“Better Working with Disabled People: The Way Forward”
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
I am today publishing the latest part of our fulfilling potential cross-government disability strategy: “Better Working with Disabled People: The Way Forward”. This sets out our new plans for Government engagement with, and advice from, disabled people.
The UK has a proud history of furthering the rights of disabled people, but we know more needs to be done to realise the Government’s aim that disabled people should be enabled to participate in every aspect of society.
The new arrangements will build on the achievements of Equality 2025. The “Better Working with Disabled People” consultation, published in July 2013, sought views on how we can best do this. The responses to the consultation, and our extensive engagement with stakeholders, have helped us to shape the plans set out in “Better Working with Disabled People: The Way Forward”.
We aim to strengthen and broaden input to policy and strategy development from the lived experience of disabled people, and also from people with particular expertise on disability issues, in accordance with the principles of open policy making.
The new arrangements are intended to contribute towards meeting our obligation under the UN convention on the rights of disabled people to closely consult with, and actively involve, disabled people in decision-making processes relating to them.
We are establishing an engagement forum, the fulfilling potential forum, involving around 40 disability organisations, including regional representatives. The forum will meet quarterly to discuss and inform Government strategy. It will be co-chaired by the Minister of State for Disabled People and the Minister of State for Care and Support.
The work of the forum will be complemented by the introduction of the fulfilling potential policy advice service, a call-off list of disability experts who will advise Government policy makers. The management of the service will be contracted out, with the Office for Disability Issues in the Department for Work and Pensions managing the contract.
The first meeting of the fulfilling potential forum is expected to be in April 2014, and the fulfilling potential policy advice service should be operational by mid-2014.
I will place a copy of “Better Working with Disabled People: The Way Forward” in the House Library.
Welfare Reforms and Poverty
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Steve Rotheram
I agree, and I support the sentiments behind my hon. Friend’s holding of that fantastically successful jobs fair and the sentiments of the ordinary people we speak to. Sometimes we in this place see everything through the prism of what happens in London, and that is wrong. Out in our constituencies the reality is very different from the growth we sometimes see not across the board in London and the south-east, but in certain parts of this end of the country.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
One of the reasons I brought the cruise terminal to Liverpool in my previous job as a Transport Minister was to create jobs, that proposal was refused by the previous Labour Government. A lot of Government Members have exactly the same aspirations as the hon. Gentleman has for his constituency—to bring jobs to the area, which is why I made that decision.
Steve Rotheram
I thank the Minister for that intervention and I have previously put on record my thanks to him for making that decision. It was a brave decision, but it was also the right decision for Liverpool and for this country. I might be playing into the hands of Conservative Members by saying this, but when we joined the EU—the Common Market, as it then was—Liverpool found itself on the wrong side of the country and business transferred to the east. However, Liverpool is once again an international destination of choice, and it now finds itself on the right side of the country for the increasing transatlantic trade. We are hoping to open the first Panamax facility in the UK there in the near future, which will create jobs. Perhaps the Minister can therefore claim some credit as a catalyst for the regeneration of our waterfront.
Mike Penning
I want some more credit, actually, because Peel Ports will do that, and I also granted permission for that. The commercialisation of the Manchester ship canal will really open up that part of the world to international trade.
Steve Rotheram
I am not going to say quite so many nice things about the other end of the M62, but I understand the Minister’s point.
The massive increase in apprenticeships has been mentioned, and we welcome any genuine increase in their numbers. I used to work for the Learning and Skills Council, however, and I know that a large percentage of the increase in apprenticeships that the Government are claiming consists of rebranded training programmes for over-25s who are already in employment. What we really want is for the Government to tackle youth unemployment in those aged under 25 and to introduce real apprenticeships to bring those people job opportunities.
Lots of people in my city are on benefits for the very first time. Far from being in clover—it beggars belief what we read in the right-wing press—they are struggling to make ends meet, and the problem that thousands of Liverpudlians are facing is new to them. For many, the idea that they might miss a rent payment is totally alien. They have not done that in the past 20 years, but since May 2010 their individual household incomes have been on such a downward trajectory that they now find themselves in rent arrears, seeking advice on debt management and unable to afford the daily cost of travel, food and energy.
The Government now admit that, thanks to their flawed economic plan, they will miss their own economic targets by more than half, yet they still try to pass it off as a great achievement. That plan has meant that growth has been non-existent for three years, that small and medium-sized businesses have gone bankrupt at a rate we have not seen before, and that people’s money no longer goes as far on payday. The Money Advice Service estimates that 8.8 million people in the UK now have serious debt problems, but only 17% of that group have access to the debt advice that they need. That shows the depth of the problem.
Figures suggest that 40% of the adult population in Liverpool are struggling with serious debt problems. Let us stop and consider that for a moment. More than a third of all working-age people are in serious debt. Their wages are simply not enough to pay off what they owe, let alone pay their monthly bills. That is central to my party’s reason for highlighting the cost of living crisis. The findings of the New Policy Institute prove that, for the first time, more than half of the 13 million people living in poverty in the UK are in working families. That really exposes the folly of the Government’s rhetoric about strivers and skivers, workers and shirkers. With the cost of living rising faster than wages in virtually every month since this Government came to office, it is a betrayal of the Britain we live in not to recognise that recovery is a hell of a long way off. The fact is that, out there in the real world, people are hurting.
Just under 11,000 people were fed by the South Central and North Liverpool food banks between April and October 2013. I took the opportunity to visit the food bank in my area on Friday, and the work that it is doing is unbelievable. It has never been so busy. Instead of listening to the absolute nonsense peddled by the Secretary of State for Education about life choices, we should be congratulating those volunteers and the people who donate to food banks so that our constituents and citizens can have a decent meal of a night. Forget the Government’s flawed line about the rise of food banks over a 10-year period while Labour was in office; that figure of 11,000 is double what it was just 12 months ago, and 35.3% of those who have been fed by the Liverpool food banks are children.
The poverty inflicted by this Government has wider implications. In a letter to the British Medical Journal, David Taylor-Robinson of the university of Liverpool and his fellow academics have highlighted the doubling of malnutrition-related hospital admissions nationally since 2008. I am sure that many Members will also have seen the recent briefing from the charity Shelter, encouraging those with rent or mortgage repayment problems to seek early advice rather than allowing the problems to build up. Unfortunately, the cuts to citizens advice bureaux and legal aid make it more difficult to get appropriate advice. One of the advice centres in my constituency has had to close. In quarter 2 of this financial year—I am going to run out of time unless somebody intervenes on my to allow me an extension. [Hon. Members: “We can’t.”] All right. In that case, I have run out of time, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
Apart from a short comfort break, I have sat through the whole debate, finding it very interesting. I found the tone and manner of most of it to be exemplary, and a credit to the House and the Backbench Business Committee. I will take exception with the Opposition Front-Bench team, because if they were so determined that they wanted this they could have had this debate and pushed for this inquiry during Opposition day debates last week or later in this week. They could even have signed the motion tabled by the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher), but they did not; there are three names on the Order Paper, but none from the Front Bench. They have suddenly decided—[Hon. Members: “It is a Back-Bench debate.] So why did we have the debate last week? What about the business next week? They have not done it.
Let us not get into the semantics of what went on but look at what happened during the debate. [Interruption.] For someone who sits there and complains about other people chuntering from a sedentary position, I must say that the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) is the leading expert in it. We heard contributions from: the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton; my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies); the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick); my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy); the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram); my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming); the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson); my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley); and the hon. Members for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark), for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk), for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), for West Ham (Lyn Brown), for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) and for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz). As I say, it is a credit to the Backbench Business Committee that it listened to the Back Benchers and tabled this debate.
The contribution from the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton was wide ranging. I am pleased that he did not place all the blame on the coalition Government, not least because he was aware that the work capability assessments were introduced by the previous Administration, as was the Atos contract, which we discussed at Work and Pensions questions. So we inherited the assessments that are being complained about by hon. Members from across the House today, particularly those being carried out by Atos. We are working hard to improve the situation and deal with the mess we inherited. [Interruption.] I would like to know how it is possible that we are making it worse, as the contract we are working to is exactly the one we inherited. The hon. Member for Derby North, from a sedentary position, asks why. We were trapped in this because the previous Administration signed the contract. We need to make sure that the work capability assessment works as we go forward.
Mike Penning
I will not give way, because I do not have time.
My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth raised the most important issue, and I am pleased that the shadow Secretary of State is here now. The shadow Minister engaged in a rewriting of history. My hon. Friend and several others alluded to the fact that the shadow Secretary of State said that Labour would be tougher than the Tories on welfare and on welfare reforms. There was no nuance about helping more people. Labour said it would be tougher than the Tories on welfare. We have saved £83 billion on welfare spending—that is the predicted saving. I would like to know where those cuts would take place if not through welfare reform. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) says from a sedentary position that the cuts would come through jobs, but more than 1 million people have been placed into jobs since this Government took office. That is most important.
Mike Penning
I will give way to the hon. Lady because she has sat through the whole debate without having an opportunity to speak, and it is a credit to her.
Lady Hermon
Before the Minister came into his current job, he was a very effective Minister in Northern Ireland. He will know, therefore, that in Northern Ireland we have had an increased threat from dissident republicans, who are deeply and utterly ruthless. Would it not be worth while to extend this proposed commission to Northern Ireland? I hope that those who have proposed it would support that, but that is a point that could be clarified later. If the commission were to be granted, we could have a worthwhile review of and inquiry into whether deprivation and poverty in Northern Ireland have fed into the increase in dissident violence. Would that not be worth while?
Mike Penning
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and for her comments about my time as a Minister in Northern Ireland. That means an awful lot to me. Most of the welfare reforms have not been implemented in Northern Ireland yet because they are being blocked by one particular party, so it is difficult to see how we could appraise what was going to happen in Northern Ireland compared with the rest of the United Kingdom because the welfare reforms have not been introduced there in the way that they have in the rest of the country. I do not think that the answer at this stage is to have an independent review. The Government issue huge amounts of research—very expensive research—and we need to look carefully at what is going on.
We have of course brought in the benefit cap and reformed housing benefit. My constituency has one of the largest council-run social housing stocks in the country—nearly 16,000 council properties—as well as quite a large housing association stock. I get family after family saying to me, “Why do my children have to do their homework in the corridor? Why can’t we move into a larger property.”
Mike Penning
Absolutely. The hon. Gentleman’s party had 13 years to do so. The housing situation has not suddenly occurred in the last five minutes. Labour did not do it when it was in government, and yet it wants to rewrite history this evening. That is not possible and it will not happen. We need to ensure that we have fairness in the system. I have listened carefully to Members throughout the debate. The system has to be fair for both sides. It has to be fair to the people who are working and to those who are on benefit.
Earlier in the debate someone mentioned the Channel 4 programme. The idea of Channel 4 being supportive of this Government would be a shock to the system and to Channel 4. I was brought up in a working class area in north London, and, as I have said, I have two estates in the top 10% of the most socially deprived areas, but I was shocked by what I saw.
Mike Penning
Whether or not it is a fair representation is a matter for Channel 4. Like the rest of the country, I sat and watched the programme. I have not said anything about it, because I do not know the facts. I will go and see what is happening on the ground rather than speaking in generalisations. Channel 4 is not in any way a mouthpiece for this Government. It has been hugely critical of what we have been doing.
Mike Penning
I will not give way, because I want to make some progress. I did not intervene on the hon. Gentleman, so he will have to understand.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley made an important point about people who have moved from employment and support allowance to jobseeker’s allowance. It is enormously important that they know what benefits they are entitled to. As I said to the Work and Pensions Committee the other week, I will look carefully at the decision letter they get when they are told that their ESA has been stopped and what they are able to claim. That is a simple way to ensure that they understand the benefits they are entitled to and that families are not short of money.
The hon. Gentleman was the only Member to raise the issue of the minimum wage. The debate about what it will be raised to is taking place now. We will wait to hear what the independent review says. It is an important debate for people who are in work but require help from other benefits.
My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West gave a wide-ranging speech. I will have to write to him about when the credit unions will be able to charge monthly interest. I have been a member for more than 12 years, and believe that the credit unions make a very important contribution to our communities. In particular, they stop that man with a threatening look from knocking at the door on a Friday night, just after pay day. All of us who have grown up on such estates have had that frightening experience. In many ways, the credit union can really help with that problem.
The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran talked about discretionary payments and the fact that people have to apply again and again. There is nothing in the rules that says it should be for three months or for any other time scale. It is plainly obvious in many cases that an individual will be able to receive the payment for the long term and that the local authority should be able to rule on that. As we said at Question Time today, most local authorities are not using all their discretionary payments, and those that have can apply for extra payments under the scheme. We are looking forward to seeing how we can take that forward to ensure that we can give those assurances to local authorities. It is important that when Members go back to their constituencies they speak to their local authorities about what they should be doing, because there is no rule on the matter. My own local authority is using the three-month rule and there is no need for that in many cases. Local authorities should look at individuals rather than the numbers.
The hon. Member for Rochdale made an important speech and a good contribution to the debate, not least because he accepted from the outset that welfare reform is imperative. I was slightly concerned during his speech by the idea that if we are not careful, we might start thinking that all welfare reform will have a massive effect. In many ways, welfare reform can have a beneficial effect on people, particularly those who have been out of work for a considerable time and, thinking of my portfolio, those who have disabilities or long-term illnesses and have not been able to get back into work. For instance, the Access to Work programme is often the key to getting those people back in to work. It is important that we understand how the different schemes work and that hon. Members ensure that there is understanding in their constituencies.
The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth talked about bogus appointments. I would love to know about that and how it happened, so perhaps we can meet after the debate. It is obviously fundamentally wrong for bogus appointments to be made and for people to then be sanctioned. It would be much appreciated if she or any other hon. Member could help us with such issues.
Mr Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.] I am sorry, Mr Speaker. I apologise. I think you have known me long enough to accept that that was a genuine mistake.
The whole debate has been sensible, apart from the contribution of the shadow Minister, who is chuntering away again, ruining the quality of the debate as usual. It is important that the Backbench Business Committee can introduce such a debate. If the Opposition Front Benchers had wanted it so much, they could have introduced it in their own time. We should let the House decide this evening.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)
1. What plans he has to improve the work capability assessment.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
We remain committed to reviewing continually and further improving the assessment. Dr Litchfield’s independent review was published in December, and the Government will publish their response in the first quarter of this year.
Ian Mearns
It has come to my attention through research conducted by several disability campaign groups that as many as four people a day are dying within six weeks of being declared fit for work under the Department’s work capability assessment. Will the Secretary of State reflect on those figures? When he finds them to be true, as they are based on his Department’s data, will he come back to the House and apologise to the families of the deceased, who suffered unnecessarily in their last precious days? We can recuperate benefits that are awarded incorrectly, but we cannot recuperate a person’s life.
