Employment: Job Creation

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister reflect on the paradox that if more people are being assessed more rigorously as being eligible and fit for work, even with disabilities—he and I agree on that—there is a certain irony in using the increase in the volume cost of the personal independence payment as a reason for taking away that PIP from those who have been judged to be so disabled that they are entitled to additional support, some of which will eventually enable them to take work? Is it not therefore a completely cost-ineffective means of dealing with the challenge of increased PIP to reduce the number of people who are eligible for it?

[Lord Freud]

We carried out a survey of a representative sample of about 400 people, with, I think, 95% accuracy. We found that the vast bulk of people in the categories that we are talking about did not have extra costs apart from the aids and appliances they were using. Some of those aids and appliances were, for instance, a bed. We found that extra costs were not applied to these particular measures.

Amendment of the Law

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

First, I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) on not just an excellent speech, but the tremendous work he did in those difficult three years alongside the then Prime Minister. When the world gathered in April 2009, applauding the then Prime Minister and then Chancellor for the work they had done on pulling people together, no one could have thought that the absurdity would exist where the last Labour Government were blamed for the sub-prime mortgage collapse in the United States and the collapse of the financial institutions across the world.

For 30 seconds, I just want to pay tribute to those who have been instrumental in anything that I have been able to do in my public life and in this House, starting with my wonderful family and my closest friends. They were somewhere in the Gallery when I made my maiden speech, and two are here from Canada in the Gallery tonight. Without our family and friends we could never do what we achieve, and so often they take the brunt of the rough and not the smooth in politics. I, of course, want to thank the workers, who are often forgotten in our democracy but who make it possible for us to be here in our political parties, for their dedicated work. I thank the voters and the people of Brightside, of Hillsborough and of Sheffield. I also wish to pay tribute to my colleagues in the House, including my right hon. Friends the Members for Edinburgh South West and for Blackburn (Mr Straw), who served in Cabinet with me. My right hon. Friend gave 36 years of dedicated service in and out of this House, and he deserves a great deal of credit for it.

My first Budget was Nigel Lawson’s of March 1988 and it was seminal in my life because my dog, Ted, was violently sick halfway through. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner), in a very loud voice, in only the way he could, pronounced, “Someone should clear up this dog’s breakfast.” I was not sure whether he was referring to what the dog or the Chancellor had delivered. That Budget certainly had a detrimental impact which I hope this Budget will not achieve.

I wish to make three quick points. I have already commended my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West for what he said about what happened through those difficult times. We do not just have to believe him; we can believe what Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, said in a speech made on 28 January in Dublin. In his second point about why our economy had managed to come through and bounce back, he said that we had a fiscal system that allowed budget deficits to rise during a downturn. It is self-evident that that is the case and it needs to be done, but it is not self-evident, in all the rhetoric we have heard over the past five years, that anyone on the Government Benches has fully understood what saved us from complete calamity—it certainly was not austerity. It has not been austerity in Greece, Spain, France or Italy that has saved those countries; what has been instrumental has been what was implemented by the Federal Reserve in the United States and by the Bank of England here: quantitative easing—printing money, as my mother called it. It eased the unfortunate—in the long term—bubble in house prices, rather than the investment in business for which it was intended, but it did make a significant difference in terms of allowing us to return to growth and to have sufficient money in the economy.

Paradoxically, the payment protection insurance mis-selling scheme also did that. The PPI repayments have amounted to £20 billion of money going into families and into local economies that people have spent. If a political party had announced that it was going to give, in a Budget, just before an election, £20 billion to selected families across the country, people would have had a fit. Yet that has made a significant impact on what has happened.

We will not and cannot allow a doubling of the pain in the next Parliament to take us backwards, with the unthinkable becoming the unachievable. That is clearly what would happen if the unfair changes and the unfair further additional austerity measures were to be implemented—and, of course, we do not know about many of them. Should the Conservatives be the lead or majority party, they will be implementing further cuts, on top of the 50%-plus of austerity measures that the coalition has already signed up to. We know about the 10% cut in the budgets in schools, because the Prime Minister has announced it. We know about the enormous cuts already in the pipeline in further education, with a 24% cut in adult skills funding. We know about the proposed budget changes already for welfare. We know what is happening in local government, with the most deprived areas taking the biggest hit. We know that if these austerity measures go any further, there will be a massive hit on those least able to take it. This is a crucial moment, when we decide whether we go backwards or forwards to a Britain we are proud of.

