Welfare Reform (Sick and Disabled People)

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) for securing this debate via the Backbench Business Committee and for bringing to our attention the fact that the WOW campaign has gathered 104,000 signatures on its petition on the Directgov website.

The fact that this motion has to be considered by Parliament is an indictment of our political system. It is an issue and a cause that I brought to the House’s attention via a debate in Westminster Hall a little over a year ago. I am pleased to say that it continues to receive the deserved consideration of this House as a wrong that needs to be righted. The truth is that we do not need an independent cumulative impact assessment to tell us what is going on. Every week, Members in this House have to deal with the devastating damage caused by the so-called welfare reforms.

In my own constituency of Gateshead, the reforms are having a profound impact on people’s lives, disproportionately affecting disabled people, their carers and their families. The policies and their implementation are causing immeasurable anxiety and tangible human suffering. We all know what the effects of them are. We support this motion as a means of exposing the truth, which is that the Government are driven by one consistent ideological principle—a determination to protect the privileged by demonising and attacking the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

[Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)]

rose—

[Ian Mearns]

I will not give way for the moment.

How else can we explain the fact that of the £63.4 billion of public expenditure cuts forecast by 2015, 29% of them fall on disabled people who make up only 8% of the population? Even worse, how else can we explain the fact that those with the most severe disabilities, who make up only 2% of the population, have to endure 15% of the cuts? In the face of that, can we continue to regard ourselves as a civilised society? What kind of civilised society seeks to finance its deficit recovery programme out of the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable while managing to target tax cuts to the most privileged?

Thirty-one people died in the three years to October 2011 waiting for their appeals against the assessments which said that they were able to work. The BBC’s “Panorama” programme reported in July 2012 that, on average, 32 people died every week whom the Government had declared could be helped into work in the medium term.

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making some excellent and powerful points. Does he agree that the work capability test is not fit for purpose and that taking a template from an American health care model on the descriptors is absolute nonsense?

[Ian Mearns]

I am about to discuss that, and I could not agree with my hon. Friend more.

Put bluntly, this Government, the Department for Work and Pensions and their agencies are telling us, repeatedly, that people who are dying are fit for work. Between January 2011 and November 2011, some 10,600 employment and support allowance claims ended and a date of death was recorded within six weeks of the claim end. This Government have repeatedly refused to release updated 2013 statistics on deaths within six weeks of the end of an ESA claim, calling such requests for information “vexatious”. Four people a day are dying within six weeks of being declared fit for work under the WCA—it is scandalous and an indictment of this place. Some might consider this bad taste, but I am told that there was a story doing the rounds that when the bones of Richard III were discovered in Leicester, Atos carried out an assessment and judged him fit for work. It would be funny if it was not so sad. It is a sad truth faced by 12,000-plus families who every year face their own personal tragedies of this nature—it is a reality.

As if not bad enough, workfare and welfare reforms are of course only part of the impact; cuts to local government expenditure also have the heaviest impact on the most vulnerable. The largest share of adult social care users—older people, people with physical disabilities and people with mental health problems—have to bear the brunt of reductions in social care. The recent joint inquiry by the all-party groups on local government and on disability showed that four in 10 disabled people are failing to have their basic social care needs met and that nearly half of disabled people say that services are not supporting them to get out and about in the community. Three quarters of the 4,500 respondents to “The Tipping Point” survey said that losing some of their disability living allowance income would mean they would require more social care support from their local council, at a time when the councils with the largest numbers of chronically sick and disabled people are suffering the largest cuts in grant funding from central Government.

In my youth I was actively involved in many Amnesty International campaigns, such as those on Chile and South Africa, and those against oppressive regimes in central and Latin America. I never would have imagined then that in 2014 the UK would be the subject of an Amnesty campaign, yet at its annual general meeting in 2013 Amnesty UK passed a resolution recognising that the human rights of sick and disabled people in the UK had been dreadfully compromised.

The convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, which the UK ratified in 2009, makes provisions for access to support services, personal assistance access to social protection, and poverty reduction programmes for disabled people and their families. The Government’s cold and callous welfare changes are in direct contravention of all those stipulations. The time has come for a grown-up debate, to move beyond the smearing of poor, disabled and chronically sick people—demonising them should stop. We need to move to a debate on how we design a society where all UK citizens are supported and given opportunities to contribute. I utterly support today’s debate and I will vote in favour of the motion.

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[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

I congratulate all right hon. and hon. Members who have participated in this debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) for introducing it. I also thank the many groups and individuals who have taken the trouble to lobby their MPs and come to Parliament today and earlier this week. I give a special mention to Jason Roche from the Royal National Institute of Blind People in my constituency, who does such sterling work raising issues for the blind and partially sighted, to Simon Duffy from the Centre for Welfare Reform, and to Philip Connolly from Disability Rights UK. They have done a terrific job and we should acknowledge the efforts of disability activists and supporters in this campaign in collecting such a huge number of signatures to secure the debate.

The dedication shown by members of the public in getting this debate held in Parliament’s main Chamber indicates the strength of feeling and the widespread concern about the extent of the Government’s cuts. We are short of time, but there are issues such as housing, the bedroom tax, income cuts, policies such as changing RPI to CPI, the social care cuts highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), and the general cuts to public services that directly impact on people with disabilities. People with disabilities tend to rely more heavily on libraries and other public services, and it is ironic that in my constituency an organisation called EDPIP—the East Durham Positive Inclusion Partnership—which is a charity set up some years ago to support some of the most disadvantaged families, is closing today. That is another indicator of the pressure that disabled people, their families and carers are under.

This is a trust issue, and I hope the Minister will take note of that because the Prime Minister pledged that the cuts would be made fairly. He said that those with the broadest shoulders would bear the greatest burden, and that people who are sick, vulnerable and elderly would always be looked after. We must remember that the sick, the vulnerable and the disabled were not responsible for the economic crash, yet they seem to be bearing the brunt of the economic burden.

We have heard from other Members about the impact of the loss of income and services. Disabled people are suffering nine times more than those who are not disabled, and disabled people who require social care 19 times more. If the cuts had been made fairly, they would have fallen on the better off, and the changes contradict the promise made by the Prime Minister that those in greatest need of help would not suffer under austerity.

A measure of the civilisation of any nation is how well it treats the weakest members of society, and by that standard the Government are failing miserably. Rather than being protected in a time of hardship, sick and disabled people seem to have been targeted. The services they rely on are being attacked from all directions, resulting in greater inequalities, poorer health and a growing sense of anxiety, fear and trepidation over their future. The cuts have not been made fairly, and they are not spread evenly across public services or entitlements. The cuts have been targeted, with more than 50% falling in just two areas—benefits and local government—affecting sick and disabled people disproportionately.

[Ian Mearns]

Does my hon. Friend share my massive concern that the company that has been delivering the flawed—as we have heard many times today—work capability assessment, has now been given the job by the Government of harvesting the whole population’s health data from their GP practices?

[Grahame M. Morris]

I think that is cause for alarm. It certainly alarms me that Atos, which has been involved in the debacle of the work capability assessments, and which has raised concerns and asked to be released from its contract, is apparently being awarded the contract for the collection of highly sensitive care data from GPs, but that is another Minister’s responsibility.

Social care for children and adults makes up 60% of all spending over which local authorities have any control. The huge 40% reduction in local government funding spells disaster and will have a huge impact on adults and children who depend on vital public services. An interesting statistic is that by 2015 and the next general election, £8 billion will have been cut from social care in England—about 33% of the total. Last year, 320,000 fewer people received local authority brokered social care compared with 2005. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington said, one reason for that is the change in the eligibility thresholds that many local authorities have been forced to make. As well as being unjust and denying people adequate social care, that has unsustainable consequences. It is a false economy. By removing care in the community, we are putting pressure on other public services, for example accident and emergency.

At the same time, changes to benefits are having an appalling impact on those who rely on them. Other hon. Members have touched on the consequences of the abolition at the end of the year of the independent living fund, which currently supports more than 21,000 people with severe disabilities. Funding cuts already mean that in many areas services for sick and disabled people are reduced to a minimum.

With such large-scale and rapid change to the services that disabled people depend on, the Government owe it to those who have been affected to have an understanding of what the impact is. That is why I support the War on Welfare campaign’s call for the Government to commission an independent cumulative assessment of the impact of the changes in the welfare system on sick and disabled people and their families. We were not elected to this House to represent and fight for the interests of the powerful and privileged. Without a cumulative impact assessment, the Government will be failing in their responsibilities.

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[Mike Penning]

Yes, it’s an age thing; the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right—and that is no doubt the voice of experience.

I welcome the debate and congratulate the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing it from the Backbench Business Committee. This is the sort of debate that should take place. I also agree that it should be a non-whipped debate; that is right and proper. We may not all agree about what has been discussed, but it is, frankly, in my opinion something the Whips should stay out of, and we should have proper debates. I will probably get shot when I leave the Chamber for saying that.

There are also some parts of this very long motion with which I have a great deal of sympathy, and there are parts of it with which I do not agree, as Members on both sides of the House will realise, but perhaps we can try to work on what I do agree on and what we can do together to make the benefits regime better for the people we are trying to represent and the lobby that is here today.

Some 24 Members including myself have now taken part in the debate and it is a shame that it was time-restricted, but I understand fully why that was the case. We could have spoken for a great deal longer and have had longer contributions, however. Many Members on both sides of the House have raised specific constituency cases and my officials are in the Box and will have taken note of them. I will write to the Members concerned directly after this debate and see how we can progress those matters forward. I will also take a personal interest in certain cases, and in particular the case raised by the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk). On that case, as the Minister responsible, I apologise unreservedly to the family. It falls back on me, and it is about time politicians stood up and apologised when things have gone wrong. In that case, things clearly have gone wrong and the family have every right to be aggrieved, and I hope the hon. Gentleman’s constituent makes a full recovery.