Mike Penning
Our thoughts and prayers are with the people and families who have lost their loved ones. There is a system in place for people with life-threatening illnesses, and particularly for those who are likely to die. As I said to the Work and Pensions Committee, the Chairman of which is in the Chamber, we are trying to get the decision making down to seven days, which we would all welcome.
Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
Am I right in thinking that we spend more than £13 billion on sickness and incapacity benefit for almost 2.5 million people of working age? Is it not right to ensure that the support goes to those who need it most?
Mike Penning
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. Of course, the scheme was brought in by the previous Administration—the Opposition have selective memory loss about that. We are determined to get the scheme right to help people get back into work and to help those who cannot get back into work through the benefits system.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
As the Court of Appeal recently threw out the Government’s appeal against the decision that the work capability assessment disadvantages those with long-term mental health problems and learning disabilities such as autism, will the Minister accept that the test is simply not designed to deal with such people? What will he do about that?
Mike Penning
The Harrington report referred to that matter specifically. Ensuring that people with hidden disabilities get all the help we can give them is is close to my heart, but the Harrington pilot is on hold because of the judicial review.
Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)
In my part of the world, the work capability assessment and the personal independence payment are administered by Atos. When my constituents finally get an assessment, they find an organisation that is as insensitive as it is incompetent. Would not the best way of improving the work capability assessment be to remove the incapable Atos?
Mike Penning
We inherited the contract with Atos as the company running the WCA. We were not happy with the quality of its work, which is why we brought in measures. We accept that that is causing delays to the system, but it is better to have the necessary quality than to get it wrong.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
How many people have to lose their appeal after 12 months of trying to get justice done? How many more people—including the four a day referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns)—have to die before they get an appeal? Surely it is time for even this insensitive Government to understand that Atos is not fit for purpose and should be abandoned, and that we should start all over again.
Mike Penning
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman said that all the way through to his own Government when they brought in Atos. What the Opposition put in place when they were in government was a complete mess. We are determined to get it right. We are listening to why the tribunal judges make their decisions so that we get the decisions right earlier on.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend confirm that that the Department has service level agreements with Atos and Capita that include claimant satisfaction and timeliness?
Mike Penning
Yes, we do. There is a financial penalty regime that I have every intention of implementing.
John Robertson (Glasgow North West) (Lab)
2. How many claimants have received the personal independence payment since April 2013.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
The Department intends to publish official statistics in the spring. In the meantime, we are looking to see whether we can publish interim information as soon as it becomes available.
John Robertson
I thank the Minister for that answer, which is good news for a lot of people. He will appreciate that a lot of people are suffering while Capita takes so long to get that information out; they have the anxiety of not knowing whether their appeals, or even their applications for assessment, have been agreed. What kind of monitoring of Capita is he doing, and does it have enough people to do the job?
Mike Penning
We are monitoring the work of both Capita and Atos, and we will have the figures as soon as we can. Under the previous Administration’s scheme, fewer than 6% of people claiming this or a similar benefit were ever assessed. It must be right and proper that there is not self-assessment; it is done by the experts.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Will the Minister look into the fact that personal independence payments seem to get stuck in the system and are not passed on to the Department for Work and Pensions? My constituent waited three months for an assessment. Three more months later, it is still stuck in the system. The Department wants to sort it out. What more can he do to ensure that they liaise with each other?
Mike Penning
The Department’s officials and the contractors, Atos and Capita, are working closely every single day. We need to ensure that we get the decisions right. In such situations as the one brought to the House’s attention by my hon. Friend, we will work closely. If my hon. Friend contacts me later, we will look exactly at that point.
Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)
When the Minister appeared in front of the Select Committee, he admitted that there had been very long delays in getting PIP assessment determinations. People had applied in the summer and still did not have a determination by December. We are a month further on and they still have not yet heard anything. I am now receiving e-mails from people across the whole country, as well as from my own constituents, who have been waiting for more than six months since they had their face-to-face assessment. They still have not heard whether they will get the benefit or not. What is the Minister doing to ensure that people find out whether they qualify?
Mike Penning
The evidence I gave to the Select Committee—the Committee’s questions were useful to me and I hope the evidence I gave was useful—is that the key to this is that we roll it out until we get the decisions right. The next part of the roll-out is taking place today in south Scotland. If we get it right, it will be a much better benefit for everybody. As we know, there are delays, but they are based on getting the quality and the decisions right. We are working very closely and very hard to make sure that decisions are correct when they are put out.
Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)
I, too, have constituents who have been waiting since September. I have received letters in writing from the DWP saying that it cannot speed it up. What can the DWP do to speed up the process?
Mike Penning
That would depend on where the claim is within the system and whether it is with Capita, Atos or DWP. I will look into the individual complaints. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to come and see me and I will make sure we get on with it.
Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
3. What assessment he has made of recent trends in the award of discretionary housing payments.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
5. What recent assessment he has made of Capita’s timescales for processing medical assessments for personal independence payments and providing them to his Department.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
As I said earlier, the end to end journey time for people claiming PIP is too long—within the DWP as well as with Capita and Atos in the hon. Lady’s constituency. More than anything else, this is to do with quality issues that we want to get right. There is no point in having a very quick journey if we get the wrong decision.
Mrs Moon
I thank the Minister for that reply. My constituent Mr Weaver applied for PIP in June, and Mrs Curran did so in July. They both had their assessments with Capita in August. The assessments have still not reached the DWP, which is totally unacceptable. Legitimate claims are being denied, which cannot be good money for the Government and cannot be a quality service. This company is inept, inefficient and not fit to carry out the work it is asked to do.
Mike Penning
I thank the hon. Lady and we will obviously look into the individual cases she mentioned. It is absolutely crucial to get it right and to get the quality right so that when benefits are claimed, those who deserve them get them and those who do not deserve them do not. Face-to-face assessment is a crucial part of this and I have said previously, that fewer than 6% of those who claimed benefit were ever assessed.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
Is it not the appeals process against the initial decision that is slowing the process down? Will my hon. Friend use his good offices and those of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to raise this issue as a matter of urgency with the Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor?
Mike Penning
My hon. Friend raises an important point. What often happens is that evidence is produced on the day of the tribunal that the Department’s officials have never seen before. In some cases, evidence has understandably come forward at that stage when we might not have known anything about it. We are looking closely at that as well as at getting more information from the judges.
Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
Since June, I have had five cases brought to my attention at my constituency surgery where applications for PIPs have been made yet not one of them has been paid. The assessments have been carried out, yet DWP employees are telling people being treated for cancer to phone up and chase Capita. Will the Minister do something about it because this system is collapsing?
Mike Penning
People suffering from terminal illnesses are being dealt with very quickly in most cases—
Mike Penning
Those with terminal illnesses are; cancer is not always terminal. I know this is an emotive subject, but fortunately plenty of people in this country live through their cancer. I will look carefully into what the hon. Gentleman says, but it is not the case that no benefits are getting through. The vast majority are. I see cases at my surgery the same as others do, but the vast majority are getting their benefits. We will, however, work on the quality.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
A GP whose patient has particularly complex medical and learning disability needs is still waiting for an assessment and a decision many months after making his application. Why are doctors’ letters not accepted?
Mike Penning
Even the last Administration had the sense to recognise that GPs were very close to their patients, and that it was therefore necessary to obtain evidence from other health experts as well, especially consultants. However, the assessment relates not to an illness or other condition, but to a person’s capacity to work. That is what is important.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
6. What recent assessment he has made of the OECD disability spend.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
The most recent OECD figures, from 2009, show that the United Kingdom spent 2.4% of its gross domestic product on benefits for people with disabilities. According to UK figures for 2012-13, we are spending about £50 billion a year on such benefits.
Fiona Bruce
Can the Minister explain how that money is being used to help disabled people in my constituency to lead full and independent lives?
Mike Penning
The reason we are spending so much money is that we want to ensure that people with disabilities or other long-term conditions can lead lives that are as fulfilling as possible, and, if they are able to do so, enter the workplace. Much of the money is spent on the Access to Work scheme, which has proved very successful. It is interesting that not many Opposition Members seem to approve of the £50 billion that the Government are spending.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
Ministers have been taking a pick-and-mix approach to the OECD figures, claiming that the United Kingdom is a top spender on disability-related benefits while referring to only one indicator rather than to total incapacity-related benefit spending. Is it not time that they came clean? Will the Minister now admit that disabled people are bearing the brunt of the Government’s welfare reforms?
Mike Penning
We do not “pick and mix” at all. Those who look carefully at the figures will see that Germany spends roughly half the amount that we spend in relation to GDP. If the hon. Lady thinks that we should spend more, that will mean another spending commitment from the Opposition.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
7. What assessment he has made of the implications for his Department’s policies of the most recent employment statistics.
Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
T8. Will the Minister update the House on the progress in providing support for mesothelioma sufferers?
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
Legislation on compensation for mesothelioma sufferers went through the House last week, and I was pleased to see the Bill receive its Third Reading. As I said at the time, it is not perfect but it will help as a fund of last resort for those who have had nothing from the system because they could not trace their employers or insurers. I hope that Her Majesty will grant it Royal Assent at the earliest opportunity.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
T4. The Government’s auto-enrolment pension scheme will provide relatively poor and insecure returns, based as it is on the private pensions industry and subject to stock market vagaries. Is not the only long-term solution a comprehensive and compulsory state scheme for all, with defined and guaranteed returns, in line with schemes overseas?
Sir Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD)
Constituents of mine who face mandatory reconsideration are stuck with the possibility of a gap in their benefits until their tribunal hearing. I know that the Secretary of State is very keen to deal with that problem. Will he tell the House what further steps can be taken to protect my constituents?
Mike Penning
One of the things we have done in the past couple of weeks, since I came to this post, is get information back from tribunal judges. Previously, we did not have that information. We are studying why judges are making those decisions, so we can make sure that we get decisions right before they go to tribunal.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
T6. Given the praise for the Health and Safety Executive from respondents to the recent triennial review, including positive feedback from the business sector, will the Minister support its regulatory function of saving British workers’ lives, instead of repeating the tired old Tory mantra about work-based dangers: “It’s health and safety gone mad”?
Mike Penning
I am slightly disappointed in my hon. Friend for asking that sort of question, because it is very important that health and safety is taken seriously in the workplace and in public areas. Right across the Christmas period, I went public about the need to ensure that Christmas was not spoiled by stupid comments, and stupid local authorities saying, “We shouldn’t do this or that”—throw snowballs, or have Christmas trees in certain areas—“because of health and safety.” That is wrong, and it has nothing to do with health and safety; it is an insurance risk.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Has the Secretary of State managed to watch programmes such as “Benefits Street” and “On Benefits & Proud”? If so, has he, like me, been struck by the number of people on them who manage to combine complaining about welfare reform with being able to afford to buy copious amounts of cigarettes, have lots of tattoos, and watch Sky TV on the obligatory widescreen television? Does he understand the concerns and irritation of many people who go to work every day and pay their taxes but cannot afford those kinds of luxuries?
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
May I ask the Secretary of State to look carefully at his many policies that are delivered through intermediaries such as G4S, Capita and Atos? Are not many of those private sector providers deeply ineffective and inefficient? They cause many of my constituents great grief.
Mike Penning
While I accept some of the things that the hon. Gentleman says—in particular, I accept that Atos’ contract for the work capability assessment was brought in by the previous Administration—there can be benefits, and savings can be made, if assessments are done correctly. To look after our constituents, we have to make sure that companies do them properly.
Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)
In the Minister’s reply to my written question of 5 December, we learned that there was a prosecution in fewer than one in four of 45,000 cases of benefit fraud. Only 400 cases resulted in a prison sentence; the vast majority were handled through informal recovery processes. What proportion of the informal repayment arrangements are up to date, and does the Minister believe that increasing the incidence of prosecution would be helpful in reducing the incidence of benefit fraud?
Health and Safety Executive (Triennial Review)
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
On 25 April 2013, the Minister for employment, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), made a written statement to Parliament announcing the triennial review of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and that Martin Temple, chair of the EEF, would lead that review. I am pleased to announce the conclusion of the review and publication of Mr Temple’s report later today.
HSE is an Executive non-departmental public body (NDPB). It is the national, independent regulator for work-related safety and health. Its mission is the prevention of death, injury and ill health to those at work and those affected by work activities.
The review has concluded that the functions performed by HSE are still required and that it should be retained as a NDPB. Mr Temple has recommended that HSE build on its well-deserved international reputation and make more progress to grow its commercial income.
I welcome these recommendations, but want to go further to introduce reforms of HSE to ensure that it delivers value for money to the taxpayer, while ensuring safety for the nation. There is considerable potential for HSE to become more commercial in outlook and in delivery—increasing the pace of the work already started within the organisation.
Therefore, I have asked HSE to begin work immediately to examine commercial models for HSE in collaboration with HMT and the Cabinet Office, and to review the HSE board to ensure it has the right skills to oversee future efficiencies and commercial income-generating options. Some of the other recommendations require further consideration and therefore the Government will respond more fully later this year.
I will place a copy of the report of the triennial review of HSE in the House Library later today.
Mesothelioma Bill [Lords]
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and Mr Speaker, who is now back in the Chair, for permission to make some opening remarks at the start of Report. While I am enormously proud to bring this important and long-awaited Bill before the House, it is with a sad heart that I do so without the presence of the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins), who has campaigned for this Bill for many years. Although we may not have agreed fully on all parts of the Bill—we will come on to those parts later—he was enormously helpful to me, not only in the Bill Committee of which he was a member, but outside the House. When I first became a Minister he was very open, and discussed with me the sort of pressures and worries that I would be having. It is a real shame he is not here today, and our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family. We wish him a speedy recovery. I know that he is very poorly, but I know that the thoughts and prayers of both sides of the House go out to him today, and I hope that we will do him proud with the Bill today.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for the remarks that he made about my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins). He is a good friend and colleague to Members on both sides of the House. He is my parliamentary next-door neighbour and, as the Minister has said, for those who are new in this place or to a role, my right hon. Friend is a tremendous source of support, guidance, help and friendship. We miss him very much today.
I am delighted that some of the amendments that my right hon. Friend was able to table before he became unwell will be debated this afternoon, and I hope that the Minister and others will want to do all that they can to honour Paul’s intentions. I know from my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), who has been in touch with Paul’s family, that they are hugely appreciative that we have the opportunity to debate these amendments this afternoon, and that can be the best tribute to Paul to wish him a full recovery so that we have him back with us as soon as possible.
