UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities

Debate between Marsha De Cordova and Stephen Timms

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Lady is right and my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea made that point as well. I think that is unhelpful and should be removed.

We also called in our report for larger employers to be required to publish the proportion of their employees who are disabled, and my hon. Friend referred, rightly, to disability pay gap reporting. Like her, the Select Committee thinks it is high time for a rigorous evaluation of the well-intentioned Disability Confident scheme.

For our current inquiry, we conducted a survey of personal independence payment and employment and support allowance claimants. My hon. Friend referred to the experiences of some of those applicants. We are going to publish our report from that inquiry soon, but it was striking how many respondents to that survey said the assessments had damaged their mental health. In describing the assessments, many respondents said that they were humiliating, undignified or even, in some cases, traumatic. There is a serious PIP application backlog at the moment.

[Marsha De Cordova]

My right hon. Friend is making an interesting point about the negative and long-lasting impact that the assessment frameworks for employment and support allowance and PIP are having. Does he agree that now is the time to overhaul those assessment frameworks to something that is co-created with disabled people, is less intrusive and focuses on providing the essential support and extra costs of living support that are needed?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I agree. There is a big job to be done, and involving disabled people in doing it would be an important part of the solution.

There is also an industrial injuries disablement benefit backlog at the moment. It remains the case, as my hon. Friend has pointed out, that when people appeal against an adverse PIP decision, the great majority win their appeal, which shows pretty clearly that there is something going badly wrong.

The Department did introduce some welcome, imaginative flexibility in assessments during the pandemic. I pay tribute to those who came up with some new ways of doing things—telephone and video assessments—when obviously the old ways could not be applied during the pandemic, and who took advantage of those long term. It is important to maintain flexibility. For some people, being able to be assessed at home over the telephone or via a video link avoids enormous distress and is a real boon, but for others it is important to be able to talk about their impairment face to face and they are happy to travel to an assessment centre to do so. I do not think there is a single solution here, but I think the flexibility that has been introduced of late will be valuable.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is in negotiation with the Department on a section 23 agreement over the protection of vulnerable claimants, arising from grave concern, which we have heard about already, about claimants who have been badly treated by the Department too often having lost their benefits or being sanctioned when the issue was, for example, a known and serious mental health problem. Too many benefit claimants, as we have been reminded, have taken their lives in these circumstances. So I welcome the initiative that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has taken, and very much hope that the section 23 agreement will be concluded and published soon.

The new ministerial team has the chance to establish a new, much more positive relationship with disabled people, based on openness in place of defensiveness. In welcoming the new Minister to his post, I urge him to take that opportunity.