Personal Independence Payment

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, the noble Lord will no doubt remember that I have raised the issue of Remploy on a number of occasions in the past. My current information is that most of the people who were made redundant as the result of the closure of the Remploy factories remain unemployed now. So getting rid of them has not increased opportunities for them to become independent—quite the contrary. I am sure the Minister knows that the unions involved are still protesting about it and still believe that the closure of the Remploy factories has certainly not helped the disabled people who once worked there and had the opportunity to make some sort of living. There are also, of course, the people who supervised their work—looking after disabled people is a specialist kind of supervision which requires a bit more training perhaps than ordinary supervision—and they also have been made redundant.

I am glad to note that the Government are continuing with their consultation and paying some attention to the way in which the transition from DLA to PIP will take place. That is very important because I have received a number of letters from disabled people expressing a great deal of concern about the transition. Although it is very nice to talk about independence and so on, one of the first things one loses when one becomes at all disabled is a feeling of independence. I speak from some knowledge because I am partially, although not very, disabled myself. Things that you used to do for yourself you have to rely on other people to do for you. It is all very well if you can afford to pay someone else to assist you but that is not the case for very many people. I am fortunate enough in that I can pay for others to assist me, but if I were not able to and relied on DLA, I would be very concerned about whether my independence would continue to be looked after if I had to rely on a different kind of benefit. So it is going to be very important to look at the transition because, as far as I can see, people who are disabled are very worried about moving from one benefit to another.

I ask the Minister: is there an appropriate system of appeal? If people are assessed in a way that they feel is not correct and does not maintain their independence, it is very important that there is a system of appeal. My understanding is that, in the current situation where there are appeals, roughly 40% have been successful. This indicates that the people doing the assessing have not been very skilled in their assessment. It is, therefore, necessary to have an appeal system.

[Lord Freud]

On the noble Baroness’s key question, clearly there will be an appeals system, as there is for the WCA. The reason behind the 40% success rate for those who go to appeal—and that figure is roughly right—is usually that there is new information, either oral or written, which was not originally available. On that basis, I do not think it is fair to say that the original WCA and Atos were at fault. Clearly that is not an appropriate charge if one is looking at a different set of information. The real question is whether all the relevant information can be made available at an early stage. We are looking to make sure that there is not additional information which would mean a claimant going to appeal, as that is expensive. The question is whether we can ascertain that earlier in order to truncate the process.