Kate Green
I am shocked to hear of the case that my hon. Friend reports. For anyone suffering terribly from a disease they know will be fatal and cruel in its passage, one of the most important things is being as close as possible to home, to their family and friends, and naturally we want to do all we can to invest in good-quality, well-researched treatment so that every mesothelioma sufferer can access care as close as possible to home.
Members across the House have pointed out the differential in the level of funding afforded to mesothelioma research relative to that directed to other medical conditions and other cancers. In fact, mesothelioma research receives no state funding at all, yet as more people access pay-outs from the scheme introduced in the Bill, the Government should begin to enjoy financial savings as a result of reduced statutory pay-outs. It is not one of the amendments proposed today, but the Minister might like to consider whether the savings that the Government can look forward to enjoying might also, to a degree, be directed towards funding further research into a treatment and cure for this terrible disease.
Today, mesothelioma research receives £1.4 million of entirely voluntary and private sector funding, and I pay tribute to the voluntary and private sector funders, including the insurance funders, that have made those research funds available. Some £1.4 million is available to mesothelioma each year, compared with, for example, £22 million for bowel cancer, £41 million for breast cancer, £11.5 million for lung cancer and £32 million for leukaemia. Clearly we are not anxious to be in some form of league table for which form of cancer is the most deserving of funding for research—all are terrible for those hit by them and for those close to them—but it is clear that mesothelioma is a poor relation in the funding that is available for research, and there is a real will across the House and, as we know, in the other place to address that matter during the passage of the Bill.
This issue was debated extensively in the House of Lords as a result of an amendment tabled by Lord Alton. At that time, a number of useful and welcome pledges were secured from the Health Minister, Earl Howe, including the announcement of a joint strategy between the DWP and the Department of Health on how to encourage proposals for high-quality research into mesothelioma. Since Earl Howe’s statement in the House of Lords, we have heard that a meeting has been hosted with potential researchers and funders to begin to take forward the implementation of that strategy. We are pleased to hear that.
As the Minister will recall, when we debated the matter in Committee my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East absolutely rejected any suggestions that it was a lack of suitable research proposals, rather than a lack of adequate research funding, that was leading to the dearth of activity in mesothelioma research. The proposal in the new clause, which was made at every stage in Committee and in the other place, is very modest in the context of the overall scheme that we are discussing. It proposes a supplement of 1% to go towards research funding on the levy on insurers. That is not 1% of gross written premium, but 1% of 3% of gross written premium—a very modest sum for a multibillion pound insurance industry to afford, but a sum that could make an exponential difference to the scale of research that is possible into the disease. I hope that the Minister is listening carefully to the pleas that we should secure that.
In Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East listed a series of research programmes that are already under way; the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford also referred to those programmes. We would like to take the opportunity to secure funding to extend, expand and continue those research programmes, and to open the opportunity for further new areas of research—as I say, there is no shortage of good research ideas.
It is important to note that such research would of course be of benefit to mesothelioma sufferers in this country. We have the highest incidence of mesothelioma anywhere in the world and, as hon. Members have pointed out, the reach of mesothelioma is extending; not just to those who worked in our traditional industrial sectors but across other sectors. Schools have been particularly highlighted, as have family members who may have been exposed to secondary contamination when workers brought home asbestos fibres on clothes and work equipment.
Not just sufferers and their families here in the UK but sufferers right across the world will benefit from investment in research. That is an important point, and one that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East would have wanted us to consider this afternoon. In the UK, we think that we are shortly to pass the spike in mesothelioma. The history of asbestos exposure and of health and safety action and legislation to prevent people from being continually exposed to that risk means that the spike in the number of sufferers will come within the next few years. That is to be welcomed tremendously here in the UK, but it is absolutely not the case around the world, particularly in developing economies—especially developing economies where health and safety standards may be much less rigorous than we are used to in this country and where economies may be expanding very rapidly—where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers may even now be exposed to the risk of mesothelioma despite all the collective knowledge and wisdom that we have of the damage that exposure to asbestos will cause.
It is also important to note that in many of those developing economies, UK companies and businesses will have business interests and investments. In some cases they may be drawing profits from industries that are continuing to expose workers worldwide to that risk. The moral obligation on us here in the UK to lead the world in research funding arises first because of our early experience of asbestos exposure and mesothelioma and secondly because we continue indirectly to be complicit in the exposure of workers in developing economies around the world.
It has been powerfully conveyed this afternoon how strongly the House feels not just about making sure that the funding proposals come forward, but that funding to support and encourage future proposals is guaranteed and secured. I know that the insurance industry feels as concerned as any of us to address the horrors of this disease and to seek to turn a corner in dealing with the risks to which we have exposed too many generations. I hope that it too will consider this very modest proposal, which merely builds on the voluntary contribution that many of them are already making. I hope that the industry will not feel that this is a step too far for it to contemplate. Even if it does feel that, it is the responsibility of those of us in this House first and foremost to speak up for victims—today’s victims and victims in the future. That is why I hope that the Minister will at last feel able to accept the amendments that have been moved on behalf of my right hon. Friend. I very much look forward to a positive response.
Mike Penning
I paid tribute to the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) earlier. When I heard the news, I e-mailed his office, as that was the only way I could contact his family. I hope that the message got through. It is not just in my current post that the right hon. Gentleman has been supportive; he was also supportive when I was a Northern Ireland Minister. He was an excellent Minister there as well. I pay tribute to the measured response from Her Majesty’s Opposition so far today and I am sure that that will continue. I particularly pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) on what must have been a difficult speech to make. The right hon. Gentleman, who is very poorly, is a close friend; we are friends across the House. It is a tribute to my hon. Friend that she was able to move the amendments today.
During the Committee stage, I gave undertakings to the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East—inside and outside the Committee—and discussed the restraints I was under, which he fully understood, given the deal that we struck with the insurance industry to get the Bill to where it is today. As promised, I met the ABI, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford Urmston (Kate Green) alluded, and the ABI has gone to the industry and will come back to me and to my noble friend Lord Howe as part of the joint approach that we have with the Department of Health on future research.
I have also spoken to Lord Howe, as I committed to do in Committee. As has been said, we have had the first meeting. One of the things I touched on with him was the issue of quality of research. That matter has been taken out of context slightly, although there was no intention to do so. It is like when anyone bids for anything; they have to tick the right boxes. When people go for a loan at the bank, they need to make sure that they have ticked the right boxes. It is not a question of the quality of research; in many cases, it is how that research has been bid for by the establishments.
It is true that the National Institute for Health Research provided £2.2 million in 2012-13 on top of the £1.4 million from the private sector. There has been money and we expect more money to come as bids come forward that match the way in which the research funding is allocated. I completely agree with the shadow Minister that we need to look at research not just in this country, as a developed nation, but for developing countries. A lot of the industries that developed products with asbestos in them have been selling them to the third world for many years. Thank goodness, many of the nations that we traditionally thought of as third-world nations are now developing nations, and it is important to force this issue forward.
Mike Penning
It is important to remember that this is about employee liability in cases where the insurer cannot be found. A great deal has been said about public liability, but this scheme would not cover that. The right hon. Gentleman is right to say that we will see more and more examples of schools in which pupils will have been affected, but that will be covered by public liability insurance. Schools and similar institutions are public places, so it will be a lot easier to find the insurer involved.
Mr Brown
I agree 100% with the hon. Gentleman, who represents a community in Northern Ireland with exactly the same history as that of the former Swan Hunter shipyard workers and others whom I represent. We have a common cause in this regard. A lot of help is given by the trade unions in the shipyards—the cases involving Short’s and Harland and Wolff are exactly the same as those involving Swan Hunter—but even with that help, the balance of advantage remains with those who know the insurance industry. Those with links to the relevant trade associations have the resources to find out whether the insurers still exist, and can find that information pretty quickly these days. Some work has been done to try to improve that process, and I am grateful for the efforts made by our Government and the present one to ensure that that continues.
The principal objection to the payment of 100% compensation is that it would break the agreement that the Minister has made with the industry. I know that he does not take offence when people like me say that a lot of premiums have been taken to insure against things that the industry is now not going to have to pay out on. It would pay out if I had my way, but the law established in 2007 says that it need not do so. The pleural plaques judgment has meant that the industry is the beneficiary of the premiums that it has taken in relation to pleural plaques, although not to mesothelioma, because the cause of action has been struck down. I think I am right in saying that that does not apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland, although it certainly does in England.
Mike Penning
I apologise for not intervening on the right hon. Gentleman earlier before he moved on to this point. I completely agree that it is spurious to argue that 100% compensation would act as an incentive. That suggestion has come from other parties, but certainly not from the Government. I want to place on record that that is not the Government’s position.
Mr Brown
I am grateful to the Minister for that intervention, and for its tone. The incentivisation argument is a distasteful one, and I am glad that the Government are not associating themselves with it. That makes it clear that the argument is about affordability within the parameters of the scheme.
I accept that the case for 100% compensation cannot convincingly be made, even by me, if the test is affordability within the parameters of the scheme. Amendment 1 proposes a figure of 80%, and whether that would be affordable within the parameters of the scheme is a finer point. I am not giving in, however. I believe that the victims deserve 100% compensation, but I understand that, if the Government are saying that the test should be the parameters of the negotiated scheme, we will have to maximise the money available to the victims within those parameters. We have all used the useful chart produced by the Minister’s Department as the factual background to the debate. The outcome will depend on whether we factor the percentages over four years or whether we take a longer, 10-year view. The Minister will not be surprised to hear that I take the longer view because I want the victims to have more money.
In determining whether the proposals are affordable within the parameters of the scheme, the Minister needs to explain two points. First, he must explain why 80% compensation would not be affordable, on his own figures. My submission is that it would be if it were spread over a longer time period and therefore cost less per year. The second point involves the cost of lawyers. This is set out in regulations, and the Minister is right to say that it should not be in the Bill itself, but the legal costs are going to have to be met. The estimate was £2,000 per case, but the figure then rose to £7,000. It is not clear which is the right figure. I do not want to mislead anyone; the cost will not come out of the money awarded to the victim, but it will come out of the overall cost of the scheme. The question of whether the cost is £2,000 or £7,000, or somewhere in between, will therefore make a difference. Will the Minister tell us what the correct figure is?
Mike Penning
The figure is £7,000, and the right hon. Gentleman is right to say that the figure comes out of the overall cost of the scheme—out of the 3%. If the claimant pays less than that figure, they keep the difference—thus, it becomes part of their compensation. We discussed the reason why the figure moved in Committee and in the Lords: it was felt that £2,000 was too low and so people would not get the sort of legal advice they needed. We desperately did not want the situation that had happened with other schemes whereby the legal teams got more money out of the compensation than that—that is why the figure is £7,000. In the negotiations I have been having, the feeling has been that the actual amount will be less, so the recipients or their loved ones will get the difference.
Mr Brown
I understand what the Minister is saying, and we all travel in hope—I certainly travel with him in hope. I hope this does not sound unduly cynical, but once the legal profession knows that a maximum of £7,000 is available for the cost of administering this, the work done and the effort put in by the individual law firms is likely to rise up towards the £7,000 ceiling. The Minister’s hope that simpler and more straightforward cases will confine themselves to a lower fee is correct, and I am with him on it, but I have the feeling that things will not work out that way. If they do not, there will be a cost on the scheme and so it will become harder to say, “We will put up the money for the victims” because the 3% ceiling will have been approached.
The second issue in this group of amendments is when the scheme should start. The Government’s proposal is to start it in 2012—backdating to the commencement of the Bill’s proceedings. My argument is that it should be backdated to the date of the consultation that led to the Bill. The consultation started under the previous Labour Government and was designed to meet exactly the same problem that the Government have identified. That consultation was on a slightly more generous scheme than this one, but of course the fruits of that consultation have not been heard and the discussions were only in their infancy when the general election interrupted proceedings.
It would be possible to make a case for a much earlier start date for a scheme of this nature. We could go back to the date of guilty knowledge for the industry as a whole, which would take us back before the second world war—if we were being really rigorous. There are certainly milestones in how our thinking has developed on these issues which go back a lot earlier than 2010. However, the Opposition Front-Bench team and I have put forward the most modest proposition that it would be possible to conceive of. We are saying that the start of consultation was the start of legitimate expectations in the minds of the victims who were being consulted and it put the industry on notice that there was to be a statutory scheme or that at least the then Government were contemplating such a scheme. This could not have come as a complete surprise to the industry.
Mike Penning
The right hon. Gentleman has alluded to the fact that I am trapped within the funding parameters of the scheme. It will be 80 million extra if we took the start date back to 2010 and that would take us outside the scheme—
Mike Penning
I apologise if I have misled anyone; I was talking about the funding parameters I am restricted by. The cost of taking the date back to when the consultation started would be £80 million. One other issue that we discussed in Committee was that although the consultation rightly contained an option that the then Government were looking at taking forward, there was also an option to do nothing. That is obviously an issue, but the big issue is the money.
Mr Brown
On that last point, I am more aware than anyone else in this place could be of the forces that would be in favour of the option to do nothing, and I have paid my tribute to the Minister for doing something rather than nothing. He should take pride in the job he has done, and I pay him all credit for it. That £80 million will be the top figure—it will be the highest possible figure that the officials believe they can give the Minister so that he can use it to dissuade the House. I am not entirely convinced by it. He cannot possibly know the real figure, because we will not know that until the cases come forward—it could well be a lot less. I would be willing to take a chance on it and to do justice to the victims. Let us stand the Minister’s argument on its head. He is inviting us to do the victims of this horrible disease—or, more likely, their families and dependants—out of £80 million. I do not want to do that, so I will want to put the proposition to the vote.
Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)
Like other hon. Members, I start by mentioning my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins), who has done much on this subject. He organises an annual memorial event in Greater Manchester, in the city centre, and as a Greater Manchester Member of Parliament I have always been pleased to attend, so I thank him for his work in that regard. I pass on my best wishes to his family, and I hope he will be well again soon.
Hon. Members will be aware that Rochdale was home to the world’s biggest asbestos factory—Turner and Newall dominated the town for many years—and it is fair to say that the legacy of asbestos still haunts our town and its people. Walking around my constituency, it is hard to find anyone who has not been affected in some way by asbestos, whether through family members, friends or colleagues, many of whom have been affected by asbestos-related diseases. Asbestos destroys lives and breaks families. In Rochdale, it has left a community legacy in the form of a massive derelict factory site that nobody is prepared to remediate effectively.
The lack of justice and compensation for many of the victims of asbestos is a scandal that has lasted for far too long. I am pleased that the Bill is before us, but we must go further than what is proposed. I believe that the Bill falls woefully short of providing adequate compensation for the victims.
