Welfare Reform (Sick and Disabled People)

Anne McGuire Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

That is exactly right. There are three consequences from what is happening. First, disabled people are being forced more and more to rely and depend on care from their own family members, who are themselves, to be frank, overstretched in providing that care, especially as local authority respite care is now being cut back so dramatically. Startlingly, as we found in a previous debate, a large number of these carers are children caring for their parents. A year-long investigation by Carers UK confirmed that carers, who save this country an estimated £119 billion a year in care costs, are about to lose £1 billion in benefit cuts.

Secondly, the care needs of many disabled people are simply not being met. A recent inquiry by the all-party groups on local government and on disability found from the evidence they took that four in 10 disabled people are failing to have their basic social care needs—which my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) has mentioned—met.

Thirdly, as my hon. Friend has said, the withdrawal of social care and support services is cutting many people off from any form of social contact with the outside world. Many are driven back into their homes, while others are forced out of them, losing all their independence, and into residential care or even hospital care as a result.



Alongside cuts to social care, there are the mounting cuts in welfare benefits. Like most hon. Members, the vast majority of disabled people whom I have met are, like any other employed person, desperate to work and support their family with a regular wage. For some, the tragedy is that their disability is so severe that they will never be able to work and will have to rely on welfare benefits to ensure that they do not live in poverty, while others need positive and sensitive practical support to help them to get back into work or to work in the first place.

The system introduced during the past six years to support people in securing work or the appropriate benefits could not have been better designed to undermine disabled people’s ability to get into work or receive the appropriate benefits to assist them. The previous Government started the process of reassessing all those on incapacity benefit to see whether they could be assisted back into work, and if not, to ensure that they had the right level of financial support. They introduced the work capability assessment, and brought in Atos to implement it. That might have been well intentioned in theory, but in practice, thousands of disabled people have been caused untold suffering, humiliation, stress and, at times, absolute despair.

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that the introduction of the work capability assessment under our Government was phased? Part of the distress he mentions was due to the fact that the contract was renegotiated to go for a big bang of assessments and reassessments of everyone on incapacity benefit.

[John McDonnell]

The work capability assessment was flawed from the start. It stemmed from the work of the American insurance company Unum, and the so-called biopsychosocial model of disability assessment. That was exposed as an invention by the insurance companies simply to avoid paying out for claims. My right hon. Friend is, however, absolutely right that Atos was brought in and then given a contract to churn through large numbers of assessments very rapidly—as fast as possible. The staff employed in order to achieve that often had minimal medical or professional qualifications, and their expertise or experience was often totally unrelated to the condition or disability of the people they assessed.

Assessments largely disregarded people’s previous diagnosis, prognosis or even life expectancy. The recent “Panorama” programme “Disabled or Faking It?” exposed the scandal of seriously ill patients—people diagnosed with life-threatening conditions such as heart failure or end-stage emphysema—being found fit for work. The so-called descriptors, or criteria, on which assessments are based bear no relation to the potential employment available, take little account of fluctuating conditions and are particularly unresponsive to appreciating someone’s mental health issues.

According to all the Department for Work and Pensions figures, the appeals roll in—on 40% of decisions—and most appeals are now successful. The test has been condemned by the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing. The report by the president of the appeals tribunal to the Government denounced the test as

“failing to coincide with reality”.

Even when someone wins their appeal, there can be a lengthy wait before their benefits are reinstated. In one period, 37,000 people were waiting up to a year to receive benefits after they had won their appeal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans). This is not the first time that the House has called for an assessment of the cumulative impact of welfare reforms on disabled people, but this time it is being called for by not only disability organisations and the official Opposition, but by the more than 100,000 people who signed the War on Welfare petition. Like others in this House, I encourage and congratulate the people who signed it, and who made us bring this issue to the Floor of the House.

I recognise, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), that this is probably an historic occasion: it is the first time that disabled people have framed the agenda in this House. I hope that we can respect that, regardless of our views.

