Employment and Support Allowance

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Tuesday 18th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray]

Absolutely. I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, because that point has been made by the expert disability charities. They do not see this cut as an incentive for people to find work; rather, it hinders their opportunities for getting back into work, if they are able to do so as part of a timely process.

In November, in response to the debate on a cross-party motion on this subject that I introduced in this Chamber, the Minister committed to ensuring that a replacement system of support would be in place for ESA recipients in the WRAG before the cut was to take place, but we have no clarity over what that system is or will look like. She said that support would be provided and an additional £15 million invested in the flexible support fund, but, of course, the flexible support fund is a discretionary fund used by jobcentres to help those in receipt of unemployment benefits to find work. It can be used to help with the cost of travel to interviews, childcare, clothing or uniforms to start work. However, the flexible support fund has been heavily criticised by the National Audit Office, the Work and Pensions Committee and others, because of its complexity and under-utilisation.

There have been allegations that jobcentre staff have been pressured into not using the fund. It is also one of the best kept secrets in Whitehall as information about it is not available on the Government’s own website. What concerns me most is that there is no detail over how the flexible support fund, which will total only £83 million after the additional allocation, will directly support ESA WRAG recipients. Have jobcentre staff been told to target the flexible support fund on disabled people?

Another commitment made by the Minister was to secure better deals with service providers to help disabled people financially. She was going to broker deals with energy companies and telecoms suppliers to help sick and disabled people with their bills, but how many people will be able to afford a BT TV package or Sky broadband on even the higher rate of ESA WRAG? Even if she has managed to secure better deals on energy or insurance costs, we have not been told about them. How much will they aid disabled people? Will they make up the shortfall? Who are the deals with? When will they come into force? Will the Government promote them?

The Minister also committed to having personalised support packages in place by now—either a place on the Work and Health programme or Work Choice. Of course the Work and Health programme has yet to start and Work Choice is not new support. Additional places were also to be provided on the specialist employability support programme, which is a very small project, with only 1,700 members in 2015. Another idea was on job clubs, but we have not had any further detail on that. There is also the drive for work experience places with wrap-around support for young people, but again there have been no detail on whether this will be available for WRAG recipients.

Increased funding for the Access to Work mental health support service has also been mentioned. It has been launched, but is available only if a person is in work or signed off work sick, so it will not help those on ESA WRAG. All in all, we have had many different ideas. There have been different, tentative and ultimately detail-free announcements. In the end we have no detail and no way of knowing how the Government plan to live up to their promise of ensuring that ESA WRAG recipients are not punished financially or how they intend to halve the disability employment gap by 2020, as was promised.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate him on bringing this serious issue to the attention of the House. Does he agree that the Government are just piling on more pernicious cuts on top of—let us not forget—the closure of Remploy a few years ago, and a missed opportunity in the industrial strategy where there is very little talk of how they will close the disability employment gap? They need to be much more ambitious and much more helpful.

[Neil Gray]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed I understand that submissions to that effect have been made to the Government’s consultation on the industrial strategy.

All of us—colleagues across this House, Members of the House of Lords, expert disability charities, which have opposed this cut, and disabled people themselves—are expecting detail from the Minister this evening. She has had two weeks’ notice of this debate. She will have known what I was going to raise because I have been asking the same questions for months. There can be no excuse for not being very clear and for not providing great detail on how her Government are honouring their many promises in debates past to placate their own Back Benchers.

Of course I can predict one thing the Minister will say. The Scottish Government now have limited powers over some aspects of social security and she will claim that the Scottish Government can therefore mitigate this cut for the people of Scotland. I hope that I can pre-empt her reading out that nonsense by telling her that I am standing here defending employment support not just for disabled people in Scotland, but for disabled people up and down these isles. Secondly, the Scottish Government have already spent almost £400 million since 2013 mitigating Conservative cuts to social security in Scotland. At a time of austerity, when Scotland’s budget is being cut back to the tune of £2.9 billion in this decade, and the Scottish Government are having to divert depleted funds to mitigate Tory social security cuts, I do not think that telling Scotland to pay twice for disability employment support would be the strongest position for the Minister to take, and it does nothing to help or answer the questions of disabled people elsewhere. So perhaps she will stick to finding a credible argument to justify this cut and outline what additional support she will provide rather than deflect responsibility for it.

