Disability Benefits and Social Care

Debate between Liam Byrne and Tom Clarke

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

Actually, Mr Harrington was appointed by the previous Government. The reform of ESA is right, but the point about reform is that we need to adapt and show flexibility. What the House needs to know this afternoon is that charities such as Mind have so little confidence in the Government’s ability to get it right that they are resigning from the process. I put it to the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) that that is not a vote of confidence.

[Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my view that the interventions of Conservative Members so far, in seeking to make cheap political points, do not represent at all the view of organisations for disabled people? Sense, for example, which speaks for deafblind people, said:

“We still remain very concerned by the overall aim of reducing the future DLA spend by over £1 billion.”

Are those not the worries that the House should be addressing?

[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?

Amendment of the Law

Debate between Liam Byrne and Tom Clarke

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my astonishment that the Secretary of State can produce savings figures, yet when we put specific questions to him we are told, “This is a matter for review”?

[Mr Byrne]

Precisely right. Indeed, the Secretary of State presented to the House of Commons a Bill that would abolish DLA before he had even bothered to finish consulting people up and down the country about what the reform of DLA should look like.

One of the greatest failures stemming from the Secretary of State’s inability to extract further money from his right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is, of course, the failure to get young people back to work. I met a delegation of young people from my constituency this morning and I asked them what they thought of the Government’s plans. Their thoughts were very simple: it just seems, they said, that the Government are stopping young people being what they could be. I could put it no better myself. Youth unemployment is now approaching 1 million. The Secretary of State likes to pretend—he did it again this afternoon—that this is somehow a problem that he inherited. [Interruption.] What he fails to remind us is that in the final nine months of our term of office, youth unemployment was falling by 67,000.

I know that the right hon. Gentleman is fond of quoting figures that do not include the number of people in higher education, for example. Fine: let us look at what the figures tell us. Since the election this is what has happened: after nine months in which youth unemployment was falling, it is now going up by 60,000—and that when the economy is supposedly growing. All the good work we did is now completely undone.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Tom Clarke

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

Perhaps the Secretary of State can tell the House this afternoon when those proposals will be ready for us to look at. [Interruption.] “In time for Committee,” he says from a sedentary position. We all look forward to seeing that.

It is now clear that for the self-employed, savers and families, this Bill at the very best poses more questions than it answers. The other question that the House has to ask the Secretary of State this afternoon is not about how we foster ambition, but about how we nurture compassion. How do we strengthen and reinforce our obligations to each other? That is something that we will hear a lot more about, when we talk about the reform of disability living allowance. What we know about the detailed reforms is not good. I welcome what the Secretary of State has said about the mobility component of DLA. I think that he has confirmed that he is withdrawing the proposal to cut £135 million from the mobility component of DLA. If that is true, it is welcome, because we are talking about a measure that the chief executive of Scope pronounced as “callous” and an

“assault on the most vulnerable”.

The rationale presented by the Minister of State has this morning been taken apart by 39 charities. I am afraid that I have to agree with the words of those campaigners who have said that

“many of these people”

—those in residential care—

“will be prevented from enjoying the freedom of movement that is taken for granted by people who are not disabled.”

Those are, of course, the words of the motion at the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference this weekend. I hope that together we may be able to prevail and get this measure dead and buried.

[Mr Tom Clarke]

On the crucial issue of the mobility component for people in residential accommodation, when my right hon. Friend put his question to the Secretary of State, I understood the Minister of State to be indicating dissent. Will my right hon. Friend give the Minister another opportunity to clarify this important issue?

[Mr Byrne]

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s suggestion. The Secretary of State has £135 million scored against the saving. I now invite him to intervene and say whether that saving is off the table, or whether the measure is going forward.