Personal Independence Payment

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, on my noble friend’s question about the medical reports, my understanding is that all information which is relevant is brought to the assessments, and that indeed people—supporters or family—can be brought forward to make the case and provide evidence. Again, I am not sure about the extent to which the fine detail of this issue is yet locked down. We are going through the details, and indeed on Monday we can start to discuss some of the fine points. The regulations have been laid in draft to be looked at by the various committees—the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and so on—and I think that that is the stage of the process that we are at. The noble Baroness is looking puzzled. If I am wrong on that, I shall make sure that that is corrected.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement. There are a number of good things in it. However, I should like to ask for reassurance on a specific point. Can the Minister reassure us, either now or certainly at the stage at which regulations are introduced, about the extent to which these changes and their impact will be monitored—for example, in relation to the employability of disabled people, in relation to whether there is a rise in demand for additional residential or homecare support, and in relation to whether there is consistency of assessment between the two different assessing bodies? There are a number of points here on which many of us would be much reassured if monitoring arrangements were in place. No Government can get all of this right. We will be bombarded with statistics from around the whole country, and it would be useful to know that central and independent monitoring was taking place.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we are planning to have a real look at this in the autumn of 2014, once the system is up and running. I am sure that we have not yet fine-tuned the exact nature of what we will be testing for, but consistency of application will clearly be one thing. We generally watch that quite closely but that is likely to be one of the issues, and the impacts will be another area which it is likely that that 2014 process will cover.