The Bill contains a number of arbitrary decisions that I think are designed purely to appease the insurance industry. First and foremost among those is the cut-off date for diagnosis, 25 July 2012, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) mentioned. I have heard no credible argument for why it cannot be put back to 10 February 2010, when the original consultation started, as my right hon. Friend suggested. I understand that that would assist an additional 700 people. The argument must not just be about cost. However, it is my understanding that with that change, it would fit within the 3% levy if it was taken over the 10-year period.
Secondly, the Bill is very limited in terms of who it supports and helps. It is being spun as a victory for asbestos sufferers, but it is limited to covering just mesothelioma victims and it will not affect people who have come into contact with asbestos domestically. That is a cause for concern.
My final point is about the level of compensation. Frankly, 75% is insulting. We must remember that the Government were proposing a 70% limit. My opinion is that a fair level of compensation would be 100%, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East suggested. I am prepared to support an 80% level. That modest increase would at least give some comfort to the victims.
All those arbitrary decisions raise serious questions about the Bill. I get the impression that the Government are good at standing up for the strong insurance industry, but weak when it comes to standing up for the victims of asbestos.
I will finish by referring to the case of a lady called Mrs Nellie Kershaw. She started work as an asbestos spinner at the age of 12 in the Turner and Newall factory in Rochdale. In 1922, she became too sick to work and was diagnosed by a local doctor as suffering from asbestos poisoning. As it was an occupational illness, she was ineligible for sickness benefit from a local scheme to which she had contributed. Her husband, Frank, who was having to look after the couple’s two children, pleaded with her employers for assistance. They refused to offer any help and she died in poverty on 24 March 1924. To this day, she lies in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Rochdale cemetery. She was 33 years old when she passed away.
Nellie Kershaw was the first person in this country to be diagnosed with asbestosis. She and her family were left with absolutely nothing. Fast-forward 90 years and we are here today quibbling over who should and who should not receive compensation and over how much the compensation should be. As it stands, the Bill does the minimum possible to support asbestos victims.
Mike Penning
I am listening intently to the hon. Gentleman’s comments, but I am really disappointed by some of them. I understand him wanting to get more compensation, but the Bill would not be here today without Lord Freud fighting to get time, and this Government getting it on the statute book, which, as the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) said, is difficult and had not been done previously. Most people who know me know I do not do party politics, but I cannot sit back and say that we have not done our bit because we are doing our bit—that is why we are here today.
Simon Danczuk
I accept the Minister’s intervention and I am not trying to be overly party political about the issue. As I said earlier, I accept that progress has been made, which I welcome, but I am pushing for more intervention from the Government, and for a better compensation scheme for my constituents and those across the country who deserve more from this Bill. I hope we can achieve that today.
Mike Penning
The hon. Member is making a passionate speech, as he did on Second Reading, and he is rightly standing up for his constituents. I have to tell him that the insurers did not come happily to the table to have this discussion. When the discussions with Lord Freud started, they were told to come, and the negotiations were based on what we could get agreement on without putting a further burden on business—in other words, the 3% levy does not go on to new business. I heard what my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) said, and we will take a close look at that. We have to look at the context. Nothing had been done for so long, but now something is being done and the insurance companies are not happy about it.
Ian Lavery
Every hon. Member who has spoken today understands that the insurance companies had to be dragged to the table, because contribution after contribution has cited examples where the first thing an insurance company does after an individual has been diagnosed with mesothelioma is run away and deny it for as long as possible in the hope that the problem goes away. In Committee, I applauded the work done by successive Governments in getting the Bill to this stage. We are just a little too far away from this Bill being absolutely fantastic for mesothelioma sufferers. Three or four points mean that it is nowhere as good as it could be, and some great arguments have been made today on how to bridge the gap.
I return to the point that the insurance companies are not companies that are just surviving. They have made profits over generations—10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years. They took the premiums and invested the money. Never mind contingency funds, the funds should be there—unless, of course, the money has been paid out in dividends or in other ways. That means that the money that should have been there for mesothelioma sufferers is not there any more because it has been given to shareholders. That is simply a point. The insurers paid out nothing on the untraced policies that they lost or destroyed. Again, that is not the fault of the people who are suffering—it is not their difficulty. Remember, the only thing wrong that they have done is to attend the workplace. For goodness’ sake, we cannot forget that that is the main point.
Ian Lavery
That is absolutely true, and that strengthens the argument put forward with regard to the apparent finances and wealth of the people who are threatening to walk away if they are asked to pay the right amount of compensation, or even more than 75% of it.
There are other examples where compensation has been paid at 100% or at 90%. The pneumoconiosis scheme in the Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers’ Compensation) Act 1979 pays 100% compensation and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme paid 90% to asbestos sufferers, so there are examples.
On the cut-off date, which my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) mentioned, why on earth is 25 July 2012 being suggested? Why not February 2010? In other case law, compensation has been paid from the guilty date of knowledge. In this case, that would mean paying compensation right back to the 1960s, but the cut-off date is 25 July 2012, and that causes huge problems. I understand that with a cut-off date there will always be losers—that is a matter of fact—but the 25 July cut-off date was when the written statement was made on the Bill, whereas the consultation started way back in February 2010. That would seem to be the most appropriate cut-off date.
Mike Penning
May I politely correct the hon. Gentleman? The date in 2010 was when the previous Administration issued the consultation document, not when the Bill started.
Ian Lavery
Yes, the consultation document was issued in 2010, but the cut-off date in the Bill will be 25 July 2012. I cannot see any rationale for that. I cannot understand the reason for it. Eligibility should at least commence with the publication of the consultation document in February 2010, but, as I say, there are strong arguments for going back even further.
It comes down to whose side we are on. As politicians, we face tough choices every day of the week. Are we on the side of the victim who will sadly pass on within months, or are we on the side of the insurance companies, which, as the Minister said, had to be dragged to the table to pay any compensation at all? The insurance companies are getting £17 million from the Government just to start the scheme, and it has been agreed they will get a further £30 million from them through some sort of borrowing arrangement.
In conclusion, when someone with mesothelioma who is soon to pass on comes to one of our surgeries and we explain that the insurance companies have only to pay 75% compensation, I wonder what their reaction will be. It is not fair, it is not just, and it is not acceptable. Wherever there is 100% liability, there should be 100% payment.
Mike Penning
I have had my own experiences with the Attorney-General when I was a Minister in Northern Ireland; I am sure other colleagues have as well. The difference between what is happening here today and what happened in Northern Ireland was that we have done a deal with the insurance companies before proposing the Bill rather than, as in the negotiations on pleural plaques, there not being a deal, so the legislation had to be forced through. That is the real difference; we have an agreement that will not affect businesses or premiums and will allow us to get the money through.
Sammy Wilson
I want to come on to that agreement. As the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) said, at the end of the day this Parliament sets the rules by which insurance companies and everybody else must abide. I understand that the Minister has had the discussions with the insurance companies. I have to say that I think that the companies have come out with a very good deal. Do not forget; despite the fact that we are dealing with people who perhaps cannot trace where the insurance was with their companies, that does not mean that, in most cases, the insurance was not paid. The premiums went to the insurance companies. They benefited from the money and they have not paid it out when the claims were made. This is not a case of there never being any insurance paid, in many cases. In most cases, the insurance was paid and the insurance companies have escaped.
Secondly, as has been pointed out, as a result of House of Lords decisions and other decisions on claims that could have been paid for pleural plaques, for example, the insurance companies have got a windfall. We can debate the size of that windfall but figures up to £1.4 billion have been thrown around. On top of that, the Government will underwrite part of the cost; £17 million plus another £30 million loan to them. Then, the companies will only have to pay out 75%, and 50% of the people who should have been covered—because they did experience health problems as a result of exposure to asbestos—are not even covered. I reckon that that is a very good deal for the companies. If this House were to say, “We think that the deal struck is overly generous and we are going to make amendments to the Bill to compensate for the overly generous deal that was struck,” I doubt very much that the insurance companies would walk away or that they would challenge it, especially as the mood of the House is that many people who should have been included in this are not, and that there are levels of compensation that should have been paid that are not being paid. Those are the kinds of arguments that I have found persuasive when listening to the arguments for the amendments.
The Minister has sat face to face across the table with the insurance companies. It is his judgment that the insurance companies will not buy any strengthening of the Bill. Given the generosity of the deal and that insurance companies try to eyeball Ministers and see who blinks first, it is my judgment that if the Government stand firm, we can get a better deal for those who suffer enormously as a result of negligence.
John Woodcock
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Insurance companies now have an opportunity to do the right thing and to be seen to be doing the right thing, and I hope they take it.
I said the Minister deserved some credit but I think he has blinked too early in this negotiation. We have all said we recognise the pressures he is under, but there are a lot of Members of this House who know a bit more about negotiations than I do and they will all tell him, just as I am about to do, that people do not tend to go into a negotiation saying, “Well, we’re going to offer this now, but, to be honest, there’s a bit further we could go so just push us a bit more and we’ll be prepared to give you a bit more.” They always say, “This is the last offer and we are not going to go further.”
Mike Penning
If that was what happened I would agree with the hon. Gentleman, but that is not what happened. The figure started at 70% and now we are at 75%. I have never blinked early in my life, and nor did Lord Freud.
John Woodcock
The Minister is absolutely right; it has gone up from 70% to 75%, but the case has been made powerfully and strongly today that he can go further, to 80% at least.
Mr Anderson
I will try to keep my voice going if I can. I appreciate the work the Minister has done but this debate saddens me. We have got a situation where employer liability was paid to these insurance companies. They have had their money and they have run with it. People have died, and that was not a surprise. We have known for a century that asbestos kills people, so the fact that people would need compensation was not a surprise. The whole argument about the cut-off date, and that we cannot just spring this on the insurance companies, is nonsense. Looking back over the last decade, at the Fairchild rules, the Barker rules and the Rothwell rules, we can see that those were all cases in which the industry tried to get out of its responsibilities.
I raised this point with the Prime Minister on 18 December. I asked him to intervene to try to resolve the issue and he said:
“I will obviously look at what he has to say”.—[Official Report, 18 December 2013; Vol. 572, c. 732.]
I understand the time constraints that he has been under since then, but will the Minister tell us whether the Prime Minister has had a chance to look at the Bill? Where has the Prime Minister been to take that look? Has he been to the TUC? The trade unions have supported people through this morass for decades. Has he been to the asbestos victim support groups, including those who have been here today, who have real-life experience of these matters? Has he been to the employment lawyers who have sat with the people while they have died, and with their families?
Mike Penning
As a trade unionist myself, I would have expected the TUC to contact me for a discussion, but it has not done so. Other groups, including victim support groups have. This is an interesting situation. I would have been more than happy to speak to the TUC, but it did not knock on my door.
Mr Anderson
I thank the Minister for his intervention, but I am talking about what the Prime Minister has done since he made a promise to the House from the Dispatch Box to look into the situation, knowing that the Bill was coming back to the House today.
Perhaps the Prime Minister has looked at what the employment lawyers have been dealing with over the years. Or perhaps he has done the other thing, and spoken to the people who have set the parameters for this debate: the people in the insurance companies. After all, he knows them all. They have bankrolled his party for decades, and they have bankrolled his constituency and those of hundreds of Conservative Members across the country. If a trade union had exerted that much influence, we on this side of the House would have been nailed to the wall. The Prime Minister knows the insurance industry well enough to have appointed the Association of British Insurers to lead the consultation. My hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) talked about gamekeepers and poachers a moment ago. If this is not the most glaring example of that, I do not know what is.
At the end of the day, however, the Prime Minister could have gone somewhere much closer to look into this matter. If he had gone to his constituency office, he would have found a document in his in-tray that was sent to every one of us as constituency MPs. It is from the Asbestos Victims Support Groups Forum UK, and it is entitled “The Mesothelioma Bill [HL]—the Victims’ View”. I shall read out a few examples from across the country.
A constituent from Stockton North asks:
“After being robbed of my husband and father of two sons why am I now being robbed of compensation for my children?”
A constituent from Birmingham, Selly Oak states:
“I hope you never have to watch a loved one on oxygen fighting to get his breath, carrying it around to be able to live, or should I say exist. You have no idea what mesothelioma sufferers go through.”
A lady from Halesowen says:
“I watched my husband suffer for 3 years and then his horrific end to this illness. I’m sure that if the Ministers in Parliament witnessed this they would change the Bill without any hesitation”.
A lady from Eltham states:
“My husband was murdered. His name was Alan. My husband died aged 58 because he went to work every day in places riddled with asbestos.”
Mrs Barker from Staffordshire Moorlands says”:
“If you haven’t seen a man die of mesothelioma like I saw my husband in hospital then maybe you ought to go to a hospital. To see him go from a healthy active man to nothing, skin and bone, or anyone diagnosed with mesothelioma fall to pieces…is heart-wrenching.”
Mrs Bell from Telford states:
“My husband died within 2 months of diagnosis of mesothelioma. He was a strong, healthy man brought down to a weak, skeletal figure in that short time. Watching someone you love reduced to such a state is soul destroying.”
Mrs Barclay from Cannock Chase says:
“Come and spend time watching someone you love struggle to walk because of pain and lack of oxygen. My husband was 6 ft 2 in tall and now he is bent double struggling to walk.”
But the Prime Minister need not even have gone there; he could have gone to visit Mr Larrie Lewington, who lives in Witney and who said:
“I’m disgusted because 90% of the work I did was for people like the Ministry of Defence, police and hospitals. I now have this death sentence hanging over me for helping the government and they are trying to reduce the amount of money that I deserve. It’s an absolute insult. I could have had another 20 years left, everything else is perfectly healthy except this horrible disease. No amount of money will ever compensate what this has done to me and my family but it will help, and give me peace of mind that I can live without worry for the rest of my time.”
That is the real story here. It is not about whether the insurance companies can afford this or not; it is about the moral duty of the people in this House to do the right thing and not be told, “We might have to put the insurance bill up and some businesses will be wobbling.” We do things in this House every day of the week that put businesses, people, trade unions and every other organisation in the country under pressure, yet somehow we are saying that because we have this deal we should not put these people under pressure. There is absolutely no excuse for what is going on here today. The least that should be done is that we should start the scheme from 2010, because that is the last point when insurers can say, “We did not realise we were going to have to face up to this.” They should be made to face up to it. They have had their money and they ran with it. They should be caught, brought back to book and made to pay the proper compensation—anything below 100% is a disgrace.
