Disabled People

Debate between Liam Byrne and Paul Maynard

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am pleased to hear the right hon. Gentleman announce his intention to abolish the spare room subsidy. He also praised to the skies the Australian insurance model that has just been introduced. Is he therefore committing to the payroll tax increases funding that model in Australia? Have we just heard yet another spending commitment?

[Mr Byrne]

Of course not. We are saying that the idea of introducing holistic care, in the way the hon. Gentleman’s Department of Health colleague implies in the Care Bill, is something the Secretary of State could learn from.

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[Paul Maynard]

I think that the hon. Lady misunderstands the actual point of PIP; it is to look at how people cope with their conditions. They are given ample opportunity to submit evidence and we help them to do that in my constituency surgeries. I hope that Labour Members do so, too, rather than store up a treasure trove of Atos scare stories that make people more scared of attending an Atos appointment than they were before.

[Mr Byrne]

rose—

[Paul Maynard]

I have given way enough times and the shadow Secretary of State has had his opportunity. If those on the Opposition Front Benches paid more attention to the “Fulfilling Potential” report, they might be a little chilled by what they read. Page 34 states clearly:

“Young people’s aspirations can decline in response to their growing understanding of the world”.

Listening to Opposition Members, I am sure that young people’s aspirations will decline because of the negative messages they are getting. The report states:

“By the age of 26 disabled people are less confident”

about entering into the world. I think we should be celebrating the fact that this Government are taking steps on a broad range of measures—not merely disability benefits—that the previous Government never had the courage to take.

For example, consider a young person who wishes to go to university. Under the Labour Government they were scared to do so because they could not guarantee that their care package would be made portable. With this Government’s Care Bill, we are doing just that. How can we put a price on aspiration? How can we quantify hope? What do I say to disabled people using an organisation in my constituency that has just introduced a “Safe Journey” card they can show on trams to ensure that it pulls away more slowly and they do not get flung to the ground? How are such things incorporated into the precious cumulative impact assessment? So much that can be done for the disabled community will never appear in any impact assessment, but it can be reflected in what we are doing with the “Fulfilling Potential” initiative.

I begin to despair at so much of what I hear from the Opposition Benches and it makes me truly angry. I pay tribute to the previous Government for their work to try to improve awareness of disability hate crime. However, I react with fury to the reaction of so many Opposition Members when the reporting of incidents of disability hate crime increases because of work done by this Government, and the previous Government, to create an atmosphere in which people are more confident to report such crime. We are told that an increase in the reporting of hate crime is evidence of the Government’s war on the disabled. I find that disgusting. It is personally abhorrent that people should campaign in a partisan way on the backs of those in the most vulnerable section of our society, to make a partisan point. That does nothing.

The contribution of disabled people to this country goes far wider than the amount they receive in benefits. I recognise, however, that we cannot talk of aspiration or fulfilling potential if we do not have a stable system of state support. We are trying to ensure that the right people get the right amount of money to match their needs, abilities and aspirations to work, live their lives and fulfil their ambitions, not match the labels hung around their necks by the Labour party.

Disability Benefits and Social Care

Debate between Liam Byrne and Paul Maynard

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that cuts to support for disabled people and carers pose a potential risk to their dignity and independence and will have wider social and economic costs; regrets that the Department for Work and Pensions has dropped the aim of achieving disability equality; whilst recognising that the disability living allowance (DLA) needs to be reformed, expresses concern that taking the DLA from 500,000 disabled people and contributory employment and support allowance from 280,000 former workers will take vital financial support from families under pressure; expresses further concern at the Work Programme’s failure to help disabled people and the mismanaged closure of Remploy factories; notes the pressing need for continuing reform to the work capability assessment (WCA) to reduce the human cost of wrong decisions; agrees with the eight Carers’ Week charities on the importance of recognising the huge contribution made by the UK’s 6.4 million carers and the need to support carers to prevent caring responsibilities pushing them into ill-health, poverty and isolation; and calls on the Government to ensure reform promotes work, independence, quality of life and opportunities for disabled people and their families, to restore the commitment to disability equality in the Department for Work and Pensions’ business plan, to conduct a full impact assessment of the combined effects of benefit and social care cuts on disabled people and carers, to reform WCA descriptors as suggested by charities for mental health, fluctuating conditions and sensory impairment and to re-run the consultation on the future of Remploy factories.

Once upon a time, the Conservatives liked to tell us that we were all in this together. Those words ring rather hollow today. After a Budget that gave us the granny tax and cuts to tax credits while giving a tax cut to millionaires, I think we can assume that the Chancellor was simply taking us for a ride. Yesterday, Bob Holman—the man who introduced the Secretary of State to Easterhouse—said it all. He said that he now had so much confidence in the Secretary of State’s belief that we were all in it together that he thought the Secretary of State should resign. Today’s debate is about many of the people Mr Holman stood up for. They are the one in four of our fellow citizens who are not all in it together with the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. They are not part of the Chipping Norton set. They do not get to go to the kitchen suppers. They are Britain’s disabled citizens. They are parents of disabled children. They are former workers, now disabled, who have paid in and paid their stamp and now find a Government determined to renege on a deal that they believed in.

