Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Julie Hilling Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Chapman]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I am well aware of that point, because those same people turn up at our surgeries week in, week out in desperation, unable to get the support that they previously would have been able to access. Social welfare legal aid is not an adjunct to the system. Right of redress if a mistake is made is a self-correcting element in the system and an inextricable part of it.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend as shocked as I am to discover that social welfare law advice in Bolton has gone up 38% and welfare benefits advice has gone up 57%? The doors have had to be closed on any new people for a fortnight because there is such a backlog.

[Mrs Chapman]

That says all we need to say about the state of some of our providers of social welfare advice.

Decisions will not be challenged, and individuals will be denied their fundamental economic and social rights, which will eventually lead to a culture of laziness, poor decision making, corner cutting and inefficiency. We are talking about cases in which individuals have been blatantly wrongly assessed. The Daily Mirror investigative team has in the past couple of weeks quantified the scale of failures of state agencies and contractors such as Atos. Through freedom of information requests, the team discovered that 32 people a week die after being certified fit to work. For example, Atos deemed 36-year-old Martina Delaney from Bolton fit for work and her benefits were cut. Her mother, Elizabeth, said:

“She was so worried about losing her flat and she had to sell the family jewellery to pay for the gas and food and never even told us, it would have broken her heart”.

They found Martina dead in her bed on 12 March.