The other clear disgrace—I am glad that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb) is in his place—is the concept that somehow the Government can claw back 100% of benefits from people and yet give only 70% compensation. Where on earth has that come from? Where is the morality in that? Has anybody made the case to say that that is fair? It is obviously wrong. Somebody who goes to the courts because the employer is identifiable will get, on average, £154,000, whereas under this scheme the most somebody will get, even though they have to go through all the same hoops, except that they do not have an identified employer or insurance company, is £115,000. So they are already £39,000 worse off. Then 100% of the benefit they had is going to be clawed back because they are lying on their death bed—it stinks! We have to put this right. If it is not put right today, we need to continue on it because this is not the end of the matter. If it is not put right in this Parliament, I hope that when Labour comes to power in the next one we will resolve it.
Hywel Williams
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) and all the other hon. Members who have spoken most eloquently about this terrible disease in support of the proposal made by the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown), which my party and I support. The hon. Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) said that it seemed unlikely that he would be so concerned about mesothelioma, given that he represents a rural area, and the same applies to me; what does mesothelioma mean to us in rural Arfon?
In the early 1960s, a Ferodo factory was established just outside my home town of Caernarfon. The slate industry was dying at the time, and many slate workers were affected with the dust disease that led to the 1979 Act to which I referred earlier in an intervention. At the time, people believed in economic planning and the plan was to establish a large factory in the constituency to mop up the unemployment arising subsequent to the closure of the slate industry. Ironically, the factory was that of the Ferodo firm, which then used asbestos in the production of brake linings, leading to cases of mesothelioma in my constituency.
I will be brief because the arguments have been very well made this afternoon by a variety of hon. Members on both sides of the House, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) for her interesting and well-informed speech. As has been said, the scheme is being set up for individuals who have not only been diagnosed with a terminal illness, but who have been suffering the misfortune of being unable to trace their employer’s insurers. It is plainly unjust that these claimants should automatically lose a significant percentage of the compensation that is rightly theirs through no fault of their own. The industry has argued that mesothelioma claimants should be encouraged to look at all other avenues before making a claim under the scheme. At a meeting I had some months ago with insurers, that point was made most strongly.
Mike Penning
It is the Government who are saying that a victim must do everything they possibly can to ensure they get a claim against an insurance company before they approach the scheme, because the scheme is a fund of last resort.
Kate Green
I rise to speak to amendment 9 in my name and to support all the other amendments in this group. Amendment 9 seeks to enshrine in the Bill the 3% of gross written premium, which is the levy to be imposed on insurance companies to fund the mesothelioma payment scheme.
What I want from this amendment is a cast-iron guarantee that that levy will remain in place as long as the scheme continues. I am sure that the Minister feels that he has already given me that guarantee on at least one occasion—if not on many occasions. For example, he gave it in Committee on 10 December.
Mike Penning
May I reiterate the guarantee that I gave the hon. Lady in Committee and again today that it will stay at 3%?
Kate Green
I am grateful for that further assurance. On 10 December, the Minister said that 3% “is not going anywhere”. On 12 December, he said:
“Three per cent. is 3% and we have no intention of moving away from it.”––[Official Report, Mesothelioma (Lords) Public Bill Committee, 12 December 2013; c. 117.]
He has given us a further assurance this afternoon. He was a wee bit more equivocal, if he will forgive me for saying so, in his letter to Committee members on 17 December, where he said:
“We will look to ensure that the rate of the levy continues to be 3% of GWP...or equivalent to 100% of average civil damages.”
I am particularly concerned about this, because the Government’s impact assessment says that the levy will raise £371 million over 10 years, but I have subsequently learned from the economist at the Department for Work and Pensions that its modelling to arrive at that figure is based not on 3% “not going anywhere” but on how much it costs to meet pay-outs at 75% of average civil damages and the associated costs. In fact, the figure of £367 million in the impact assessment, which is what the Government have been relying on as the cost of the scheme that they say is affordable to the industry, means that the industry will face a levy of just 2.46% over 10 years. I know that the Minister has assured us that there will be a review after four years of the operation of the scheme of the amount the levy has raised and what can be done to increase the rate of payments beyond 75%. Indeed, the Minister has said to me that there might be other things that can be done, too.
If the industry can afford 3% today, it can afford 3% over the lifetime of the scheme. If the rate were maintained at 3% over the first 10 years of the scheme, it would raise £452 million rather than £371 million. That would be a further £81 million for sufferers that the industry is telling us it can afford. Indeed, the industry thinks that the scheme will run for 30 or 40 years and talks about there being a cost of £30 million to £35 million a year, or £1.2 billion to £1.4 billion over the whole period of the scheme. The cost of 100% payouts going back to 1968 will be £1.1 billion, so 3% would allow us a much earlier start date and to increase the rate while leaving some money over for research or to cover other diseases.
It seems to me that there is plenty of scope to enshrine the level of 3% in legislation. The industry can afford to pay it and we have no reason to believe that it cannot or will not be able to afford it in the future. The industry says that that is an acceptable levy that would put more money into the scheme, if not immediately then in subsequent years. The industry will face the levy during the first four years of the scheme, so we are not asking for any extra money during those years. I cannot understand why that levy cannot be enshrined in the Bill today.
I strongly support amendment 5 on the start date, proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown), for exactly the reason given, for example, by my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery)—the guilty knowledge which backdates, even on the most modest reading, to at least February 2010 when the Labour Government launched the most recent consultation. I would argue that since that date the industry has been on notice that there will be a scheme, and one for which it will have to pay.
The Minister says that one option in the consultation was to do nothing, and that might be true. Consultation documents always contain a do nothing option, but that rarely suggests that nothing will transpire. I do not think that the Government of the day, this Government or insurers have thought that doing nothing was the option on the table. Labour’s consultation document specifically said that Ministers were
“persuaded that an Employers’ Liability Insurance Bureau…should form part of the package”
creating a compensator of last resort. The industry has been planning for a scheme based on market share of employers’ liability insurance, either historic or current. In its response to the Labour consultation, the industry concentrated on only two costed models and made it quite clear that that was the basis on which it expected the scheme to proceed.
It has been noted, although I think some of my colleagues were rather sceptical about the figure, that backdating to 2010 could increase costs by £80 million over 10 years. I think that figure is acceptable and understand why the Government have suggested it. We will see an early spike in claims during the first few years of the scheme and in later years, of course, we will expect the number of claims to reduce. I accept that backdating the scheme to February 2010 would breach the 3% levy by taking it to 3.56% over the first four years of the scheme, although it would be comfortably within 3% over the first 10 years. However, I strongly contend that for a multibillion-pound industry that is receiving, as colleagues have pointed out, a £17 million gift and a £30 million loan from the Government, it could easily swallow that cash-flow issue, especially given that, as has been pointed out repeatedly this afternoon, it has been taking income in premiums for such policies over years—in fact, over decades. The money is already in its hands.
Let me remind right hon. and hon. Members that it is not possible to access the scheme unless the technical committee that will manage it takes a view that an employers’ liability insurance policy was in place. It is not possible to access the scheme on the basis that there was no policy; there must be prima facie evidence that there was a policy and that premiums were therefore collected.
I understand and strongly sympathise with the points made by colleagues about the moral case for 100% of average civil damages to be the basis on which the scheme should operate. In fact, I believe that that is the Minister’s, and everybody’s, preferred moral position in relation to the victims of this horrific disease. I was very pleased to hear him put on the record—I think it is the first time he has had the chance to do so—that it was not his view that a figure below 100% was necessary to create some sort of incentive to sufferers to find an insurer rather than simply come to the scheme. I think we have all found quite offensive the suggestion that sufferers are in some way shopping around for the best deal. I am grateful to him for putting on the record that the Government do not believe that that would be the case.
I was struck by the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald)—sadly, he is not in the Chamber at the moment—that because of well-established principles of contributory negligence, in paying out less than 100% to victims we albeit inadvertently send a message to them that it may be perceived that to some degree the suffering that they are facing is their own fault. That is an extremely unfortunate and unjustified message to send to victims who have contracted a disease simply from going out to work to earn a living and support their families. I hope we can all accept that whatever the constraints imposed by the deal that the Minister has been able to negotiate, the moral case for mesothelioma sufferers coming to this scheme is that they should be compensated in full.
The proposal by the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) is supported right across the House. We recognise that an 80% payout is a very reasonable compromise even within the terms of the scheme that the Minister has negotiated. There would be more money in the scheme if the Government and the industry stopped messing around with the likely legal fees that claimants would be facing. The fees were £7,000 and then went down to £2,000, which somehow magically allowed us to get the pay-outs up to 75%, and now they have gone back up to £7,000 again. The hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) is not able to join us in today’s debate, but in Committee he made some very telling points about lawyers’ fees. He is a well-paid lawyer, so I am sure he will forgive me for saying that he ought to know —[Interruption.] The fees were considerably more modest than his fees, as I think we all heard. He pointed out that any assumption of the basis on which legal fees were calculated within the scheme would create the danger of that becoming the tariff for its legal fees. The Minister undertook to have further discussions to see whether it would be possible to bear down on the level of legal fees.
I have since been advised by an asbestos victims support group that it has been asked to help to get mesothelioma victims to put pressure on their lawyers to keep the fees low. That is unacceptable. At a time when they are coping with an appalling illness and worrying about the future for their families, as they know they may not even survive to receive the compensation that they are due, the last thing they need is to get into an argument with their lawyers about fees. I really hope that the Minister is able to do much more than simply pass the problem back to victims. Perhaps he will respond to that point in his comments.
Another issue that we discussed in Committee and have not yet got to the bottom of is that a whole range of other fees are covered by the levy, as we have debated during the passage of the Bill: the insurance industry’s legal fees of £24.2 million, as distinct from the victims’ legal fees; the scheme administration costs of £4.4 million; and the set-up costs of £1.4 million. In Committee, the Minister assured me that the industry’s legal fees would be spent to the benefit of claimants and said he would get back to me if he was wrong about that. As he has not done so, I assume that those fees will be spent for the benefit of claimants. However, since he told me that on 12 December, I have been racking my brains as to how they would be spent for the benefit of claimants, and I have not been able to think of anything. I therefore hope that he will now be able to give me chapter and verse on exactly how those fees are to be deployed.
I also hope the Minister will be able to confirm that the sum set aside for setting up and administering the scheme will contain no profit element. This is of particular concern, because we know that the insurance industry itself is likely to bid to run the scheme. The Minister assured us in Committee that the process of appointing the body to run the scheme would be a competitive one. He said it would be based on value for money and commercial criteria, which is welcome, but those criteria would not necessarily preclude the administrator from making a profit: they might simply have to come up with the best price.
I am still in some about doubt about the position on arbitration costs and whether they are also being taken out of the levy. The Minister has not yet responded on that.
All those factors could serve to deplete funds that could otherwise be deployed for more generous pay-outs or to an earlier start date. It really is not good enough that we are still in the dark at this very late stage as to how much of the levy is earmarked for expenditure other than direct payments to victims.
Mike Penning
I again thank colleagues from all parties for the tone of the debate and the measured way in which it has been conducted. I thank in particular the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), for her comments. I hope she will agree that we have been as helpful as possible to her, her team and other colleagues, not only through letters but through access to our team managers. I am slightly concerned about the technical questions she asked at the end of her speech, because I had hoped that they had been addressed. If I am not able to address them all now, I will make sure that my team contacts her to do so in the near future.
We have heard some excellent contributions. As has been said several times, morally I am probably in agreement with nearly everything that has been said. These people are not at fault. They mostly went to work in good faith and they have contracted an atrocious, abhorrent disease that is fatal. They and their loved ones need this fund’s support. There are no arguments whatsoever about that. Many of us are disappointed that we are still discussing this issue all these years after this terrible disease, its cause and its effects—it is fatal—were known about.
At the outset I thank the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) for his very kind comments. I praise the work he did when he was a Minister trying to introduce a similar Bill. I also praise not only the support groups, but the trade unions, because without their pressure over the years we probably would not be in this position.
Having said that my moral position is absolutely as one with that of colleagues, I have to be a pragmatist. The Bill has come from the Lords and I am the Minister with responsibility for taking it through the House.
The hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) mentioned the figure of £17 million, but that is to get the fund going and to keep us below 3%. It is not being given to the insurance companies to do whatever they want with it. It is to get the fund running for four years. On the issue of 3%, the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East was spot on to say that, although he was thinking of a 10-year period, I was thinking of four years, and that after that four-year period there will be a review.
I am restricted by the maths and our agreements. Could the insurers afford this? I have no doubt whatsoever that they could, but that is not the deal that has been struck. As has been said, the House could decide to set the limit at 80%, but I want this Bill to receive Royal Assent and for compensation to be paid in July. That is not happening at the moment and it has not happened for years. Could it be better? Yes, it could. I said as much on Second Reading and I have said so extensively elsewhere.
Grahame M. Morris
I agree with much of what the Minister has said. Will he respond to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) about the 3% levy? If the advice is correct that the money will not be spent in the first years of the scheme, perhaps it could be redirected into medical research on the causes of mesothelioma.
Mike Penning
What I have said in Committee and today is that there will be a review after four years. I have committed to the 3% figure beyond the four years, as is absolutely right. I will come back to the £80 million that has been touched on in a second. Actuaries have looked at this very carefully and the Health and Safety Executive, for which I am also responsible, has looked at the costings. We will consider the review at the end of the four years, but there is no way in which the figure will drop below 3%. As far as I am concerned, that will flow through until we get 100% compensation.
It is very important for hon. Members to understand that we are talking about 75% of the average, which means that some people will be worse off—I fully admit that—but that some people will get more than they would have done if they had been able to trace their insurer or employer and go through the scheme. That is an interesting parallel. The percentage is an average, and in working with an average some will be on one side of the line and some will be on the other side of the line. I know that it is really difficult for those on the wrong side of the line in theory, but there will be people on the other side of it.
Where should the arbitrary line be? Of course I could say, as I did in Committee, that the consultation issued by the Government before the last election included a proposal to do nothing. I accept that there is a proposal to do nothing in most consultations, but it was there. I do not, however, think that that is the biggest issue; the biggest issue is how we stay within the 3% over the period and within our financial obligations. That is the position that I am in.
I cannot, obviously, support the 100% figure. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) for her work on the cross-party group, including before she entered the House, but, sadly, I cannot accept 80%. We have discussed that, and I think that she understands why. I need to make sure that we stay within the realms of what we have agreed and get the Bill through the House and on to the statute book.
Mr Anderson
I regret to hear what the Minister is saying. One thing he could do is to change the clawback from 100% to 75%, which would at least give people a little more money.
Mike Penning
Some things are out of my hands, and such is the legal situation in relation to clawback. I cannot change that through the Bill. It just happens: if someone gets compensation, there is clawback on it at 100% because taxpayers’ money is used to pay the compensation.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
From what the Minister is saying and the feeling of the House, it may well be that the Bill is just a work in progress. Are we collectively agreed—the Minister, in particular—that we may well have to revisit the Bill properly after, say, three years and try again to give decent compensation to everyone?
