Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)

Anna Turley Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Jess Phillips]

Q 11 Apologies for being a bit late; I was stuck in the Chamber.

My questions have been largely answered, but I have some real concerns about the advice sections you are talking about. In my experiences of women and domestic violence, their husbands leave and they are left with the mortgage of a property. They have never worked and would find it difficult to get into work.

I am concerned about the advice, but I am also concerned about what detail is not in the Bill. I am confused. It is confusing enough, let alone if you are a vulnerable person in a difficult situation. I wonder if you have some concerns about the detail and whether you will need more detail before you can give firm conclusions about whether this is going to be terrible for the claimants.

Paul Broadhead: Yes, the detail will tell us the exact process—how this will work, who will provide information and all that final detail. That is not here at the moment. We are talking at a bit of a conceptual level, but I think we are generally supportive. Both parties are supportive of moving this to a loan in most cases, but we have concerns about the mechanism for delivering that advice and ensuring that there are not unintended consequences. There is a lot still to be worked out in the secondary legislation.

Paul Smee: We have offered to get down and work closely with DWP Ministers on the detail. We have a lot of experience within the lending community of how to deal with people who are in arrears and how to handle them sympathetically. We will be very keen to work with officials to come up with detailed proposals that work for the industry and for the claimants.

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q 12 Building on that point about the lack of detail in the Bill, one of the biggest concerns you have raised is the huge number of existing claimants, but there is no detail on how they will be dealt with. What are your thoughts on how they should be dealt with? How serious is it that the detail is not there?

Paul Broadhead: Many, in fact more than half, of the existing claimants are in receipt of pension credit, so we are talking about a certain type of individual and we need to ensure that the advice is right. Many of these people have been long-term claimants, so we need fully to understand that change. The timetable for delivery is challenging. There could be an argument—I am not saying there is, because it depends on the Government’s delivery plans—for saying, “Okay, on 1 April 2018, this applies to new claimants,” and we then make sure that we take our time to ensure that everyone understands the effect of the change on their circumstances. Perhaps we could put that back 12 months or so for existing claimants, but it needs to be considered very carefully so that we do not end up with unintended consequences. We have talked about debt—whether it is debt or not and whether it is going to be repaid—and many of these people will not like the thought of debt and might put themselves in a more difficult position than is needed.

Paul Smee: I hope that the Government can come to an early conclusion about the channel through which the advice will be given, because we would want to work with those who are giving the advice in order to understand their position.

[Corri Wilson (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (SNP)]

Q 13 What effect, if any, would the potential increase of sanctions have on the entitlement period? If there were breaks in claims, would that have an effect?

Paul Smee: I am not sure I can answer that off the top of my head. I would not expect there to be any, but if I find that there is, I will drop you a note.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will come back to Kate Green with some more questions, but first Anna Turley, because she has to go at four o’clock.

[Anna Turley]

Q 63 The Disability Benefits Consortium submission made reference to possible knock-on effects in other areas as a result of the abolition of the WRAG. Do you agree and what do you think the knock-on implications could be?

Sophie Corlett: I don’t know whether you meant just within the DWP area or more broadly, but our anecdotal information is that since the welfare changes there has been a big knock-on effect in health terms in the number of people who have become much more unwell, partly because of the stress of sanctions and expecting to lose their money, but also because people who have less money are more likely to fall into debt, and that has a very toxic relationship with mental health problems. We are aware of that link.

[The Chair]

Anna, are you happy with that?

[Anna Turley]

Q 64 I was thinking more broadly: anything from mental health to housing.

[The Chair]

Let us have a quick answer from everyone on this important question.

Roy O'Shaughnessy: First, none of us wants to see anyone disadvantaged by the changes that are coming in the Bill. That is first and foremost. I do not think there is enough actual evidence yet to make conclusions about how significant the changes have been or will be going forward. There were two community hubs that we self-financed, where we literally took a health-based approach to the challenges that our customers were facing. We provided food and meals. We had a JCP desk in the centre. The Work Foundation just concluded their report a few days ago. We have not assimilated it all yet, but the thing that stood out was that we have achieved a statistically important uplift in the results of those hardest-to-reach customers, the ones with the greatest barriers to employment, with illness.

Two main things stood out. There is a significant difference. The vast majority of the customers in those two hubs have a much better experience than those in our other centres, and our staff are happier working with those customers because they have more resources to deal with their needs. So my view is that organisations like ours at the table will need to work very closely with Government to take that learning and try and put it into practice, to mitigate those cases where it would be adversely affecting individuals.

Elliot Dunster: I would echo some of those points. It might be a useful time to think a bit about disabled people’s lives as well. Lots of disabled people are in receipt of social care, for example, and a third of social care users are disabled people. It would be interesting, as part of the discussions the Committee has, to think about how those systems interact with the back-to-work support that disabled people get. How do the conversations that local authorities have about the provision of social care for disabled people interact with the employment support that disabled people get? Currently, those two things feel quite far apart from the disabled person’s perspective. That might be an example of where two different parts of two different systems could work better together to support people into work.

Laura Cockram: Just building on Elliot’s point, a number of different cuts have happened, and there has been no cumulative impact assessment of the cuts that have taken place since 2010, whether that is the closure of the ILF or the social care cuts to local authority budgets. So I think there is a wider concern. If we are pushing people who are not ready to work, as Sophie has said, back into work earlier or too early, there could be some knock-on impacts on the healthcare system, where we know there are already funding concerns. We might be pushing problems around the systems, rather than dealing with them.

Gareth Parry: Our view would be that disabled people do not not get jobs because they are disabled; they do not get work because of a whole series of barriers that get in the way, some of which are disability-related and many of which are not. I would certainly support, from other things that have been said, the idea of a more holistic approach to somebody—the idea of a key worker-type approach, where somebody helps that individual to overcome all their barriers.

We have some evidence in our organisation that about two thirds of the barriers that disabled people say they face and stop them getting work are actually nothing to do with their disability. It is about transport, housing, debt, health—a whole load of issues. It is going to be interesting to see the evidence base that comes out of the three Jobcentre Plus pathfinders that are running. They are using the concept of a specialist employment adviser, who is going to take that more rounded, holistic approach. The evidence that comes out of that pilot is going to be really interesting.