Oral Answers to Questions

Jo Swinson Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

3. What steps he is taking to improve public understanding of benefits available for people with (a) a hidden disability and (b) other forms of disability.

[Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

5. What steps he has taken to improve public understanding of benefits available for people with (a) a hidden disability and (b) other forms of disability.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said earlier, the Government’s welfare reform programme will help to make our benefits system more understandable, less complex and better focused on those who really need help to live an independent life, so restoring trust in benefit provision, which has been so badly eroded in recent years. The Government also provide support for better understanding through Jobcentre Plus and work to support user-led organisations.

[Maria Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question on an issue of which many hon. Members are aware. We are very conscious of the language we use when we talk about these issues, because we are clear that it is the system that has trapped people in a spiral of welfare dependency and that there has been a failure to reform benefits such as disability living allowance and to build any sense of reassessment into them. Those are the sorts of things that can create such problems and the Government are tackling them.

[Jo Swinson]

Despite the public’s overestimation of benefit fraud, in our constituency surgeries we see cases of the exact opposite—people who have a severe disability that affects their ability to work but who are found by the initial Atos assessment to be fit for work. Appeals can be stressful and costly, so will the Department implement Professor Harrington’s recommendation and publish data on the quality of Atos assessments and the percentage of successful appeals, so that we can judge for ourselves whether improvements are being made?

[Maria Miller]

We have accepted all of Professor Harrington’s proposals. Let me draw to my hon. Friend’s attention the fact that the number of successful appeals against the work capability assessment are substantially lower than for its predecessor, the personal capability assessment.