DWP: Performance
Debate between Rachel Reeves and Baroness Laing of Elderslie(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Rachel Reeves
Well, I will send the Secretary of State all the letters I have had from his correspondence unit, not one of them signed by him. [Interruption.] Well, letters that I have written to the Department about the challenges facing—[Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman says he replies to these letters; he has not written a single letter to me about—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The House is discussing an important point.
Rachel Reeves
If the Secretary of State now claims that he signs his letters “The correspondence unit”, perhaps he has replied, but I would have expected the Secretary of State to sign the letters and I will be very happy to forward all the letters to him. [Interruption.] He carries on chuntering from a sedentary position; I have not had a single letter about my casework from him. I will send them all to him, and perhaps he can write to me and my constituents explaining why they have been treated so abysmally by him and his Government.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I received an e-mail today from a constituent who is in considerable distress. She first applied for her PIP on 1 November 2013, so she has now been waiting for eight months. She is in work and she has always been physically fit but she has now just been struck by misfortune. She is in such distress and Atos has told her that her referral is subject to a quality check to see whether Atos is doing its job properly. Clearly, if it has taken eight months to get to this stage, it is not doing its job properly.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Interventions must be short because a great many Members are waiting to speak and it is simply unfair if people make speeches instead of interventions.
Rachel Reeves
Eight months is far too long for anyone to have to wait and, clearly, any further delay is totally unacceptable.
On the work capability assessment, the Government spend £100 million a year on the contracted assessors, as well as tens of millions more on decisions that are appealed. Now, the process has almost reached “virtual collapse”, according to the senior judge overseeing the trials, with Atos walking away from the contract, the Government yet to identify a replacement and a backlog of more than 700,000 assessments in a queue. As a result of the disarray, we are seeing spiralling costs to the taxpayer, with the latest report from the Office for Budget Responsibility showing an £800 million increase in projected spending and leaked documents revealing that the Government now see this as one of the biggest fiscal risks, with spending on course to breach their own welfare cap.
Rachel Reeves
That links in with what I was saying earlier. If the Government do not learn from their mistakes, how can they make improvements?
Universal credit is widely off track; the work capability assessment has almost completely broken down; personal independence payments are a fiasco; the Work programme is not working; the Youth Contract is a flop; support for families with multiple problems are falling far short of its target; the jobmatch website is an absurd embarrassment; the unfair and vindictive bedroom tax is costing more money than it saves; and the Government cannot even agree on a definition of child poverty let alone take action to deal with it.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to fail to deliver on one policy might be considered unfortunate; to miss one’s targets on two has to be judged careless; but to make such a complete mess of every single initiative the Secretary of State has attempted requires a special gift. It is something like a Midas touch: everything he touches turns into a total shambles.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of State will spew out dodgy statistics, rant and rave about Labour’s record, say “on time and on budget” until he is blue in the face and, in typical Tory style, blame the staff for everything that goes wrong. We have all long given up hope on the Secretary of State ever getting a grip on his Department. The real question today is when will the Prime Minister learn and take responsibility for the slow-motion car crash he has allowed to unfold? The DWP has the highest spending of any Government Department, and the responsibility for handling some of the most sensitive situations and some of the most vulnerable people in our country. We will all be paying a price for a long time to come for this Government’s failure to get a grip, and the lives of too many people, such as Malcolm Graham who is still waiting for his personal independence payment, have been irreparably damaged. It is clear that this Government will never take their responsibilities in this area with the seriousness that is needed. Let me pledge today that a Labour Government will. They will help those thousands of families who have been let down by the system and the millions of taxpayers who are seeing their money wasted. That change cannot come soon enough.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Before I call the Secretary of State, let me say that Members know perfectly well that making a long intervention instead of waiting to make a speech is simply rude and it is unacceptable. Interventions must be short. As there are so many Members waiting to speak, I will have to impose a time limit of six minutes on Back-Bench speeches, after the Secretary of State has spoken.