Welfare Reform (Sick and Disabled People)

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Like other Members, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) for securing this important debate. I also pay a huge tribute to the petition proposers and supporters, and all the people who are watching this debate, either in person or on Twitter. They will have noticed that the number of Members on the Government Benches has gone up to three—it was two until a few moments ago. Sadly, that reflects the priority that Government Members give to this issue. I pay tribute in particular to Francesca Martinez, who has done so much to bring forward the petition that we are discussing this afternoon.

I will focus on the work capability assessment, which was introduced by the last Administration in 2008 and has so very clearly failed people in need. The British Medical Association’s GP committee voted unanimously in 2012 that, after four years, the policy had been a failure. It was clear when it was introduced that it was part of an attempt to appear to be hard on benefits and to be clamping down. It happened at the same time as things were being made harder for lone parents, with more and more conditions being piled on. It is part of the rhetoric about the deserving poor versus the undeserving poor that, sadly, we still hear today.

I was disappointed that the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), on taking up her post as shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, used the opportunity of her first interview to say that she would be tougher than the Tories on people on benefits.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West did not say that. She said that she would be tougher on welfare spending, not on people on benefits.

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[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

This important debate is very welcome, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and the Backbench Business Committee for arranging it. Like others, however, I pay particular tribute to the 104,000 people who signed the War on Welfare petition that forms the basis of the motion, and who were the driving force behind today’s debate. The volume of signatures is testimony to the strength of public feeling about these matters. I have had the opportunity to meet War on Welfare campaigners in my constituency and here at Westminster, and I can testify to the anger and fear that many feel about the impact of the Government’s policies on disabled people. It concerns non-disabled people as much as disabled people, which is not surprising in view of the fact that—as my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) so powerfully reminded us—only one in five disabled people is born with a disability.

It is to our shame that, in all walks of life, disabled people face injustice and unfairness. They are twice as likely to be treated unfairly at work as non-disabled people; they are more likely to be victims of crime; they face additional living costs associated with their disabilities; they are twice as likely to live in poverty; and they are less likely to be in work. Today the employment rate among disabled people is 45%, while the rate among the working-age population as a whole is 71%. The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) rightly identified some of the labour market barriers that disabled people face. Moreover, shamefully, they are on the receiving end of a virtually non-stop flow of hostile and abusive rhetoric.

One would expect that, faced with that grim picture, the Government would focus their efforts on tackling the injustice and discrimination that confront disabled people, but the policies of the current Government so often make matters worse. That is why Labour wholeheartedly supports the call for a cumulative impact assessment of the effect of those policies on disabled people, and why we called for such an assessment last year.

The Government have argued that Labour never carried out such an assessment, but Labour never unleashed such a deluge of negative policies on disabled people. Let me say to the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) in particular that our record speaks for itself. [Interruption.] He should listen to this. Poverty among disabled people, which stood at 40% when Labour came to office, subsequently fell to about one in four, and the employment rate among disabled people rose by 9 percentage points. We introduced a host of measures to strengthen the rights of disabled people. We passed the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and introduced the Equality Act 2010, we formed the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and, in 2009, we signed the United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

Let us contrast that with the damaging policies of the current Government, which have been highlighted today. Cuts in local authority budgets have meant swingeing cuts in social care. The independent living fund has been closed to new applicants, and its future remains unclear. The Work programme is failing disabled people badly—only 5% of disabled participants have found work—and the Work and Pensions Committee has established that there is just one specialist disability employment adviser for every 600 people in the work-related activity group.

[Guto Bebb]

If the hon. Lady is so proud of the record of Labour, can she explain why training and skills programmes financed by the European social fund in Wales are not being made available to Work programme planners because of a decision by the Welsh Labour Government?

[Kate Green]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that exactly the same is happening in my constituency. I am glad that he mentioned training and skills, because this Government are placing the future of residential training colleges in jeopardy. They closed 33 Remploy factories last year, and 12 months later two thirds of former Remploy employees were still out of work. Funds from the closures were promised to help those former workers into jobs, but they seem to have disappeared.

[Grahame M. Morris]

I am sorry to interrupt the flow of my hon. Friend’s speech. She is presenting some excellent arguments. She mentioned specialist support. Northern Rights provides bespoke support in my constituency, but it cannot secure a contract from the DWP because of the prime contractors who are operating in the area.

[Kate Green]

It is so often the way that organisations which have a specialised knowledge and understanding of the labour market barriers that confront disabled people, and can identify with those people, are themselves shut out and deprived of the opportunity to set up post-Remploy work settings or provide support through the Work programme.

Damaging changes in the benefits system have also had a devastating effect. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), that applies both to cuts in benefits provided specifically for disabled people and to other cuts that affect them disproportionately. Employment and support allowance is in trouble—decisions are taking longer—and problems with the work capability assessment persist. About one in 10 decisions are appealed against successfully. The hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery), who is no longer in the Chamber, appeared to think that the fact that people could appeal was a sign of the success of the system, but surely it would be better to get the decisions right in the first place.

It is clear that Atos cannot cope. I know that the Minister will say that Labour made the contract, but four years and four independent reviews later—independent reviews which, I should tell the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid), are required under Labour’s legislation—things are going from bad to worse.

[Mr Reid]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kate Green]

No I will not.

