Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2011 Grand Committee

The term “personal independence payments” is— I am sorry—inaccurate and confusing, and does not reflect the purpose behind government proposals. I would like greater clarity from the Minister about the prime objective of personal independence payments. If PIP is to offset the significant extra costs of disability, enabling a person to live rather than simply survive, it would be far better to use phraseology that makes this clear and also provides a bridge from its predecessor. I beg to move.

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, I could not agree more strongly with these amendments. As ever, my noble friend Lady Campbell has nailed the issue and then hit it firmly on the head. The title of the Government’s proposed replacement benefit to disability living allowance is vague, confusing and misleading. As my noble friend Lady Campbell points out, it does not even mention disability. No doubt this is intentional, and sadly this Government have taught us to be fully justified in our cynicism. By removing any indication of PIP being a disability costs allowance the Government can manipulate entitlement to the benefit to their heart’s content.

I should declare my interest as someone who has received DLA and its predecessor benefits since the mid-1960s. Should I now expect screaming Daily Mail headlines spelling out the shocking amount this must total over the years? Of course, they will completely fail to mention that it was only this benefit that enabled me to be mobile, educated and employed, and so become a contributing taxpayer for the whole of my career. Now more than ever this week’s shocking press headlines vilifying disabled people as scroungers could not teach us more clearly that it is essential that the press and public know what this benefit is for; that they are given no excuse for the misinformation; and that the name spells out clearly what is in the tin. It is a disability living costs allowance.

The Minister has emphasised throughout this Committee stage that the Government’s whole purpose with this Bill is to change the country’s culture in people’s attitude to work. It remains to be seen whether they will succeed. I hope that they do. But sadly, what this Government have succeeded in doing is changing the public’s attitude to disabled people. It has become totally acceptable to depict disabled people as scroungers defrauding the benefits system. The Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith, was quoted as saying on 11 November in the Daily Mail:

“At the moment hundreds of millions of pounds are paid out in disability benefits to people who have simply filled out a form. The vast majority are getting the benefit for life without regular checks to see if they are still eligible”.

He finished that sentence by saying,

“or if their condition has worsened and they need increased support”.

Of course, concern for those who are missing out was not the lead story.

Will the Minister say when we are going to see the Government move to rebut any of these wildly inaccurate press reports which are helping to stoke disability hate crime? The Government’s acceptance of this group of amendments would be a welcome indication of their intent and I feel sure that my noble friend Lady Campbell has made the Minister very aware of the importance of this issue.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Campbell of Surbiton has very ably described the purpose of this amendment. I, too, declare an interest in that I am in receipt of DLA. Like my noble friend Lady Wilkins, it has helped me in terms of education and working throughout my life.

When I was doing my own research on what the title PIP meant, the most common response was, “Isn’t that something linked to pensions—a personal investment plan?”. The title should more accurately reflect what the benefit is and why support is required. Obviously, a name change on its own will not solve the issue but anything that clarifies why the benefit is necessary can only be helpful. Many disabled people are very frightened, partly by what will happen to their benefit but also about the change in the way in which they are viewed by society. It is not just in the recent media coverage over the weekend.

There has been a worrying change in how disability is reported in the media. The Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research in the media unit at Glasgow University has recently published a report, Bad News for Disabled People. It compared the coverage of five papers in 2005-06 and 2010-11 and found that there had been a decrease in stories presenting disabled people in a positive way and an increase in stories concentrating on benefit fraud. The focus groups in the same study all claimed that levels of fraud were much higher than they are in reality with some suggesting that up to 70 per cent of claimants were fraudulent. Participants justified these claims by reference to articles that they had read in newspapers. One of my concerns with the current name is that it possibly suggests that disabled people are getting a lot more money than they will actually receive. I also believe that there is an ongoing misconception over the purpose of DLA that we need to correct.

The DWP has highlighted in a press release the length of time many disabled people have received DLA as if people somehow do not need the benefit after a certain time. Again, this leads people to misunderstand the purpose of the benefit. Many people with congenital conditions, like myself, will continue to have higher costs of living throughout their lives. Of course, there need to be reviews as circumstances can change, but the fact that some people continue to qualify for these benefits in the long term is not on its own a signal that the system has gone wrong. A colleague frequently says to me that language is the dress of thought. Disability cost allowance is the right name to use.

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[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I hope that the Deputy Chairman will not mind if I intervene from a sedentary position, which I think has been accepted in this Committee previously. I take the Minister’s point. We are all—I certainly can hardly deny even with a big “C”—being conservative with a small “c” on some points. Picking up from what the noble Baronesses on the Front Bench here, as it were, were saying earlier, we have to acknowledge a combination of things, which is nervousness among the disabled population about what is going on, accompanied by a change of name with which it feels comfortable. If the Minister could allay the concerns more clearly, it might be easier to change the name. I ask the Minister to bear in mind that at the moment they are trying to change a name which is aggravating the worries about the actual changes that are going on. That is the political point.

