Benefit Claimants (North-east)

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mrs Riordan.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah). She has done everyone a great service in securing this extremely important debate. I am also immensely pleased that so many Labour MPs from the north-east have spoken this afternoon: my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) and my hon. Friends the Members for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck), for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon), for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) and for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). They all took part and have spoken with compassion and forensic attention to detail, which it would be nice to see from those on the Government Benches as well.

To understand the problem, we need to think more about the reasons why people in the north-east claim benefits. The north-east is the area of the country with the highest unemployment. At the moment, unemployment is 9%, compared with a 6% national average. An issue with sanctions is that we suspect them of forming part of an attempt to massage down the level of unemployment figures, in particular in our region. It is absolutely clear, however, that there is a serious problem for people in finding work, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East pointed out. The ratio of vacancies to claimants, when that number was last collected in 2012—again, the Government are hiding more recent numbers from us—was 4:1 in the south-east, but 9:1 in the north-east.

High unemployment in the north-east is caused by economic restructuring, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool pointed out. When people move from, say, being an administrator in the local magistrates court, they are not immediately able to go and work for a biotech company. They are bound to be unemployed for a certain time. We need a safety net to support them during that period. The Government have been boasting about the level of public spending cuts in the north-east, because they believe that we were over-dependent on public service jobs, but it behoves the Government to take a more positive attitude to the people most affected by their chosen policies.

The second problem, also mentioned by my colleagues, is the overhang of heavy industry, which means that we have higher levels of industrial injuries, disabilities and chronic illnesses. Therefore, any problems in the benefit system that relate to JSA, PIP, disability living allowance, ESA, IB or industrial injuries benefit—all areas that the Department has managed to mismanage over the past five years—weigh particularly heavily in our region. In Redcar, for example—it is unfortunate that the hon. Member for Redcar (Ian Swales), who is a Liberal Democrat, has not bothered to turn up today—16% of the working-age population is on out-of-work benefits. That is not a lifestyle choice by the people who live in Redcar; it is because they face serious problems.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central talked about the problem of people with chronic conditions and disabilities who have wrongly been turned down for benefits. That continues to be a problem and I still have such problems in my constituency. It is incredibly unpleasant for people, creates misery, worsens their health and is a prime example of Tory welfare waste. The level of appeals has been as high as a third; the level of decisions overturned has also been a third—the Minister is looking puzzled, but I am quoting from what the Select Committee said about the ESA system in 2012. The cost to the public purse therefore has been £70 million per year. In the north-east, we are used to working with the Japanese and they have a “right first time” approach; we would like to see more of that in the benefits system.

The second set of problems involves the immense delays that we see over and over again. The situation is pitiable and particularly problematic at this time for people making PIP applications. Since April 2013, 670,000 people have made claims; as of last October, 287,000 people were still waiting for decisions. That is appalling; that is almost half. I know the problem is a continuing one, because my constituency office is looking at 35 such cases. At the moment, 900,000 people in this country are stuck in that waiting period. What is the Government response to the report by Mr Paul Gray? It would be helpful to hear something from the Minister. Again, however, we have the problem of the Government avoiding addressing the issue by delaying the publication of the statistics on waiting periods for some further months.

The final and most discussed set of problems is to do with sanctions. Everyone knows that we need some sanctions in the benefits system. Indeed, like my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East, I was a Minister in the DWP during the previous Parliament, and the last thing I did in that role was take a statutory instrument through the House in March 2010 to tighten up the sanctions regime.

Under this Government, however, we have seen an absolute explosion in and abuse of the use of sanctions. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) had an Adjournment debate on this issue in the main Chamber just before Christmas, to which the Minister responded. My right hon. Friend has discovered that, across the nation as a whole, the number of people sanctioned has doubled during this Parliament, that sanctions are longer and that a quarter of JSA claimants will now be sanctioned at some time during their claim. In the north-east, it is even worse. The number of ESA claimants sanctioned has increased at least fourfold and the number of JSA claimants sanctioned has doubled, meaning that in any year, 30,000 people are being sanctioned at any moment in time in our region.

[Mrs Hodgson]

It is obvious to the Opposition that that is what is feeding—I use that word deliberately—the rise in people accessing food banks. When I visited a food bank in Washington in December, the people there said that when they analyse the reasons why people are coming through their doors, benefit sanctions are by far the top reason given.