Mike Penning
That is exactly what we are doing because there is a four-year review. It was announced in the other place, and I talked about it on Second Reading and in Committee. We are committed to the four-year review, which I know we will work on.
All the amendments would affect the speed at which the Bill goes through, because if we amend it today, it has to go back to the other House and there will be ping-pong. That would delay the compensation, which should be remembered by hon. Members who really want their constituents to get compensation. Along with the restraints on me within the agreement, that is why I will oppose the amendments. I hope that hon. Members will not press their amendments, so that we can make progress and get on to the next group.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Mike Penning
I thank the shadow Minister for tabling the amendment and for setting out her position early when she said that she would not press the amendment to a vote. She is quite right, and I reiterate the point I made in Committee: I do not think this is the right Bill for addressing that important issue. I agree that the change in HMRC’s interpretation of the existing law—as opposed to a change in the law itself—is a massive issue, but fortunately there is time for us to deal with it between now and July. I have been meeting Justice Ministers to discuss the matter. As I am sure the House will understand, the Ministry of Justice does not want the courts to be clogged up with people asking for court orders in order to obtain their employment records, and I am sure that that was not the intention when the legislation was enacted.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Could the matter eventually be dealt with by means of delegated legislation?
Mike Penning
I understand that that is possible. It could also be dealt with through a deregulation Bill. In any event, we will find the necessary vehicle. As I have said, the Ministry of Justice does not want the courts to be clogged up with requests for court orders, and the matter will be resolved.
Kate Green
I am grateful to the Minister, I am also grateful to the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) for his helpful intervention about the possibility of secondary legislation. Perhaps the Minister could discuss with his colleagues and with the Government’s legal advisers whether the regulations under the Bill—which I expect to complete its passage later this evening—could be used as a vehicle for the change. Although more substantial Bills such as the Deregulation Bill may make some progress between now and July, we have not observed legislation proceeding all that speedily under this Government, particularly given the notorious requirement for a legislative “pause” while Ministers go off and rethink from time to time. Obviously, if the Minister has to use colleagues’ primary legislation to deliver his intent, he will be careful to select a Bill that would pose no such risk.
Mike Penning
Just to have a little bit of fun with the hon. Lady, let me point out that, having first been accused of trying to rush the Bill through, I am now being criticised for the fact that the Government are slowing down legislation. One cannot win, can one?
Mike Penning
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
It is an honour and a privilege to be the Minister who has taken the Bill through the House so speedily, with the help of Her Majesty’s Opposition and many other Members. Let me explain why the Bill is necessary. It will provide a fund of last resort for those who suffer from mesothelioma as a result of asbestos poisoning, and for their loved ones. As was pointed out earlier by the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown), it has been on Ministers’ desks for an awfully long time. It is not perfect—I accept that it is not perfect—but it will, I hope, do what it says on the tin and get compensation to those who so greatly need it.
I want to pay tribute to those who have helped get this Bill where it is, in particular the civil servants in the Box this evening—my Bill manager, Lee Eplett, Rose Willis, Fiona Walshe and Jenny Vass—the Bill Committee joint-Chairs, the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) and my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), and the Government Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), for their assistance in expediting the Bill’s passage. We had three days—six sessions—for the Bill Committee if we needed them. I think everybody who served on the Committee will accept that we discussed it at length yet we still had time to spare. That is exactly what should happen with a Bill; no one should come out and say, “We haven’t discussed it at length.” We will be finishing slightly ahead of schedule this evening as well. I hope the tone with which the Bill has been addressed during its progress through the House, with the assistance of Her Majesty’s Opposition, will be continued, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) for the way in which she has worked with me and my officials so that, should the Bill get its Third Reading, we can send it off to Her Majesty for Royal Assent, get the regulations down, and get compensation paid to those who so desperately need it, hopefully by July. I commend the Bill to the House.
Tracey Crouch
I am pleased that we have reached Third Reading of this Bill. It is a welcome Bill, but I remain disappointed that it is not as good as it could and should have been if we were to provide fair and reasonable justice to the victims of mesothelioma. I recognise the constraints that the Minister was under as a consequence of the negotiations that were made before the Bill entered this Chamber. Although it is a good day for the victims of mesothelioma, it could have been a great day for them had some of the amendments that were tabled on Report been listened to.
Mike Penning
Let me place it on the record—I think I did this earlier—that my hon. Friend could not have done more for her constituents during the progression of this Bill through the House. I paid tribute to her earlier on, and I do so again now.
Tracey Crouch
I am grateful to the Minister for his comments. My constituency has high levels of mesothelioma because of its dockyard history and the heavy industries that surround the Medway towns. Earlier, the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) expressed concern that I might be poacher turned gamekeeper as a consequence of my time in the insurance industry before coming to this place and trying to secure better compensation for mesothelioma victims. My bosses from my previous life know that I was strong campaigner for mesothelioma victims. Indeed I was proud of the efforts that I took during my time in the insurance industry to try to improve access to compensation. It just so happens that I was also elected to a constituency that has high levels of mesothelioma.
I am pleased that we had a debate today, but, as I have said, I remain slightly disappointed that nothing has happened to the Bill since it received its Second Reading. I see that as a failure in the way that Parliament works. Although I pay tribute to the Minister’s officials, who have worked incredibly hard and been generous with their time, it is a shame that the Bill that was prepared before our debate in Parliament is exactly the same now despite the fact that there is a strong will on both sides of the House to improve the legislation.
Let me pay tribute, as I did on Second Reading, to Lord Freud. He had a difficult time in getting the insurance industry to the table. I notice from the list of meetings that he met with the industry many times. Although he has had fewer meetings with the asbestos working group, it has had access to civil servants. He has done a good job, and would, I think, share the Minister’s view that this is not a perfect Bill. In a perfect world, he would have liked much better legislation.
None the less, both Ministers, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) and Lord Freud, are quite right when they say that this legislation would not have happened had it not been for this Government, and I welcome that. I remember the negotiations that took place with the previous Government and it is quite right for the Ministers to say that they are proud of where they have got to. Mesothelioma victims will be better off as they will have access to some compensation but, as I have said, I still think that the Bill is flawed.
I also want to pay tribute to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips), who did a fantastic job in Committee in raising many of the issues I would have liked to have raised personally. He brought to the debate understanding of the issues of mesothelioma and the concerns of the victims. Having met victims, he understands how awful the disease is, that it is a fatal disease that can be contracted only through exposure to asbestos and that victims will, unfortunately, die an incredibly painful death. He did a fantastic job of bringing forward many of the points I would have liked to have made.
I also want again to pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins). He and I have worked on this issue for many months and years and it seems strange to stand up in this Chamber and discuss mesothelioma without his being in the House. I hope that he recognises that those of us who have tabled amendments and spoken in the debate have done so partly on his behalf. He has been a sound campaigner on the issue for many years. He is a decent man and all he wants to do is to try to improve the compensation for victims of this dreadful disease.
I look forward to the publication of the regulations and welcome the fact that there will be a review of the legislation. Like the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), I rather innocently and possibly even naively believe that we should be making legislation that does not need to be reviewed in four years’ time and that it could be better scrutinised and considered in this place and in the other place before it passes into law. We are where we are, however, so I congratulate the Minister on getting the Bill through the House on time. I am pleased that many victims will secure some sort of compensation for a disease that they got simply by going to work.
Work Capability Assessment (Independent Review)
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
The Government are pleased to announce that the “Fourth Independent Review of the Work Capability Assessment”, carried out by Dr Paul Litchfield, will be published later today. This is the fourth of five annual independent reviews as required by the Welfare Reform Act 2007.
Dr Litchfield has reported on the progress of the implementation of recommendations made by Professor Harrington in the first three annual independent reviews of the work capability assessment. He has also evaluated the operation and effectiveness of the work capability assessment, perceptions of objectivity surrounding the assessment and recommended further changes that may be needed to improve the assessment.
The work capability assessment is integral to the Government’s commitment to ensuring that as many people as are able to do so engage in employment and those who genuinely cannot work receive the appropriate support.
The Government welcome Dr Litchfield’s report as a key step in making sure the assessment is as effective as possible and are currently carefully considering his recommendations. The Government’s response to Dr Litchfield’s report will be published next year.
Personal Independence Payment: South East
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
Ministerial CorrectionsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Fiona Mactaggart
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions which of the 21 personal independence payment consultation centres serving South and East England cannot be reached within (a) 90 minutes and (b) 60 minutes by public transport from all parts of their catchment area.
[Official Report, 18 November 2013, Vol. 570, c. 677W.]
Letter of correction from Mike Penning:
An error has been identified in the written answer given to the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) on 18 November 2013.
The full answer given was as follows:
Mike Penning
No claimant should travel more than 90 minutes (single journey) by public transport, for their consultation. As part of the process Atos, as the assessment provider in the south and east of England, will offer an assessment at their nearest location and it is only when that location is full would claimants be sent to an alternative site. As part of their bid, Atos stated that 75-90% of claimants will have no journey longer than 60 minutes. In the exceptional circumstance where a claimant is unable to make a journey within 90 minutes via public transport Atos will offer either a home visit or the ability to use a taxi.
The correct answer should have been:
Mike Penning
No claimant should travel more than 90 minutes (single journey) by public transport, for their consultation. As part of the process Atos, as the assessment provider in the south and east of England, will offer an assessment at their nearest location and it is only when that location is full would claimants be sent to an alternative site. As part of their bid, Atos stated that 75-90% of claimants will have no journey longer than 30 minutes. In the exceptional circumstance where a claimant is unable to make a journey within 90 minutes via public transport Atos will offer either a home visit or the ability to use a taxi.
Mesothelioma Bill [Lords]
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Before I start my speech on Second Reading, let me, too, pay tribute to the firefighters and professional emergency services in Glasgow. As a former firefighter, I know the training that those in the emergency services go through, but nothing prepares anyone for the scenes they will have encountered when they arrived. I have had a huge and devastating disaster in my constituency, at Buncefield, and the fact that the public went in rather than walking away proves what a great nation we all live in today.
As I am a Minister of the Crown and an MP who is dyslexic, it was an interesting experience to be given the Mesothelioma Bill. It is an honour and a privilege, however, and I hope that colleagues will bear with me if I occasionally get the word “mesothelioma” wrong.
I think we can all agree that working people should have proper protection from personal injury or disease arising as a result of their work. When the principle is breached through negligence or a breach of statutory duty, it is obviously right that that person should be compensated by their employer or their employer’s insurer. However, many sufferers of diffuse mesothelioma, the aggressive cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, are unable to find an employer or relevant insurer to claim compensation from. They developed a fatal disease through the fault of their employer yet they are still unable to seek compensation through the civil courts because the responsible employer no longer exists or the records are insufficient to show who the insurer might have been.
My brief states that the “previous Administration” made some noise about this issue over the years, but in fact previous Administrations have done so—yet there is still no provision on the statute book. I am confident, however, that we can get these measures on the statute book as soon as possible and I shall explain why in my speech.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I am pleased to see this Bill, only three years after the Labour consultation, and I am particularly pleased that the Minister is in charge of its progress through this House. Will he admit that this is not the scheme that Labour published in February 2010, that almost all the concessions the industry sought during the consultation have been conceded by the Government and that this is a now a scheme that shows that the Government have not stood up to the interests of the big insurance companies?
Mike Penning
No, no and no. The previous Administration undertook their consultation just before the general election. I will not get into party politics, but as the former Minister started on the subject, I will continue on it. After 13 years, suddenly there was a consultation, which was very wide ranging and did not develop the scheme. I cannot find out exactly what the previous Government wanted to do, because under the rules I am not allowed to see that, but all the indications are that what they would have proposed would not have passed into statute without huge cost to the taxpayer, or to people being insured today. None of that cost is incurred under the Bill.
The Bill is part of the ongoing commitment by the Government and the insurance industry to correct the market failure that everyone accepts there has been in respect of mesothelioma cases. It tackles the problem in two ways: first, by providing a power to set up a payment scheme and, secondly, by providing the possibility of establishing a technical committee that will, where there are disputes, make decisions that are binding on the insurance industry.
Diffuse mesothelioma is a fatal disease caused exclusively—this is crucial to the Bill—by exposure to asbestos. It has a long latency period, often of between 40 and 50 years, but after diagnosis average life expectancy is, sadly, only eight to nine months, with very few exceptions living beyond that. The long delay between exposure and developing the disease, combined with inconsistent record keeping in the insurance industry, means that too often people struggle to trace an employer—the employer may no longer exist—or the insurer who provided the employer’s public liability insurance, against which they can make a claim for civil damages. The insurance industry and the Government recognise that this is unjust, and that a provision must be brought forward in the Bill.
The obvious question is: why is legislation being introduced? Despite recognition of the failure of the market, the insurance industry has not been able to put forward a scheme of its own that would compensate those concerned. Disputes between insurers, and the different interests of companies that still offer employers’ liability cover, or active insurers, and those no longer offering cover, or run-off insurers, have prevented the industry from agreeing a voluntary levy; I think that was looked at in the consultation.
Mike Penning
I want to make progress. I am very conscious of the time, so I will not take an awful lot of interventions. Colleagues will have the opportunity to speak, either later on Second Reading or in the later stages of the Bill.
Industry representatives asked for legislation imposing a levy to support the payment scheme. The Bill establishes a payment scheme that will make substantial lump-sum payments to eligible sufferers from mesothelioma—and, crucially, eligible dependants of sufferers. The scheme will be funded through a levy on insurers active in the employers’ liability market, meaning that the active employers’ liability insurance market will bear the cost of the scheme.
Mr Jones
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I know that the insurance companies are trying to sell this as a generous scheme, but all estimates say that it will be worth about £350 million. Last year alone, the profits of Lloyd’s of London were £2.7 billion. Does he not think that, from that perspective, the insurance companies are getting away very cheaply?
Mike Penning
Nothing is perfect, but there was nothing there before, and if we had carried on the way we were going, nothing would be there, going forward, for people who are suffering so much, and who need help today. [Interruption.] It is no good the hon. Gentleman chuntering; he has had an opportunity to intervene, and perhaps later he will make a speech. That would be more useful than chuntering. As a friend of mine, he should know better, because I will not respond to that sort of chuntering. It just wastes time in the House.
The scheme is intended to be an alternative to seeking civil damages, which we still want people to do, if the opportunity arises. The driving principle is that where adequate records are not available—this is why the scheme was developed—the disease has been diagnosed, and there has been negligence or a breach of the statutory duty, a person should still be able to access payment for their injury. That is the crucial part of the Bill. Payments should be made, wherever possible, to the sufferers themselves, while they are still alive; I think that everyone would want that, but sadly it has not been happening. The scheme will therefore be straightforward, simple, and quick to process claims.