On the call for a cumulative assessment, I am not going to say to the shadow Minister that previous Administrations did not do that—although they did not—but there was a reason why and it is very complex, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has also said that that could not be done properly and accurately enough. I hope the shadow Minister and others will understand why, although the Treasury carries out independent reviews of different parts of Government policy, it does not do that. I respect the work done in other reports, but they are not cumulative in the way we would like.

[Ian Mearns]

Outside agencies have attempted to do cumulative impact assessments—Scope and Demos, for instance, worked together on an assessment. Surely, given the resources of Government, we can do a better job than those organisations and make a good fist of it.

[Mike Penning]

Actually, I was going to refer to the work by Dr Duffy, and when we leave the Chamber today, I will ask my officials to contact Dr Duffy and his team to see whether we can work closely together. Perhaps we can give them better information so we can be as accurate as possible.

The right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) said my heart is in the right place, and I hope it is. I consider it a great honour to do this job and I desperately want to make things right and proper. If we look at the spending since 2009 going forward and projected into 2015, we see that the budget in this area of Government expenditure will continue to rise. We have a slightly more cumulative figure than the ones I cited earlier, and it is about £50 billion a year, so we spend just under £1 billion a week in this budget. The key for everybody in the House is how we spend it—that we spend it correctly.

I also believe in having a work capability assessment. I do not agree with the motion, but I do agree with the shadow Minister. I think that the assessment was brought in for the right reasons. I am not going to say all the problems were caused by the previous Administration because, frankly, the problems with Atos and the WCA have been there for everybody to see since the general election as well. It is not quite as simple as saying, as some Members have, that we should go out tomorrow morning and sack Atos. It has a contract. As I said at oral questions earlier in the week, I am determined that once we have negotiated the position with Atos—and we are in negotiation with Atos, which is why I was so surprised to read the views of Atos in the press over the weekend—we must make absolutely sure taxpayers’ money is not paid to Atos as compensation for the end of the contract when that comes. That would be fundamentally wrong and I would not agree to it. The negotiations continue.

We have discussed several aspects of benefits today, and I believe that the time being taken for people to be assessed is fundamentally unacceptable. This is an issue not only for the suppliers of PIP and the WCA—we have talked about Capita and Atos—but for my Department as well.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2014 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

1. What plans he has to improve the work capability assessment.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)]

We remain committed to reviewing continually and further improving the assessment. Dr Litchfield’s independent review was published in December, and the Government will publish their response in the first quarter of this year.

[Ian Mearns]

It has come to my attention through research conducted by several disability campaign groups that as many as four people a day are dying within six weeks of being declared fit for work under the Department’s work capability assessment. Will the Secretary of State reflect on those figures? When he finds them to be true, as they are based on his Department’s data, will he come back to the House and apologise to the families of the deceased, who suffered unnecessarily in their last precious days? We can recuperate benefits that are awarded incorrectly, but we cannot recuperate a person’s life.

[Mike Penning]

Our thoughts and prayers are with the people and families who have lost their loved ones. There is a system in place for people with life-threatening illnesses, and particularly for those who are likely to die. As I said to the Work and Pensions Committee, the Chairman of which is in the Chamber, we are trying to get the decision making down to seven days, which we would all welcome.

Mesothelioma Bill [Lords]

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson]

I want to come on to that agreement. As the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) said, at the end of the day this Parliament sets the rules by which insurance companies and everybody else must abide. I understand that the Minister has had the discussions with the insurance companies. I have to say that I think that the companies have come out with a very good deal. Do not forget; despite the fact that we are dealing with people who perhaps cannot trace where the insurance was with their companies, that does not mean that, in most cases, the insurance was not paid. The premiums went to the insurance companies. They benefited from the money and they have not paid it out when the claims were made. This is not a case of there never being any insurance paid, in many cases. In most cases, the insurance was paid and the insurance companies have escaped.

Secondly, as has been pointed out, as a result of House of Lords decisions and other decisions on claims that could have been paid for pleural plaques, for example, the insurance companies have got a windfall. We can debate the size of that windfall but figures up to £1.4 billion have been thrown around. On top of that, the Government will underwrite part of the cost; £17 million plus another £30 million loan to them. Then, the companies will only have to pay out 75%, and 50% of the people who should have been covered—because they did experience health problems as a result of exposure to asbestos—are not even covered. I reckon that that is a very good deal for the companies. If this House were to say, “We think that the deal struck is overly generous and we are going to make amendments to the Bill to compensate for the overly generous deal that was struck,” I doubt very much that the insurance companies would walk away or that they would challenge it, especially as the mood of the House is that many people who should have been included in this are not, and that there are levels of compensation that should have been paid that are not being paid. Those are the kinds of arguments that I have found persuasive when listening to the arguments for the amendments.

The Minister has sat face to face across the table with the insurance companies. It is his judgment that the insurance companies will not buy any strengthening of the Bill. Given the generosity of the deal and that insurance companies try to eyeball Ministers and see who blinks first, it is my judgment that if the Government stand firm, we can get a better deal for those who suffer enormously as a result of negligence.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

Surely the nature of the insurance business in this respect is that the risk is spread over a whole range of different liabilities. The very fact that the insurance companies have done that means that they should pay up when they ought to. They are not doing so; they are trying to wriggle out of it.

[Sammy Wilson]

I wanted to come on to that point, so I will jump to it now. The risk is, of course, fairly minimal in any case. First, it has already been covered and, secondly, I heard the Minister say that this cannot be passed on through additional premiums on employers’ liability insurance. No Minister can guarantee that when insurance premiums go up, some of the marginal increase is not to enable the additional costs to be recouped by the insurance industry. I do not know what kind of scrutiny of employers’ liability insurance premiums the Minister intends to introduce to ensure that the costs are not passed on, but in any case, as the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) has pointed out, the insurance companies will already have made provision for this Bill.

Housing Benefit

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Graham Evans]

The hon. Gentleman raises a very good point and he is right to say that moving house is one of the most stressful things in life.

In my constituency, a disabled lady who lived in a three-bedroom property had to sleep in the lounge and was not able to get upstairs. An appropriate home was found for her with one bedroom on the ground floor and she is very happy. Her old house is now filled by a young family with two children and one on the way. Moving house is very stressful, but sometimes it is the right thing to do.

The debate is a rare example of when I can use Karl Marx as a policy template. We can consider the social housing market using the phrase:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

That is to say, what people can afford is what they need. It is a simple enough concept to support low-income families but, in reality, housing policy has moved far away from it.

First, let us consider the ability to pay. Housing benefit payments almost doubled from £11.2 billion to £23 billion under the previous Government. That is a cost of £900 per household per year. If hon. Members ask my constituents whether paying £900 per year to pay for other people’s rent on top of their own is reasonable, they will get a short response. In fact, if the Government had not taken action—this Government are prepared to take the tough decisions when Opposition Members are intent on driving Britain to economic ruin—the cost of social housing would have risen to £25 billion in the next financial year.

Secondly, let us consider the need element. As I have set out, I understand the importance of social housing and why the country needs it. Let me be clear that the right type of housing should be available to those who need it. A quarter of a million families are in overcrowded accommodation, and 2 million households are on social housing waiting lists. In part, that is because of the lowest housing growth since the 1920s, and that was under a Labour leadership. Some who do not need social housing insist on remaining, blocking families who have urgent need.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman gave the House some statistics, but will he concede that, unfortunately, many of the vacant properties he describes are in the wrong places for the people who need them?

[Graham Evans]

There is an element of that in various communities. In my area, people like to live within their own communities. I accept that. The problem is not straightforward, but it is not insurmountable either. People can swap homes within local communities, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman that that is a problem. The problem is not insurmountable for good local housing trusts or local authorities. It might not happen overnight, but with a little bit of creative thinking, moves can be accommodated—people can downsize and upsize.

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[Mr Raynsford]

My hon. Friend makes an obvious and clear point that illustrates one of the deeply unfair and cruel impacts of the policy.

The policy runs against basic human nature when teenage children are told that they cannot expect to have a bedroom of their own, particularly at a time when those in charge of education are emphasising the importance of children having a bedroom in which to do their homework, so that they can do well at school.

[Ian Mearns]

I have seen an estimate that 375,000 children could be affected by the bedroom tax. Is it the Government’s deliberate policy that up to 375,000 children might have to move school because of moving house as a result of the bedroom tax, so disrupting their hard-earned education?

[Mr Raynsford]

My hon. Friend, along with many other colleagues, has forcefully made the point about the destructive impact on communities and the impact on people who are unfairly forced to move because of the bedroom tax and other measures.

I have talked about the cruelty of the policy. I shall now show that it is unsound and in some respects based on a fraudulent premise. That premise is that the bedroom tax is about making better use of the social housing stock. This is simply wrong when the supply of smaller lettings available to those adversely impacted is hopelessly inadequate. It is wrong when, according to the Local Government Association, less than a quarter of those hit by the tax have the option of mitigating it by moving into smaller accommodation. It is clearly wrong when the largest single group of people known to be under-occupying social housing—notably those who are over retirement age—are exempt from the tax.

I can understand why, politically, the Government do not wish to be seen to be penalising elderly people, but they cannot on the one hand claim that these measures are about achieving better use of the social housing stock and then entirely ignore the largest group of people known to under-occupy accommodation. Recently visiting a 91-year-old pensioner living in a four-bedroom property brought that home very clearly to me. The council is giving priority for a move locally not to people like her, although that would be logical, but to people who are hit by the benefit cut of the bedroom tax, because it is only right that those people should be given priority, to protect them from the tax. We thus get these absurd and perverse consequences where the policy works against the very objective that it is supposed to achieve.

We have heard about the other perverse consequence—the extent to which the policy is leading not to better use of the housing stock, but to increased vacancies among larger properties in areas where people simply cannot afford to occupy and pay the bedroom tax, and to increases in rent arrears, which is not just bad for the affected tenants, putting their tenancy at risk, but bad for the landlords who require rental income to fund increased investment in social housing.