[Baroness Wilkins]

To follow up on that, perhaps I may press the Minister on press reports. Is his department, or are Ministers, ready to undertake some counteracting of what is going on in the press? On a previous day in Committee, he said that we do not control the press. Of course, the department does not control the press but there is a strong suspicion that stories such as the one that appeared last Friday in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph with the same words may have been leaked from the department to the right-wing press. If Ministers cannot control the press, it would ease the fears of disabled people immensely if they could come up with some very positive comments for the radio and television media where they have some control to counteract the appalling image that is being put across about disabled people.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am very sympathetic to that point. The trouble is that when I and my colleagues—and, I am sure, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and the opposite side of the Chamber when it was in power—try to make positive stories, it is terribly hard to get any coverage at all. That is the trouble. The press is very hard to use in this way. I could use some emollient language here. I am genuinely concerned at the difficulties that we have as a department in getting a balanced view. Journalists tend to write unbalanced stories. I am conscious of and very concerned about that. I take it and I will try to get some counterspin, if you like, working. I think you are absolutely right that we are in danger of seeing the position of disabled people undermined by the media coverage and it behoves us to try to get that rebalanced. I accept the commission, if that is what it is, and will try to do something about it.

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I have two final questions. First, has the Department of Health provided a cost for the time and expenses of providing the 2 million medical notes for the working-age disabled people who will go through the new assessment process? Secondly, has the Department for Communities and Local Government provided an estimate of how much demand for council-funded care services is likely to change? I beg to move.

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, the amendment asks the Government to think again about the proposal to have only two levels of the daily living component of PIP compared with the current three levels for the care component of DLA. While changing from three to two levels may seem attractive from the point of view of simplicity, it is likely to be achieved at the cost of creating unnecessary dependency and hardship among large numbers of people. As we have heard it could also result in greater pressure on health and social services.

I am sure that the Government are aware of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation inquiry, which found that,

“that little bit of help”,

was crucial in preventing greater needs developing, enabling older people to remain in their own homes, living active lives and saving unnecessary expenditure on health and social services. The same experience applies to disabled people below retirement age. In addition, for many disabled people it is that little bit of help that makes it possible for them to seek and retain employment. Currently the lower rate of DLA care component can make a major difference and, in the long run, save unnecessary expenditure.

As the DWP has acknowledged, many of those who responded to the consultation opposed the proposal that there should be only two rates of the daily living component and expressed a fear that it would result in many people who currently receive some much-needed help no longer getting it. As the Government’s own review of research on what DLA is used for shows, there is widespread evidence that current payment levels do not cover the real costs that disabled people incur. That includes those receiving the lower rate of the care component. Not only will the removal of assistance to this group mean that some—many—will make greater demands on health and social care services, it will deprive local authorities of the funds to enable them to do so. Currently local authorities take the whole of the care component when charging for community care services. Once more, local authorities will face higher demands with fewer funds.

I shall close by quoting two people who currently receive the lower rate DLA care component and who explain the difference that it makes to their lives. The first person said:

“My medical condition means I need a special diet if I am to remain out of hospital. I use my DLA to pay for this food, and also for the extra heating I need to keep warm”.

The second person said:

“In the early stages of my wife’s illness we got this small sum of money which did make a major difference to our lives. It helped to pay for someone to sit with her while I went out shopping, and it meant that our lives could carry on that bit longer before we asked for more help”.

It is hard to believe that abolishing the lower rate will do anything more than remove much needed help from large numbers of people. This may help the Government to reduce the DLA budget but the costs will undoubtedly turn up elsewhere in public expenditure, whether it is in the costs of increased health needs or in the implications for social services budgets.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I picked up two points in the course of this debate. First, I think the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, indicated that she thought there were 655,000 potential losers from this. Is that right?

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[Lord Addington]

My Lords, the social model is something that anybody who has been involved in disability for any length of time has been searching to get hold of and use more correctly. I remember that when we did the Disability Discrimination Act, we had a variety of people coming in to see the committee, and it became my role in that committee to ask for a workable definition, which I failed to get from those groups at the time. We have moved on and are getting better. This is a step forward. We are building an agreement here, and I look forward to what the Minister says about it. This is something on which we might be able to admit that there is a continuation of government policy over various Governments. There has been a continuation of agreement on this over many subjects among the parties and across all political barriers. Implementation may change slightly over the years, but growth and consensus have been built up.

