Ten Years of the Work Capability Assessment

Marsha De Cordova Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Laura Pidcock) on securing this debate. I thank all organisations that have provided briefings for it, and commend the excellent campaigning work of so many disabled activists, including those from Disabled People Against Cuts, who have shown that through direct action, our voices can be heard. I welcome the Minister to his new post, and I, too, hope he lasts longer than his predecessors. I look forward to working with him to try to make a difference.

My hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham made an excellent opening speech that highlighted the flaws in the unfit-for-purpose assessment framework, and the inadequacies of the assessment. She eloquently described the impact of poor decision making, and the flaws in the process that so many individuals have to go through. These ill and disabled people have to endure weeks, if not months on end, of waiting to receive the vital social security support to which they are entitled. She rightly highlighted the damning report from the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which stated that this Government have caused a systematic violation of the rights of disabled people. She also highlighted the harrowing experiences of so many people, which I will come on to later in my speech.

This afternoon hon. Members from across the House have shared their testimonies and paid tribute to their casework teams. We MPs are picking up a lot of this casework. We heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), for Lincoln (Karen Lee), and for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Hugh Gaffney), and from the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens), to name just a few.

Ten years on from its introduction, the unfit-for-purpose assessment continues to cause unnecessary harm. I admit that the work capability assessment was flawed from its inception, in that it fails to assess a person’s ability to work, instead relying on a series of functional descriptors that do not reflect the real world of work or the barriers to it. Under the coalition Government in 2012, WCA criteria were revised and the descriptors changed, making the test more restrictive. Once assessed, a person was placed in one of two groups: limited capability for work, or limited capability for work and work-related activity. In 2017, however, the Government did the unthinkable and abolished the work-related activity group component for employment and support allowance and universal credit. That denied nearly 500,000 ill and disabled people almost £30 per week, and chose to ignore the additional costs and distance from the labour market that are faced by ill and disabled people.

All hon. Members here have mentioned the outsourcing of assessments. Since 2010, more than £1 billion has been paid to private contractors, including Atos and Maximus, which have repeatedly failed, even by the DWP’s own performance standards. Despite those failures, the DWP recently announced that it will be extending the contract for Maximus until 2021. Does the Minister not agree that instead of extending the contract for a further 16 months, it is about time that we ended the privatisation of the assessments and brought them back in-house? I also ask the Minister to publish the contract and its terms, and how much it is going to cost, as his predecessor promised.

Members have told heartbreaking stories about the failures of the outsourced assessments, such as that of Larry Newman, who was assessed by Atos, was awarded zero points, and died of lung problems soon after. Healthcare professionals are asking inappropriate and offensive questions, and are compiling inaccurate reports. Citizens Advice says that 81% of its advisers have seen assessment reports that contain inaccuracies.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Marsha De Cordova]

I am sorry; I have to keep going.

The flawed WCA has led to inaccurate and poor decision making. Some 74% of decisions on ESA are overturned at appeal, but less than a quarter of ESA cases are overturned at mandatory reconsideration. As a result, many are forced to go to appeal tribunals, which, according to Citizens Advice, have an average waiting time of 30 weeks. That is 30 weeks without vital social security support. In 2017, the DWP spent £120 million challenging the cases at appeal tribunals. When will the Minister act to address the failure of the mandatory reconsideration stage?

My hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham mentioned all the cases that drop out of the system before even getting to mandatory reconsideration or appeal stage. Do we record that information? If not, does the Minister not agree that it is time to start recording and calculating the number of people who are falling out of the system? Will the Minister also share how much it costs to administer ESA appeals?

It is good that the ESA65B letter will be revised for the summer. Will the Minister pause any further distribution of those letters to GPs?

Perhaps the biggest failure of the work capability assessment lies in its role as a cause of and contributor to mental distress for ill and disabled people. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth listed all the people who took their life in 2017. This is just not good enough. The Government recently revealed that 5,690 people died six months after being found fit for work. That is unacceptable. These are people like Stephen Smith, who was found fit for work, despite having multiple illnesses. He died last week, and we send our condolences to his family and friends, because this is not an acceptable situation. There is no stronger indictment of a failing system than thousands dying months after being denied vital social security support—the support that is supposed to be the safety net for the most vulnerable in our society.

It is time to scrap the failing system. It is not time to merge or integrate ESA, universal credit and personal independence payments. As long as two assessments are deeply flawed, combining them will only expose individuals to the risk of two adverse decisions as opposed to one.

This is a cruel and callous assessment framework, which has created a hostile environment for disabled people. Labour, disabled people and disabled people’s organisations are clear that we need to scrap the work capability assessment immediately and replace it with an assessment framework that treats disabled people with the dignity and respect that they deserve. We need to end this hostile environment.