On all the bases, then, on which this policy is being promoted, it is not succeeding and it is having perverse and damaging consequences. The hard truth is that this is not a policy prompted by a desire to make better use of the country’s social housing stock. If that were the real intent, pensioners would not be exempt, and the Government would be increasing, not cutting, investment in new social housing. Indeed, if the impact of the bedroom tax were, miraculously for everyone affected, to find alternative smaller accommodation, the policy would fail because the Department for Work and Pensions would be left with a half a billion pound hole in its budget.

The whole wretched policy emerged not out of an evidence-based study of patterns of occupation, need and mobility in social housing, but out of a crude cost-cutting imperative that was introduced in total disregard of the human consequences. It is a deeply flawed and cruel policy, based on unsound premises, for which all those who are responsible in the Government should be ashamed. The sooner this wretched tax is abolished, the better.

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[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

In the lead up to the 2010 general election and in a desperate attempt to detoxify the brand, two words were bandied about to persuade the electorate that there would be a different kind of Tory if the Conservatives were elected. Those two words were “compassionate conservatism”, whatever that is. Wolves in sheep’s clothing—that is what I call it. No one standing on a Tory ticket in the next general election should be in any doubt whatsoever that once again it will be two words that will define their heartless brand of ideological politics—“bedroom tax”.

What happened to the Prime Minister’s mantra that we are all in this together? What happened to the Chancellor’s claim that he would not balance the Budget on the backs of ordinary people? Whatever happened to big society? Almost two thirds of those affected by the bedroom tax in my part of the world are disabled—that is 21,000 people hit the hardest while millionaires get tens of thousands of pounds every year in a Tory tax bung. Before the inevitable accusations of being feckless or unemployable are levelled against any of my constituents by Members such as the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies), whose rant should be videoed and played to anyone who doubts that it is the same old Tories, let me point out that 6,000 people on Merseyside who are now in rental arrears had never missed a payment in their life until the coalition’s welfare changes. The majority of those clobbered by this Con-Dem con trick are ordinary working people on low wages. This is entirely a Tory and Lib Dem-manufactured hardship imposed on those who need help the most, driven not by fiscal constraints but by political dogma.

I want to concentrate on three consequential areas of this policy. First, the Government have not given sufficient regard to the impact that it has already had on housing associations.

[Ian Mearns]

My hon. Friend is right that there is a significant impact on housing associations. The Home Group, a large housing association that has many properties in my borough of Gateshead and thousands of properties across the north of England, has seen a 53% increase in arrears in the past 12 months, mainly as a result of the bedroom tax.

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[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I will not; I have only a short time in which to speak.

Labour Members talk about fairness, but is it fair that someone on a low income who is in privately rented accommodation should pay taxes in order to subsidise someone else’s spare room? Is it fair to raise taxation from low-paid workers to subsidise other people’s accommodation?

[Ian Mearns]

The hon. Gentleman has not recognised that people with disabilities often get priority when it comes to public housing. That is why there is a predominance of people with disabilities and greater levels of ill health in publicly provided housing.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

It is an issue of principle—equality between socially provided housing and private sector rents. At the moment, there is a discrepancy that the Government—perfectly fairly and perfectly wisely—are trying to equalise.

It is, I think, very irresponsible of Labour to persist in peddling these half-truths about the nature of what the Government are trying to do, and many people in this country think so, too. It is apparent that this Government measure enjoys a wide body of support. It is exactly on this issue where the Labour party is on the wrong side of public opinion. On welfare, the public are consistently behind the coalition parties in the polls—and this debate shows why.

Labour Members who are sitting rather lemming-like in their places have absolutely no idea about fiscal responsibility and no idea about trying to reform a system that cannot be sustained. The notion that Labour would be tough on welfare has been shown to be untrue. It is not the case that Labour is tough on welfare. On the basis of the bits of the debate that I have had the pleasure—or, rather, misfortune—to listen to, I felt I was back in 1974. We have gone back to an early-70s, socialist-style model, in which there is no sense of responsibility, no sense of any fiscal constraints under which Governments have to operate and not even any sense of fairness when, as I mentioned, the taxes of people on lower income are being used to subsidise the spare room.

What is particularly frustrating for Government Members is to have to listen to the same old debates, the same old primary-school name calling of “the bedroom tax” and all the rest of it, which are completely lacking any grounding in reality. We have said that we want fairness. Councils are able to use discretionary payments, and we hear anecdotally that councils are refraining from using them. These are the anecdotes that we hear. It is now time for the Labour party to wise up and get realistic about the nature of the challenges we face and the overcrowded nature of much of this country’s social housing.

Disabled People

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my Front-Bench colleagues for choosing to debate this cause, which I brought to the House’s attention in a Westminster Hall debate at the end of last year, on 18 December, when I urged the Minister for disabled people, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), to conduct a cumulative impact assessment on the real-term effects of welfare reform on the most vulnerable people in our society. I am sure she will remember that very well-attended debate.

The Chancellor and the Prime Minister have repeatedly lectured us about the need for fairness and said that we are all in this together. However, it is clear that it is not the richest, most powerful and most able in our society who will pay the costs of this Government’s cold calculation and uncaring disregard. Instead, it will be the least able, the most vulnerable and the least powerful—the disabled—who will pay the price.

We call for a cumulative impact assessment because a range of cuts and changes is taking place at the same time, and we need to assess their cumulative effect. I am sure Members have read, or at least heard of, the report “The Tipping Point” by the Hardest Hit campaign, which concluded:

“Many disabled people feel that they are living on the edge, and that the loss of even a small amount of income could tip their already complex lives into greater dependence and insecurity.”

That has been brought into stark relief by campaigns outside this House by organisations such as the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux, Mind and Carers UK, and the WOW petition and Pat’s petition. They have brought this to our attention, although I think Members already knew about it because in our surgeries we and our caseworkers are dealing with it in person, on the telephones and via e-mail on a daily basis.

“The Tipping Point” study discovered that disabled people and their families are struggling to make ends meet and feel increasingly nervous about the future, and because of that the Government need to act urgently to arrest disabled people’s slide into entrenched isolation and poverty. Members have heard of Pat’s petition, which had been signed by 62,500 people at the last count that I saw. It called on the Government to:

“Stop and review the cuts to benefits and services which are falling disproportionately on disabled people, their carers and families”.

I ask the Government not only to listen, but to act.

Let us look at the elements of welfare reform that are having an impact on disabled people, and their carers and families. The introduction of the universal credit will result in 2 million households seeing a drop in their income, with disabled people being among those worst affected. The DWP’s own equality impact assessment from November 2011 predicted that disabled households would lose £37 a week, compared with a figure for non-disabled households of only £26 a week.

Another major change is the introduction of the personal independence payment. Last year, in a Westminster Hall debate, the Minister with responsibility for disability matters said that 160,000 claimants would get a reduced award and 170,000 would get no award—that was before a single individual assessment had taken place, so it was a very mean prediction. That announcement concerned me greatly, given that the Minister already had figures on those who would get a reduced award and those who would receive no support before any assessments had taken place. Surely that suggests that the Minister is capping the number of those on PIP, rather than basing that benefit on individual need.

The issue of contribution-based employment and support allowance is affecting many of my constituents. The time limit of 365 days—one year—on those in the work-related activity group, and its retrospective implantation, is forcing many disabled people on to jobseeker’s allowance, given that there is no magic tree spouting jobs these days in places such as north-east England. As I am sure the Minister is aware, unemployment there is going up, not down, yet we seem to be expecting more people with disabilities, or profound disabilities, to get into the world of work, where jobs are already scarce.

Let me give an example from my constituency. It concerns a lady suffering from bronchial pulmonary dysplasia, who was too ill for a heart and lung transplant and who had been on steroids for 37 years. She had brittle bones—osteoporosis—kidney failure and was unable to walk. She regularly had fractures, she had osteoarthritis and she was diabetic. She was initially placed in the work-related activity group and told she would need to find work. As I am sure hon. Members have already fathomed out, she was housebound and bedridden. Thankfully, intervention from my office and other support groups showed that the DWP had clearly made a mistake and it was forced to retract that initial assessment.

I do not wish to talk extensively about the bedroom tax, but so many people who face it do not have spare rooms. These rooms are used to store specialist equipment or are for a family carer, often a spouse or a partner, to sleep in; if those rooms were not available, they would not get that much-needed sleep. We need to remember that those carers save the Government about £100 billion a year, because they take on the role of caring for those disabled people almost exclusively.

Before I move on, I need to talk briefly about Atos, its shocking assessments and the assessment process. I would need all day to discuss that, but I shall just say that the citizens advice bureau in Gateshead has undertaken 1,400 appeals on behalf of people, 1,200 of which have been successful.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not just the welfare reform assessments that are affecting the people with disabilities, but the legal aid changes, which meant that people can no longer appeal against these welfare benefit decisions with help from the CAB?

[Ian Mearns]

I very much welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention, as she describes exactly why we need this cumulative impact assessment. So many different strands to this debate are having an impact on disabled people, and their carers and families.

Before I finish my contribution, I want to refer to a website, calumslist.org, which shows how many suicidal deaths have been directly attributed to welfare reform by a coroner’s court. The total so far is 33. When we had the debate in Westminster Hall in December the figure was 24, so that cost is going up by the month. We need to ensure that the assessment criteria take proper account of the full range of barriers faced by people with disabilities and health conditions, making the assessment and reassessment processes as simple, transparent and proportionate as possible and ensuring that robust evaluation and monitoring processes are in place. We need to bring all the strands together—the bedroom tax, housing, the welfare reform and the changes to legal aid. All those things will have an impact on people’s capacity to deal with the real changes occurring in their lives day by day. I ask all Members to support the motion.

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

Research published in March by the think-tank Demos and by the disability charity Scope, which my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain) mentioned earlier, revealed that by 2017-18, 3.7 million disabled people will collectively lose £28 billion as a result of the Government’s cumulative benefit changes. If Scope and Demos can do a cumulative impact assessment, why cannot the Government? That is a staggering expropriation from arguably the most deprived and disadvantaged section of the entire population and it is perhaps worth rehearsing quickly the range of the cumulative impact: the incapacity benefit reassessment; the reassessment of the personal independence payments; the overall cap; the universal credit; the time limitation of employment support allowance; the change to local housing allowance; the bedroom tax; the abolition of the independent living fund; the 1% cap on benefit uprating; the localisation of and 10% cut in council tax benefit; and the 1% cap on various benefits and tax credits. That is the range of it.

