Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, I, too, declare an interest as I have received DLA since its inception. Luckily, having reached the age of 65, I will escape the Government’s proposals for the time being. When I became disabled in the mid-1960s, just about the only disability support on offer to take part in everyday life was an invalid trike—the blue Noddy car. For me, that symbolises what was then the extent of expected integration. Little was expected of disabled people and unless your family had money and resources you led a very limited life. Disabled people had low expectations and were not much in evidence.

Over the following years, political pressure slowly increased with the rise of the disability movement and the range of support needed by disabled people to become contributing citizens began to be addressed. The Noddy trike morphed into the mobility allowance, then into DLA, which added personal care, and that developed into incorporating people with communication needs and learning difficulties, lacking arm movement and so on, until most recently when blind people became entitled to the high rate for mobility and care.

That support is what has enabled disabled people to work and contribute to their communities. It is why you see disabled people on the streets, living independent lives. We now expect to be treated as equal citizens. The lengthy DLA claim may not be simple but it represents progress. It reflects the very real complexity and diversity of the extra support needs of disabled people’s lives. Disability living allowance is a complex benefit because disability is hugely complex and any reform needs to be done with great awareness of that complexity if it is not to leave disabled people more deprived and impoverished, denying millions the hope of living the independent lives that we have come to expect.

That awareness is sadly lacking from this Bill, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, just now. As all noble Lords’ post bags and mail boxes have shown, disabled people live in great fear of it being enacted. There are many issues concerning the introduction of PIP which we will need to return to in Committee. For now, I draw attention to just one, in Clause 79. That proposes to double the current qualifying period for eligibility for support from three to six months. The Disability Benefits Consortium is concerned that this will diminish the preventive impact of DLA, pushing many more people into debt as they try to manage the costs of their impairment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, so eloquently pointed out, Macmillan Cancer Support and other cancer organisations are particularly concerned that it will have a devastating impact on disabled people who have sudden onset, long-term conditions such as cancer, stroke and spinal cord injury.

The first six months of these conditions can be the period when extra costs, especially for travel and parking for treatment and family visits, are greatest. Specialist treatment centres are often far from patients’ homes. Macmillan Cancer Support cites a cancer patient in Devon who regularly had to travel 125 miles for radiotherapy. The Minister for Disabled People has made it clear that the proposed change in the qualifying period is not financially driven but to align the definition of long-term disability in the Equality Act. Will the Minister reconsider allowing people with certain conditions, who face the sudden onset of a disability and immediate additional financial costs, to receive an early assessment for PIP?

There are so many aspects of this Bill which will have a disproportionate impact on disabled people and I hope to take a full part in Committee in trying to alleviate them. For now I will concentrate on the proposals for housing.

The Bill’s proposal for a household cap on benefits comes in addition to the local housing allowance caps being introduced from this year. As we have heard, according to leaks from the DCLG, officials estimate that this will make 20,000 families homeless, forcing people to move away from their support networks, moving children from school and pushing families to places with lower rents—lower rents because there are fewer jobs.

This second wave of cuts to housing benefit will undermine the housing safety net for people who lose their jobs and need temporary financial help so that they do not lose their home as well. It will affect people who are working, but who are on very low incomes, as well as those unable to work, and that, of course, means that it will disproportionately affect disabled people. Shelter, among other organisations, has called for housing benefit to be removed from the housing benefit cap. What is the Minister’s response?

There are harsh new size criteria on all working-age tenants in social housing who receive housing benefit. The Bill allows the Government to reduce the amount of housing benefit to people of working age in social housing if they are considered to be underoccupying their property. The callousness of these criteria is chilling. Each person or couple living as part of a household would be allowed one bedroom, except for under-16s of the same gender and under-10s of different genders who would be expected to share bedrooms. If the household is judged to be underoccupying its home by one bedroom it would lose 13 per cent of its housing benefit, but it would lose almost a quarter— 23 per cent—for two or more bedrooms.

Think what this means for couples who are in ill-health and are having disturbed nights from severe pain, constant coughing or laboured breathing, when the only thing that keeps that relationship from breaking is the possibility of a night's sleep. Two-thirds of the people who will be affected are disabled, which is almost 500,000 people, according to the equality impact assessment. With disability come large items of vital equipment: mobile hoists, bulky wheelchairs and their spares; exercise equipment; oxygen storage; and boxes of incontinence supplies. Where are they to be put if a couple has just one bedroom? What of disabled people who need an overnight carer? Is the carer expected to sleep on the floor? It is estimated that 100,000 of the disabled people who will be affected currently live in homes that have been specially adapted for their needs. If they are forced to move, new adaptations would have to be paid for, if they are not to be homeless, so what saving would the Government be making from this measure?

I believe that disabled people have every reason to fear this Bill. Its most alarming aspect is the Government’s willingness to risk the consequences of such a massive change. With their heavy reliance on secondary legislation, they cannot know the full impact of their proposals or how they interact with each other. We know from the equality impact assessments that disabled people will bear a disproportionate amount of the cuts and that no mitigating action is proposed. I hope that we can take that action in Committee.