Sadly, we expect roughly 28,500 deaths from mesothelioma between July 2012 and March 2024, when the scheme is expected to come to its conclusion. We are seeing a peak at the moment.
Mike Penning
I will give way one last time, but then I will have to make some progress.
Mr Dodds
I simply wanted to say, given the Minister’s experience in Northern Ireland—the Bill extends to Northern Ireland and the Assembly has passed a legislative consent motion—that many people there will warmly welcome the fact that legislation is being put in place. I would have liked it to go further, but I commend the Government for bringing it forward.
Mike Penning
I am very pleased that I gave way to the right hon. Gentleman. The legislative consent process has taken place in Northern Ireland and in Scotland, which is important in ensuring that the Bill can go forward.
If the Bill is passed before the end of the year, the first payments could be made by July 2014, which I think is what we all want. Around 300 people a year could receive an average payment of £115,000, less benefit recovery, which will be around £20,000 on average. Timing is key, because the number of mesothelioma cases is expected to peak in 2015. We must act now and launch the scheme as soon as we can, with the regulations made as soon as possible after Christmas. I expect the regulations to be in place by April 2014.
Let us look quickly at the eligibility criteria. First, an individual has to have been diagnosed with the disease on or after 25 July 2012. Secondly, they were employed at the time of exposure to asbestos, and that exposure was due to negligence or breach of statutory duty on the part of the employer. Thirdly, they have not brought a claim for civil damages against an employer or the employer’s insurer. Fourthly, they are unable to do so—this is not a replacement for civil action. Fifthly, they are not already receiving damages or other payments relating to the disease from another source.
Eligible dependants of diffuse mesothelioma sufferers may apply to the scheme in cases where the person with the disease has died before making an application or while the application was being processed. Eligible dependants will receive exactly the same amount of money as the sufferer would have received.
A sufferer must have been diagnosed on or after 25 July 2012 to be eligible for the scheme. There are always difficulties with cut-off dates, but without one the costs would be unlimited. I know that it is unfortunate, but we have to be pragmatic as we move forward. With a cut-off date, we can proceed with the agreements.
Mike Penning
If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will make some progress.
The date of 25 July 2012 was when the Government announced that we would be setting up the payments scheme and so created a reasonable expectation that eligible people diagnosed with the disease on or after that date would receive a payment. The Bill does not, and cannot, look to respond to all the people who have been affected by asbestos diseases. The issue of individuals who have developed asbestos-related diseases but cannot trace a third party will have to be addressed outside the Bill. The Bill is not an appropriate instrument—I know that some people think that it is—for taking that forward.
Mesothelioma is a distinctive disease, because it is always fatal and always caused by asbestos. That allows for a straightforward scheme to be put in place as soon as possible. A streamlined scheme, such as the one we have brought forward, could not cover all the other diseases. It would otherwise be very complicated and expensive for the taxpayer.
Mike Penning
If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I am not going to give way.
The costs of other schemes would be disproportionate and the agreements we have with the insurance companies —I know that some colleagues do not like them—would make that very difficult. We are 100% committed to delivering on the Bill. This measure represents a huge step forward, and it should be recognised as such. I thank the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds), who is no longer in his place, for doing so.
The scheme will make payments to eligible people according to a fixed tariff and according to the age of the person who has the disease. The payment will be based on roughly 75% of the amount of average civil damages. Those who have followed the Bill’s progress through the other House will realise that it raised the figure from 70% to 75%. The figure of 75% is probably is not as important as the 3% levy, which is very important.
Mike Penning
I will not give way.
Setting the payments at the right rate is crucial to the success of the Bill and the ultimate establishment of a payment scheme. The payment rate of 75% of average civil damages takes the levy right to limit of what insurers have indicated they could absorb without passing the costs on to new businesses—an absolutely crucial issue. It is the absolute maximum that would be realistic within a fixed-payment scheme.
The levy on insurers will be imposed on active employers’ liability insurers at large today, not the individual insurers who took out the premiums, who were covered in cases that come under the scheme. The scheme could be jeopardised if the levy were set disproportionately high. That could delay the introduction of the scheme, preventing the payment mechanism from being in place at the time of the peak of mesothelioma deaths, which, according to the actuaries, will be around 2015. I am sure we will debate that as we go through the Bill, but I hope that that will not detract from the importance of ensuring that it gets on to the statute book as soon as possible. As everybody in the House will understand, the scheme must strike a careful balance in making a substantial payment to eligible people while ensuring that the contribution made by the insurers is fair and not excessive. Crucially, the proposed levy rate must not be so high as to risk increased costs on business, thereby adversely affecting British businesses, which no one in the House would want.
In addition to the payment scheme and the levy, the Bill makes provision for the possibility—I stress, the possibility—of establishing a technical committee to adjudicate on making binding decisions on disputes between insurers. I think we would all prefer that to these matters being in the courts.
The Bill and the principles behind it merit the support of the whole House.
Mike Penning
I am coming to the end of my comments.
We have no doubt that the principle of the Bill—[Interruption.] It is no good Opposition Front Benchers chuntering; they will have their opportunity to speak in a minute. Let us just get on. If the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Gemma Doyle) wants to speak, as lots of Members do, she will be welcome to do so. That is why I am not giving way every five seconds.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Minister is expecting to speak for a second time in this debate, but he is not prepared to give way during his speech now. Can you confirm that it is a matter of discretion for the whole House as to whether somebody is allowed to speak for a second time in a debate?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
If a Minister seeks to speak for a second time, it is with the leave of the House. As the hon. Gentleman knows, whether any Members, including Ministers, decide to give way to an intervention is entirely a matter for them and not for the Chair.
Mike Penning
I am conscious that lots of colleagues want to speak in this debate, which has been shortened because of the two very important statements that took place earlier. I have given way three times and there will be plenty of opportunities for Members to speak. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) has probably got his press release, yet again, but that is unnecessary in this sort of debate.
I hope that the House will see the urgent need to push this Bill through and get it through its Committee and Report stages so that it goes on to the statute book and I am able to move the regulations that are under consultation as soon as possible. It can then provide compensation for our constituents who have been suffering from this terrible disease or, if they have died, for their dependants who need assistance from the scheme.
Kate Green
I can only agree with my hon. Friend, and I hope the industry does not assume that the House will let it get away with the minimum it can propose. I assure the House that the mood of many colleagues from all sides is determinedly that we should do the best we can for victims—we and the industry owe them that.
As I think the Minister has alluded to, there is also a debate to be had about the scope of the Bill. It will exclude the self-employed unless they can determine they were de facto employees, and exclude family members who may have been contaminated—for example because they washed a brother’s or husband’s overalls. It will cover only mesothelioma and exclude all other asbestos-related illnesses. I heard what the Minister said about that, and again, I hope we can explore that issue further in Committee. Lord Freud offered welcome assurance about Ministers’ intentions in relation to other forms of asbestos-related disease when the Bill passed through the House of Lords, and I hope we will be able to secure firm commitments from the Minister on that.
Mike Penning
I can certainly assure the hon. Lady on her second point. On her first point, it is right that the House has those calculations before we go into Committee, and I will ensure those figures are made available to her in the Library.
Kate Green
I am grateful to the Minister. Taking advantage of his generosity, he will see the amendments that the Opposition table in the next few hours, so will he bring forward figures for a range of different scenarios, including 75%, 80%, 90% and 100% of average civil compensation?
Mike Penning
I ask the hon. Lady please not to push me too far; but I accept those points and my civil servants are listening.
Kate Green
I would never push the Minister too far.
We had hoped to have received fuller details of the scheme’s operation by now, but regrettably the regulations have yet to be published. I am sure, however, given the shameful history that precedes this Bill, that Members will agree it is vital that the scheme is seen to be run in a transparent and wholly independent manner. In the House of Lords, Lord McKenzie asked for more information about the oversight committee, and I have seen the letter that Lord Freud wrote to peers on 4 September on that matter. That offers some reassurance, but we would like to see provision for the oversight committee included in the Bill. That is of particular concern because, as I understand, the insurance industry could—and intends to—bid to run the scheme. I confess that I am not entirely comfortable with that notion, but if ultimately the industry is selected to manage the scheme, the role and make-up of the oversight committee becomes all the more important.
Tracey Crouch
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I was persuaded by the 100% argument, but having read the House of Lords debate, I now think that 100% would not be right. There is room for compromise on the percentage and we need to ensure that we put the victim at the heart of the compensation scheme—not the insurers and lawyers who may ultimately benefit from it.
I am also concerned about the lack of clarity on assumptions relating to the age of people diagnosed with mesothelioma. Some think that those accessing the scheme will be younger than the current age group of claimants going through civil schemes, whereas the Department has assumed that there will be an older age group. I tend to believe that, as employers’ liability insurance has been compulsory since 1972, and given this disease’s latency, those unlikely to be able to trace their insurer, making them eligible for this scheme, would surely be older and the younger workers would be fewer. Again, there is room for negotiation with the insurance industry over the compensation levy.
I understand that the industry is worried about a cohort of younger people who might access the scheme because of exposure in schools and other areas with a less obvious asbestos risk. I am afraid that that is bunkum, because not only would schools have some form of liability insurance, but it would be possible to access compensation via civil procedures. For me, the current 25% running cost of the scheme is far too high, and I genuinely think that this is a poor outcome for the sufferer and a good outcome for the industry, which, as the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) said, has behaved poorly over many decades in this area.
Mike Penning
I am conscious that during the course of the debate I may be able to alleviate some concerns across the House about how the scheme is proceeding. Earlier in her comments, my hon. Friend asked whether the legal fees would be in addition or inclusive. They are clearly in addition to any payments that the person receives from the scheme.
Tracey Crouch
We will have an interesting discussion about that in Committee. The representations I have received are contrary to what the Minister says, suggesting that the fees would still come from the claimant, albeit that the Government will uplift the amount of compensation payable in the first place. A victim might get £57,000, for example, but would then have to pay the £7,000 fee out of it—unless the legal fee comes in lower than that, in which case they get to keep the difference.
Mike Penning
Let me clarify once and for all that the legal fee of £7,000 is outside the payment. If people do not spend £7,000, they keep the difference. It is outside, not part of, the compensation.
Tracey Crouch
As I say, we will have an interesting debate in Committee. Is the Minister saying that the insurance industry will pick up the legal fee? Where is this magic legal fee coming from? Who is paying for it? If it is not the claimant, it must surely be in the 25% administration costs. Officials have said that it is not within those costs, so we are going to have an interesting debate about where this £7,000 is coming from and, indeed, what it actually equates to.
Paul Goggins
My hon. Friend is very knowledgeable about these issues and he makes an important point. I am saying that the date should be put back to at least February 2010, and there are arguments for going back further. I hope that we will have an opportunity to examine those arguments in Committee.
Mike Penning
On the point raised in the intervention by the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), the dependants of those who have been affected by this terrible illness will be comp—I nearly used the word “compensated”; we are not supposed to use it. Payments will go to them. It is not the case that no payment will be made just because someone has sadly died. The dependants will get payments as well, and that has to be taken into account. I understand what the hon. Gentleman was saying, but that has to be taken into consideration.
Paul Goggins
I am happy to be the conduit for a conversation between the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham. I hope that we will be able to have a sensible discussion about this in Committee. Whatever the start date is, it should predate July 2012.
My third point relates to section 48 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, to which I referred earlier. Last week, I received a copy of a letter sent by Lord McNally to Lord Alton of Liverpool. One or two other Members who took part in the debates during the passage of the LASPO Act also received a copy. Section 48 prevents sections 44 and 46 from coming into force in relation to mesothelioma claimants. That means that the new conditional fee agreements cannot operate in relation to mesothelioma claims.
Ministers keep making the point that the review that has to be carried out under the LASPO Act has somehow to be dovetailed with the arrangements in this Bill. In the letter, Lord McNally says:
“I can absolutely guarantee that we will work in a synchronised way with the DWP”.
However, there is no relationship between the review set out in the LASPO Act and the provisions of this Bill. As I have made clear, the provisions in the Act cover civil claims and the arrangements for conditional fee agreements. They will ensure that claimants have to pay back 25% of their success fee to the lawyer who represented them. There have been arguments about that, and the Government clearly have their point of view, but Parliament has expressed the view that that provision should not operate in relation to mesothelioma claimants.
The Bill, on the other hand, deals with a fund of last resort for people who cannot find their former employer or insurance company, and who have no one against whom to make a civil claim. The two issues are therefore completely separate, and I ask the Minister please to clarify that when he responds to the debate. If there is to be a decision in relation to section 48 of the Act, let us have that debate and make that decision, but let us not confuse that issue with the provisions of the Bill that we are debating today.
My final point relates to research, which the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford also mentioned. It is shameful that we spend so little on researching the causes and treatment of mesothelioma. It is a disease that will kill 2,400 people this year, and in the region of 60,000 people over the next 30 years, and we should be devoting much more to research. I applaud the initiative that a small number of insurance companies took to set up the research fund that is being managed by the British Lung Foundation. Some good, promising work has been done as a result of that, and Lord Alton and his colleagues in the House of Lords wanted to make that arrangement more sustainable, better funded and more reliable in the long term so that we could get some proper research done and some good outcomes. Indeed, Lord Alton pressed an amendment to that effect, but it was narrowly defeated. However, that does not remove the argument, or the need for Ministers to do much more in regard to the funding of research.
I was struck by Lord Freud’s comment in Committee in the other place, when he was asked about his own efforts to improve investment in research, from the Government and from other sources. He said:
“I have hit a brick wall at every turn” [Official Report, House of Lords, 5 June 2013; Vol. 475, c. GC250]
He is a Minister who was trying to get a better outcome for research but clearly found it difficult. Earl Howe also spoke on Report about how he was trying to improve the research programme, and I would be grateful if the Minister could update us on progress tonight, because the promises were made in July and it is now November. I hope that some progress has been made, but we cannot get away from the fact that the Bill should contain a provision for the long-term funding by the insurance industry of research into the causes and treatment of mesothelioma.
I welcome the Bill, but it could be and must be improved. The families of those who have suffered and died as a result of this dreadful disease must be better compensated, and we need a scheme that is affordable and in which those people can have confidence.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins). He has put forward some compelling arguments.
I welcome the Bill. Mesothelioma is a terrible disease, and I have seen at first hand the indignity and pain that it has inflicted on many of my former patients. Perhaps it is because I have been there in the room while they have suffered repeatedly having fluid drained from their lungs that my main complaint about the Bill is that it does not go far enough in its scope. It would be a terrible shame if we were to pass it without taking the opportunity to act on this important area of prevention.