The study found that 123,000 disabled people faced three benefit cuts that will lose them an income of £18,000 in the five years to 2018. A group of nearly 5,000 disabled people will suffer a combination of six benefit cuts, losing a total of £23,000 each over five years. That works out as £88 per week per person, which for people on the breadline is absolutely huge.

The gratuitous harshness of the Government’s treatment of disabled people comes out mostly in the initial attack on and forthcoming abolition of the independent living fund. The ILF gave new life, engagement, mobility and participation to severely disabled people. Two years ago, the Government closed the fund to any new claims and now they will devolve it to local authorities. Let me ask the Minister some questions—and I expect a reply. Will that be ring-fenced when it goes to local authorities? Will it be the same level of expenditure, with no reduction in public spending of the kind that the Government slipped in when they made the switch from DLA to PIP or in the devolution of the council tax benefit?

Then we have Atos and the work capability assessments. Frankly, the ESA system is simply not working. A Citizens Advice study found that nearly half the Atos reports included inaccuracies that were so serious that they would have affected the decisions made and 70% of them included incorrect factual recordings of the history given. Reviews have found considerable variability in decision making, and there is a 42% success rate at appeal; the rate is much higher when the individual disabled person is represented. There is a very low employment rate among claimants 12 to 18 months after the decision.

The inherent problems that remain with the ESA are legion. The descriptors do not capture a person’s state of health in a way that reflects their ability to work, while medical evidence from those who have detailed, accurate and relevant knowledge is ignored. The assessors lack the time, ability and medical knowledge to understand an individual’s condition and how it relates to work and the assessment is irrelevant to work because no attempt is made to discover what work an individual is supposed to be capable of doing.

As so many disabled persons who have been through the process have said, the worst aspect of the employment and support allowance assessment is fear and insecurity. There is the belief that a test has been created for people to fail, no matter how sick they are; the stress that makes ill-health worse; and the stress and uncertainty of repeated assessments, which are like a sword of Damocles hanging over people perpetually.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) referred to Calum’s List. I thought 30 people had died; he says it is now 33. In nine cases, the family believe that stress triggered the death, and in 20 the person took their own life. Who is responsible for this bleak, unforgiving trail of misery? Behind Atos stands the Department for Work and Pensions, with its guidelines, regulations and descriptors, which underpin the Atos work; its targets—which are, of course, denied—for return-to-work decisions; and the sanctions to make sure that the assessors produce results.

[Ian Mearns]

One of the things that I find regrettable about this debate and previous debates that I have taken part in is that Government Members feel as though they are engaged in some sort of academic exercise; they are talking about statistics, rather than the impacts on real people.

[Mr Meacher]

I have certainly felt that. The Minister made an extraordinarily complacent and bland statement; he read out a speech that he was given by a civil servant as though he was seeing it for the first time. [Interruption.] I am referring not to the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), but the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban); we will judge the Under-Secretary in a moment. The speeches from those on the Government Benches have been extraordinarily disappointing, but I want to keep to the subject of the debate.

Behind the DWP stands the Treasury and the Chancellor, who have parcelled out targets for huge expenditure cuts, as we all know, without any prior investigation whatever of the extreme variability in human disability, let alone the wide differentials in job opportunities across the country. This is not an exercise in genuine social policy, but a preconceived shoehorning of the sensitivities of disability into the Chancellor’s unremitting cuts agenda.

If the Under-Secretary wishes me to be a little more positive, I will be, gladly. It is not at all difficult to see what needs to be done. We should make much more use of evidence and the claimant’s own doctor; significantly increase the time available for an assessment; improve assessors’ questioning technique, and preferably transfer that whole function back to the national health service; provide the claimant with a copy of the medical report and an opportunity to discuss inaccuracies with the decision maker; and, above all, greatly improve the descriptors.

I am sorry, but not surprised, that the Minister who spoke earlier has fled the Chamber; it is a pity. As he knows well—the Under-Secretary also knows; I spoke to her about this yesterday—for five months, I have been asking the Minister to meet a representative delegation to discuss these matters. I had to give the Minister a prior commitment—he seemed to need it for self-protection—that it would be a constructive engagement. It will be; we want to work with the Government to make things better, because we care about disabled people far more than we do about attacking the Government, although they deserve that we should. Given that the issue involves 1.5 million seriously disabled people, the reluctance of the Minister responsible, and his procrastination for so long a period as five months, is utterly scandalous. In the Under-Secretary’s reply to the debate, to which I shall listen very carefully, I expect her to tell us exactly when the Minister will meet us.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Charlie Elphicke]

I will speak briefly. I think that it is important that all of us who represent communities with a lot of deprivation, such as my constituency of Dover and Deal, make sure that the Government, or any Government, have policies that make work pay. About 5 million people in this country could work but do not. We need more of an incentive for people to realise their potential and do well in life. Part of that needs to be an economic incentive. Let me pray in aid the words of the Chancellor of the Exchequer:

“We have to acknowledge that over the last five years, those on out-of-work benefits have seen their incomes rise twice as fast as those in work. With pay restraint in businesses and Government, average earnings have risen by about 10% since 2007. Out-of-work benefits have gone up by about 20%. That is not fair to working people who pay the taxes that fund them.”—[Official Report, 5 December 2012; Vol. 554, c. 879.]

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Charlie Elphicke]

I will in a moment.

It is also unfair on those people who are not in work, because they have no incentive to go and seek work. We need to provide that incentive, not because we want to attack people who are unemployed but because we want to give them every incentive to get work, realise their potential and take the opportunity to do really well in life and be a great success.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr McCann]

rose—

[Ian Mearns]

rose—

[Charlie Elphicke]

I have been quite generous in giving way, so I would like to make a bit of progress.

Let me turn to the issue of child poverty. We heard a lot of rhetoric on child poverty from the shadow Minister, in addition to the amazing spending commitment that he delivered to the Committee in response to my intervention. Let us look at the child poverty figures, which the Opposition say are a key reason to oppose clause 1. The figures from the last Parliament show that, after housing costs, there were 3.6 million children in poverty in 2004-05. In 2009-10, there were 3.8 million. In other words, it went up 200,000 under the previous Government. The figures for 2010-11, the latest available, went down 200,000 under the present Government. The achievement of the previous Labour Government was therefore to increase child poverty by 200,000—not a great record, to put it mildly—while the present Government have been in office at a time when child poverty has been falling.

Let us also consider the fact that there were 700,000 children in severe poverty in 2004-05. By the end of the Labour Government, that figure was the same. After one year of this Government, however, the figure had gone down to 600,000. Before the Opposition start talking about child poverty, they ought to take a closer look at their record in office. We also need to have a closer look at the policy of universal credit, which, according to Government statistics and the Red Book, will take about 350,000 children out of poverty.

It is important that we look after children and give them the best possible start in life, and this Government are committed to that. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is certainly committed to that, as am I. I am committed to the Bill, and the measures in clause 1 are really important because we need to do all we can to ensure that people who are not in work achieve their potential, get into work, do really well and achieve great success in their lives.

[Ian Mearns]

The hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) forgot to mention that while those on benefits have had their benefits uprated at twice the rate of those in work in percentage terms over the past five years, the actual increase in financial terms has been on average about £49 for those in work and about £12 for those on benefits. Those figures were put into the public domain by Paul Lewis on “Moneybox” on BBC Radio 4, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman has. It is important to take those figures into consideration. Percentages are meaningless; 50% or 100% of very little is still very little. Making comparisons in the way that he did demeans the debate.

I would like to thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Evans, because this is an important debate on a Bill that, if voted through, will have a detrimental impact on many thousands of my constituents and others across Tyneside and the north-east. I have said this before, but it is important: the way in which this country’s economy works is very different in different parts of the country. It is therefore important to remember that the equation of welfare to work is a two-part equation. Welfare is one part; work is the other. In some parts of the country, there is no work; in others, between a dozen and 20 people—or even more in some places—wait for each vacancy. In such places, where people have no real opportunity to get work anywhere near their own locality, there must be decent welfare so that they can sustain themselves, their families and, most important, their children.

I was fortunate enough to speak in previous debates on this issue earlier this month, so I shall keep this speech as brief as possible, given that many Members will wish to take part in the debate. I shall try not to repeat the points I have already made. Instead, I shall focus on the impact that the Bill will have on families and, particularly, on children. I also do not want to disregard one important set of people—namely, those with mental health difficulties. I believe that the impacts of the Bill on those people has been underplayed to a certain extent.

I visited Tyneside Mind in Gateshead on Friday and spoke to a range of service users there. It is disturbing to see the increased pressure being put on those vulnerable people, who are in a fragile state of mind, to jump through a whole range of hoops, and to see the impact that the new measures are having on them.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that this situation puts great pressure on local agencies that are trying to help people back into work—the Agored Cymru in my constituency, for example, which works with people with mental health and substance abuse problems—and that they are feeling the pinch as well?

[Ian Mearns]

I have no doubt that that is the case. It applies to the north-east of England where the capacity of local authorities to help out local communities has been dramatically undermined—disproportionately, by comparison with other parts of the country.

This Bill provides yet another example of the Government demonising the most vulnerable in our society, making the poorest live in relative poverty. The Government’s decision to cap uprating on certain benefits and tax credits will, as confirmed only last week by the Minister with responsibility for disabilities, result in around 200,000 more children living in poverty. Let us bear in mind the fact that this is not the only policy forcing those on the lowest incomes into poverty. We need look only at the sprouting of food banks everywhere truly to understand the impact of this Government’s welfare agenda.

According to the Child Poverty Action Group report entitled “The Double Lockout: How local income families will be locked out of fair living standards”, this Bill

“is poverty-producing and means that both absolute and relative child poverty will increase”.