The Minister has, of course, been commendably frank about his plans to replace Atos with other providers—that was called for initially by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne)—but we need root-and-branch re-purposing and reform of the work capability assessment, as well as improvements in the process. Those improvements should include systemising the collection of evidence in all cases, including evidence from GPs and other clinicians, providing suitable, accessible settings for assessments, and ensuring that recordings of interviews are always available to claimants.

[Caroline Lucas]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kate Green]

Not at the moment.

I do not apologise for our intentions when we introduced the ESA and an assessment of people’s capacity for work. We wanted that to be a supportive and facilitative process, but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) pointed out, the renegotiation of the Atos contract by the current Government has rebalanced the system to be punitive, not facilitative. The Minister’s plan to replace Atos with other providers goes nowhere near to meeting the need for wholesale reform.

However, I do part company with the motion in its call for the WCA to be scrapped. I know that will disappoint many disabled campaigners listening to the debate. In my view, the assessment should be the first step in a process of identifying and assembling the right support, including financial support. I say to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) that I have never thought there should be no assessment or reassessment, and I do not think it now. Justified criticisms were made of people being left for years on incapacity benefit without any support or any check on their progress or the deterioration of their condition, and we should not go back to that. Yet just this week, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore)—who has had to leave the debate to attend a Bill Committee—pointed out, we learned that Ministers are going to leave people on ESA in exactly that position for the next two years without reassessment, and apparently planned to keep both claimants and MPs in the dark about it. I hope the Minister will be able to clarify exactly the background to that extraordinary decision today.

[Caroline Lucas]

I think people with disabilities will be disappointed to hear what the hon. Lady says, because the current work capability assessment has become so tainted by being linked to a Government who are very clearly trying to reduce the amount of money they give out that if a new Labour Government wanted to redesign the assessment, which would still obviously need to assess whether or not people are eligible, they should call it something else. By sticking to the name “work capability assessment” and not being able to support the motion, the hon. Lady is doing people with disabilities a disservice.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Lady largely made a very helpful contribution, but there is an important point about the legitimacy of the assessment process—a legitimacy that disabled people will themselves recognise confers on them the entitlement to the benefits they receive. It is very important that we do nothing to undermine the public’s perception of entitlement.

Meanwhile, as we can see from today’s National Audit Office report, the roll-out of PIP is also in trouble. Terminally ill patients and disabled people have to wait weeks, if not months, for a decision, leaving them stranded financially, and anxious and uncertain about their claim. Why on earth Ministers awarded a PIP contract to Atos, given its failure to manage the WCA contract properly, is simply beyond my understanding. What on earth were they thinking of?

The replacement of the DLA with PIP also comes with a 20% budget cut, leaving disabled people and their carers facing the loss of vital financial support. Some will lose their Motability vehicles, and some will fall out of work as a result. The Disability Benefits Consortium has suggested that if 50,000 people leave work as a result of losing the mobility payment, that could cost the Exchequer £464 million in lost taxes and national insurance and in additional benefits.

It is not just about cuts to benefits specifically for disabled people either, because other benefit cuts affect them disproportionately too: the bedroom tax; the introduction of the benefit cap, which will also significantly impact on carers, many of whom cannot take paid work to escape it; the localisation of council tax support; the removal of funding for local assistance schemes; and, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) pointed out, the decision to uprate benefits by CPI, which impacts particularly harshly on disabled people, who face substantial additional living costs.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) said, in times of austerity it is disabled people who are bearing a disproportionate burden, and the Government’s responsibility is to work hand in hand with them to protect and strengthen their independence, their dignity, their choices and their right to live free from stigma, hardship and fear. As a first step to doing that, it is high time that Ministers undertook a proper cumulative impact assessment of the effect of their policies, took action and faced up to their devastating effects.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

I want to make some progress, but I promise that I will give way to the hon. Lady in a moment.

[Kate Green]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mike Penning]

I want to make a little more progress on this point.

The National Audit Office report has been mentioned today. It was a snapshot report based on the situation in the autumn of last year. When I appeared before the Select Committee, I spoke extensively about one aspect of the report, which dealt with terminal illness. It is crucial to understand that I hid nothing away from the Committee, and that I said that the length of time involved in dealing with those cases was unacceptable. It has now come down to about 10 days. That is still too long, although it is less than it was under the previous scheme. We will get it down even further. I am working closely with Macmillan, and we have agreed to pilot a scheme for the 2% of terminal cases in which we will return to a paper-based system until I can get a secure PDF into place. Macmillan is pleased with what we are doing on that. The system is still not perfect, but we have moved an awfully long way, and we learned a lot of the lessons before the report even came out.

[Kate Green]

My point is on the WCA, and I hope that the Minister will address the question that I and my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) raised about the suspension of reassessment of ESA claimants for the next two years. Will he tell us why the Department appears to have decided not to inform claimants or Members of Parliament about that?

[Mike Penning]

If we were to inform claimants and Members of Parliament about the minutiae of every single change in policy, we would be here a lot longer. As most Members know, I am not hugely party political, but I must point out that the previous Administration did not offer that level of information either. That is not how Governments work. We are trying to deal with the delays, and to ensure that people get what they are entitled to as quickly as possible and that nobody will be worse off while we are doing that. We are, however, in the middle of a really difficult negotiation with Atos over the WCA.

I want to talk about how we can speed things up. Yesterday, I chaired a meeting of a network involving all the major stakeholders and charities. I hope that I will not upset any of the charities by leaving them out. It was a positive meeting, at which I said to them, “Sit with us and work with us to help us improve on what we have.” I was very much in listening mode, which is why I shall now give way to the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi).