Welfare Reform (Sick and Disabled People)

Debate between Ian Mearns and Guto Bebb

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.