Recognition of Fibromyalgia as a Disability

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and Toby Perkins

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Toby Perkins]

I entirely agree. The impact on the rest of the family includes caring responsibilities that fall on them, restricting their ability to develop their earning potential. The consequence is that the entire family of a fibromyalgia sufferer will suffer too. It is a powerful point.

Estimates suggest that as many as one in 20 people suffer from fibromyalgia. Since I secured the debate I have been contacted by many MPs—there have been many interventions in the debate—and by constituents and other members of the public. People say that at last someone is talking about the condition, which they or their partner have suffered with for so long, feeling that no one understood. The feeling of being misunderstood is familiar to many fibromyalgia sufferers. Often employers are baffled as to why on some days an apparently healthy member of staff is the life and soul of the party, but on others cannot turn up for work because they are crippled by their condition. By the same token, those employees often feel tremendous guilt that a condition that decimates their ability to contribute keeps striking them down. That often leads them to conclude that they must go into work even though they are in extreme pain, frequently making themselves even more ill in the process. It truly is a vicious circle.

Fibromyalgia sufferers are also misunderstood, as we have already heard, by those who assess them for benefits such as PIP and employment and support allowance, as their conditions are variable and can often be managed in the very short term. Many fibromyalgia sufferers have taken pills to help to manage the pain and support them through an ESA assessment, only to discover that the assessment outcome bears little relationship to their daily experience of living with fibromyalgia.

I have had constituents speak to me about the fact that the tablets they took to enable them to get in a taxi to travel to their assessment and get through that assessment for an hour meant that, when they got home, they were in bed for days afterwards. I think they thought to themselves, “If only the assessor could see me now, half an hour or an hour after the assessment, they would see why I’m unable to work. I’ve been able to get myself through that assessment, trying to comply with the system, but to my own disadvantage.”

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an extremely powerful speech. As I will say in my contribution, my wife is a fibromyalgia sufferer. Is it not the case that stressful experiences actually exacerbate the condition, leading to hugely damaging flare-ups?

[Toby Perkins]

That point is spot on, and made from the powerful perspective of someone who knows what it is like to live with someone experiencing fibromyalgia. I will come on in a moment to some of the other things that are believed to be triggers for fibromyalgia, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We all know—it is one of our worries about the assessment regime within benefits—the stress of that process: the stress of going through the assessment, of believing that benefits will be taken away or of wondering how they will feel the next day. It is an incredibly unhelpful situation where people’s income is tied to their being ill, so they wake up almost hoping to be ill to justify the income, while simultaneously wishing they were better because they want to be able to contribute. That is something that is known much more widely in our benefits system, but fibromyalgia sufferers are very familiar with it.

Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and Toby Perkins

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins]

I accept that some progress has been made. There was a real rebirth in apprenticeships over the second half of the previous Government’s time in office and the current Government have said a lot about apprenticeships. However, I was disappointed that they did not support our amendments on apprenticeships, and people will feel short-changed because the Bill represented a real opportunity for the Government to take substantive steps on apprenticeships.

The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that many employers recognise the importance and value of apprenticeships. However, the number of under-19 apprenticeships is falling, and there has been a big increase in the rebadging of programmes that were previously known as back-to-work schemes as apprenticeships. I hope that the hon. Gentleman does not mind me saying that he was the oldest new Member of the 2010 generation. Older workers are incredibly important, as is demonstrated by the vigour with which he performs his tasks, and no one would describe him as an apprentice, but many older workers with a huge amount to offer our economy are being classified as though they are apprentices.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

The hon. Gentleman talked about the need to tackle the problem of low-wage jobs. Today’s report by the Office for National Statistics indicates that workers in Wales earn an average of £473.40 a week, whereas the UK average is £518 and the London average is £660.50. How would a future Labour Government tackle that wage inequality?

[Toby Perkins]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I am glad that Members can cite important statistics by the ONS in the Chamber, given the importance of our having statistical accuracy which we have heard about.

On the hon. Gentleman’s specific question, we have a commitment on the living wage for businesses involved in major Government contracts, as well as to increasing the minimum wage to £8 by 2020. We also have a broader commitment to a skills-based economy in which we can create jobs that deliver wages that people can live on, as ultimately that is what will make the biggest difference to increasing wages, rather than the use of Government regulation as a silver bullet.

The small business community took pleasure from the arrival of a small business Bill. We give the Government credit for bringing forward a Bill with the words “Small Business” in its title, as such businesses have been overlooked in recent years. However, sadly, the opportunity to include in the Bill many of the measures that we proposed to benefit small business has passed us by. Provision on late payments is a classic example, as the Government had a real opportunity to support a late payment plan that would ensure that the onus to pursue payment—eventually through the courts, but initially through invoicing—was removed from small businesses that are owed money. Despite the sensible evidence that the Committee heard from the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile), among others, about why small businesses do not pursue their big business customers, the Government did not support our measure, which was backed by the Forum of Private Business and the Federation of Small Businesses, and would have been a significant step forward. However, on a more positive note, the Government talked yesterday about how they could strengthen the prompt payment code and ensure that businesses with payment terms of longer than 60 days would not be considered to be prompt payers.