How exactly? First, delinking the uprating of benefits from increases in the price of commodities such as fuel and food will obviously result in a fall in standards of living for anyone dependent on state assistance. Given that two thirds of the households affected by the Bill have children in them, it is not hard to understand why child poverty will increase. Furthermore, given that proportionately poorer households spend more on basics such as fuel, food, water and other households necessities, their rate of inflation is higher when the prices of those basic goods increase faster—a trend we have seen over recent years.

In the last few months we have seen utility companies hiking up their prices—the highest change we have seen is about 10.8 or 11%. How on earth are the low paid and those out of work supposed to heat their homes if their benefits are not increased in line with inflation? We are going to see families—we are already seeing them—having to make the difficult choice between eating or heating.

The Children’s Society estimates that the following professions are also affected: 300,000 nurses and midwives in the NHS; 150,000 staff in primary and nursery schools; 1.14 million admin workers, secretaries and secretarial assistants; 44,000 electricians and electrical fitters; 510,000 sales assistants and cashiers; and 42,000 armed forces personnel.

[Toby Perkins]

Does not that list of people in those professions that are going to be badly hit fundamentally undermine the idea that the Bill is really about incentivising lazy people to go and get a job, which will happen only if the incentive system is made a little bit nastier?

[Ian Mearns]

I think it is the ultimate insult to ordinary people’s intelligence to say that in order to incentivise those at the top end of the economy we have to pay them more, while incentivising people at the bottom end by paying them less. “We are all in this together”—I don’t think.

By no stretch of the imagination should these hard-working people—all those I have just listed—be regarded as shirkers. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates the cost of child poverty to the taxpayer as £25 billion, despite the fact that 57% of children living in poverty have one parent working. Surely increasing the number of children suffering from child poverty, which is what the Bill will do, will take more out of the Treasury’s coffers in the long term than would be saved from capping the uprating.

[Martin Horwood]

On the subject of insulting people’s intelligence, will the hon. Gentleman vote for either of the amendments that seek to change the rate of this benefit cut?

[Ian Mearns]

What I will do is listen to the debate and see whether I can be convinced one way or the other.

Given that the majority of the people impacted by the Bill are in work, the Minister should perhaps have listened to my suggestion on Second Reading: why not legislate for a living wage so that low-paid workers are not reliant on the Government to top up their income but are paid an adequate wage?

[Margot James]

The hon. Gentleman talks about low-paid people and what they are suffering, but will he acknowledge that many people have been taken out of tax altogether, including 3,000 in his own constituency, and that 30,000 people in his constituency have at least benefited from the increased personal allowances?

[Ian Mearns]

I live in the heart of my constituency, among the people whom I represent, and, oddly enough, the people whom I represent do not feel massively better off as a result of the Government’s changes. VAT, for instance, has a dramatically greater impact on those at the lower end of the income spectrum.

[Kate Green]

Is not one reason why very low-paid people do not gain in any way from an increase in the tax threshold the fact that if they are working part-time on the minimum wage, they will be below the tax threshold in the first place?

[Ian Mearns]

The position in my constituency is exemplified by the fact that household income probably hovers just above £20,000 per annum. That is household income, not personal income.

[Mr McCann]

Is it not the case that people do not feel better off because since the Government took office, the price of the average weekly shopping basket has risen by 17%?

[Ian Mearns]

I could not agree more, and that, of course, has a dramatic impact on people at the lower end of the income spectrum.

Let me clarify something that I said a moment ago. The average income per household in my constituency is just above £20,000 per annum, but that average is dragged up by some relatively well-heeled neighbourhoods. An awful lot of my constituents are struggling to get by, and I have a fantastic amount of sympathy for them, but there seems to be a compassion bypass on the Government Benches.

Given that most of the people affected by the Bill are in work, perhaps the Minister should adopt my earlier suggestion and return to the idea of a living wage. That could reduce the benefits bill, and also make companies such as Starbucks pay their staff a real wage so that we, the taxpayers, would not have to subsidise multinationals that may not be paying the corporation tax that they should be paying.

The Chancellor talks of strivers and skivers, but I see something different on the ground. I see families scraping by in low-paid work, or jumping from insecure jobs to benefits and back again. I have come across people who are working with all their might and main, moving from one part-time job to another just to scrape a living, and all too often the work that they are doing is demeaning and low-paid.

The truth, unlike what the Government keep spouting, is that those who rely on benefits and tax credits are in work, have worked, or will be desperately trying to find work in the near future. They are not scroungers, but victims of a stagnated economy, and the Government are undoubtedly making the situation worse. We need to stimulate the economy rather than stagnating it. We need to provide jobs in places such as the north-east. That, rather than crippling those who are on the lowest income levels in the whole economy, is the way to reduce the benefits bill.

Let me say this to Members in all parts of the House. When they walk towards the Lobbies, they should think long and hard about whether they can vote to allow 200,000 more children to live in poverty. I know which Lobby I will choose.

[Mr Redwood]

I think it would be a good idea for us to start by working out what we agree about, because during debates such as this the House sometimes becomes very tribal. It seems to me that we agree that we hate poverty, and that that is true not just of the Opposition but of the two governing parties. We see poverty as a scourge. We come here to promote and support policies that will make people better off and improve their living standards—of course we do—and today’s debate is about how we can achieve that in very straitened and difficult circumstances.

I should have thought it was common ground that we need to ensure that it is more worth while to work. In order to ascertain whether that is common ground, I intervened on the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms)—who was very eloquent—and he said that that was indeed Labour policy as well as Conservative and Liberal Democrat policy. So we agree that we want to get rid of poverty and that we need to make work more worth while. That is where our Ministers are faced with a difficult dilemma. Last year’s benefits uprating occurred at about the peak of the spike in inflation and so benefit recipients got the 5.2% increase whereas low-paid people working alongside them in their local communities got perhaps 1.7%, if they were lucky—that was about the average. Suddenly, in one fell swoop, people were 3.5% worse off in work than out of work because of the normal uprating.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Redwood]

What a miserable world the hon. Lady lives in. People on £30,000 and £40,000 need more money as well as people on £10,000 and £20,000, and I am here to try to ensure that they get more money. I do not believe that the Government should take all their money; they should be allowed to keep more of it so that they have more to spend, which would create more jobs. I thought that was part of the Opposition’s argument—or it would be, were we having a different debate. They will not use that argument today, because we are debating benefits.

My right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench are trying to deal with part of the problem by taking people out of tax altogether and cutting the amount of tax that those at the lower end of the income scale have to pay. That is a very good thing to be doing. They are also about to launch their universal credit in trial systems. The whole purpose of universal credit, as described, is to make it more worth while to work and to deal with the fact that if benefit is taken away too quickly, people face a high rate of tax combined with benefit withdrawal, which is a big disincentive to going to work. It might even get in the way of their going to work, as they might not have enough money for the bus fare, the clothes they need and all the rest of the things one needs when setting oneself back up in a job. That is very important.

[Ian Mearns]

Where is the work?

[Mr Redwood]

The hon. Gentleman shouts “Where is the work?”, and of course we need more work. There are a lot of jobs on offer and we wish people well in applying for and getting them. I accept his implied point: in some parts of the country work is very scarce and we need economic policies that promote it. That is where lower taxes can be extremely helpful, and I urge my colleagues on the Front Bench to do more, if they can, because if more money is circulating in people’s pockets, bank accounts and purses, we will have more spending in the economy, which will help.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew George]

I am sure that my right hon. and hon. Friends will make up their own minds on that issue. I do not speak for them, but I have made it clear that I will vote against the Bill as it stands, because I do not think it addresses the fundamental concerns that I have enunciated elsewhere.

To return to congratulating my hon. Friend the Minister on his achievements, my beloved coalition colleagues may not like what I am about to say—[Hon. Members: “Don’t say it!”] Having listened to what has been articulated by those in the Conservative party in recent months, we have to acknowledge what would have happened had my hon. Friend and, indeed, the Liberal Democrats not been in the coalition Government. First, we have to question whether we would have had the increase in the personal tax allowance, on which I congratulate the coalition Government. The Conservatives made it quite clear that they wished not only to freeze benefits altogether but to do so for six years, so we would not even be getting a 1% rise. There would have been a wider impact on pensioners and the disabled, which would have been significant. Child benefit would have been constrained, as well as being cut from families with more than two children.

[Ian Mearns]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful contribution. Given what he has said, does he reject the spin of some Government Members who have said that people on benefits have had their income uprated by 20% over a five-year period as opposed to 12.5% for those who work? When we examine the figures in cash terms—the impact on people’s pockets—we see that the uprating has been worth an average of £49 for people in work and only £12 or so for those who rely on benefits.

[Andrew George]

There has been a lot of selective quotation of statistics, with selective beginnings and ends of the time period within which those comparators are applied. I understood that the purpose of the Bill was as the Secretary of State articulated it when he introduced it—to ensure that benefits would never rise faster than average wages. Our amendment would deal with that.

Atos Work Capability Assessments

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) and thank him for bringing this debate to the Backbench Business Committee. We were delighted to schedule it, and the number of Members present from both sides of the House demonstrates the importance of this issue mainly from a constituency perspective. I, like all other Members, have received a huge amount of correspondence about awful, tragic cases of individuals who have been badly treated by Atos during their work capability assessments.

The fault lies not with Atos, but with its employer, which, in this case, is the Department for Work and Pensions. When we look at the other employers for which Atos works, such as Royal Mail and the NHS, we see numerous cases of people who have been signed off work—not just their current work, but for any work ever again, with a recommendation that they be retired from all kinds of work—going back to Atos, but this time when it is employed by the DWP, and being assessed as entirely fit for work. They get no points and are deemed fit for work. As my right hon. Friend said, the number of people who are not just not fit for work but who die after being assessed as fit for work, is a reflection not of Atos but of the DWP. That is where the questions need to be asked.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will not be surprised to learn that in Gateshead, of the 1,400 cases taken to appeal by the citizens advice bureau, more than 1,200 were successful. I am worried about the CAB’s lack of capacity to deal with other cases that it could have taken but which have been unsuccessful because they were not advocated at tribunal.

