Fishing Industry

Debate between Eilidh Whiteford and Anne McGuire

Thursday 11th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs McGuire]

I hear what the Minister says.

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I do not know how accountable an unelected Member of the House of Lords can be. However, does the right hon. Lady share my concern that the issue—for once—is not that he is unelected, but the effectiveness of his contribution and his lack of experience to represent the industry? It is a bit like playing the sub and keeping the star striker on the bench.

[Mrs McGuire]

When he winds up the debate, I hope the Minister will clarify the situation. Will the noble Lord be part of the discussions? Will the Minister be leading the delegation? I know he has great experience of, and takes a great interest in, the fishing industry, but in some circumstances it would be appropriate for a Scottish Fisheries Minister to represent the UK. The Minister has to prove that a Scottish Fisheries Minister cannot represent the views of the whole UK industry. Under the Labour Administration in Holyrood and here, the Scottish Fisheries Minister occasionally led those discussions. In the interests of mature partnership within the UK, and given the significant interest of the Scottish fishing industry in these discussions, he should tell us why the lead is not being taken by the Scottish Fisheries Minister. There might be a straightforward answer, but I think we need to be more mature in the way we co-operate across these islands in representing the UK in these discussions.

I will not be here, but I hope the next time we have a fisheries debate in this Chamber, it will be in Government time. It should not be the subject of a Backbench Business Committee decision, although the Committee has always been very supportive of holding this debate. The fishing industry is too important for the Government not to take responsibility for holding the debate in their own time.

Working-Age Disabled People

Debate between Eilidh Whiteford and Anne McGuire

Thursday 25th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

Thanks very much, Mr Sheridan, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

First, I welcome the Minister to what I think is her first set-piece debate on an issue in her portfolio. She follows a distinguished line of Conservative Ministers for Disabled People. We should never forget that her colleague, the Foreign Secretary, piloted the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 through the House. Frankly, he did so in the teeth of opposition from his own party, and he should be recognised for the contribution that he made with that first step along the road of legislating for the rights of disabled people. I welcome the new Minister to her post.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) for mentioning Lord Morris of Manchester, who was the first Minister for Disabled People, and certainly a great source of advice and opinion to me when I was the Minister. Along with his colleague, Lord Ashley, he made sure that we all kept on our toes on these issues. They were at the forefront and the pioneers of parliamentary activity, as well as activity outside Parliament, in ensuring that the rights of disabled people were recognised. The memorial service for Lord Morris will be held soon and I hope that many colleagues can attend.

I also particularly thank members of the Work and Pensions Committee for their valuable report. I appreciate the time and effort that have gone into accumulating the evidence and presenting the report to Parliament. It is an interesting comparison that we in Westminster Hall this afternoon are competing with a badger cull debate in the main Chamber. I will let that comment stick to the wall and say no more.

I offer a vote of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South, who has been a Member of the House since 1997. She came into Parliament with me as one of the so-called Blair babes. At times, we felt like Blair’s grannies, but never mind. My hon. Friend has served the House with distinction since that time, no less than during the past two years in her chairmanship of the Work and Pensions Committee. She brought to the report, and indeed to her contribution to our deliberations today, her very particular and personal insight into disability benefits.

Sometimes I think that MPs give the impression that somehow they are not real people, and that we do not live lives out there that have nothing to do with politics. I know from my hon. Friend’s activities, both as a teacher and as a political activist, that she has provided inspiration to many people who are disabled—not only in the way that she conducts campaigns and is articulate on behalf of disabled people, but because of a very particular knowledge. We should recognise that and not hide her particular light under a bushel. I want to pay that particular compliment to her. She has done that work while managing yet another difficulty, having just spent more than three months in hospital.

I thank the Work and Pensions Committee for providing a pretty comprehensive picture of the changes that are taking place. I appreciate that the report is a little dated now in some respects, but the views that underpin it have not dated, not least the view of the context and environment in which the changes are taking place. I will come back to that point shortly.

I also welcome the Government’s response to the report, although I must say that in many places it is pretty inadequate. It is full of fine words, but as some people in some parts of the country say, “Fine words butter no parsnips.” There are a lot of people out there who think the Government response is camouflage rather than one of substance.

However, I welcome the Government’s recognition that more work needs to be done before personal independence payments are introduced in April 2013. We have heard some of the reasons why more work needs to be done. We are talking about an incredibly tight timetable for a change that will throw the financial stability of many disabled people in this country up in the air. We should not run away from that, and I hope that the Minister will not run away from it. Therefore, will she update us on the progress on her deliberations on those changes that are necessary and that the Select Committee report has identified as necessary?

I hope that the new Minister will not underestimate the distress that the uncertainty is causing out there; I do not think she will. Yesterday, I met with some young people from a Royal National Institute of Blind People group called Haggeye. You, Mr Sheridan, will not be surprised to learn that that is a Scottish group; they have amalgamated our national food with their own disability to name the group. They were joined by some other young blind and visually impaired people from other parts of the country. They had a tour of Parliament, and they met with some MPs and Mr Speaker.

