Incapacity Benefit Migration

Anne Begg Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant]

I do not go to Starbucks any more because of tax issues, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right.

I do not want to stereotype the Rhondda, but my surgery is held in a room with thin walls and by the end of the encounter with my constituent we were shouting at one another. When he left the room saying he was going to report me to the police—I was not sure what for—everyone queuing outside applauded me, not him, because they had the same attitude as everyone else: stealing from the system is fraud, and it is theft from other people. There is no innocence, and in one sense it is the worst form of theft. However, the level of such fraud is small, and such stories are sometimes blown up out of all proportion so people get the impression that everyone is at it, which is not true.

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

The Select Committee on Work and Pensions has just embarked on an inquiry into fraud and error in the benefits system, and I would say that the extent of that is fairly small. However, may I give my hon. Friend another example? Somebody came to my office as a cleaner through the new deal for disabled people. There are people who have been out of work for 10 years, as she had, with mental health problems. She thought she would never work again, but the correct support—with a job broker, with someone just building up her confidence—got her into work and she ended up expanding from that job into other jobs as well. As it turns out, she had Parkinson’s disease, not mental health problems, and I have never seen anybody so relieved to get a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, because she knew what that was and she could cope with it. However, the key was the specialist, detailed help that she got as an individual, and my concern is that that is perhaps what is lacking in some of the new areas that the Government have introduced in order to try and get people with disabilities into work.

[Chris Bryant]

I would go further—I think that sometimes the organisations that are most fleet of foot, most sensitive and come without some kind of governmental sanctions regime, such as those in the voluntary sector, can be the most successful at enabling somebody to gain the self-esteem that enables them to get into work.

I remember working with the Prince’s Trust in my constituency with kids who are at risk. People there were saying that they could not understand why kids who really enjoyed coming on some of the courses that they were doing, which were all about confidence building and so on, all turned up uniformly late—not uniformly late in the sense that they all arrived at the same time, but that they always arrived late. It was only when they worked out that the kids could not tell the time that they realised what the problem was: because the kids were in families where nobody was in work, nobody was used to getting up in the morning to go to work. That is why a basic skills assessment is vital.

Of course, schools should be dealing with all these issues, but sometimes that does not happen. It is a fact that we still have a significant number of people who are, to all intents and purposes, innumerate and illiterate, and tackling those basic skills and providing an assessment very early on is one of the important changes that we need to bring in. I worry that the voluntary sector, which has had a very tough time since 2010, certainly in my patch, is not able to provide the support that leads to people being able to get into jobs, as it was able to do historically.

[Dame Anne Begg]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will, but I am conscious that I have now gone on for quite a long time.

[Dame Anne Begg]

I thank my hon. Friend.

It has become an afternoon for anecdotes. When I was teaching, there was a young boy who could not turn up to school on time. I was his form teacher, and I discovered that the rest of his family had all been schoolphobics, that his parents did not work, and that although they did have a clock at home they could not work out how to set the alarm. I got him to bring it in and that is exactly what we did. We were able to keep him in school a bit longer than we managed with his siblings.

[Chris Bryant]

I cannot set the alarm on nearly any of the things in my house and I have not got children to be able to do it for me—they are basic skills. I will move on, if I may.

It is also true, as I think we all agree, that poor initial decisions end up being expensive for everyone. I think Governments of whatever stripe would like to be able to improve the quality of initial decisions. As was found in the run-up to 2013, £26.3 million had been spent on the tribunal service. The Government have changed the way in which that operates, and I shall come to that later, but when 19% of appeals are still overturning the initial decision, a lot of money is effectively going down the drain on behalf of the taxpayer. I suppose some lawyers would say that paying them is not money going down the drain, but if we could improve the quality of initial decisions, whether that is down to form-filling, ensuring that the correct information is available from the very beginning, or whatever it is, we would be saving ourselves time and energy, and most importantly, saving a great deal of heartache for a considerable number of people.

I shall move on to some of the problems that exist at the moment. It is uncontested that Atos has not been a great success. I think Atos itself would say that—in fact, it has done. It has effectively put its hand up and said that it has not been a great success. We note that the Government are now ending the deal; that is an established fact, but I would like to ask the Minister a few questions and if he is not able to answer fully now, I completely understand, because the questions are relatively technical, but I should be grateful if he would write to me.

The Minister referred, I think in questions on Monday, to the fact that Atos will be paying him—

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I think that we always have to keep the matter under review; otherwise we are wasting time and energy on a process that is just injurious to the health of people whom we are trying to help, and at a cost to the taxpayer that does not provide a dividend. So, yes, of course the Government should do that. I was just hoping that the Government would be able to say whether the £800 million relates to the people who would have been reassessed. How many people will continue to receive benefits even though the Government have basically decided that they should not?

I want to talk about access to mental health services, because one of the issues that arose in Health questions earlier this week was that there has been a significant fall-off in the availability of talking therapies, and there is clear evidence that talking therapies, whether cognitive behavioural therapy or others, are predominantly concentrated in areas where there are fewer people on the various kinds of incapacity benefit. That is rather unhelpful to the process of trying to get people with mental health needs back into work, so I wonder what strategy the Government have to try to ensure that it is addressed.

Incidentally, one other thought occurs to me in relation to the point that my hon. Friend has just made. There are only so many doctors in Britain. If the Government decide to take a lot of doctors into Atos to make assessments of people’s fitness for work, there is a danger that they will simply be taking doctors out of the national health service, and that may have an impact locally on whether people are being helped back into work by getting better, rather than being forced back into work by being assessed by Atos. Of course, that is where there has to be a joined-up Government approach.

I want to ask the Minister about the Work programme, because, as my hon. Friend rightly said, there is a significant problem in that respect. The Secretary of State effectively admitted that in Work and Pensions questions on Monday. I think that he had hoped and expected that a much larger percentage of people would have been helped into work through the Work programme. Of those with disabilities, it is something like 5%, which is a very low level.

Of course, we all know from our constituency case load that some people need dramatic intervention to be able to get into work. Drug and alcohol abuse, leading to and coming from chaotic lifestyles, often makes it very difficult to assist people, even though there are many people with addictions of various kinds who are fully functioning in a work environment—we have only to look at the history of Parliament to see that. What assessment have the Government made of how the Work programme could be improved to enable more people with disabilities to get into work, or do the Government believe that the situation is not improvable and that 5% is what the level is going to be?

[Dame Anne Begg]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the specialist employment programme for people with disabilities is called Work Choice? One would expect that the majority of the people on Work Choice, if not all, would be in receipt of ESA and be in the WRAG group, but actually almost all of them are on jobseeker’s allowance; they have been found fully fit for work. That might explain why Work programme providers are not being successful in getting ESA claimants into work—that specialist help is not for them; it is for people who are closer to the labour market than they are.

[Chris Bryant]

Which is the next paragraph on my sheet of paper. We just managed to hear it from a different voice, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

I want to move on to the issue of discretionary housing payments. The Papworth Trust has found that over three quarters of councils include disability living allowance in assessing people’s eligibility for discretionary housing payments. That is against Government advice. Of course, because the system is discretionary, it is not Government-enforced, but that is one of my concerns about the discretionary system. People can be living on either side of a street, and just because one council decides to include DLA in the assessment and the other decides not to, they are treated differently.

My anxiety about that is that it leads to people not trusting the system in the end, because people do not know the specifics of who is in charge of deciding what. They just think, “He’s got it; I haven’t got it. That seems unfair.” When that is alive in the system, confidence in the whole of Government and the welfare or social security system falls apart, especially because the clear evidence now is that people with disabilities are less likely to be granted an award under the discretionary housing payment system than people without a disability. That seems to be at odds with what I presume the Government would like to achieve, so I wonder whether their advice needs to get stronger, whether we need to lose the word “discretionary” or whether the system needs to be restructured.

[Dame Anne Begg]

The Work and Pensions Committee’s report that was published yesterday on support for housing costs states:

“We recommend that the Government issues revised guidance to local authorities which advises them to disregard disability benefits in means tests to assess eligibility for DHP awards.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

I am not certain that that would work, not least because decisions that had been made would also have to be reversed. The decision must be based on the evidence that is before the decision makers. I agree with many of the things that the shadow Minister has said, but it is crucial that we remember that this is not about diagnosis. The diagnosis has been done by the clinical experts. In response to the shadow Minister’s concern about a drain on NHS doctors, a lot of the assessments are done not by doctors, but by trained clinicians.

Like other hon. Members, as a constituency MP I have had correspondence about the matter, so when I took on this portfolio a couple of months ago I desperately wanted to dig down and look at it. Dr Litchfield’s report came out almost simultaneously with my arrival in post. One of the first things I did was to go off to a tribunal and listen, as a member of the public can do, to two cases being put before the tribunal judges. As I left the building, I said to my officials—I have said this in the House before—“Clearly, we are not getting decisions right.” The first case that I listened to should not have been at the tribunal; we should have sorted it out before. In the second one, interestingly enough, the Department had not seen the evidence until the morning of the hearing. Extra evidence was produced, and the judge had used his autonomy to waive the four-week rule and allow it to be presented.

I have been urgently looking at how we get the right decisions by ATOS professionals being sent to our decision makers. The final decision is made by the Department, not by Atos; Atos makes a recommendation and we look at it. I looked carefully at the quality of the decisions that were coming from our contractor, which in this case was Atos. I have said on the record several times that I was not happy at all about the quality of the decisions. Before I arrived, the Department had been putting pressure on Atos to improve quality, so we were also starting to get an ever-increasing backlog. So many cases that could have been decided through paper assessments were instead being assessed face to face. Even then, people were appealing, and because we were getting the assessments wrong, we were losing the appeals.

We will always lose some appeals, as the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), knows. It is for judges to weigh up what the will of Parliament was in making regulations, and apply that to the case before them. I was keen to make sure that we got this right, because we are talking not only about taxpayers’ money, but about individuals. The shadow Minister described the welfare system as a safety net. For some people, it will be there from birth onwards, and for others it will come into play because of circumstances, events, traumas and illnesses over the course of their lives.

The shadow Minister was quite right to say that there will be things that I will be unable to answer, and other things that I will not be able to discuss because of confidentiality within contractual obligations. Regarding Atos’s decision to exit its contract early, I was pressurised by colleagues from both sides of the House to remove or sack Atos. One of the shadow Minister’s colleagues said that I should sack Atos. The problem with that was that because of the form of the contract, we would almost certainly have had to pay compensation to Atos, and I do not think that anybody inside or outside the House would have wanted us to do that. We have negotiated an early exit for Atos and have arranged for a team to work alongside its management as it continues to do the work while we exit it. I cannot simply turn off the tap, because we would have no capacity. The biggest issue with Atos has been with its management controls, rather than with its front-line decision making.

[Dame Anne Begg]

Under the original time scale, the migration from incapacity benefit to ESA was meant to have been completed by now—I believe the date was the end of March 2014—but a sizeable number of people have yet to be migrated from IB to ESA. The original contract must have worked to the original time scale, so Atos surely was not still contracted to carry out the migration, even though it was contracted to do the reassessment. Surely, an automatic break must have been built into the contract; otherwise, Atos would still have been employed even when there was no work to be done, because it was meant to have been finished by now.