Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Jo Churchill and Corri Wilson

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.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Jo Churchill and Corri Wilson

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Corri Wilson]

Q 21 My question is to David. With increased conditionality, there are likely to be more sanctions. Would you foresee any additional cost to the Government as a result of this?

David Holmes: I do have a general concern. One of the great things about the troubled families programme is that it enables a holistic approach to be taken to working with families. In the broader context of the Bill, we also have to be holistic about Government policy, and we need to be careful to ensure that if we are working with troubled families to try to improve their lives, we don’t have changes to welfare legislation that impact negatively on those same families, without being very conscious that that is the course that we want to take.

[Jo Churchill]

Q 22 My question is to Geoff. Did you extrapolate any of the findings out? I like the programme—it has huge benefit for these families—but one of the evidence-based things that I drew from it was about those people who you could get into either volunteering or work, because it is that construct that is valuable. One of the unforeseen consequences, which to me was brilliant looking forward, was that school attendance improved hugely, and then you start to break a cycle. So are we looking at any further reporting like that, which obviously has long-term effects on positive results in the job market going forward?

Geoff Little: We have been measuring families through this programme for over five years now. We started by measuring people’s progress 12 months before they came on to our programme, and then 12 months afterwards. We have been doing that year on year for five years now, so we have a body of very robust evidence, and that tells us that, yes, there are sustained changes in people’s lives here. This is not a quick fix; the problems that people have take decades, sometimes generations, to develop. You are not going to turn that round in a 12-month, quick-fix, dip-in dip-out programme. You have got to do this in a sustained way and understand how the place impacts on the family as well. Seeing how it can impact on a family who may have all kinds of complex problems but who live in a relatively affluent area is a different task than dealing with the same type of family, with the same type of problems, but who are surrounded by families who also have complex problems.

The context absolutely matters, and I think we can measure the impact in different types of places. Then, the key thing for me is that you have to respond in an appropriate way for the appropriate place, and I think the programme allows us to do that, because what we are reporting on is outcomes in the place as a whole, and not simply family by family.

The important thing for me is that the reporting programme that we are being asked to comply with asks for no more information than we are already providing, so it is not an extra burden. It asks us to provide information on a cross-cutting basis. It is not about whether you are getting work outcomes, or school attendance outcomes, or domestic violence outcomes. You report on the outcomes in the round, and I think that is so different from the normal reporting on individual requirements to individual Departments of State, backed by an individual inspectorate, which simply leads you to front-line staff behaving accordingly. I think that this cross-cutting reporting changes the way people behave.