Welfare Reform Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2011 Grand Committee

Moved by

[The Earl of Listowel]

51CAA: Clause 13, page 6, line 8, at end insert—
“(1A) The Secretary of State shall, when imposing work-related requirements with which claimants must comply, ensure that claimants have the necessary type and level of personalised support, and access to localised support, to enable them to obtain employment, or to undertake work or work related activity.”

[The Earl of Listowel]

The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, have put their names to this amendment. I shall speak also to Amendment 71F. These amendments have similar ends. They ensure that hard-to-reach vulnerable claimants receive the support they need to find and maintain employment. Noble Lords will be aware of the currently very high rate of youth unemployment. The danger is that the hardest-to-reach young people will lose out the most in these difficult times. As vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked After Children and Care Leavers, I am particularly concerned for young people leaving care, but other young vulnerable groups are those with learning difficulties or drug or alcohol problems, black and minority ethnic groups, Travellers, those in the criminal justice system and others. Many of these vulnerable claimants may combine several of these tickets.

Good practice is out there. Action for Children’s Youthbuild programme assists such people into work in the construction industry. It provides one-to-one support and has a 70 per cent success rate in gaining employment for its young people. It costs £31,106 each year to keep a male in a young offender institution, so we are making an important difference in the cost to the taxpayer by finding these claimants work.

I shall give another example. Some noble Lords are already very familiar with the National Grid Transco young offender programme. I should declare an interest as a beneficiary of hospitality in the past from National Grid Transco. I was introduced to the programme about eight years ago, and I think it has been running for 10 years. It began at Reading young offender institution. In a nutshell, the programme carefully selects young people in young offender institutions and then provides them with training to NVQ level 3. Originally it offered forklift driving, but it moved on to pipe laying and so on and so forth. If the young person passes the NVQ, he is guaranteed a job in a company. National Grid Transco has been very effective in recruiting businesses such as Skandia, Anglian Water and other large companies to take on these young ex-offenders. Going to award ceremonies, I have seen young men with their partners, often with their young children, starting a life of work, earning money, providing for their family, being there for their young children and giving them an example of what it is to be a good father, and one can be fairly hopeful that their own children will follow that example. It makes a huge difference to reach out to these hard-to-reach claimants and get them into employment. Of course, National Grid Transco has reduced the reoffending rate in this group from well above 70 per cent to below 7 per cent.

However, the Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee’s recent report, entitled, Work Programme: Providers and Contracting Arrangements, highlighted the pitfalls in this area. It states:

“Previous contracted employment programmes have experienced ‘creaming and parking’, whereby providers focus their attention on the participants who are most likely to gain sustainable employment, at the expense of those who face greater challenges to finding work”.

We need to ensure that this Bill hits those groups. I hope that the Minister can accept these amendments or come forward with a similar change to the Bill. The Government’s reforms—I hope he agrees—will be disappointing if they do not reach these hardest-to-reach groups. I look forward to his reply.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

There are quite a few moving parts to this. I have talked about the WFHRAs reviewing that and there is also a review coming out on the sickness absence regime in the not too distant future. There are areas that need to be brought together, which impact on this reasonably specifically.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, for his support and the Minister for his helpful reply. Clearly, he has a great depth of knowledge of this area and I am grateful to learn from him this afternoon. I have a couple of brief points to raise. I also have an aside which is that his black-box approach sounds very familiar, in terms of the young offender programme for National Grid and Transco, to which I referred. It was developed for National Grid and Transco by Dr Mary Harris, who is an astrophysicist by background. Her approach was very much testing and incrementally trying things out until she got a method that seemed to work very well for young people. Maybe there is some read-across there to what is being discussed this afternoon.

The Select Committee for the Department for Work and Pensions looked at the work programme, and although it welcomed it, it had this to say:

“However, there is a risk that creaming and parking may still take place under this model”—

the work programme model—

“since it remains open to providers to continue to focus on the easier to help participants within each customer group”.

Perhaps the Minister could write to me, or say now to the Committee, whether he is aware of that particular problem and what needs to be done within each of the tranches.

The second issue that I would like to raise with the Minister—and I would like to think more about this—is where he talks about attending being a fundamental requirement. One just has to attend if one is going to get anywhere through this process. I can imagine for some young people that even attending would be a big step to take. I do not want to push it too far, but if you have someone coming out of the criminal justice system who is very oppositional and who has complete distrust for authority of any kind, you might need to woo them a little bit before you can even get them in a meeting—but it would be well worth while wooing them in terms of the outcomes at the end. That is the first point; I will go back and think about the second.

