Disability Benefits and Social Care

Debate between Liam Byrne and George Hollingbery

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I invite the hon. Gentleman to intervene on me again when I talk about Remploy in more detail—[Interruption.] No, Remploy forms an important part of our motion, and it is right that we should have an informed debate on the matter. I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will let him have his say at that stage.

We believe that disability living allowance needs reform, and that an independent assessment is needed. We also believe, however, that the assessment should be designed first, and that the savings should be calculated afterwards. This Government have set an arbitrary, top-down financial cut, and they are now scrambling around trying to figure out what kind of assessment will deliver that cut. So little thought has gone into this that disabled people now face being tested for employment and support allowance, DLA and social care, as well as for a raft of other benefits. The testing alone will cost the taxpayer £710 million.

Surely we should be thinking harder about this. Surely we should be trying to determine what is the right assessment for DLA and ESA—which are different benefits—and asking how we can bring them together in a way that would be more convenient for disabled people and that would help them to secure the support that they need to live an independent life. Such a reform would save money. Indeed, when I was at the Treasury, my civil servants costed it and determined that it would save £350 million by 2015.

To this bleak picture we must, I am afraid, add more. Cuts to social care and to housing benefit will make the situation worse, £1 billion has now been cut from local council budgets for social care since this Government took office, and Ministers are still dragging their feet over long-term reform. Meanwhile, 1 million unpaid carers have given up work or reduced their hours, and four in 10 have fallen into debt, thanks to a system that does not work and is set to get worse.

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

I seem to recall that the Government announced some time ago that £3 billion would be transferred from national health service budgets to the social services sector each year. Is that correct, or is my recollection wrong?

[Mr Byrne]

The cut is from the Department for Communities and Local Government’s own figures. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the study published by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, he will see the reality of what is hitting social care services up and down the country and the vulnerable people they support.

The great tragedy of this story is that there might be some kind of explanation if this were all part of a grand master-plan to get disabled people back to work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

Let me deal with my hon. Friend’s intervention by listing a series of practical measures and steps that I think that the Government could and should now take.

First, why do the Government not honour every letter of the Sayce report? Why do they not honour the recommendations of Liz Sayce that factories should have six months in which to develop a business plan and two years before a subsidy is withdrawn, that the viability of Remploy factories should be decided by an independent panel of business and enterprise experts—with trade union involvement—rather than by unilateral action from the DWP, and that expert entrepreneurial and business support should be provided to develop the businesses into independent enterprises? Each of those recommendations needs to be implemented.

Secondly—here I come to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas)—the full 90-day timetable for consultation should be re-started, given that the terms were radically changed halfway through the process.

Thirdly—this is relevant to the points that have been made about procurement—may I ask what steps the Secretary of State has taken to draw together local authorities, as well as central Government Departments, to ensure that any extra work that can be put in a Remploy factory is put in a Remploy factory? Surely we should be exhausting all those opportunities before we move on.

Fourthly, we should take a more flexible approach to each and every factory. The fact is that some factories will need more support in order to continue, while others will need less. And fifthly, we should review the subsidy per worker offered to Remploy workers, given that it may be different from the subsidy that is available under Work Choice.

If the Secretary of State is in any doubt about what these factories do, I will go and do a day’s work in a Remploy factory, and I hope that he will join me. I think that we should invite the Sunday Express as well, for good measure.

[George Hollingbery]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for being so generous with his time.

The subsidies involved in the two separate programmes, the Access to Work programme and the social model and Remploy, are not just different but wildly different. The average subsidy per person in Remploy is £25,000 a year, whereas the average subsidy in the support programme is £2,900 a year. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it would be much better for the money from Remploy to be redeployed in the Access to Work programme?

[Mr Byrne]

Where are the jobs that those people are going to go into? When factories are closing in constituencies where the average number of people chasing each job is twice the national average and the Work programme is failing disabled people, we have a problem that needs to be solved. We need practical steps to manage Remploy’s future.

Labour Members feel passionate about this subject. We are proud of the progress that we made for disabled people when we were in government. We appointed the first ever Minister for Disabled People, and we introduced the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Supporting People, the new deal for disabled people, new strategies for disabled children, Valuing People, and the Equality Act. Poverty in disabled households fell by a fifth in the last three years of our Government.

We succeeded because we believed in co-producing policy with disabled people. It is a disgrace that Kaliya Franklin, Sue Marsh and the authors of the Spartacus report had to use freedom of information requests to draw out of the Government that the DWP’s response to the DLA consultation was so misleading. It is also a disgrace that the Government have dropped from their business plan the goal of securing equality for disabled people. They should now set about changing course. They should begin by introducing a combined, cross-governmental assessment of the impact of their reforms. I congratulate Scope on producing a “starter for 10” this week.

Labour Members believe that rights should be made a reality for disabled people. We will campaign for that justice throughout this Parliament and beyond, and I hope that the House will express its support by backing our motion this afternoon.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and George Hollingbery

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

That is deeply concerning, and I will dwell on it in a moment.

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a persuasive case on the detail—clearly a lot of it remains to be found, but this is a confusing and complex matter. Will he admit that the current system is unsustainably complicated? There are 8,600 pages of guidance on benefits administration at the DWP and 2,000 pages for local government, and there are 30 different benefits to administer. Change is required. If we have a framework and consult widely, we will have a better system.

[Mr Byrne]

The Opposition want welfare reform that sticks. When so many details are unclear, the danger is that the Bill will unravel progressively as it comes into effect.

We have discussed whether the Bill passes the test of fostering ambition for families and have shown that a great number of questions remain unanswered. Let us now consider savers. All hon. Members want to nurture the ambition to save. The amount that people must save for a deposit for a house is heaven knows how much, but now that tuition fees have been trebled, more families have to save harder to get their young people into college. One might have thought, therefore, that the Government would provide more incentives to foster the ambition to save, but the noble Lord Freud told the House of Lords that

“the £16,000 savings threshold would extend to all households eligible for universal credit.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 15 December 2010; Vol. 723, c. WA204.]

There we have it. The Government are so keen to foster the ambition to save that once someone has £16,000 in the bank—the price of two and a half years at university—their tax and in-work benefits are taken away.