I recognise some of the good work that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), is trying to do, including with employers, to fulfil potential. His heart is probably—I was going to give a caveat, but I will not: his heart is in the right place. The difficulty that we all have is not with his heart, but with his and his Government’s proposals for welfare reform.

It is with sadness that I note that we are yet again asking for a cumulative impact assessment that the Government should have undertaken when they introduced their welfare reform package. Since then, there has been a pretty crude campaign of vilification of those in receipt of disability benefits. The Government have attempted to conflate the tiny proportion of claimants who defraud the system, with whom none of us in this House have any truck, with others. The hon. Member for Weaver Vale fell into that trap when he talked about fraud and error. Those are two completely different things. The Government have conflated those attempting to defraud the system with those legitimately in receipt of a range of benefits. As we all know in this House, that has resulted in an increase in disability hate crime.

I also feel sadness because the Prime Minister made the following commitment in 2010:

“people who are sick, who are vulnerable, the elderly—I want you to know that we will always look after you”.

He even assured us that cuts would be made in a fair way, and that we would ask

“those on higher incomes to shoulder more of the burden than those on lower incomes.”

Yet the reality is that disabled people lose nine times more than most others, according to the Centre for Welfare Reform, and those disabled people with greater needs sometimes lose up to 19 times more than other people.

Opposition Members are not against welfare reform; indeed, as many have pointed out today, we started it when in government. In opposition, we have offered on more than one occasion to work with the Government in a consensual way to try to find a way forward. I know from conversations with disabled people that they are not against welfare reform, but they are against what has happened over the past three years, because the welfare package fails on various counts.

The Prime Minister’s comments about looking after the most vulnerable run counter to the fact that the Government’s welfare package disproportionately affects disabled people, who are hit simultaneously by various changes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) pointed out. There is the employment and support allowance, universal credit, the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, the change from the disability living allowance to the personal independence payment, and the changes in social care provision that others have pointed out.

I want to turn briefly to PIP, because we were told that it would help the most severely disabled people. If that had been the outcome of the policy change, perhaps we could have understood it, but the Government started with a number and framed a policy around that number. The National Audit Office report published this morning is devastating; it shows that the Government went into a reform of benefits that affects the most disabled in our community without knowing where they were going, or how they would implement the reform. According to the report, on the first day of the claims process, the Government met their target, but when we get to the claims being passed to the assessment provider, that information is not recorded. The expectation is that assessments will be completed in 42 days, but 64 days is what is actually being delivered. Worst of all, the terminally ill—those who have a life expectancy of no more than six months—are having to wait 28 days. The Minister may tell me that that has changed, and I hope that it has, but it seems that a sixth of those people’s total lifespan will be used up while they are in the bureaucratic morass of the PIP assessment.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

My right hon. Friend has described the effects of the Welfare Reform Act 2012; is she concerned that it was cast in a way that gives the Government scope, without the need for further primary legislation, to make serious changes to terms and interpretations relating to the benefits that we are talking about, including PIP? With the changes that the Chancellor is promising in relation to annually managed expenditure, there will in future be more times when a number is fixed on, and people are squeezed off benefit to reach it.

[Mrs McGuire]

Yes. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, and I am delighted that he has made his point.

The Minister got quite agitated just now. I hope that he will give us some facts and figures about the implementation of PIP, because there has been a wall of silence. We all know what is happening in our constituencies, but we are accused of giving anecdotal evidence; he is in a position to give us the real evidence.

Since 2010, it obviously has not mattered what was said to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions about his welfare reforms. He has become a victim of his rhetoric and is obsessed by the idea of his legacy. We used to have beneficiaries of the social security system; now many people feel that they are victims of that system. I ask the Secretary of State to put his cumulative impact assessment where his reforms are. I say to him, “Do the assessment, and prove me and 100,000 people out there totally wrong, if you have the courage.” I say categorically that if he will not or cannot do that, we are entitled to ask why he is still in his job.