In today’s debate on what I hope will be a consensual motion, there will be interventions from those on the Treasury Bench asking which cuts the Opposition support, and that is a perfectly reasonable line of argument. Let me deal with it at the outset. We do not believe that the spending review set out by this Government was wise. We warned of the risks of cutting too far and too fast. We also warned of the risks of a double-dip recession, and now we have one. The cost is astronomical. That is why the Chancellor had to explain to the House, in his last Budget, that he had to borrow £150 billion more than the Office for Budget Responsibility said Labour would have borrowed, as set out in our last Budget. In the Department for Work and Pensions, the bill for jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefit is now running out of control as a consequence of the Secretary of State’s failure to get people back into work, and £9 billion more than was originally forecast is now projected to be spent. Someone has to pay that bill, and the Government—the Cabinet and those on the Front Bench today—have decided that it should be paid by Britain’s disabled people.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has mentioned the disabled. Will he explain why Labour supports segregated employment—apartheid for the disabled—in Remploy? Are the disabled community not full members of society too?

[Mr Byrne]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, and I will talk about Remploy at length later in my speech. I hope that he will intervene on me again at that stage.

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[Mr Byrne]

Those are precisely the kinds of worries that the House should reflect on because this is a very difficult and sensitive area of policy. The Government are not attempting to prosecute reform with any kind of consensus at all. That is why charities are resigning and resiling from their administration.

To the picture of ESA reform, I am afraid we have to add the Work programme. Once billed as the greatest back-to-work programme designed by human hand it is now missing its target for disabled people by 60%. Charity after charity says that the number of people referred to them for specialist help to get back to work is minuscule and tiny. St Mungo’s and now the Single Homeless Project have even gone to the lengths of resigning from the programme altogether.

This Government’s contempt is not reserved for disabled people without a job. There is plenty of it to go around for people with a job, including those Remploy workers in factories to whom the Secretary of State said, “You don’t produce very much at all. They are not doing any work at all. They are just making cups of coffee.” I hope that, in the course of this debate, the Secretary of State will take the opportunity to resign—I mean apologise. [Interruption.] I may not give way to calls on that point, but I congratulate the Sunday Express on its campaign, highlighting the disgraceful treatment of Remploy workers. We all know that Remploy has to change—that is the point I would make to Conservative Members—but this Government have decided to press ahead, closing these factories at breakneck speed. These factories are in constituencies where twice as many people as the national average are chasing every single job. How can it be right to say to these factories that they have until Monday to complete a business plan that, if it is not successful, will see the closure of factories in communities that need jobs and cannot afford to lose them?

[Paul Maynard]

Let me give the right hon. Gentleman another chance to answer the question put to him earlier. How many of these factories were closed under the last Labour Government? I know what the figure is; I wonder whether he knows what it is.

[Mr Byrne]

I will not deny the fact that a number of factories were closed under Labour, but that was part of a reform programme that saw £500 million added in support for the future of Remploy. The point for the House this afternoon is this: the time given to help Remploy factories figure out a future is too short.

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[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Eleven people are chasing every single job in my constituency, and there is no point in the Secretary of State going to Merthyr to tell people to get on a bus to Cardiff because there are no jobs in Cardiff either. After the last round of redundancies in the Remploy factory in the Cynon Valley in 1988, only one man ever found a job again. With unemployment now running at 9% in my constituency, I ask the Secretary of State again: where are the jobs? Tell us: where are the jobs for disabled people?

[Paul Maynard]

rose—

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend speaks powerfully. This underlines the importance of a series of tests that the Government must pass on Remploy. I shall come to that, but I give way for the last time to the hon. Gentleman.

[Paul Maynard]

I am listening carefully and I promise not to intervene again. Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify something for me? Is he arguing that disabled people should not be expected to be able to work in the wider workplace? The implications of that are a lowering of the expectations of the disabled community and suggest that all we all are fit for is to have a label placed around our necks and then be put out of sight and out of mind? Is that really what he is suggesting?

Youth Unemployment

Debate between Liam Byrne and Paul Maynard

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

Long-term youth unemployment in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency is up this year by 133%. That is a serious increase. I am happy to share with him the figures produced for us yesterday by the House of Commons Library. Those statistics speak to one key point: we need action to get youth unemployment down, and we need it now.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

In my constituency, the figure is 36% year on year. I was delighted to read in The Times today the figures to which the right hon. Gentleman just referred on long-term youth unemployment. I made the point of getting the figures from the House of Commons Library, so that I could see what the figure was in my seat. Is he aware that in 235 constituencies, youth unemployment, by the measure that he requested, has fallen since May 2010, and that in a further 41 constituencies, it has remained static?

[Mr Byrne]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman the figures in his constituency. Long-term youth unemployment in his constituency has risen by 233%, and that is an extraordinary increase, but surely he will agree with the judgment of the TUC, the CBI and the Prince’s Trust that now is the time for urgent action to get young people back to work, including young people in his constituency.

[Paul Maynard]

As the right hon. Gentleman has again mentioned my constituency, I note that according to the Library the unemployment figures rose from 75 in May 2010 to 100 in September 2011. I represent a coastal community. Has he ever heard of seasonal unemployment?

[Mr Byrne]

The figures are seasonally adjusted, as the hon. Gentleman will know, but surely he is not saying to the House and to his constituents that he is seriously relaxed about the rise in long-term youth unemployment in his constituency. I simply do not believe that that is his position.