Personal Independence Payments

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

I thank my hon. Friend. This is a principled reform. It is about adding integrity and rigour to the system. It is about fairness and transparency, and helping those who need this support the most.

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I think that the comment by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) was a disgrace.

May I suggest to the Minister that we will not fully understand the impact of her announcement until we see the revised assessment criteria? Welcome as they are for blind and deaf people, will they have the continuing perversity of penalising blind people for having a go at undertaking journeys that they could undertake with DLA but could not undertake unless they had the support that PIP is intended to provide for them? In other words, will they avoid the perversity that was built into the previous assessment criteria and, above all, continue with the higher rate of the mobility component, which was unanimously agreed by this House just two and a half years ago and was threatened under the previous draft assessment regulations for PIP?

[Esther McVey]

I will continue to engage with the right hon. Gentleman; we met only yesterday. We inherited a confused system in which over 50% of people did not have medical support for their claims and 71% of people were left on indefinite awards. We want to engage with people and ensure that those who are most in need of support will get it. We do not want to penalise anybody who is trying their best. It is not about that; it is about offering support where it is most needed.

Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

This has been an interesting and instructive four and a half hours. There have been some excellent contributions, including from some Government Members, although not from the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), who has just spoken.

I say to the hon. Members for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr Evennett) and for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) that we should not reinvent history but learn from it. Having been the Secretary of State for Education and Employment for four years and later briefly the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, I think that there are real lessons to be learned from our efforts to change the system. Unless those lessons are learned, we will reinvent the wheel all over again and there will be disappointment for those who believe that this Bill is the bee’s knees. Unfortunately, it is not. In 1998, when we set about reducing the unemployment claimant count to under 1 million for the first time in a quarter of a century and the labour force survey figures to below 1.5 million for the first time in 30 years, we did so not just because the economy was expanding and there was growth, but because we were helping people from welfare into work.

Work is the best form of welfare; making work pay is the right thing to do; promoting independence is sensible and logical; encouraging people to be self-reliant, including through thrift and savings, really does make a difference; and honesty in the benefits system is something that we should all aim at. The only problem is that the Bill does not achieve those things. If it did, I would be wholeheartedly in favour of it. I ask Ministers to take another look at the Centre for Social Justice report and to compare it with what is on offer this afternoon in this Bill.

I will use the example of disability living allowance, purely because I know more about issues relating to sight loss than about most other aspects of disability and welfare, despite my ministerial experience. Both with the universal credit and DLA, we are in danger of moving in the opposite direction from that which the Government say is their policy. The introduction of the personal independence payment removes automatic entitlement for certain defined groups with specific challenges, including blind people. I do not speak about these issues very often in the House, but if we remove the care component we also remove the mobility component, which is about to be expanded in April, as was agreed to by Members in all parts of the House and hard fought for by those responsible over a considerable period. To do that will have a perverse effect, and the opposite effect to that which was intended. Instead of promoting a can-do approach that makes it possible for people to get out of a position of dependence, the proposal will trap people in that position.

The perversity is best demonstrated on page 16 of “Disability Living Allowance reform”, which was published in December. It gives examples of what the system will mean and talks about testing whether someone is capable of

“planning and making a journey, and understanding and communicating with others.”

However, the whole purpose of disability living allowance was that because they received it people were able to do those things, not that it trapped people by doing those things for them. Whereas the work capability assessment is about what someone can do, the new test for disability living allowance, under its new title, will be about what they cannot do. That leads to dishonesty, with people presenting what they cannot do in their worst circumstances, not in their best. With the new universal credit, people will be encouraged to save but then penalised when they do.

Every step in the Bill that will have a positive outcome is trumped by an administrative complexity that will make the situation worse. We are all in favour of simplicity, but the problem is that simplicity does not usually lead to equity. That is why we have ended up with the complex system that Members have described this afternoon. If we could have produced a simpler system quickly and easily, we would already have it. We laid out principles in September 2005 that I believe have stood the test of time, but unless the Government listen, and unless they review and understand what has happened in the past, we will go through the same problems all over again.