At one point during the day, I had a conversation with them and I must say to the Minister that that conversation with those young blind and visually impaired people encapsulated many of the discussions that I have had, and I am sure other Members of the House have had, during the last several months. We talked about their fear of the future. One young woman said to me, “I don’t think I’m going to qualify.” There are grave concerns out there among visually impaired people about whether they will qualify for the new PIP. She also asked, “What happens to me?” The financial underpinning that allows her to conduct her life could be taken away.

The Government must accept responsibility for the environment that they have created. I welcome the words of, I think, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), and indeed of the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd), who are supporters of the coalition Government. They recognised that throwing a hand grenade into the debate on the disability agenda in June 2010, without any warning or consultation, did not set the right tone for the debate.

The Minister needs to look again at what is meant by “co-production”. The hon. Member for Eastbourne made a valiant attempt to say that that announcement in June 2010 was an example of co-production. It was not co-production; co-production would have meant that disabled people were involved in discussions before the announcement was made. If he wants to see some experience of co-production, in 2005, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) started on the route to our welfare reforms and he did so by talking to disabled people and involving them from the beginning, rather than saying, “The Chancellor has said that and we now need to manufacture a new benefit around it.” The Chancellor effectively said that there would be a cut of whatever billions of pounds he happened to conjure up at that time. I appreciate that the Minister is new to her post, but the Government must accept some responsibility for that environment.

I also want to highlight some other issues that I hope the Minister will address. I note, for example, that the response by the Department for Work and Pensions fails to reply effectively to the evidence given by Professor Sainsbury, who, at paragraph 38 on page 15, says that

“he was ‘at a loss’ as to where the 20% figure came from”

and did not know how it could have been put into the public domain

“before any work had been done on the criteria and thresholds for the benefit.”

Although we have heard fine words that the change is about serving the needs of disabled people and so on—we all know the script—the reality is that the figure was put into the public domain and policy arena as a savings target, not to define a new benefit to meet the needs of disabled people. No matter how much work has been done in recent months to try to ameliorate that impression, it still sticks, because that is where it emanated from. I hope the Minister will allude to that initial statement by the Chancellor.

Moving on, the Government’s response says on, I think, page 5 that the 20% figure was

“a high level assumption”

and that further work is being undertaken on

“assessment criteria and the detailed policy that will underpin primary legislation. More detailed and updated expenditure savings figures will be provided”.

Will the Minister provide us with some of that information to allow people to start to flesh out exactly what is meant by this new benefit? It is disturbing that anguish has been caused to many disabled people on the basis of a high-level assumption of a 20% cut, translated into the withdrawal of benefit from between 500,000 and 640,000 people—that is the rough spectrum, depending on how we cut the statistics. I hope she will refer to that. Are there current working assumptions for the reduction in spend and numbers? If so, will she share them with us?

I was pleased that various Committee members here, and indeed the Committee as a whole, highlighted the issue of media coverage. The reality is that the Government set the initial context. We should not run away from that, and I hope that the Minister will not because some of her ministerial colleagues were disgraceful in how they never or rarely rebutted any of the scrounger stories in the national newspapers. I was delighted that the hon. Member for Eastbourne mentioned some of those issues. Indeed, on occasion, the Secretary of State fuelled such media stories. I remember one about disability living allowance for children and Motability cars. He said—it was in quotation marks—that all people had to do was fill in an application form for DLA and, Bob’s your uncle, they could move almost directly into their new Motability car.

[Dr Whiteford]

The right hon. Lady is making an important point about how disabled people have been vilified in the press in recent months. Does she agree that far from being a benefit paid to people who cannot help themselves, DLA actually helps a lot of disabled people keep themselves in work, making them and their families less dependent on the state?

[Mrs McGuire]

That is right, and it is a part of this debate that has been missed. Although a significant number of people on DLA are not in work, an equally significant number are, and they use their disability cars, if they have them, to get from home to their workplace. If they are not on the higher rate, they can use their allowance to meet some of the additional costs. One of the young visually impaired people I met in my discussions with Haggeye yesterday said that he used his DLA for a taxi to work, because it was too difficult for him to navigate the roads. He worried about that. The hon. Lady is quite right.

I will give the Minister a bit of flexibility, as this is her first outing, but the newspapers have been awash with stories equating in the public mind those on disability benefits with scroungers. Glasgow university, commissioned by Inclusion London, delivered a report showing that the number of negative stories about disability had increased. Frankly, many people felt that the Government had set up an Aunt Sally and then knocked it down. Instead of being honest about what disability living allowance is for, they set up the image that everybody who claimed it was not entitled to it. There have been instances of hate crime, with people being harassed because others did not think they were as disabled as they made out to be. The way that the debate has been conducted has had a domino effect.

I thought optimistically that the Secretary of State had seen the error of his ways but, disappointingly, he has proved himself a serial offender. He was at it again this morning, this time talking not about disabled people but about people with families. I use this to illustrate my point about setting the context. I was aghast to hear him say in his interview this morning that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of families out there on benefits who have multitudes of children. A freedom of information document published by the DWP on 12 September shows that there are 10 families in receipt of benefits who have 13 children. It is not until we get to families with one, two and three children that the numbers run into hundreds of thousands.