[Lord Freud]

To save the department writing a letter, I actually think that “creaming and parking” is not desperately helpful, although I know that it is a very popular phrase. I shall explain exactly why. Within a black-box approach, if you are a provider you are clearly trying to spend your money on an outcome that will be successful. Our job is to ensure that we put the amounts of money into the right level. There will be people who are ready and worth while investing in and people for whom it is not the right time—you need to wait. There is quite a sophisticated judgment there, and you can get those judgments too crudely wrapped up with what are basically terms of abuse in “creaming and parking”. That is how I would respond to that, and I hope that that has saved us a letter.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I thank the Minister and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 51CAA withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, the noble Baronesses, Lady Hollins and Lady Meacher, spoke most movingly about people with mental health problems and fluctuating conditions. What they said was extremely important. I want to add that people in manual wheelchairs are no longer automatically going to be on ESA after their work capability assessment. They may be on jobseeker’s allowance. That concerns me because we all want people in manual wheelchairs looking for a job and if they are otherwise healthy, of course they want to get a job. They may not be impaired in any other way, but they just cannot walk. However, if ever there was a group of people who needed reasonable adjustments made, this is it because around the country a lot of jobs will not be physically accessible for people in manual wheelchairs. With the Disability Discrimination Act, Jobcentre Plus officials will have to take that into account. However, if it were reinforced by the words “reasonable adjustments” in the claimant commitment, that would remind officials that it is an important thing that they have to have regard to because there must be an awful lot of jobs that are not open to people in manual wheelchairs, simply because of the difficulty of getting into a place of work. This amendment is an extremely good one for that reason, so there is another group of people who might need this reinforcement in Amendment 51CD.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am prompted to ask the Minister a couple of questions as a result of what has been said. Are the needs of care leavers being particularly taken into account? The Office for National Statistics reviewed the mental disorders and level of mental health of young people in care in 2004. The results were really shocking. It found that, on average, 40 per cent had mental disorders. The most vulnerable group, the 10 per cent in children’s homes, had 68-plus per cent levels of mental disorder. This is not surprising given the histories of these young people but when they leave care, and one hopes that some of those issues have been addressed while they have been in care, I am concerned that they might have difficulties with these meetings. I wonder whether some of them might even have difficulty turning up to a meeting and whether there needs to be somebody going out to them and making a relationship or whether they need to be worked with through some organisation, such as Action for Children, which knows them well and has built a relationship of trust with them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, we support this group of amendments, which seeks to ensure that a person’s long-term health condition or impairment is taken into account, both when drawing up a claimant commitment and when considering compliance and, therefore, possible sanctions. Amendment 51CE requires that evidence from a claimant's own health professionals is part of any health assessment required in drawing up the work preparation requirements, along the lines set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and emphasised by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher.

The amendments affect both those claiming ESA and those who fail the assessment process and are asked to claim JSA instead. They apply to people with long-term physical or mental health conditions and impairments. I particularly bring to the attention of the Committee the fact that many of these long-term conditions also fluctuate, as has been mentioned, particularly things like multiple sclerosis. As the Committee will know, MS is twice as prevalent in women as it is in men, so it will excuse us taking a moment on it. Some long-term conditions, such as relapse-remitting MS, also happen to have what can appear to be very non-specific symptoms, such as fatigue, generalised pain and cognitive difficulties. It is vital that the assessors understand those, along the lines mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and that the advisers take full account of the claimant’s own physician.

The DWP note states:

“Claimants with a health condition, or who are undergoing regular treatment to manage their health condition (but do not have limited capability for work) will be required to provide evidence of any limitations on what work (hours, nature of work, and location) they are capable of doing. This will be taken into account when setting … requirements”.

However, as has already been touched on, if a claimant raises reasonable objections to their work availability and work-search requirements, although those will be considered by the adviser, where there is no agreement, the claimant can only get them reviewed by another officer. That was mentioned earlier by my noble friend Lord McKenzie. That falls short of a proper right of appeal.

