to what to highlight today. Noble Lords will know of Dame Philippa. She is famous for advising successive Governments for nearly 40 years on disabled children, and she ran the Council for Disabled Children for 30 of those years. She is currently the chair of the Prime Minister's Standing Commission on Carers. She said to me:

“I am very keen (with my two sector hat on) to stress the need to move away from this categorisation of people as having severe, moderate, low needs. None of those categories make sense without screeds of explanation that tax credit assessors simply will not have. They completely negate the idea of prevention and support”.

Let us listen to the experts and accept the amendment, which I feel makes sense.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, I spoke to a similar amendment to this in Grand Committee, but it was grouped with various other amendments and the debate was therefore not as clearly focused on disabled children as it might have been. In this amendment, the focus is simply on ensuring that disabled children do not receive less support in universal credit than they did under the benefit and tax credit system. The two noble Baronesses from whom we have just heard said it all and I shall not repeat what they said. However, it may be worth reinforcing how this works.

The disability elements of child tax credit will be replaced under universal credit with either a disability addition if the child is on the lower rate of the care component of DLA, or a higher addition if the child is in the middle or top rate of the care component. Children who are registered as blind will now qualify for the higher addition. The difference in rates is significant. As the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said, the lower addition will be worth about £27 instead of the current £54. We know that children will still receive DLA, even after other disabled people have transferred to the personal independence payment, and there are three rates of care component within DLA—lower, middle and higher. In the benefits system, the middle and higher rates usually go together, but under universal credit the middle rate will be aligned with the lower rate. This means, as we have heard, that children with significant impairments, such as those with Down’s syndrome or who are profoundly deaf and who now receive the middle rate, will in future be entitled to only the lower rate. Thus, their families will lose out.

The bar is set pretty high for children to qualify for the highest rate of the care component. They either have to be visually impaired or need not only frequent care or continual supervision by day but prolonged or repeated care during the night. This means that children who are, say, registered as blind will be entitled to £77 a week, while children with Down’s syndrome or who are profoundly deaf will receive about £26 a week.

The rationale for the change is, as we have heard, supposedly to align the rates of support for adults and children and to simplify the additions—as well as to target those in greatest need. However, the gateways for children and adults are so different that the alignment is not really relevant. As for targeting those in greatest need, it is a matter of judgment as to whether it is better to help a greater number of families with disabled children or to give fewer families greater help. What worries me most is that families with disabled children are disproportionately more likely to live in poverty, as many studies have demonstrated, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, said. Parents of disabled children are less likely to be in work, so the so-called tidying-up and aligning exercise is likely to push already poor families deeper into poverty.

I would very much welcome some help regarding the transitional arrangements, which I failed to grasp when my noble friend described them in Committee. Perhaps he can tell us about them in his reply. We are having to cope with a difficult question.

Disabled People’s Right to Control (Pilot Scheme) (England) Regulations 2010

Debate between Baroness Thomas of Winchester and Baroness Campbell of Surbiton

Monday 8th November 2010 Grand Committee

[Baroness Campbell of Surbiton]

My Lords, I also really welcome the regulations. I, too, pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for introducing them; it was a very inspirational thing to do. It was risky and I think it will pay great dividends in the future. How nice that all sides of the Committee can support this initiative.

The right to control is, as the Minister said, a significant landmark for disabled people. For decades, disabled people have campaigned for the right to have choice and control over our lives. A small thing, you may say, but it is something that we have not been able to take for granted in the way that non-disabled people have. Now we have equality.

The regulations take us a long way towards the goal of choice and control. If implemented well—and they do need to be implemented well—they have the potential to transform the way we live. By exercising the right to control, disabled people will inevitably become more confident in taking personal responsibility for their role in the community and family life. It will enable greater freedom to plan and pursue educational, work or volunteering opportunities. In short, disabled people have at last been put in the driving seat of their own destiny. What is more, this is a legal right, enshrined in legislation—not a gift or a charitable favour, for which one must be grateful, but a right. This is a real step forward for disabled people.

As the Minister said, one of the key articles in the UN convention on the rights of disabled people is Article 19. It concerns the right of disabled people to live independently and be included in the community. As noble Lords will be aware, the UN convention states clearly that disabled people should have and enjoy the same human rights as everyone else. It sets out obligations on states to ensure that those rights are met. The right to control goes straight to the heart of Article 19 and provides a vehicle to realise this right and, consequently, goes a long way towards implementing the convention. That is terrific.

In addition, the way in which the right to control legislation has been conceived and developed accords well with the UN convention duty on states to involve disabled people in the planning and implementation of such rights. Both the previous Government and now the coalition Government have involved disabled people at every stage of developing the right to control legislation and now its implementation. I should know because I am the chair of the advisory group of disabled people and experts in independent living who helped to shape the legislation, proposals for the trailblazers and the evaluation. Everything about us was discussed with us during this process. The seven trailblazers are following the same model of co-production at a local level. This will ensure that the experience and knowledge of disabled people permeates how the right to control continues to be delivered and developed.