[Natascha Engel]

I am glad that my hon. Friend has made that point as I want to come to that.

The proportion of original Atos decisions that are overturned is shocking—it is about 30% or 40%. I would be grateful if the Minister replied to that point. Precisely how many people deemed fit for work by Atos have their decisions overturned on appeal and are signed off work? I have asked about that in the past. The number is very high, but I would like to have the precise figure.

The welfare rights organisations dealing with the people who are being deemed fit for work—for instance, the unemployed workers centre in Derbyshire and the CAB—are swamped at the same time as they are having their funding cut. Not only are they swamped with work, but volunteers are leaving in droves because they cannot cope with the amount of work and the stress of seeing all these cases.

How many people deemed fit for work who do not take their cases to appeal then find work? As has been said, the employment situation, especially the further north we go in the country, gets worse and worse. In my constituency, there are 15 people applying for every job. Is it really for the best to sign people as fit for work when there are no jobs to be had? I would like answers to those specific questions.

We all want people to go back to work if they can, but the welfare state is there to protect those who cannot. People who are not fit for work would love to work if they could, but they cannot. The jobs are not there, but they are being signed fit for work. How many of them are getting a job, and how many of them are just being signed over to destitution?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) on securing this important debate. There is a huge groundswell of discontent about Atos and the work capability assessment. It is deplorable that our sick and disabled constituents are experiencing immense hardship after being deprived of benefits having endured an Atos WCA. We all recall last year’s television programmes exposing the way people are treated across the country by Atos, and I have heard from a number of my constituents who have been badly treated—treated without care, compassion or understanding.

[Ian Mearns]

I am sure that, as a Scot, my hon. Friend will share my concern about the fact that Atos will now be carrying out the personal independence payment assessments as well. The Government have already determined the outcome of those assessments. The Minister for disabled people, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), told this House that by October 2015 560,000 claimants will have had their assessments, and 160,000 will get a reduced award, 170,000 will get no award, and 230,000 will get the same support. How can we know the assessments are valid when we have had such a prediction?

[Mr McKenzie]

I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. The accuracy of assessments is essential, as I will go on to discuss later.

Let me outline briefly some of the cases that have been brought to my surgeries, on the back of a recurring issue now being referred to by my constituents as the “Lazarus letter”. This is a letter they receive instructing them to make their way to Glasgow for assessment and containing many connotations about what will befall their benefits. A constituent who suffers from severe cerebral palsy and could not travel was refused a home visit and told to go to Glasgow to be tested. Another constituent who was recovering after being seriously injured in an accident was advised to attend an Atos assessment in Glasgow. Both those constituents could not possibly travel because they were in so much pain, and I had to get involved and ask for a home assessment for them. It does not end there because they then had their benefits cut or stopped because Atos sent the assessment forms to the wrong address. If it cannot get the address right, what chance does it have with assessments?

Clearly many of my constituents have not been treated with the fairness and decency they deserve. Although I realise that we need to see whether people can work, we need a system that is humane and fair, not one that causes fear and loathing. It is time the Government realised that they are driving many sick and disabled people into poverty. What does the Minister think of Citizens Advice’s detailed year-long study “Right first time?” on the controversial work capability assessment run by Atos, which has revealed evidence of widespread inaccuracies in the medical reports that help to determine whether individuals are eligible for sickness benefits? Citizens Advice also tracked a group of people through the process of claiming employment and support allowance and looked at how their claims were handled. The report’s conclusions are stark: 37 individuals were tracked and had their reports examined, with serious levels of inaccuracy revealed in up to 43% of the reports. That level is significant enough to have an impact on the claimant’s eligibility for benefits—surely our sick and disabled deserve better than this.

The low rate of accuracy is worrying because the reports are used in deciding entitlement to other benefits. Is it not better to have an accurate, fair and just system of medical assessment, one that claimants know will treat them fairly and with the humanity they deserve, rather than a system that is, frankly, unfit for purpose and that uses a company, Atos, that instils fear and loathing in people, resulting in a system where people are continually appealing against decisions? We have already heard that the success rate against the decisions is about 60%.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

As someone who has been in this House for two and a half years and who in the past has been unemployed and has held low-paid jobs, I think that the mirth with which parts of this debate are being greeted will be seen with dismay by many people outside this Chamber.

The Bill is yet another example of the Government demonising and punishing the most vulnerable in our society and making the poorest live in greater poverty. The most important fact to take into account is that the Bill does not target only those who are out of work, whom I refuse to refer to as skivers, but those who are in work on low wages. It does not affect just those in part-time work, but people who are in more than full-time employment—people who regularly work long hours or complicated combinations of part-time jobs just to make ends meet.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the problem is not just with the 1% cap? A constituent came to see me before Christmas who had been made redundant last year by a local factory. His wife is a cleaner and he has now taken employment in a local garage serving petrol at night. He will lose about £20 a week when the bedroom tax comes in because the family home of 30 years is now deemed to be under-occupied.

[Ian Mearns]

I could not agree more. My surgery in Gateshead is regularly populated by people with similar problems. This is a society that Government Members do not understand. In the whole town, the average income of a household is not much more than £20,000 a year. That is the income for the whole household, not for an individual.

[Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)]

Surely the way to help people on incomes of just above £20,000 is to reduce the amount of tax that they have to pay. What the hon. Gentleman is proposing is to tax them with one hand and give part of it back with the other. The way to solve the problem is to do what the coalition Government are doing and remove them from tax altogether.

[Ian Mearns]

What is shocking for low-income families is the impact of VAT on their real income. Rises in VAT and other taxes of that nature have a disproportionate impact on people on lower incomes.

[Mrs Moon]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Ian Mearns]

I am afraid that I will not, because I need to make progress.

The shocking statistic is that the number of people experiencing in-work poverty has risen to 1.6 million. Sadly, workers are increasingly reliant on welfare to top up their low wages. The number of families receiving tax credits has risen by 50% since 2003 and 4.4 million jobs pay less than £7 an hour. We have to ask ourselves whether we want to continue to support a situation in which private employers in particular do not want to pay a living wage to the staff that they employ in order to make profits.

As the Secretary of State knows all too well, a real-terms cut will have a much greater impact on low-income households than on higher-income households because basic living costs make up a greater proportion of their income. Even when a cut is proportional to income, it is often felt more acutely by a household on a lower income, as a greater proportion of its income is spent on essentials such as food, fuel and clothing.

On Friday, The Daily Telegraph reported the managing director of Waitrose as predicting that the prices of basic food such as bread and vegetables could rise by up to 5% this year, and in the past few months utility companies have hiked up their prices—the biggest change that I have seen so far is 10.8%. How on earth are the low paid and those out of work supposed to heat their homes and feed their families if their benefits are not increased in line with inflation? Families are already having to make difficult choices between heating and eating.

Make no mistake about it, the Bill is intended to squeeze further the already squeezed. Analysis by Unison shows that in-work poverty is becoming the modern face of UK hardship. It is estimated that the freeze suggested in the Bill will cost an average family with two children more than £1,000 by 2015-16. The Chancellor may point to changes in personal tax allowances as the reasoning behind the Bill, but that will do little to offset the shortfall in the income of working families. The Child Poverty Action Group argues that a working family eligible for both housing and council tax benefit will gain only 13p a week extra—13p!—as a result of the extended personal allowances. We should remember the furore that the 20p upgrade in old-age pensions caused under the last Government, and in this case we are talking about 13p. It is a slap in the face for the working poor and their children.

The CPAG has also spoken of its grave concern about the Bill, arguing that failure to

“uprate in line with inflation will increase absolute child poverty, relative child poverty and the material deprivation”

of many children. The Bill fails any fairness test with regard to income distribution, and it fails the working poor, the job seeking, the caring and the disabled poor. It will push those at the bottom further down the ladder.

The Bill is shrouded in smoke and mirrors. The Chancellor’s choice of start date to illustrate the rise of out-of-work benefits is 2007, but if we take a longer period, for instance beginning in 1979, we can see that benefits have risen significantly less than wages. He talks about strivers and skivers, but I see something different on the ground—families scraping by in low-paid work or jumping from insecure jobs to benefits and back again. The truth, unlike what the Government keep spouting, is that the vast majority of those who rely on benefits and tax credits are either in work, have worked or will desperately be trying to get into work in the near future. They have made a contribution to society, but their families are really struggling.

Welfare to work is a two-part equation: welfare and work. Where there is no work—in many parts of the north-east there is not a great abundance of work—there must be welfare that is enough to sustain families fairly. I know that in difficult times we all have to think about ways of reducing the bills that face the Government, but let us do that in a way that is proper, productive and economically and socially beneficial. Let us do it by stimulating, not stagnating, our economy; by unlocking the huge investment potential of UK business; and by creating hundreds of thousands of real jobs, building houses and reinvigorating our infrastructure, not by punitively poisoning the minds of ordinary people and punishing the poor.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I do not have time to do justice to the appalling, grinding impact of this miserable piece of legislation on the 3,500 people I represent who are seeking work, including a number of people who until last year used to work for Remploy, when they were casually forced out of work by Ministers. I do not have enough time to do justice either to its impact on the 8,500 working families who will lose out as a result of the Bill, or the 40% of children across Greater Manchester who already go to school hungry. There was not one single reference to them in the autumn statement, and we have heard very little about them from Government Members today.

It is bad enough that, as food banks spring up across the country, the impact of the Bill will be felt by the children I represent. It is worse that the Government believe it is appropriate to label them and their families as shirkers and scroungers—to play the politics of division while at the same time failing to explain how jobseeker’s allowance claimants gaining 72p per week and millionaires gaining more than £2,000 per week could possibly be fair in anyone’s book.

In the past few days, it has become absolutely clear that the case for the Bill is based on a series of what I can only politely describe as false premises: that it is on the side of people in work, when, as the Resolution Foundation pointed out, two-thirds of the people who will be hit are in work; and that there is a culture of worklessness, which the Joseph Rowntree Foundation roundly disproved in its recent research.

[Ian Mearns]

One of the things that stuns me about the debate is the fact that 57% of children living in poverty actually have one parent who is in work. It is dreadful that Government Members discount that fact.

[Lisa Nandy]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. That brings me on to the third false premise that the Bill is based on: that there are two distinct groups, the working poor and the non-working poor, who can somehow be separated out and divided when, as we know and as the research proves, most of the people we are talking about are moving in and out of work at an alarming rate. Many of the people I represent work part-time on zero-hours contracts. They are agency workers and they are in insecure employment.

Welfare Reform (Disabled People and Carers)

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Owing to the interest in this debate, it will be necessary to impose a time limit on speeches. I shall decide what that will be after the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) has finished his speech.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I am happy to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope.

Today’s debate, I hope, will categorically highlight the unfairness of the Government’s welfare reform agenda on disabled people, their carers and families. I urge the Department for Work and Pensions, in collaboration with the Minister for disabled people, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), to conduct a cumulative impact assessment on the real-term effects of welfare reform on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. I was urged by a number of groups to try to secure today’s debate. The importance of the debate and the issues within it is reflected by the number of hon. Members present this afternoon. I am gratified, and I thank my hon. Friends for coming along to support this debate.

The Chancellor and the Prime Minister have repeatedly lectured us about the need for fairness and said that we are all in this together. However, as I hope to demonstrate conclusively in this debate, it is not the richest, most powerful or most able in our society who will pay the price of the Government’s calculation and uncaring disregard, but the least able, most vulnerable and least powerful—the disabled.

I am sure that hon. Members will have read, or at least heard of, the report, “The Tipping Point”, by the Hardest Hit campaign, which concluded:

“Many disabled people feel that they are living on the edge, and that the loss of even a small amount of income could tip their already complex lives into greater dependence and insecurity.”

This summer, the Hardest Hit coalition surveyed more than 4,500 disabled people on their views and experiences of the welfare and social care systems. It also conducted a series of 50 in-depth interviews with disabled people and a poll of more than 350 independent welfare advisers. From the study, it discovered that disabled people and their families are struggling to make ends meet and feel increasingly nervous about the future. The Government need to act urgently to arrest the slide of disabled people into entrenched isolation and poverty.

Disabled people have experienced a massive drop in income—about £500 million—since the emergency Budget of 2010. Recent reports have shown that just in the past year, cuts for typical disabled households ranged from £200 to just over £2,000. The latest estimates suggest that disabled people will experience £9 billion of cuts over the lifetime of this Parliament—half the total cuts to the welfare budget.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend touch on the fact that many people who are permanently disabled now have to go through assessment schemes, which cause a lot of anxiety in their families? At the end of the day, there is a long wait to see what those results are and, more importantly, what the effects will be on those people and their families.

[Ian Mearns]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I will reflect on that entirely. Added to the ordinary stresses of life for disabled people and their families, the mental anguish of not knowing the future is piling pressure on to many family circles.

I am sure that hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber will have heard of Pat’s petition, which closed last month. The petition was signed by 62,693 people, calling on the Government to

“stop and review the cuts to benefits and services which are falling disproportionately on disabled people, their carers and families”.

To appreciate fully the widespread concerns and understand why a cumulative impact assessment is essential, it is vital to look at the specific elements of welfare reform that are affecting disabled people, their carers and families. First, the introduction of universal credit, which will replace six income-based benefits and tax credits for people of working age with a new single benefit, will result in 2 million households seeing a drop in their income, with disabled people being among those worst affected. The Department’s own equality impact assessment from November 2011 predicted that disabled households would lose £37 a week, compared with non-disabled households, which would lose £26 a week. Quite honestly, it almost feels that the malice knows no bounds, as the Government are targeting even disabled children—they are halving support for those children from £52 to £26.

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentions children. I was recently contacted by a father in my constituency, whose daughter has severe cystic fibrosis. Her claim for disability living allowance has just been refused, and the appeal has also been refused. Given that the Government’s stated aim is to cut spending on disability payments by 20%, and that, in the north-east, where my hon. Friend is also from, Atos has been appointed to deliver the tests for people, does he share my concern that such situations will become more common in the future rather than less?

[Ian Mearns]

Alas, I fear that that is the likely outcome.

[Mr Brian H. Donohoe (Central Ayrshire) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate about an issue that is burning hot in my constituency. Does he agree that Atos is not the problem? Although it has to administer the problem, it has been set certain parameters in which to work. The consequence is that everyone blames Atos, when the Government should be blamed for all that is happening to disabled people.

[Ian Mearns]

That is the case. We can hardly blame Atos for managing a system to its own benefit, because it is on a sort of performance-related pay that relates to the number of assessments it makes.

The cumulative effect on children could be as much as around £1,300 a year. Disabled children are losing that sum.

Another major change occurring through welfare reform is the introduction of the personal independence payment, which will replace disability living allowance. The disability Minister made a statement last week, which I thought was a little odd to say the least. She said:

“By October 2015, we will have reassessed 560,000 claimants. Of those, 160,000 will get a reduced award and 170,000 will get no award, but 230,000 will get the same…support.”—[Official Report, 13 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 464.]

How could the Minister or the Department have drawn those conclusions before having done a single assessment of any individual? We already know that the outcome will be that 160,000 will get a reduced award, 170,000 will get no award, and 230,000 will get the same sort of support. I hope that I am not the only Member slightly concerned that the Minister, before any assessments have taken place, already has figures of those who will get a reduced award and those who will receive no support. Surely, it is down to the assessment to determine what the outcomes will be, but it seems that the Department has already pre-determined the outcome of the assessments for each individual.

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. The interest here today shows how concerned we all are, as are the people we see in our constituencies. I share my hon. Friend’s concern. I wonder whether people will simply be reassessed and reassessed until they no longer qualify for the benefit. I want to raise the case of a constituent of mine, a terminally ill constituent—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. You cannot, because this is an intervention. I ask you to resume your seat. If we allow interventions to be too long, it will inevitably take time away from other people. The hon. Gentleman introducing the debate is not in a position to comment on individual constituency cases.

[Ian Mearns]

Returning to “The Tipping Point” report, it found that 84% of disabled people believe that losing their DLA would drive them into isolation and into struggling to manage their condition. Nine in 10 disabled people fear that losing their DLA would be detrimental to their health.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate, my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Many disabled people will be pleased to see it happening this afternoon. Does he agree that a further concern and uncertainty about DLA is whether it will be used by local authorities in the calculation of income for determining housing benefit? While the Burnip case remains unresolved—the Government are planning to appeal—we really do not know how much DLA people will have to spend on their needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Mearns]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. That is why we are asking for a cumulative impact assessment of all the welfare reforms, including the housing benefit reforms.

Some 65% of respondents in work stated that without DLA they would not be able to work; 30% of disabled people stated that without DLA their carer would not be able to work; and 75% of disabled people said that losing DLA would mean that they needed more social care support from their local authority. Cumulatively, we can see a great deal of worry and concern emanating from the households of disabled people.

The Government say that they have to cut spending, but cutting DLA will simply mean that they have to spend more money on other things. It is clearly a false economy. We need to take into account the knock-on and implementation costs of replacing DLA with PIP. The Hardest Hit coalition concludes that the Government have over-estimated the total amount of savings that that will generate by, potentially, £1.6 billion.

Let us consider what is happening with contribution-based employment and support allowance. This is affecting many of my constituents at the moment. The Government’s decision to place a time limit of 365 days on those in the work-related activity group for ESA and to implement that retrospectively is forcing many disabled people on to jobseeker’s allowance. We should bear it in mind that there is no magic tree sprouting jobs at the moment, particularly not in places such as the north-east of England and particularly not with the Government’s economic plan. We talk an awful lot in the House about welfare to work, but it is a two-part equation—welfare and work—and I am sorry to say that, in my constituency, work is hard to come by, and in the north-east of England as a whole it is particularly hard to come by at the moment.

One of my constituents suffers from bronchial pulmonary dysplasia, is too ill for a heart and lung transplant, has been on steroids for 37 years, has osteoporosis, has kidney failure, cannot walk a single step unaided, has a fracture in her right arm, has left arm damage, has osteoarthritis and is diabetic. She was initially placed in the work-related activity group and told that she would need to find work. It should be borne in mind, as I am sure hon. Members have already fathomed, that she is housebound. Only after my intervention did the Department for Work and Pensions realise that a mistake had been made.

I do not want to talk extensively on the topic of Atos or its assessments, because frankly I would need all day. I have been sent a huge amount of information from concerned constituents and lobby groups for this debate, and I could quite easily speak for 10 hours. Unfortunately, I will not have that privilege, but it is a common occurrence in my constituency that people are concerned and genuinely feel harassed by the assessment process.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

This is a very important debate. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the perverse outcomes of the reforms is that the constant reassessment is making sick people even more ill? The financial implications, as well as the health implications, are completely negative. This system simply is not working.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Mearns]

I absolutely concur with that. For people who have a physical disability, the added stress that that brings can often mean that their mental health deteriorates and they end up suffering genuine mental illness. That is no laughing matter for anyone affected by such an affliction. Not a week goes by when I do not get a piece of casework because Atos has assessed one of my constituents as fit for work and the decision is somewhat questionable. From my perspective and that of many charities and professionals, the work capability assessment is not fit for purpose and is particularly inept at assessing people suffering from mental health problems.

According to Mind, 40% of people applying for ESA are doing so because of mental health problems, yet it found that a lot of people with mental health problems are waiting for a work capability assessment. Some 87% of respondents said that the prospect of a reassessment was making them unduly anxious. More than one third had increased their medications as a result of anxiety, and 51% reported that it had made them have suicidal thoughts. Those data are shocking. We should not be vilifying the most vulnerable people in our society; they are contemplating taking their own lives.