It will be very interesting to know how the Minister sees this approach being built into a variety of other subjects later on in the amendments on this part of the Bill, because that will allow us to assess how deep the thinking has been. It is very easy to say, “Of course we’ll do that”, and it has been done. We have all fought many smaller battles on disability over the years because somebody has said, “Oh no, that’s the way we do it”. One of the most recent ones I have been involved in, which I hope is coming to a happy outcome, is, “Oh, you’ve got to be able to spell to an acceptable standard to become an apprentice”. I have bored many people in this House with that over the past few months. They did not quite take on board that the use of language can be through various means. The electronic devices in front of you mean that you can transfer written meaning—text to voice, voice to text and back again—in various ways and have been able to do so for well over a decade. The people who have got involved in this—the people who were writing legislation at that point—were just out of touch with the reality and the perception of those other people who do not share the mainstream. They were interacting with one aspect.

If we can get a definition of how that is coming in, not so much for this amendment but to throw into a couple of others, we will all be a little happier. If you have a wonderful, magical definition that we can put into a Bill, I will cheer.

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support this group of amendments, which were so comprehensively introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton. I, too, read with great interest the Scope paper The Future of PIP, to which she referred. I strongly urge the Government to take forward the paper’s recommendations and to consider seriously the merits of this group of amendments, which would ensure that the assessment used to determine eligibility for PIP adopted the social model of disability.

I am somewhat bemused by the contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. For many years there has been a very good description of a social model. I am proud to say that we first discussed the issue on “Link” in 1975. The progenitor of the social model of disability was on the very first programme. I hope that thinking has progressed since then.

[Lord Addington]

I did not say that there was no definition; I said that it was not presented to the committee in a way that we felt we could use in legislation. That is the process. One may have an idea that is solid and makes sense, but getting it into workable legislation is something very different.

[Baroness Wilkins]

I thank the noble Lord for that explanation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, said, it is the Government's stated aim that the new system should be underpinned by the social model. Ministers have insisted that the assessment process should recognise the disabling barriers that stand in the way of full and equal citizenship for people who need support to go about their daily lives. The Minister for Disabled People recently stated:

“Our vision is clear: we want to remove barriers to create opportunities for disabled people to be able to fulfil their potential and be fully participating members of society”.

I welcome the amended draft regulations that were published by the Government on Friday. They take into account some of the criticisms of the earlier draft. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, said, this is only a start. There is still concern about whether the Government will be able to identify the needs of a broad range of people, including those who need to make greater use of utilities or who incur additional transport costs. The amendments will assist the Government's recognition of the need for the assessment process to recognise the impact of disabling barriers. They will reassure disabled people and their organisations that they have been listened to, and they will provide the clear principle on which the Government say they want the new assessment to be based.

DLA and its replacement, PIP—DCLP as we will now call it—were created in recognition of the fact that it is highly costly to live as a disabled person in today's society. It is not just impairment or illness that create costs but the environmental, economic and attitudinal barriers that often accompany such experiences. The Counting the Cost report by Scope and Demos clearly demonstrated that factors such as the suitability of housing, the accessibility of local transport links and whether an individual has already received other forms of support from friends and family will all contribute to their extra costs. Therefore, it is imperative that these factors are considered when designing the assessment for PIP or DCLP. Otherwise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, eloquently outlined, many disabled people across the country will fail to receive the most appropriate levels of support, and the new assessment process will not be fit for the Government's stated purpose.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I was rather surprised to see that the amendment was felt to be needed. I had thought that the past 30 years would have made such an amendment redundant. Some time back, for just a few months and for reasons that I am ashamed to admit, I was in a wheelchair. Looking back, it is hard to say whether the difficulties I had were due to social or medical factors. What I am sure about is that an impairment easily becomes a disability if the environment is not supportive of that individual. That seems to make the difference.

What puzzled me until the noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned it was that we had not referred to the DDA. The whole point of the DDA was to set the medical impairment in a context which, through social, practical, emotional and moral reasons, did not serve to bar the person from full involvement in their lives. What we asked with the DDA was that employers and providers of goods and services should be required to make “reasonable” adjustments. This seemed a perfectly intelligent balance between the costs for small businesses and the rights of individuals not to face artificially induced and constructed barriers to their full social inclusion.

I remember going around the city and looking at our historic buildings, which we had been told by various people could not be made accessible for disabled people. On the contrary, the brilliant architect John Goldsmith, who was then over at the old DoE and was himself disabled, showed how we could ensure full access to buildings from museums to 18th century chapels for disabled people in wheelchairs and the like. In the process, mothers with buggies, pensioners loaded down with bags and a whole swathe of the community found that they had added access on the back of what we were doing nominally for disabled people. We opened up some of the most beautiful buildings of the City to perhaps a third of its population who had found barriers in their way. Without needing to get into a debate about social and medical because I cannot follow down those paths, I say to the Minister that I just do not see how you can separate the one from the other, because they interlock whether they be transport, housing, public access to buildings or whatever. Unless you have both sides of that equation, an impairment will continue to remain a disability—unnecessarily so—for far too many people.