Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Corri Wilson]

Q 40 This is a question for Kirsty and Tony. How can you incentivise people who have been assessed as ill to get back to work? When we are capping people who receive severe disablement allowance, how is this treating people fairly?

Tony Wilson: Can I make two quick points to add to Kirsty’s really good, comprehensive list of what works in supporting disabled people and those with health conditions? One further thing is early intervention. One thing we could do much better to incentivise and support is to intervene much earlier. We intervene very late. By the time somebody has got through the work capability assessment and the ESA, they have probably been out of work for a year or more, although they might have been previously in work. Early intervention is really important. The earlier we can engage people, the easier it is and the more effectively we can incentivise a quick return to work.

In terms of financial incentives, for example, one thing that was abolished in 2011 was the in-work credit, which was a payment made to people who were claiming incapacity benefit or ESA when they returned to work. The in-work credit was paid at about £50 a week for 26 weeks. We did a qualitative evaluation of that; there was never a formal impact assessment of it. There is very good literature around financial incentives to individuals when they move into work, internationally. It is not something tested very well here. We should look at how we create financial incentives. It is a behavioural tool to support people to make the transition into work and help to meet the transitional costs of work.

As others have said, I have significant concerns around the incentive and disincentive effects of the changes to the ESA WRAG. As much as anything, the most likely effect is to further increase the cliff edge between the support group and the rest of the benefits system. It will probably make the WCA even more of a mess. It will clog up the system even more with appeals and problems. We need the fundamental reform that Charlotte talked about.

Kirsty McHugh: One of the positive things over the past few years has been the introduction of the Health and Work Service. We need to stop people becoming long-term sick to begin with. The early intervention with the employer is important so that when somebody becomes ill, they are prepared to keep them in work. We need to keep an eye out to ensure that that is doing what we want it to.

A lot of people get assessed to death. They go through the personal independence payment assessment and the WCA. They are assessed by the employment providers. We could probably streamline some of that process—that is the outsourced sector and the DWP element. At the moment we are not sharing those assessments in a sensible way. We could probably take some costs out of the system and make life much easier for the people who are subject to it if some of those system issues were more effective than they are currently.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

Q 41 I will try to be succinct, because you have covered a lot of this. My major interest is in how we help occupational health outcomes that would aid employees, particularly those who, for example, suffer from cancer and, through no fault of their own, end up in a situation where they are claiming. Many of them, after Question Time yesterday, asked me why we could not do something like invoke a conversation between a doctor and the employer to avoid them falling between the cracks. They are okay to work and they want to work, but it is an all-or-nothing scenario. Is there any mileage in a better dialogue or a service where doctors can help to inform—this leads into long-term conditions, an ageing population and so on—so that we have a better conduit of information between different services?

Kirsty McHugh: Short answer—yes. We know that the NHS is not brought into the conversation as much as it should be. Again, a positive: employment is now one of the NHS framework outcomes in a way that it was not before. That should be a big step forward for us. Where things work well, the GP is part of the conversation. We often find people who have been on ESA for a long time and whose medicine has not been reassessed. The prescription keeps on running, which cannot be good for them and does not help that idea of work being good for people.

[Jess Phillips]

Q 42 I am just going to go back to some of the discussion about the benefits cap. My colleague, Emily, pointed out the effect on the cost of housing and on those people living in the private rented sector. Do any of you perceive that the changes in the rates that will be offered will have an effect on the market, thus pushing down the costs of rents for those landlords? If not, will it potentially just affect—

Tony Wilson: Categorically no; it will not have any impact on rents. I can say that fairly categorically because the Department produced a really good evaluation of the local housing allowance reforms in the previous Parliament, which, I think, found that 92% of the impact was borne by the tenant and 8% by the landlord. Essentially, landlords did not have to adjust their prices; tenants just had to pay.