Personal Independence Payment

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, clearly what we are talking about today is a centralised national process. There are social care provisions on the ground which local authorities are responsible for. PIP will be far more consistent and, indeed, objective than the current DLA, where the criteria for deciding who is entitled to DLA have become increasingly fuzzy. That is one of the problems associated with DLA. The money is designed to deal with the extra costs of being disabled, and those costs are incurred whether someone is in work or out of work—they are extra costs that need to be borne. However, the point of it being made as a payment, as opposed to a provision, is so that people can decide where best to apply those funds. As the right reverend Prelate said, some people will decide on the softer things, which for certain people are just as important as the harder requirements, but it is up to them to decide how to spend that money.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I wish to make two brief comments. First, I have a question, which I am sure the noble Lord will be able to answer. Of the 170,000 people who are going to lose DLA when it moves to PIP, how many are on the current lower-level rate? Secondly, perhaps I may challenge the Minister to be wary of the assumption that DLA should be an objective test. It was never intended to be as such in 1992, when we introduced it, primarily because two people with the same objective disability may have very different competences in coping with that disability. It will depend on their resilience, their family support, their educational ability and their financial resources. Because DLA was person-centred and not a box-ticking exercise against some objective at their assessment, it was able to respond to that difference in competence, as well as to the depth of the disability. I very much hope that the Minister will not be led by a false myth into thinking that this can be reduced to an objective account of external health or mental health which is standardised across the country. It cannot be and, in my view, it should not be.

I support my noble friend very strongly in urging the department to come up with a layered assessment of how all of those benefit changes are interacting. I share briefly with the House a letter I received from a disabled middle-aged lady in an eastern region city who lives in a two-bedroom bungalow. She has rented a nearby garage so that she can charge up her mobility scooter. She is now faced with a housing benefit cut and losing one of her bedrooms of her bungalow, but as she says, there is no one-bedroom bungalow for her to go to. She has had a wet room installed under the disability facilities grant, so if she moves out within five years she would have to repay the grant. If she moves she has to repay the grant; if she stays she has a housing benefit cut. On top of that, she will almost certainly be forced to pay 20% for the first time on council tax, even though she is on benefit, and on top of that, some of her DLA support may also be questioned under PIP. What advice will the noble Lord give me to give to that lady?

[Lord Freud]

Yes, if I can deal with those in order. We do not have a breakdown of where people have moved from.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords—

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

Order. This is a Statement, not a debate.