Welfare Reform (Sick and Disabled People)

Mark Lazarowicz Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful for the chance to speak briefly in this debate, and I thank the hon. Members who arranged it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said in the opening speech, in this debate we in Parliament are giving voice to the thousands of disabled people and many others throughout the country who are concerned about the impact of Government welfare policies on those with disabilities.

Like many hon. Members, in preparing for this debate I thought that the most useful thing I could do was to highlight the experience of, and briefly quote, some organisations who work daily with disabled people in my constituency. The welfare rights officer at the Royal National Institute of Blind People Scotland, whose Edinburgh office is in my constituency, has told me:

“The main issues that we are seeing in the RNIB service are long delays in the applications for PIP. So far I have only had one decision out of 9 claims made between July and November of last year… Clients making PIP claims are waiting 3 months and longer for medical assessments…also, if assessment has been carried out still not getting a decision from DWP.”

I am sure that hon. Members are aware of the report published today by the National Audit Office, the spending watchdog, which has highlighted, as one would no doubt understand, that such experiences are not unique. In its words, thousands of disabled people are facing “distress and financial difficulties”, because claims for the new personal independence payment are taking too long to process. Most claimants are waiting more than three months for their cases to be decided, rather than the target of 71 days, while terminally ill patients are waiting up to a month, instead of getting a decision, as they are meant to do, within 10 days.

I have been told by Waverley Care, a charity that provides care and support to people living with HIV or hepatitis C, that as a result of the overall benefit changes, the case load of staff dealing with benefits has increased dramatically, especially regarding appeals. It says that an increasing number of people are going to it for help because they find it too daunting to deal with the Department for Work and Pensions. Demand has also gone up sharply for the food parcels that it distributes, as has demand for help from its hardship funds. Typically, it has found that people are struggling to pay for food, toiletries and fuel. One reason why the demand for food parcels has increased is that people are running out of money between benefit payments, often because they have been switched to a benefit on which they receive less money, but also because, in the process of being switched from one benefit to another, there is a gap of two to three weeks during which they do not receive any money.

I have received similar information and reports from HIV Scotland, and reports from Citizens Advice Scotland again highlight that such experiences are not unique to my constituency, as I am sure hon. Members would understand and expect. I have spoken not only to organisations, but directly to disabled people who are going through those experiences daily. On the national day of demonstrations about Atos, I went along to join disabled people at the demonstration outside its Edinburgh headquarters, which happens to be situated in my constituency.

Like colleagues across the House, I of course hear the experiences at my surgery every week of people whose lives are being turned upside down by the impact of Government welfare policies, of people who are sanctioned without any apparent cause and—in relation to all the problems of the work capability assessment procedure, which many hon. Members have mentioned—of people who are rejected in spite of having the clearest medical advice that they are incapable of doing the work that they are expected to do.

I contacted Inclusion Scotland, which represents a wide range of organisations involved with disability issues, and I am afraid that its report just highlights the fact that although we have so far seen chaos—as well as inhumanity and, bluntly, cruelty—the way Government policies are going suggests that the worst is yet to come. It highlights that the consequences of those policies, taken together, will be incredibly damaging for so many disabled people in this country. In Scotland alone, 80,000 working-age disabled people will lose some or all of the mobility allowance to which they would otherwise have been entitled if the DLA entitlement criteria were still used, while 90,000 fewer disabled people in Scotland will qualify for the assistance with their care needs and daily living costs to which they would otherwise have been entitled under the DLA eligibility criteria.

The same experience is of course true across the entire UK. Under this Government’s welfare reforms during the past four years, we have had chaos, misery and a bureaucratic nightmare, as well as a waste of money with the bedroom tax, as we are increasingly seeing throughout the country. The policies are fundamentally wrong and they need to be reversed.