Disability Benefits and Social Care
Debate between Liam Byrne and Maria Miller(12 years, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)
The right hon. Gentleman will of course know that the £320 million specialist employment support budget is protected, and that any money coming from Remploy will be reinvested in it.
Maria Miller
The right hon. Gentleman does a huge amount of work in this area, and I would not want to fall out with him. I know that we both believe that disabled people should be looked at as individuals, and that he does a lot of work to make that a reality. I do not want to categorise people simply because of a condition they have. People deal with their conditions in different ways. That is what the personal independence payment is all about. I hope we can continue to work on this matter with the right hon. Gentleman, and with many outside organisations, because we need to put right the previous Government’s failure to introduce any reforms.
Let me dispel some of the other myths we have heard, starting with those about Remploy. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill knows full well that the programme Labour put in place was unsustainable, with more than £250 million in factory losses since its modernisation programme began. Labour set the unachievable target of a 130% increase in Remploy’s public sector sales in 2008, when the right hon. Gentleman, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury at around that time, must have known public sector spending was set to fall. Under Labour, very few additional contracts were won, and what is particularly shameful is that all this did nothing more than give people false hope. The modernisation plan was designed to turn factories around through a £550 million investment, yet it now still costs more than £20,000 to employ an individual in a Remploy factory and losses last year alone amounted to £65 million.
Maria Miller
The right hon. Gentleman knows that my predecessors and I have put a great deal of effort into looking for ways to get work into Remploy factories. He also knows that the DWP has awarded business to Remploy factories.
Maria Miller
The hon. Gentleman just has to face the fact that at the end of the modernisation plan, which we are approaching, decisions will have to be made. Given the fiscal problems we faced when we came into government—the devastating state the country’s finances were in—we could well have made some very different decisions, but we chose not to do so. We chose to stick with Labour’s plan to modernise Remploy, and it has turned out that we had £65 million of losses last year and it still costs more than £20,000 to employ somebody in a Remploy factory. We simply cannot allow that to go on. What we want to do is ensure that that money is working harder. Indeed, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill would have had to take the same decision.
Maria Miller
The right hon. Gentleman knows exactly what I meant: our very clear commitment is to work at ensuring that those factories can be set free from Government control. That is absolutely what we are doing. We are spending a great deal of time—we started in March—on the process for expressions of interest. We have received more than 60 such expressions in respect of factories throughout the country—I believe we have now received about 65—many of which have gone forward to business plans. We hope that many more will go forward successfully. That is my aim, and it is why we are taking time to do this and taking the time to talk to Labour Members about this issue.
Labour Members need to wake up to what is happening in their constituencies. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) intervened during the speech by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, and I should gently remind her that although there are, importantly, 41 disabled people working in the factory in her constituency, many, many more are not receiving that support. Yet, through employment services, we were able to support more than 500 individuals into mainstream employment, not into segregated factories. So I would rather take the £740,000 loss on the factory in her constituency last year and use the money to support the individuals in that factory into mainstream employment, so that we can actually have the sort of world that my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys has been talking about.
Maria Miller
The right hon. Lady is obviously a little sensitive on that point, perhaps because the fund was about to run out of money when we took over. We had absolutely no choice at all about the action we took and perhaps Labour Members should take a little more of the responsibility. They lost control of the situation for some of the most vulnerable groups in society and they must stand up and be accountable account for that.
Mr Byrne
By the end of the Parliament, nearly £3.5 billion will be cut from disability benefit yet only £2.5 billion net is being taken from Britain’s bankers. How can the Minister justify the disgraceful fact that the Government are taking more from disabled people than from bankers? Will she justify it now?
Maria Miller
The right hon. Gentleman should have taken that opportunity to apologise for writing the note saying that the country had no money left. Although he knows that the banks’ actions made a difficult problem worse, he, as someone who is well versed in economics, also knows that the real foundations of the problems of our country are the structural deficit that he left behind
Maria Miller
The right hon. Gentleman should perhaps keep quiet while listening to what the Government are doing.
The former Chief Secretary did not solve the problems. He and the then Labour Government ducked the important decisions when they were in power—[Interruption.] And now, as I think hon. Members can hear, he is ranting in opposition. Meanwhile, we are working hard to try to implement the new personal independence payment, which is on track for 2013, meaning that support for disabled people will be fairer. At the same time, we are doing much more to support disabled people into work, enabling them to have the same opportunities in life as anybody else: from the Work programme, in which where we are paying providers by results, to Work Choice, through which we are providing intensive back-to-work support for those facing the greatest barriers to employment, and the Access to Work scheme, through which we are investing more to help disabled people and employers with the extra costs of moving into work. None of that was done by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill in his 13 years in government.
Maria Miller
My hon. Friend is right to pick up on those details, because such details make a real difference to family life.
Maria Miller
Will the right hon. Gentleman let me finish my comments on this point? I think his hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) was expecting to intervene, too, so perhaps a little more civility is called for.
My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) is absolutely right to say that disability living allowance will not be counted within the benefit cap. People who are in receipt of DLA will not be subject to that cap. That is a really important point to make and it is the sort of detail that can make all the difference. The same is true of his comment about the carer’s allowance, which will be outwith universal credit although the universal credit will also recognise the important role that carers play. As this is carers week, we should pay tribute to their role in our communities and our constituencies. I also pay particular tribute to the work of the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), to make more support available for carers, especially through carers’ breaks and by ensuring that carers are able to continue their important role.
Maria Miller
We absolutely are following that up. I know that the hon. Lady follows such matters closely, so perhaps I need to ensure that she has more details, because I would have anticipated that she knew we are carrying out more work to ensure that there we have a robust evidence base, as she would expect.
I shall draw my remarks to a close. Given that this is an Opposition day debate, I had hoped that we would hear some clear ideas from the Opposition about what they would do; instead, we have heard the same confusion.
Maria Miller
The right hon. Gentleman was clear about what he would not do—he would not make reforms to DLA; he would not modernise Remploy; and he would not make the WCA fairer—but we heard nothing about what he would do. It is not much of an opposition when rant replaces engagement, when dithering replaces determination, and when there is such political opportunism, including attempting to intervene on someone who is trying to finish their speech. It is no wonder the Leader of the Opposition sacked the right hon. Gentleman as his policy guru; perhaps, for once, the Leader of the Opposition got it right.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liam Byrne and Maria Miller(13 years, 4 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)
I thank my hon. Friend for her question; it is important that we deal with people’s jobs needs in a very individual way. Jobcentre Plus has disability advisers who have special knowledge of dyslexia, and it is something that requires continued support.
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
On 11 July the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), confirmed that his Secretary of State had seen analysis by the Department for Communities and Local Government suggesting that his benefit cap could make 40,000 people homeless, and actually cost more than it saved. I do not mind who answers this question, but will someone please confirm whether the Minister himself also saw that analysis?