I am not sure whether many hon. Members have heard of the website Calum’s List. It shows how many suicide deaths have been directly attributed to welfare reform by coroners. So far, there have been 24. How many more cases are there that have not been so attributed by a coroner? Surely the Minister should be looking into the tragedies that the Government’s agenda is causing.

In my constituency, I was provided with an interesting statistic by the local citizens advice bureau. In the last year, it has conducted 1,416 welfare benefit appeals. Of those, 1,201 were successful. That shows that of all benefit appeals that the CAB assisted Gateshead residents with in the last year, more than 80% were won. That prompts the question: why did the system fail in the first place? Surely it is a complete waste of time and money.

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

The Government will argue that the system and the process are getting better, but I saw a constituent the other day with a serious brain injury whose benefits had been stopped because he did not go for his reassessment, but he did not go because he has short and long-term memory problems. These cases just keep on coming. Does my hon. Friend agree that that does not fill us with confidence for the introduction of personal independence payments?

[Ian Mearns]

Unfortunately, my forecast is that, in areas such as the one that I represent, with its particular age and disability profile, we MPs can look forward only to a tsunami of casework coming in our direction. We need to reflect on how we will deal with that.

Some figures even suggest that the work capability assessment appeals cost £50 million annually. Does the Minister really think that those assessments are effective and cost-efficient? A lady in my constituency with significant mental health issues tried to claim disability living allowance but was unsuccessful, and subsequently attended a tribunal without representation and lost. She visited the local CAB for help, and it assisted her in appealing again at the tribunal. The decision was overturned, and she was awarded £4,000 in backdated benefit. She also gained an extra £41 a week to live on. She reports that that has made such a difference to her physical and mental well-being, she no longer has to choose whether to “heat or eat”—a dilemma that many families with disabled people now face.

We need to ensure that the assessment criteria take proper account of the full range of barriers faced by people with disabilities and health conditions, make the assessment and reassessment process as simple, transparent and proportionate as possible, and ensure that robust evaluation and monitoring processes are in place.

Let me come on to social funds, which were designed to help people with expenses that are difficult to meet on a low income. The centrally provided social fund has been abolished and replaced with the devolution of discretionary social fund emergency payments, including crisis loans and community care grants, to local authorities. The making of those payments has been delegated to local authorities, and of course we know about the disproportionate cuts that authorities in the north-east have had to make in their mainline budgets.

About one third of the users of crisis loans and community care grants are disabled people. Localising that provision could have a significant impact on them, as there is no statutory duty obliging councils to provide that service or ring-fence funds for that purpose. In other words, local authorities can choose to use that money for other purposes. Given the tight budgets that they are currently overseeing, there is a high likelihood that the money will be injected into other services. The Department for Work and Pensions acknowledged that itself in its research.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on obtaining the debate. Does he agree that Jobcentre Plus in localities such as Scunthorpe is concerned about that transfer of responsibility to local authorities, which are ill prepared to take on that very important task?

[Ian Mearns]

I could not agree more. My local authority has shed about one third of its administrative staff. That prompts the question: how will a local authority with such a huge cut in its capacity to deliver for its people ever be able to come to terms with the demands that will be placed on it?

Another distressing topic at the moment for disabled people and their carers and families is, of course, the bedroom tax. The reduction in housing benefit for social housing tenants whose accommodation is deemed to be too large for their needs will disproportionately hit households with disabled people. Of the 670,000 people estimated by the DWP to be under-occupying accommodation in the social rented sector, two thirds of those affected may be disabled. Many organisations such as Carers UK believe, as do I, that the policy will have a detrimental impact on certain groups of carers and many disabled people. Some families may be unable to cover the shortfall and be forced to move.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

Inclusion Scotland made the point to me that it is not only about financial costs. If the family of a disabled person moves away to get smaller accommodation—if it is available—they will lose support networks and contact with carers and families. If they have to move, due to the tax, they will lose those things, which they need to survive. I am sure that point has been made to many other hon. Members.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Mearns]

I could not agree more. I thank my hon. Friend for making that point; it is absolutely true.

Steve Cowen, the chief officer of the Gateshead Carers Association—I cannot ignore it, because its office is next door to mine—has told me about the devastating impact that the proposals will have on carers and their families in Gateshead. Steve says that carers are the glue that holds the health and social care system together. The reforms hit them hard, and hit them again and again.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that the bedroom tax needs to be promoted? The Government need to raise awareness of it sooner rather than later, so that families can budget and prepare for it. It will be a terrible shock for many.

[Ian Mearns]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He is right, but I need to make some progress, so I will move on swiftly.

A member of a couple could have a disability that means that the couple cannot sleep in the same room, for entirely appropriate reasons. A couple may need an extra room for equipment. A local authority—or a family—may have spent a considerable amount of money adapting a property for a family who are then forced to move, which not only would be distressing and disruptive to care arrangements, but could risk a greater long-term cost, because the adaptations need to be replaced in the new, smaller home. It is clearly daft.

Cuts in disability benefits imposed by the Government will, of course, affect disabled people living across the whole country, but, as with almost every other aspect of the Government’s approach to public policy, the impact is felt most keenly in areas with the greatest number of people living in relative poverty—the areas with the greatest need. Wales has the highest proportion of disabled people in the UK, with one fifth—21%—of working-age people living with a disability. It also has the highest proportion of benefit recipients for all types of benefits—20% of people of working age. Recent statistics show that just over 10% of Northern Ireland’s population are in receipt of disability living allowance.

A report prepared for the DWP by Christina Beatty, Steve Fothergill and Deborah Platts-Fowler listed the regional differences. The 20 areas with the greatest proportion of working-age people receiving DLA include Merthyr Tydfil, Neath, Blaenau Gwent, Easington, Caerphilly, Knowsley, Glasgow, and Liverpool—the list goes on. In my constituency, about 4% of people are affected. Surprise, surprise, the 10 areas with the lowest proportion of working-age people receiving DLA include Runnymede, South Northamptonshire, Kingston upon Thames, south Buckinghamshire, Windsor and Maidenhead, Surrey Heath, and Wokingham. So much for “We’re all in this together.”

The report from the Hardest Hit coalition highlighted the dismay felt by many disabled people on finding that they have become the easy target for cuts. Perhaps more shocking is the fact that the Government’s rhetoric justifying disability benefit cuts is hardening public attitudes. Many disabled people feel that the media portrayal of benefit scroungers is behind the increasing amount of disability hate crime, which is at an all-time high. That is despite the fact that estimated overpayments of DLA due to fraud make up less than 0.5% of total spending. As anyone who reads the Daily Mail will know, there are a lot of myths in the debate about welfare reform, and some are very damaging to disabled people. We need to confront those myths head-on. They are lies.

Official levels of fraud in disability and out-of-work benefits are far lower than public perceptions and polling suggest. The Office for National Statistics highlights that just 0.3% of overpayments for incapacity benefit were due to fraud. Figures on fraud for both DLA and incapacity benefit are outstripped by the figures for official error; in other words, mistakes by officials at the DWP cost the taxpayer more than fraud. Though it is true that the welfare bill grew in 10 years, disability benefits were not the main cause of that expenditure or a ballooning welfare budget.

Disabled people feel that they have been deliberately targeted, even though there is a clear alternative. Although estimates vary, tax evasion and avoidance cost the Government between £50 billion and £100 billion a year. It is estimated that a mansion tax on expensive properties, above a threshold of £2 million, would affect an estimated 74,000 people and, at face value, raise £1.7 billion. A financial transaction tax of about 0.05% on transactions such as those involving stocks, bonds, foreign currency and derivatives is possible. The bank levy introduced in January 2011 raises £2.5 billion annually, but a Robin Hood tax could raise up to 10 times that amount—£20 billion a year.

Whatever one’s view of the trade-offs, the priority should be the need to protect the poorest. In October 2010, the Prime Minister promised always to look after the sick, the vulnerable and elderly. The Chancellor said in his June 2010 emergency Budget:

“Too often, when countries undertake major consolidations…it is the poorest—those who had least to do with the cause of the economic misfortunes—who are hit hardest. Perhaps that”

has been

“a mistake that our country has made in the past. This coalition Government will be different.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 180.]

Really?

There are practical things that the Government can do over the next year. The first is to learn from the mistakes of the work capability assessments and ensure that the assessment for personal independence payments is as fair as possible. Secondly, they could review the work capability assessment, starting with the WCA descriptors, to ensure that it works consistently and fairly for all individuals with limited capability for work or work-related activity. Thirdly, they could get the fundamentals of universal credit right, ensuring that disabled people do not lose in cash terms due to the transition to universal credit from 2013. Fourthly, and most importantly, as loth as I am to implore the Government to do anything, I implore them to conduct a thorough cumulative impact assessment on the impact of all welfare reforms on disabled people, their carers and families. When the Government collect the results, they must act on them, so that no one is left floundering in unnecessarily deprived circumstances because of a welfare reform Act, the results of which were all too easy to predict.

Employment Support

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I put the following simple fact to the House: as a result of what we are announcing today, 8,000 more disabled people throughout the country will have the opportunity to move into work, compared with 1,500 people who work in Remploy factories and who will be affected. In these difficult economic times, we have to take tough decisions, but this is a decision that is about much more than that; it is about the sort of country we are—a country that wants to have disabled people included at the heart of our communities instead of in segregated factories.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I would agree with the Minister’s logic if we were in a period of full employment across the country or in regions such as the north-east of England, but the north-east is bearing 10% of the total cuts announced today. Sadly, I am convinced that very few, if any, of the people affected in my constituency and in the north-east in general will find other employment easily. What support will be given to the people of the north-east, so that they can get another job in the north-east?

[Maria Miller]

I do not doubt the hon. Gentleman’s sincerity, but he needs to look at the facts. Some 20,000 disabled people were helped into employment last year, and that was achieved not in easy economic times, but in the difficult economic times we inherited from Labour. We made sure that 20,000 disabled people were able to get into employment. I can reassure him that throughout the country we are very effectively getting disabled people into employment, and that the £8 million we have put aside for employment support will help ensure that his constituents get the sort of support that I know he would want them to get.