Disability Benefits and Social Care

Dan Poulter Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I will give way once more, and then set out a number of principles of which I think the Government should approve.

[Dr Daniel Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I am touched by the right hon. Gentleman’s concern for Remploy employees. I think that it is a good concern. Will he confirm, however, that the Labour Government presided over the closure of 28 Remploy factories?

[Mr Byrne]

That was part of a reform programme that included £500 million for modernisation. This is the point. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is missing it. The argument that we are prosecuting this afternoon is not about whether Remploy needs to change. Remploy does need to change, but is now the right time for it do so, given that long-term unemployment is approaching 1 million? Where are the real plans to ensure that these factories have a future?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Daniel Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I oppose the motion, muddled as it is, and support the Government, based on the principle, which underpins their benefits system reforms, that people should always be better off in work than on benefits; on the fact that disability living allowance needs to be reformed and overhauled for the benefit of the people who receive it; and on the fact also that the Government are increasingly committed to putting in place social care reforms and reforms that benefit carers and people who look after those with disabilities.

It is important to pay tribute to the previous Government’s laudable aims on a number of those objectives, and in that respect we are all Blairites. Tony Blair said, as we believe, that people should be better off in work than on benefits, that we have an over-complex benefits system, and that we live in a country where there is generational worklessness on many estates throughout the land. Those problems are all unacceptable, but it has fallen to this Government to tackle them, and it is a great pity that after the previous Government’s 13 years in power, many still exist and, in fact, became worse rather than better.

The principle that underpins the reforms under discussion is the idea that people should always be better off in work than on benefits. This Government have inherited an over-complex benefits system that is comprehensible only to experts, and the fact that it is so complicated means that the people most in need of benefits find it difficult to access the benefits to which they are genuinely entitled.

The system often lets down the most vulnerable in our society, too, and DLA is in great need of reform. People who have historically been categorised as disabled under the system that we inherited have sometimes been written off by it, even though we know that someone with a mental health problem, or with a physical illness, can greatly benefit from engagement in the workplace. The act of working, and of being part of the workplace, is an important part of the rehabilitation and medical care of somebody who suffers from a mental health condition.

[Sheila Gilmore]

The hon. Gentleman makes the mistake of confusing DLA with incapacity benefit, which has now become employment and support allowance. DLA is not a benefit that writes people off into unemployment; it exists to help people to meet the additional costs of disability, and many people who receive it are, indeed, in work.

[Dr Poulter]

I am not making that mistake at all. The point is that the previous Government’s benefits system put people in a category in which they were characterised as not fit for work, often for the long term. But it is important that somebody who has a mental health problem, or who has an intermittent or a lapsing physical illness such as multiple sclerosis, can, if they are able to, work. People with mental health problems—there is very good medical evidence to support this—often benefit from engaging in work. It improves their mental health and is an important part of their recovery.

[Mrs McGuire]

Will the hon. Gentleman therefore accept that DLA acted as a facilitator for some of those people to whom he refers and who needed to get into work? It met some of their extra costs, and, to echo my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), I think that he is confusing two different benefits. I hope that he will consider the exact point that he is making.

[Dr Poulter]

The point I am making is that the benefits system, which was complicated, wrote off a certain group of people. There were laudable aims, because it is right, for example, to give additional support to people with mental health problems, but an important part of their recovery also involves engaging in the workplace, often on a part-time basis and then, if suitable to that person, by moving on to more permanent employment. The previous system did not, however, help enough people with mental health problems to engage properly with the workplace. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) earlier represented the position of Mind, which has historically taken that position, in agreement with the comments that I have just made.

On support for, and reform of, the care system, my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) said in an intervention that the Government are providing an additional £3.8 billion to the NHS to support better integration with social care. The key to improving and supplying better support for carers, and for other people who look after the long-term disabled, is to ensure that the NHS and social care services are better integrated.

We inherited from the previous Government a system of silo working, with the NHS traditionally working in one of them. For example, the payment-by-results system in many hospitals reinforces the fact that not enough attention is paid to the discharge of people with illness, or to the prevention of people becoming unwell in the first place, and what we need to move away from in the NHS, for financial and human reasons, is a crisis management service that fails to invest in proper preventive care. This Government have already put an additional £400 million into talking therapies, which will help to support people with mental health problems.

The £3.8 billion investment in the NHS to provide such integrated working with local social services will provide the support that carers need on the ground to make sure that many people with mental health problems and physical disabilities get the preventive care that they need. It will also provide an important link in making sure that the frail elderly and people with dementia are no longer inappropriately rushed into hospital but are better cared for and better looked after in the community, and that their carers get the care and support that they need, which keeps carers and patients well.

For all those reasons, the Government have a very strong programme that will deal with several of the problems that this country faces as a result of an over-complex benefits system. Their reform of the benefits system will help people with mental health problems and the long-term disabled to engage with the workplace, which is good for their mental health and their recovery. The reformed system will also ensure that the important role that carers play in health care and in social care is properly recognised and properly funded.

It is only under this Government that there has been a genuine approach to integrating health care. It is only through the establishment, through the health care reforms, of health and wellbeing boards that there will for the first time be a genuine joining up of social care, housing care and NHS care at a local level which will allow carers and the disabled, and everybody who is in need of a better and more joined-up community-based care, to be put together in the right way. Those are the very good principles behind the reforms to the health care and benefits systems, and I am proud to support the Government today.