I do not think that a family with three children is large. I certainly do not think that a family with four children is large, having come from one myself. To set a context by saying that reform—in this case, reform of other benefits—is essential because tens of thousands of people are out there abusing the system is disrespectful to the people who, more often than not, want to get out of the benefits system. The Government certainly set the context quite nicely in terms of disabled people, because disabled people have been feeling threatened since then.

I was interested to read on page 5 of the Government response that the Department is

“developing a case study approach to illustrate the contribution disabled people make to society”.

Again, what exactly is happening? When is it happening? What newspapers have been approached? It is fine for the Minister for Disabled People to write features for major disability organisations, but it is not the opinions of those organisations that we need to change; it is those of the mainstream press. I am interested to hear her response.

I appreciate that we have taken a lot of time and will probably run out of time, and that the Minister has a lot of questions to answer. On the assessment of the impact of introducing PIP, will she consider a cumulative impact assessment of all the benefits affecting disabled people? The previous Minister used to say that it was too difficult, but it is astonishing to me that a Department with more than 100,000 civil servants should find it too difficult to come up with a cumulative impact assessment of their policies on disabled people. Disabled people know what the impact will be, and if the Government are not prepared to accept some of the findings of the Hardest Hit campaign and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson’s report earlier last week, they are duty bound to come up with their own impact assessment. They cannot just discredit everyone else’s and say, “We’re not going to do one.” I hope that the new Minister will think about that.

Can the Minister tell us when we will see the final regulations? Time is getting tight; there is no doubt about that. PIP is coming in next April, and we have not yet seen the final regulations. I am also interested in knowing what the Minister’s interpretation of co-production is. It is not just consultation after the effect; it is the involvement that I have mentioned.

I, too, welcomed the comments made by the previous Minister for Employment, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), about the idea of there being a “conversation”, but let me test the logistics of that idea because this is a crucial issue. The Government’s response says that there will be no time limit, which I am sure is a welcome statement, but although there might not be explicit targets, if a company has to carry out some 100,000 reassessments in a short time, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South has said, there is an implied target. There might not be a target in the contract, but one is certainly implied, particularly I understand that Capita has already found out that 60% of people would like home visits. I just do not know how the Government will do this.

On the prime contractors, many colleagues have identified that there is no great confidence in at least one of them, and the Minister might be aware that in Scotland Atos has contracted with an NHS social enterprise called Salus. Atos told Third Force News, the newspaper of the voluntary sector in Scotland, that

“subcontracting the work to the NHS would help assessors make more informed decisions as they would work alongside local health boards when it came to assessing claimants.”

Why would Atos contract with an NHS unit only in Scotland? Is there a particular reason, perhaps concerning the politics of Scotland or because Atos feels that there is more sensitivity there? To whom is it subcontracting in the other areas in which it has the contract? Regarding the trail of public money, is it not ludicrous that the Department for Work and Pensions, as a public sector organisation, is contracting with a private sector organisation, in this case Atos, which is then subcontracting to a public sector organisation? What way is that to run a business?

[Dr Whiteford]

The right hon. Lady asks a valid question. Does she share my view that we might now get more accurate assessments?

[Mrs McGuire]

The expectation would be that there might be more accurate assessments, but we must also take on board the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), who said that the assessment criteria are set not by Atos but by the Government. The issue is how those assessment criteria are interpreted further down the line. We might get better, more valuable assessments, but as the previous Minister said on more than one occasion in this House, the ultimate decision is made by the decision maker in the Department for Work and Pensions, and the criteria are set down by that Department. We must always remember that.

I want to come on to an issue relating to Atos, of which the Minister may or may not be aware. I understand that this afternoon some major disability organisations are up in arms about the fact that Atos has apparently named them in the contract. They did not know anything about it. As a matter of fact, they are incandescent with rage, because their being named in the contract has given the company an element of credibility. In one instance the contract states, I think, that those voluntary organisations are going to carry out the disability training of Atos staff and do various other kinds of partnership work with the company. Someone in one of the organisations has said, “It is difficult to know whether we should fall about laughing, because it is so ridiculous.”

Will the Minister tell us whether Atos named in the contract organisations that it had not contacted? What is happening now that those organisations are challenging the fact that Atos has put them down there? If the contractual system has proved to be flawed, will the Minister say that she will have to review the contracts? We cannot have a situation in which a private sector contractor uses as cover disability organisations in the voluntary sector, when those organisations have not given their permission and have in some instances said that they would have nothing at all to do with Atos.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Eilidh Whiteford and Anne McGuire

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs McGuire]

The hon. Lady definitely is not getting in—certainly not at the moment.

The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) said that there are communities in all nations of this country—smaller communities, but sometimes larger ones—where there is an insufficient supply of houses, which is very true. People might have lived in them all their lives and would be unable physically to move.

[Dr Whiteford]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely important point. This problem is not isolated to Argyll and other island communities. In Scotland, 44% of social tenants need a one-bedroom house, yet only 24% can have one. That is the fundamental nature of the housing stock in the whole country.

[Mrs McGuire]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point.