Disabled People

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, first, I wish the noble Lord, Lord Freud, a speedy recovery and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fellowes of West Stafford, on his excellent maiden speech. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, on her excellent speech.

This debate could not be more timely as a prelude to the mass lobby and march on Parliament next week. Under the banner “The Hardest Hit”, disabled people from all over the country will be ensuring that their MPs and the Government take note of the dire impact that the Government's policies are having on their lives, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Low, on securing this debate.

The Government might not have intended disabled people to be the ones who suffer most under their policies, but that is certainly their effect. The fact is that cuts in welfare benefits are falling unfairly and disproportionately on disabled people, leading to an increase in poverty levels among disabled people and their families. The think tank Demos's report Destination Unknown calculated that the impact of the emergency Budget last June alone will mean that over the lifetime of this Parliament disabled people and their families will lose a total of about £9 billion in much needed income.

Over the past year, we have seen such drastic reductions in people's income increasingly justified by unwarranted stereotypes being applied to those in receipt of disability benefits, particularly to those who have been receiving incapacity benefit and the disability living allowance. The Government have promoted a myth that the increase in the number of people claiming incapacity benefit over the past 10 to 15 years is a result of people with trivial health conditions exaggerating either how ill they are or the impact on their ability to work. In fact, the Government's own statistics in the 2011 report Trends in the Employment of Disabled People in Britain show that most of the growth of limiting long-standing illness has been among people at the more severe end of the spectrum.

In spite of this, the Government, and the media, tend to present two images when discussing the reform of incapacity benefit. The first is the deserving disabled person, the healthy blind person or wheelchair user who wants a job and who the Government want to support into employment. The other is the welfare dependant, the press's scrounger, who exaggerates their impairment or illness and who needs a tough regime of conditions to get them back to work.

What is missing from these two images is a third group, which research tells us in fact makes up the largest group of those on incapacity benefit. Many of these people had been in employment for years, paying their taxes and national insurance contributions, until they developed a chronic condition that means that now they find it extremely difficult to fulfil what an employer expects from the average worker. An example is people incapacitated by chronic pain. More than one in 10 of the population lives with chronic pain, and almost two in every five will lose their job as a result. This portrayal is pernicious, and its effect, as Tom Kenny, my local welfare rights officer, has found, is that people are apologetic and loath to claim the support that they need and are entitled to, lest they be seen as scroungers.

However, it is becoming clear that there are further reasons why we are seeing so many disabled people losing their benefits. As the Guardian revealed on 2 April, under the growing pressure to cut the welfare budget, some Jobcentre Plus advisers are working to targets on the number of people they refer for sanctions each week, meaning that clients can lose their benefits for up to six months. The latest DWP figures available show that from January to October 2010 the number of claimants with registered disabilities who lost their benefits more than doubled to almost 20,000.

The Minister might dismiss that as a mere press story, but let me set out what is happening in my local area with disabled people's claims for employment and support allowance. The disability organisation's welfare rights officer, Tom Kenny, is overwhelmed by clients being found fit for work who are obviously incapable of working. Without exception, all have been treated disrespectfully by the Atos doctors and nurses. Every case that he has taken to tribunal has been overturned on appeal. His experience of the poor quality of medical examinations by the DWP-appointed Atos staff is shared by numerous other advice workers, but when Atos fails clients, the independent decision-makers at the DWP are supposed to make an independent judgment of the assessment. In the past, that would have happened, but what Tom has found most striking is that obviously erroneous negative Atos decisions are now not being overturned; they are just being rubber-stamped. In doing this, the decision-makers are acting illegally and, of course, appeals are increasing.

There has been a fivefold increase in the number of IB and ESA appeals being processed by the Tribunals Service over the past two years. This has come about even though there were no really major changes to the regulations. It is unlikely that the increase in appeals is due to increasing incompetence in Atos and the DWP. It is much more likely that the staff are working to an agenda dictated by government targets to reduce the number of people on incapacity benefit and ESA. With the new, tougher WCA regulations that came into force last month, we can expect appeals to rocket.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has said that people who are genuinely sick have nothing to fear from the new system of assessment. The evidence points to the contrary. During the WCA’s pilot phase, Citizens Advice estimated that 40 per cent of appeals found in the individual's favour and, most importantly, that where the CAB assisted on the appeal, the success rate was 70 per cent. As I have shown from my local area, there are similar success rates where the individual is assisted by a welfare rights adviser, yet these voluntary organisations are increasingly having their funding cut. This makes it less likely that people who have been cheated by an ineffective and unfair system out of a benefit they should qualify for will receive proper redress for such an injustice.

However, the Government have another card up their sleeve. Not only are disabled people finding it much harder to claim the benefits to which they are entitled; there will also be far less help available to challenge negative decisions. The Government’s proposals for the reform of legal aid in England and Wales include cutting all legal help and representation for welfare benefit matters. It means that there will be no legal advice on appeals to tribunal for awards of DLA, attendance allowance, incapacity benefit, income support, housing benefit, social fund payments and others. The argument set out to support this cut is that the importance of financial entitlement is “relatively low” and that the issues are not complex. Tell that to someone who is struggling to cope with MS and has lost their job. Is the importance of their financial entitlement relatively low?

In its report on the Government’s planned cuts to legal aid, published on 30 March, the cross-party Justice Select Committee said that disabled people could be hit “disproportionately” hard. It goes on to say that it is,

“concerned that the ability of the most vulnerable people to present their cases will be weakened because they will not have had help and advice in preparing them”.

So much for the Government’s commitment to protect the most vulnerable in society.

The Government could ensure that the assessments are carried out fairly in the first place by people who are competent to understand the reality of a person’s disabling conditions. Is the Minister willing to take up that challenge? The results of a survey conducted by the Disability Benefits Consortium with the support of the Multiple Sclerosis Society in October last year demonstrate just how necessary this is. The survey found that, of 208 people with multiple sclerosis who had gone through the work capacity assessment, 60 per cent said that the person who carried out the assessment did not understand their impairment; 70 per cent said that the assessment did not take account of how their symptoms were affected by repeated activity such as fatigue or increased pain; and 65 per cent felt that the assessment made their health worse because of stress and anxiety. As one person said:

“The assessment was stressful and made me feel like a fraud. I began to doubt my sanity—I have been told basically that nothing is wrong with me and that I'm fit to work. Am I imagining the pain, the fatigue, the lack of balance and my jerky hands? NONE of this was included in the ESA written report even though I told the assessor about it. Neither were my MRI scans taken into consideration; nor my GP’s reports. The whole assessment process is bizarre. I feel like Alice falling through the rabbit hole”.

The frustration of a debate such this is that there are so many more areas to cover and so much more that needs to be said. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, would convey this message to the noble Lord, Lord Freud: will he take up the challenge that was put to him at the end of the recent debate on the new WCA regulations on 16 March when he expressed surprise at the disability organisations’ horror at his plans? He was challenged to mend his department’s communication with the disability community—and to do so personally and not leave it to his senior officials. To help that process, I invite him to visit my local disability organisation, Hammersmith and Fulham Action on Disability—HAFAD. He will not have to travel far. There he can learn at first hand the effects of his policies on the lives of disabled people. I hope that he will accept.