Disability Support

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to commission an independent assessment of the cumulative impact of changes to the social security system on sick and disabled people and their families and carers.

It has been a long day for everybody, but I appreciate the fact that we are able to hold this debate, as it is so important to the millions of disabled people, many of whom will be watching today. We applied to the Backbench Business Committee for this debate back in June, and I am grateful to the Committee’s members for supporting this debate, but in six months a lot has marched on.

Let me refresh everybody’s memories. Back in 2013, nearly 105,000 people signed a petition launched by the War On Welfare campaign—WOW, for short—that called on the Government to carry out a cumulative impact assessment of the effect of Government cuts on disabled people. Back in February 2014, we held that debate, and Members from all parties raised the alarm about the cumulative effects of austerity on disabled people. Disappointingly, the Government’s response at the time was to deny that the public spending cuts—not only in social security but across other Government Departments—were having such a detrimental impact on disabled people. They also said that cumulative impact assessment methodology was very difficult. At that time, Scope and Demos estimated that the cumulative effects of the changes in the Welfare Reform Act 2012 alone amounted to £28 billion-worth of cuts for 3.7 million people.

It is abundantly clear from the numerous inquiries, reports and analyses, as well as from the personal testimonies of disabled people themselves, that austerity is doing immense harm to disabled people and their families and carers. I shall expand on that in a moment, but first I wish to clarify exactly what a cumulative impact assessment—or a CIA; it is a mouthful to keep saying that every time—is. A CIA involves various methods and processes to assess the overall effect of a set of changes—for example, Government policies such as tax or welfare reforms—on a particular population, which in this case is disabled people. The assessment can not only quantify the impacts—for example, by looking at the net changes in income—but use qualitative methods to understand how the policy changes affect disabled people or other groups. As whole, impact assessments are decision-making tools. They should inform policy development based on the evidence and findings that the assessments present. They can also be used retrospectively. The power of CIAs is that they consider a number of policies together to see how they affect each other.

I believe passionately in evidence-based policy. Too often, it is the other way around: policy-based evidence—we select the evidence that suits the policies that we want. CIAs can help to avoid that. For me, they are an essential component of open and transparent policy making. If a politician says, for example, that they want to tackle burning injustices in society, CIAs will say whether or not a policy programme can achieve that. They are therefore also a way to hold politicians to account.

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

We should bear it in mind that the Government, at least at the two most recent general elections, wanted to save about £12 billion from the welfare budget, so all these systems are geared towards that end. That is why we have major problems with universal credit. For people with disabilities, there are issues with the independent living allowance, which really unsettled a lot of families, to say the least. More importantly, every so often a person with disabilities is subject to a review, which causes great anxiety, and in some instances leads to mental stress and strain. It is not a very fair system, and the private sector should not be involved because at the end of the day it is very much about saving money.

[Debbie Abrahams]

Yes, and I shall come to exactly some of the points my hon. Friend raised. He managed to get quite a bit into that intervention.

What CIAs have been done so far? Back in March this year, the Equality and Human Rights Commission published its report on the cumulative impact of tax and welfare reforms. The report looked at the effect, since 2010, of tax, welfare, social security and public spending on people with protected characteristics as set out in the Equality Act 2010. It included assessments of the impact on disabled people. The EHRC looked at the measures introduced in both the 2012 Act and the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, including the move to personal independence payments from disability living allowance; the cuts in support to the employment and support allowance work-related activity group; the introduction of universal credit, which involved the removal of the severe and enhanced disability premiums; the freeze in the uprating of social security support payments; and more. The EHRC analysis found that, by 2021, households with at least one disabled adult and a disabled child will lose more than £6,500 a year—that is 13% of their income. Households with six or more disabilities lose almost £3,150 a year, and disabled lone parents, predominantly women, with at least one disabled child lose almost £10,000 of their net income.