As we know, the process for assessing whether someone has limited capability for work is not perfect. It is not easy. Will the Minister update us on the implementation of the year 2 recommendations from the Harrington review following last month’s closing date for evidence? This continued process and the very real concerns that it is causing disabled people mean that it is important that long-term health conditions are considered when the claimant is asked to sign up to that claimant commitment or when good cause is being considered as to whether a sanction should be imposed for failure to comply.

Even if the review process is perfect, there will still be some people with long-term health conditions who are able to undertake work search but who need their conditions to be taken into account. They may, for example, be able to work very competently and fully but for only part of the day or a few days a week from time to time. In other words, they can work well but not necessarily on a sustainable basis. The resulting absences or the requirement for additional time to travel to work or extra support at work need to be taken fully into account when assessing both their search for jobs or subsequent work record. The descriptors relating to fluctuating conditions will be crucial in assisting the assessors.

Because the claimant commitment is new, we do not know the extent to which DWP advisers will take long-term or fluctuating conditions into account. There is a precedent for health conditions to be taken into account when good cause for turning down a job is considered. Those are already set out and include,

“any condition … that suggests that a particular job or carrying out a jobseeker’s direction, would be likely to cause you excessive physical or mental stress or significant harm to your health”.

The draft regulations do not list how this issue will be dealt with under universal credit. Will the Minister outline what is intended in this regard?

I want to finish by bringing to the attention of the Committee the concerns of Scope, which is very worried about the proposals as they stand. It fears that,

“there will not be adequate safeguards to ensure that sanctions are not applied to disabled people who are unable to meet the conditions due to factors relating to their impairment or condition”.

Scope is,

“not convinced that applying long-term sanctions … will incentivise those to comply after the sanction has been introduced”.

Moreover, Scope is,

“deeply concerned that the use of stricter sanctions will impact upon disabled people receiving JSA”.

After all, sanctions are most likely to affect those who did not fully understand that penalties could be imposed. This frequently involves claimants who already face multiple barriers to work, including various disabilities.

Scope also believes that there is little to suggest that sanctioning such claimants in this way will actually do much to change behaviour when a claimant, perhaps with a learning disability, has not understood why they were sanctioned in the first place. Scope is concerned that conditionality requirements and sanctions, as has been mentioned by other noble Lords this afternoon, will not be applied to disabled people until there has been proper consideration of need. A thorough assessment of need and barriers to finding work must be carried out before any decision is taken to apply a sanction. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how he responds to the concerns raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hollins and Lady Meacher, and other noble Lords who have spoken.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I apologise. I should have put a couple of questions to the Minister. How will care leavers be treated in this system, and what additional support and flexibility might they expect to be shown? Perhaps he might prefer to write to me on those two points.

[Lord Freud]

Before I start on the amendment formally, it is worth making it crystal clear that the structure of the changes we have made bear in mind some of the real issues that we are talking about. I am particularly conscious of people with learning difficulties and fluctuating conditions, or a nest of other problems. I want to spend one minute on the design of the new welfare system, when it comes out like Aphrodite coming out of the sea near Paphos. The first point is the design of the work programme, where the rewards are not to get someone into a job and to keep them there, as it used to be, for 13 weeks. When you think about it, that is not what we want; we want someone to be in a long-term job. The structure, particularly for the hardest to help, is that the real rewards for the provider are when someone is in work for more than two years—it is two years and three months. You do not get someone into a job for two years and three months if it is inappropriate. That simply is not going to happen so when we are talking about the work programme, the incentive on the providers is to match people up with jobs that they can do in a way that the current system simply does not.

The second structural change that we are making, and which is really relevant in this area, is in how the universal credit works. By pulling together the two systems, the out-of-work benefits system and the in-work tax credit system, you do not have this desperate problem that we have today where if you take a risk and try to get a job and it did not work, you go back to go—and now try to get your benefits again. It is a nightmare but there have been bits of sticking plaster on it.

If you are in a fluctuating condition and this week you cannot work—let us say you have a job where there is a little flexibility—all that would happen would be that you would slide up the taper. Nothing would have changed in the nature of your benefit. There is just an adjustment in your universal credit payment and when you can work more, you get more. Those two things are big structural changes to bear in mind when we deal with these areas. They will help a lot because much of what people are rightly so concerned about are some of the incredible blocks that are in the current system and which make it so difficult for people to partake. It is why we have excluded so many people from having a full life, because in modern western society being part of the economy of the country is having a full life. They have been excluded and there is all the depression that results, so there are some really strong underlying changes that should help.