Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Adebowale Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Adebowale]

62E: After Clause 138, insert the following new Clause—
“Condition relating to mental health
In section 8 of the Welfare Reform Act 2007 (limited capability for work), after subsection (4) there is inserted—
“(4A) Regulations made under subsection (1) shall provide that a person assessed as suitable for employment and support allowance by virtue of his mental condition but not currently receiving treatment from a mental health provider service shall be immediately referred to an appropriate mental health provider service and the prime provider shall then ensure that the person is already receiving or now receives suitable mental health employment support.
(4B) The Secretary of State shall issue guidance on what constitutes an appropriate mental health provider service and suitable mental health employment support for the purposes of subsection (4A).””

[Lord Adebowale]

My Lords, at this late hour I will try to be brief. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, who put his name to the amendment, apologises for his absence; he is at Davos. I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, expressed sympathy with the sentiments of what I am about to say in support of the amendment. I appreciate that and hope that we can move forward.

I start with a shocking fact; more than 1 million people are on incapacity benefit by virtue of mental illness. The condition may not be curable but it is treatable. Noble Lords may be interested to know what proportion of these people are in treatment. The figure is 52 per cent. This comes from the official psychiatric morbidity survey. It is the number of people receiving any form of treatment. Of those, half receive medication only, without any form of counselling or talk therapy. This tells us everything that is wrong with our current situation. We pay people money because they are sick but we do not have a process to ensure that they get treated. There is not a lot in this Bill that we can do to change that—that is the way it is—but if somebody is drawing benefit because they are sick, they should surely either be in treatment for that sickness or immediately be offered treatment. Anything else is a shocking waste of taxpayers’ money, apart from anything else.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

Yes, it is.

[Lord Adebowale]

I thank the Minister for his thoughtful response and the Members of the House who have taken part in this useful debate.

It is frustrating for me that there is evidence about the interventions that are likely to work with people who have the most common types of mental illnesses which restrict their ability to work—mainly anxiety and depression. The use of programmes such as Beating the Blues—the cognitive behavioural therapy approach which is most widely used in mental health, and the most widely researched intervention in the world—has a measurable and predictable impact on mental health. It is possible to apply some of these approaches and improve a depression and anxiety score such as to enable someone to work.

It is important that we pick up on the point, which noble Lords may not fully have understood, that we are dealing with people in a client group who are sometimes ill, but most of whom want to work. This is not me saying that—it is the expression of these individuals. They recognise that work is a powerful mental health improver. One in six people with serious mental health conditions currently work, and yet eight in 10 wish to do so. This means that there are 356,000 people with mental health conditions in the UK who wish to work but are not doing so. These people are inviting an intervention.

Although I recognise the seriousness of the Minister’s remarks on this issue, there is a systems failure that we could resolve. This is not about people like me and my organisations coming up with credible solutions; we have to match those credible solutions with the policy and the practice of the DWP. That is why the amendment is so important.

While I am on the subject of the work programme, my discussions with Ministers often ended with the sentence, “It is early days”—and it is early days—but the days are running out.