The Disability Benefits Consortium brings together 70 different expert disability charities and they have opposed this cut from the start. On the same day as the cross-party motion presented to the Backbench Business Committee was debated in November, they signed an open letter to the Government calling for the cuts to be stopped. They have criticised in particular the Government’s idea that somehow disabled people are disincentivised to work by receiving an extra £30 per week. The Government completely ignore the fact that the majority of sick and disabled people are desperate to work but struggle to find a job. The Government ignore the fact that a third of ESA recipients sometimes cannot afford to eat on the old ESA WRAG rate. Almost seven in 10 say that this cut will cause their health to suffer. The Government have done nothing to assess how this cut will impact on the mental health of recipients. Nobody could suffer a one third cut in their income and not see their health deteriorate in some way as a result, especially when they are already struggling to get by.

The people we are talking about today are people with disabilities or mental health conditions. They want to work, but they cannot. They are faced with the double indignity of wanting to work but being unable to find a job, and then being told that the financial support they are struggling to live on is a disincentive to find work. I am aware—not just from the debate in November when a number of Tory MPs followed MPs from eight other parties through the Lobby to call on the Government at least to pause these cuts, but since then—that all is not well on the Government side of the House in relation to this policy. I understand that the Prime Minister attended a meeting with concerned Tory MPs a few weeks ago and was told directly by them that she needed to do more. Perhaps we will get some clarity tonight as a result.

We need to hear from the Minister what she is going to do to live up to that quote about liquidity. What is she doing to ensure that disabled people, who are already struggling to get by, will be financially supported in addition to any enhanced employment support that may be forthcoming?

This will be one of the final debates of this Parliament. So far the Government have failed to listen to the disability charities, Opposition parties, the Work and Pensions Committee or the will of the House, given the vote in November. Perhaps in the coming weeks, Government MPs will hear more from the electorate about this devastating cut and come back in the next Parliament with a more serious response.

[The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Penny Mordaunt)]

I welcome the debate secured by the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) and thank all Members who have attended and intervened on his speech. I shall concentrate my comments on the work-related activity group issue, which is at the heart of the debate. The hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) asked about measures to deal with the disability employment gap. Clearly, we are going through the Green Paper consultation responses, but we want to build on the momentum created on these issues and wish to bring forward a White Paper at the earliest opportunity. Additional working up of those ideas will be done with employers and the third sector, which will be able to continue the momentum.

[Hannah Bardell]

I thank the Minister for dealing with that point, but does she not think that that should have been done before the cuts were made? Would that have been a logical approach, rather than making the cuts, leaving people destitute and devastated, and then thinking about how they are going to be helped?

[Penny Mordaunt]

The WRAG issue was debated heavily last year and voted on in the House. The measures that were put in place to provide additional support to that group, which I will go into in detail, were debated at the time and confirmed in the Green Paper. So the issue was mentioned in the Green Paper, but it had been consulted on extensively beforehand.

On the point about the industrial strategy, we are very much engaged with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and we are looking at what can be secured on this agenda from that strategy.

Help is available to enable people to live independent lives and ensure that those who can work have the opportunity to do so. This includes personal independence payments, the Access to Work scheme; local authority-provided social care support and aids and adaptations; NHS-provided aids; free prescriptions; free or discounted travel, for example to hospital appointments; the blue badge scheme; disabled students allowance; the disabled facilities grant; budgeting loans, cold weather payments through the social fund; and housing benefit. I shall not repeat the arguments that I made, as the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts has quoted me, but I will address some of the points on liquidity before moving on to his questions about the support package.

We have announced some additional funding for the flexible support fund in the coming years, which offers grants to support claimants with the associated costs of returning to work. Through the flexible support fund, Jobcentre Plus has a discretionary fund that is available to claimants. This includes barrier awards for individual claimants. Such awards could include travel and care costs to help people to attend training or the jobcentre itself. The funds can also be allocated to help claimants to move closer towards or into work—for example, for clothes to attend a job interview and start work, and much more. Each district manager is allocated a proportion of the national budget. There are very few national guidelines, and they have considerable freedom as to how to deploy the funds locally. This clearly helps with work and employment support-related costs.

As the hon. Gentleman will know, at Christmas we introduced a new procurement tool, which enables people quickly to purchase things, commission services and so on using the flexible support fund, so I take issue with the allegations he makes. Maybe the process has involved a lot of admin historically, but that is currently not the case.