The way in which we have developed the right to control over the past two years, as an advisory group and on the ground with our buddies, has taken the personalisation agenda a step further and set a new dynamic support service culture whereby disabled people, who once had to apply to five or six different agencies for support, will now engage with one support planning process. This is something for which disabled people have been asking for a long time. A new public support service where disabled people will, again by legislative right, decide for themselves how best to use their resource allocation is at the heart of this process. We will be able to devise creative solutions of our own for our own support, and exercise as much control in the commissioning of the outcome as we feel able. If you do not feel that you can control everything, you do not have to; you can have a plurality approach.

I know that some noble Lords have concerns that some disabled people may not be able to take that kind of control over their lives in this way. However, I can reassure them that on the advisory group we looked at this issue and made sure that the right permits flexibility and will be well supported throughout the process. Flexibility, of course, is the key. Disabled people can ask for a particular service to be provided or take a mix of existing services and a direct payment, or, in my case, use a direct payment to purchase all their support themselves and be totally 100 per cent in control. However, I know that most disabled people are not control freaks like me.

There will be support and advice for those who want their payments to be managed by a third party, and advice, training and guidance for people who want to employ personal assistants. Advocacy and support will be an integral part of the right to control. I am particularly keen to see how well the trailblazers fulfil this important part of the right-to-control culture and keen that we scrutinise it as it develops.

Peer support is incredibly powerful in demonstrating to disabled people what can be achieved. It is another important part of trailblazer activity. Before I began employing my personal assistants more than 20 years ago, I needed to observe how other disabled people managed their employees and I learnt from their mistakes—as I am sure others have learnt from mine.

We all have dreams or expectations from life; disabled people are no different. Delivered successfully, a right to control will change for ever the way in which the state responds to our needs. I am confident that, by transferring power from the state to the individual in this way, we will overturn decades of low expectation and witness a transformation in people’s capability and well-being.

However, I recognise that this is an ambitious project. We are overturning a culture of dependency and philanthropy. There will be teething problems as we bed it down. However, I have been extremely pleased to be part of this transformative exercise. I have seen how people have grown, even during the two years in which I have had the privilege of chairing the advisory group. I am looking forward to seeing the success of the trailblazers and their eventual rollout across the country.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, as my noble friend said, it is just over a year ago that the band of Peers who speak on DWP matters welcomed the amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill, now Act, of 2009 which have triggered these regulations for pilots. I, too, can give them a hearty welcome.

I said a year ago that the amendments, now regulations, would herald a real shift in power from the state to disabled people, ensuring that they are in the driving seat when it comes to the support they need. I seek a few clarifications and have a few questions.

The amendments, which inserted a new clause, included a power for the Secretary of State to issue directions under existing community care legislation to deliver alignment under existing enactments. The then Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, to whom I also pay warm tribute, said:

“Alignment means delivering the effect of the right to control to individuals in receipt of adult community care services”.—[Official Report, 27/10/09; col. 1114.]

My noble friend Lord Freud responded that it made far more sense to base the right-to-control approach on community care services, which are likely to be required on a sustained and long-term basis, than on the more transitory requirements surrounding support for disabled people to secure employment.

I should be grateful for clarification on that point. I think it means that adult community care is not included in these regulations because it comes under other legislation on direct payments, but that under these regulations authorities are enabled to share information about community care. Is this correct? Presumably this means that assessments will be shared so that disabled people do not have to undergo multiple assessments.

We all know how stretched local authorities’ financial resources will be. Will any support be provided to authorities to enable them to develop and implement a single assessment system? Will there be any practical support for organisations that provide information, advice, peer support and advocacy? There is an obligation for authorities to give to the disabled person information about organisations that provide advice and assistance, but there is no duty to sustain those organisations, nor is there a right to advocacy. Perhaps my noble friend can say what support there will be for the pilots.

Having read the document helpfully provided by the Office for Disability Issues, Making Choice and Control a Reality for Disabled People, I end by asking my noble friend one or two questions arising from that document. On page 20, I see that the Office for Disability Issues is working with the Department of Health to consider allowing, within the trailblazers only, third parties to carry out non-complex assessment reviews. Are we talking about people other than healthcare professionals? I was not sure. If we are, there is already a certain amount of controversy about those who carry out the work capability assessment, and it is important to get all these assessments right.

Another small point is the rule that a disabled person has to be informed in writing of various things. We are told that this means,

“in a format that is accessible to the person”.

If that is what the regulation means, why does it not say so?

Finally, have we got anywhere with the idea that the excellent access to work provisions might be guaranteed to a disabled person before the offer of a job, so that a potential employer would be more encouraged to offer that person employment? I hope that my noble friend can answer those questions—perhaps in writing, if not today. However, in general, I welcome the regulations most warmly.