Summer Adjournment

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

In 2010 more than 234,000 people were claiming employment support allowance for a mental or behavioural disorder, which is 40% of the total and by far the biggest single group. The figures are similar for other sickness benefits. The Department for Work and Pensions is now in the process of migrating all sickness benefit claimants to employment support allowance, which includes reassessing their fitness to work through a work capacity assessment, but there are huge doubts about the fitness of this work capacity assessment for people with mental or behavioural disorders. Over 40% of people who lost their benefit won again at appeal—that is, over 20,000 in 16 months, which is far more than for any other refused benefit. After waiting for many months they had their benefits reinstated, but they should not have had to suffer that wait. This number does not include the people who had a decision reversed at an earlier stage or who gave up their struggle to make a claim.

This is a benefit claim system that is not fit for purpose. I have heard numerous examples of people with very serious and apparent mental illness having been found to be “fit for work” because they do not happen to meet the descriptors used as part of the work capability assessment. I do not need to remind the House that many of these people are highly vulnerable. The heads of a number of leading mental health charities and the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote to The Guardian following a poll which showed that over half of those surveyed reported suicidal thoughts as a result of the prospect of a work capability assessment, while 95% said that they did not think they would be believed at their assessment.

In recognition of this failure of the work capability assessment procedure for people with a mental illness, the Government are enacting Professor Harrington's recommendation for mental health “champions” in every assessment centre. Professor Harrington is also, at the request of the Government, working with leading mental health charities to review the mental, intellectual and cognitive descriptors used in the work capability assessment. Despite this, not all assessment centres yet have an assigned mental function champion, and where they do, they have not had the time to bed in and change practice in their centres.

The mental, intellectual and cognitive descriptors are recognised by the Government to be in need of review. In the meantime, tens of thousands of vulnerable people are being forced to undergo an assessment procedure that the Government acknowledge is failing them. I call on the Government to suspend all reassessments of those with a mental or behavioural illness until such time as Professor Harrington’s recommendations are fully implemented. The descriptors of mental, intellectual and cognitive impairment and the mental function champions need time to change working practices within the Department for Work and Pensions. We cannot allow hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people to undergo a process that we know to be flawed, risks suicide, causes huge distress, and is denying benefits to an unacceptably high proportion of those who are, in fact, entitled to them.