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The sanctions problem is extremely alarming. For example, a constituent of mine, Mr A, rearranged an appointment he had missed—he had got confused because a close family member had died. When my office got in touch with the jobcentre, the sanction for that was overturned. Mr B was sanctioned for missing an appointment because he was collecting his ill daughter from school. The jobcentre falsely accused him of having a fictional child. The sanction was overturned on appeal, but in the meantime he was sanctioned for 13 weeks. In another case, Ms D was sanctioned because she refused to do a job at the weekend, when there was no child care.

There is a pattern to the sanctions cases that we are receiving, taking up and seeing overturned. I had a look at the Department’s guidelines on what constitutes a good reason for someone not being sanctioned if they miss an appointment. Good reasons include: domestic violence; health conditions; harassment or bullying at work; homelessness; travel time; domestic situations, such as bereavement or child care issues; learning difficulties; and legal constraints. We have heard examples of cases involving almost all of those reasons today.

Will the Minister deny this afternoon that there are any targets for jobcentres on sanctions? Will she tell us how many sanctions have been overturned on appeal? Will she also tell us how many of those overturned fall into those categories—how many people have been wrongly sanctioned because a bereavement, a child care problem or ill health have not been properly taken into account?

From what we are hearing it is clear that decision makers and people working in jobcentres are not clear about what is in the guidelines. When the Minister gets back to her office in half an hour’s time, will she write a letter to all the jobcentres across the land to tell them that those categories are there for good reasons and that she expects decision makers and people who work in jobcentres to take proper account of the guidelines that her Department has promulgated? We cannot have a set of guidelines in the left hand and a piece of behaviour in the right hand, and no connection made between the two.

As my right hon. and hon. Friends have said, however, it should not be necessary for us to come to the Minister to tell her about these problems. She should know what they are. She should have tackled them and done something about this situation. I want to know why she has not. Why has she not sorted out the sanctioning problem? I very much hope that she will be able to tell us, in detail, what she is doing about it. She must understand that she is responsible for the misery caused to thousands of people up and down this country. Of course, it is possible that Ministers in her Department do not care about the misery they are creating, in which case, as no good reasons for what is going on have been given to us, one might say that they are the ones who should be sanctioned.

The upshot of the situation is that we have seen appalling maladministration and cases of people living in a half light that make the Kafkaesque seem totally straightforward. As my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West said, the number of people in the north-east accessing food banks has gone up, and in the six months between April and September last year it reached 40,000.

The whole situation is the result of Tory welfare waste. It is a waste of public money, a waste of official time—things get done and then redone, and redone again—a waste of the efforts of people in the voluntary sector, who would much prefer to be doing creative projects, and it is certainly a waste of the lives of the people who are on the receiving end.

--- Later in debate ---

[Esther McVey]

On what happened pre-2010, that was so significantly different from what is happening now. There was widespread inconsistency in decision making, with similar cases treated differently in different jobcentres.

[Helen Goodman]

Will the Minister give way?

[Esther McVey]

I will not; I will proceed a little further. We had to ensure that we did not have different approaches and inconsistencies. We had to ensure that everyone was treated the same and fairly across the country. In 2010, 1.4 million people had spent most of the previous decade trapped on out-of-work benefits, so our mission was to renew the incentives to work and to remove barriers in people’s way and, in so doing that, transform the benefit system for those who were locked out of work but who wanted to work, so that, going forward, we could give them the best help to get them into work.

The latest employment figures nationally and in the north-east show that employment has increased by 1.75 million since the election, and by nearly 600,000 in the past year. In the north-east, it has increased by 32,000. There are a record 30.8 million people in work in the UK and 1.18 million in the north-east. Employment for women in the UK is at a record number of 14.4 million and rate of 68.1%. That has increased by 300,000 in the past year in the UK and in the north-east by 18,000.

Private sector employment has increased by nearly 640,000 in the past year—nearly 2.2 million since the election—and 60,000 in the north-east. We have done that as part of our transformation of the UK as a whole to get it back to working. There are various sources of extra support, such as the £310 million in the north-east for the regional growth fund. There are new and other companies expanding there, such as Siemens and Quorn. There is offshore development, and £20 million for research to create jobs and innovation. That shows that considerable infrastructure investment is going into the north-east.

[Helen Goodman]

Will the Minister please address the issues that we raised about why people are being sanctioned, and say what she will do about it?

[Esther McVey]

Part of the picture—perhaps Opposition Members do not want to hear this—is about why welfare has been changing and what has been happening. How many people are sanctioned? We know that, per month for JSA, the figure is between 5% and 6%, and that for ESA the figure is less than 1%. In the past year, the number of people sanctioned actually decreased. The number of adverse decisions overturned on reconsideration is 12%, and the figure on appeal is 3%.