There is no safe lower exposure limit for asbestos, and children are particularly at risk. A child who is exposed to it at the age of five is between two and a half and five times more likely to develop mesothelioma than an adult aged 30. Since 1980, 228 teachers have died in this country as a result of negligent exposure to asbestos. Let us remember that every one of those teachers had 30 children in the classroom with them. Let us also remember that 75% of our schools contain asbestos, and evidence from the Health and Safety Executive shows that about 13,000 out of 23,800 schools were built at the time when asbestos use was at its peak. That asbestos is now crumbling. Every time a drawing pin is stuck into an asbestos board and taken out again, it releases about 6,000 asbestos fibres.
The trouble is that the argument we take in this country that we should literally cover up asbestos is not good enough. The evidence shows that slamming doors and children kicking kick-boards around the classroom edges can increase the level of asbestos fibres in the air by about 6,000 times. We should go far further than we are doing; that is what happened in the United States. In 1980, the US conducted its first major audit of asbestos and introduced stringent regulations in 1986. As a result, the level of mesothelioma in the US has stabilised since 1999; there are now about 14 deaths per million per year, whereas in 2009 in the UK there were 37.8 deaths per million—and unfortunately, that level continues to rise. I know that the Minister has said he expects it to peak in 2015, but we do not yet know what the future impact of asbestos exposure in schools will be.
Mike Penning
This is a good opportunity for me to address a slight hiccup. The number of mesothelioma victims will peak in 2014—the claims will peak in 2015.
Dr Wollaston
I thank the Minister for clarifying the point. The trouble is that the Bill is about compensating people who have been negligently exposed in the course of their work. What will we be saying to future victims who are negligently exposed in the classroom? They will not have an employer; they are being negligently and knowingly exposed by the state, and it is simply not good enough that we take a view that there is nothing we can do.
Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)
It is not very often that I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), but I want to start by agreeing with the Minister, who was right to say that we should not have had to be here tonight. This issue should have been resolved no later than when the previous Government were in office and probably much earlier than that. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has said, this has been known about since at least 1965. We should have done something about it. Lots of us had meeting after meeting with the previous Prime Minister and others in the previous Government as we tried to find a way forward. I believe that he was genuine in his approach but that he was badly advised by civil servants and special advisers who were frightened that the cost would escalate. As a result, we did not take the action we should have taken.
Mike Penning
I did not put the blame on any particular previous Government. I referred to Administrations and I am sure the hon. Gentleman appreciates that.
Mr Anderson
I did not say that the Minister said that. The issue should have been resolved, because the facts have not changed between then and now.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck mentioned the Mick Knighton Mesothelioma Research Fund. I have been a patron of that fund for more than a decade. When I was president of Unison I was approached by a former colleague I used to work with in the mines who asked, “Can you help these people out, Dave?”
It is worth listening to the story of Chris Knighton, whose husband was a classic sufferer of mesothelioma. He would think nothing of getting on a pushbike and riding from Newcastle to Berwick and back again on a Sunday morning before going to the club to see his mates, who had just staggered out of bed. They would be standing at the bar, bleary-eyed, asking, “Where have you been, Mick?” He had done a 100 mile bike ride on a Sunday morning.
On one of those Sunday mornings, the lad fell on the floor. The following day he went to see his doctor, who told him he had mesothelioma. “What’s that, doctor?” asked Mick. He told him it was asbestosis of the lungs. “What can you do?” asked Mick. “Nothing,” said the doctor.
Within a matter of months, the lad was dead. His widow set up the research fund with a good friend, Anne Craig, and they pledged to raise £100,000. Two years ago they raised £1 million, and all that money has been put into research into this disease. It is people like them and the men, women, children, daughters, wives and husbands who have suffered that this debate should really be about.
There is a history of people exploiting asbestos throughout the world. I was proud when a member of my trade union went to South Africa and worked alongside Thompsons Solicitors to litigate against companies there. One of the stories they heard in Namibia was that one of the ways in which companies ensured maximum output was by filling big plastic bags with raw asbestos. How did they make sure they were full? They put young Namibian kids in them to tamp down the asbestos as if they were pressing grapes. Those kids were exposed to raw asbestos at the ages of six, seven, eight and nine. Those are the sorts of people behind the desperate negligence under discussion.
Other diseases have been mentioned. When compensation for plural plaques was challenged in the courts in 2007, the case was won and people stopped getting compensation. As I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), KPMG announced a £1.4 billion windfall on that same day. That is what the insurers got as a result of the Law Lords’ ruling. Members on both sides of the House tried to get our Government to change the law so that those people could get compensation again.
Other parts of this nation have managed to change the law. Earlier, the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) intervened on the Minister in relation to Northern Ireland, and the Scottish Parliament has been able to do it, but we were told that it could not be done in this part of the world. We should have done it.
Equally, people may not have mesothelioma or anything life threatening, but the truth is the same: they were negligently exposed at work to substances that the employer knew would be damaging. Employers have known that since 1892, when asbestos was first recognised as a poisonous substance. As we have heard, they have known since 1965 that it should have been illegal to do so, but they kept on exposing people to the substance for days, weeks, months and years.
We are now told that people can have 75% of their compensation. One thing always sticks in my mind in talking about this. I first had real evidence of mesothelioma when I spoke to a lawyer dealing with it, a guy called Ian McFall, who works in the Thompsons north-east office and is a renowned expert on the issue. He told me that the fibres lie dormant for decades, but all of a sudden they become active, the person suffers horribly and then dies.
I used those words when there was a discussion about this issue some years ago. I was approached via e-mail by a woman who was not one of my constituents, who said that I had really upset her. Her family was sitting there, with their father going through the process, and she had tried to be careful to shield her family from knowing the truth.
I am sorry that I have to repeat those words today, but the people of this country need to understand how serious this disease is. It is to the credit of the Government and others that they have accepted that this is a very special case, because it is a killer. There are no two ways about it: if you get this, you are going to die. That is the main reason why the situation has been challenged to the extent it has over many years.
The insurance companies have put forward the compensation as somehow an act of benevolence: “We are being really nice to you, aren’t we?” No, they are not; they have been caught on the hop and forced into a corner to put right what they should have done. The deal struck between the Government and the insurance companies is just that—a deal. It has not involved the people it should have involved to the extent that they should have been involved, whether they are claimants, their support groups or, crucially, the trade unions.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck spoke about the work of the trade unions, but that had an impact not only on trade union members but on every member of the public in this country. Many people are not in trade unions or in unionised workplaces, but they have the same rights to compensation and legal redress as those for whom the trade unions work.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
I am grateful to have been called to speak so late in this debate. I apologise to both Front Benchers, and to most of the speakers who preceded me, for not having been here throughout the debate. I declare an interest as a former asbestos worker. I suspect that not many former asbestos workers have spoken in the debate. If they have, I suspect that they were from the Labour Benches. No disrespect to Government Members, but hearing from such speakers gives us greater insight into the issue.
I am a former fire brigade worker, and I suspect that I share the same background as the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning)—or is he right hon.?
Jim Fitzpatrick
He has not been promoted yet. When we worked in the fire service, we used asbestos anti-fire equipment; we had asbestos hoods and gloves. We are lucky: having worked for local authority fire brigades, we know our employers, know that they are insured, and can trace them. Should anything happen to us —goodness forbid—our families could track back and seek appropriate compensation for our early demise. Clearly, that is not the situation for thousands of other asbestos workers, especially those who worked in industries and businesses that have gone out of business or become defunct.
On the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) about being able to track people, when I was the senior health and safety official at London fire brigade, I got management to agree that every member of London fire brigade who served before the withdrawal of asbestos equipment would have “asbestos-exposed” on their personal record file, so thousands of firefighters are covered. London fire brigade was great in making sure that that happened.
I share the Labour Front Benchers’ five key concerns about the Bill: that the level of compensation is lower than it should be; that other asbestos-related diseases have been excluded; the decision on the cut-off date; the clawback of benefits; and, most importantly, the level of research into asbestos-related diseases. We have some very strong points to make. It is clear that there is support in the other place, especially from senior Members on the Government Benches. I would be very surprised if Government Front Benchers in this House did not have great sympathy with a number of the points raised by the British Lung Foundation and other charities that provided briefings for today’s debate.
I look forward to the Bill going into Committee and to having discussions with Government Front Benchers. I look forward to them being as accommodating as they can be, because bringing the Bill forward is a great signal of their intention to deal fairly with the victims of asbestosis and those suffering from mesothelioma. I think that the Bill can be improved and hope that the Government see it that way, too.
Chris Bryant
I think that is spelt with an “i”, not an “e”.
As many Members have pointed out, cancer of the mesothelium is a particularly cruel disease. First, it affects some of the worst paid in society and some of those who do the hardest physical labour, who are not rewarded particularly well at all. That is why we have heard from so many hon. Members this afternoon about how the parts of the country and the communities most affected are those that have had some of the toughest industries, whether shipbuilding, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Gemma Doyle) pointed out, or down on the Medway, as the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford pointed out, or in Totnes, as the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston)—she is unable to be here at the moment, for understandable reasons—pointed out. Sometimes a whole family can be affected, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) explained. We heard a particularly sad story from the hon. Member for Falkirk (Eric Joyce), who told us about his brother, who recently died as a result of mesothelioma.
Mesothelioma is also cruel because of the long tail, which many Members referred to, which means that it is often almost impossible to track down the details of the company from which a victim might need to claim compensation, because it is such a long time since the asbestos was introduced into the body.
Mesothelioma is also cruel because the insurance industry, as many Members have pointed out, has behaved cruelly through its extreme reluctance to provide compensation. Sometimes it is the negligence of the industry in keeping proper records across the years that has made it all the more difficult for people to get redress. Finally, it is cruel because once a person has contracted the illness, as many Members have explained, the length of time before death is so short. Who in this House would want somebody to have to spend their last dying months trying vigorously to chase down lawyers and insurance companies?
Many issues were raised, but I will cover those that are particularly important and have been mentioned constantly. The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford, in an excellent speech that I could not fault—I hope one day to see her on the Labour Benches—made the very valid point that the 75% compensation that is being allowed for by the Government is not borne out by the figures to which the insurance industry has already signed up through its 3% commitment. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston said, there is a perfectly good moral case for saying that it should be 100% compensation. We will want to tease out these issues in Committee. I am grateful for the Minister’s comments about being able to provide us with numbers and statistics before we get to the first Committee date, because it feels as though there has been a bit of jiggery-pokery over these numbers in the past few weeks while the Bill was in the other place and since then.
The second key issue is the earlier start date that many of us think would be suitable. That was mentioned by the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), who is not in his place. It seems inconceivable that any part of the insurance industry was unaware that there was going to be a scheme of this kind after the Labour Government started the consultation in February 2010, so it is only fair that we should go back to the earlier start date. Several other Members referred to this, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) and my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Mr Hepburn), who had an interesting idea about how judges would have reacted if there were an illness that affected only judges and whether legislation would have been introduced rather more swiftly.
The third issue, which was raised by several Members, including the hon. Member for Totnes, is about self-employed people and people who manifestly fall outside the scheme as currently organised, including those who might have contracted mesothelioma by virtue of washing their partner’s clothes. We will want to return to those matters in Committee.
Fourthly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East mentioned, there is the 25% that is apparently being allocated to lawyers. When I first arrived in the House, one of the big issues facing mining constituencies such as mine was the miners’ compensation Bill. The biggest row we had was with lawyers who wanted to extract unnecessarily ludicrous fees for work that could already be paid for, and in fact was paid for, by the Government. We will want to shine some light on the precise statistics. If a significant amount of money—say £7,000, a figure that has been stated several times—ends up being taken out of people’s compensation to pay for lawyers, that would not be the justice that people are looking for.
The fifth issue, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), is who runs the scheme and who will sit on the technical committee. She also referred to the very important requirement on us to consider how to ensure that that is not just a stitch-up between Government and the big players in the industry when much smaller players need to be considered as well.
The sixth issue, which my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire mentioned, is the 100% clawback. It seems intrinsically unfair for the Government to say, “You can only receive 75% of the compensation that you would get if you were going through the civil courts in the normal way, but we will take back 100% of the money that you received in benefits.” There may be arguments to be had about that, but it is something else that we will want to look at in Committee. It was also referred to by my hon. Friends the Members for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Jim Sheridan) and for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery).
I hope the Minister will also address the question of the timetable for the Bill. The programme motion allows for the last Committee sitting to take place on 17 December. We have always wanted to help the Government get the Bill through as fast as possible, with the sole caveat that, while it is a good Bill, it could be immensely better. Of course, we want to ensure that there is adequate time not just for consideration in Committee, but for consideration on the Floor of the House on Report and Third Reading. My anxiety is that if the Committee finishes considering the Bill on 17 December, the Bill’s Third Reading will be on 19 December—the day Parliament will rise. I hope the Minister will be able to reassure us about that, but I cannot see how else he will be able to get the Bill through before Christmas.
Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) made an extremely good point, namely that we should stop talking about whether the Bill is generous, generous enough or not generous enough. The most important thing to recognise is that this is not about generosity. It is not some kind of charitable act that we are doing; we are trying to right an injustice. It is a fairly simple point. We believe that it is only really possible to right that injustice if we improve the Bill by ensuring that people get a better deal with regard to the percentage of compensation on offer, as well as by going back to an earlier date and by looking at some of the many other issues that have been raised.
I assure the Minister that we will do everything in our power to help him get the Bill through, but at the moment it has only three stars and by the end we want it to have five. That will require amendments and his co-operation.
Mike Penning
With the leave of the House, I will respond to the debate, which I opened earlier today.
May I say from the outset that my intention was for as many Members as possible to be able to take part in this important debate? Seventeen colleagues, including those on the two Front Benches, have taken part. I could have taken a few more interventions, but if I had taken too many the hon. Members for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and for West Dunbartonshire (Gemma Doyle) would certainly not have got in. Anyone in the House who knows me will know that that was my intention and that I was not trying to shirk my responsibilities in any way. Perhaps when the hon. Lady has been here a little bit longer, she will know me a bit better.
Interestingly, many Members have said that the Government are in bed with lots of different parties and that perhaps I am anti-trade union. Many Members will know that I am a proud member of the Fire Brigades Union and that I was a member of Unison’s predecessor when I was a lifeguard in Castle Point in Essex after I first left the Army. It is important that we pay tribute to those who have worked so very hard over the years to introduce not just this Bill, but others. I pay tribute to the trade unions for the work they have done over the years and to the victim support groups across the country.
I also want to acknowledge something that my former colleague from the fire service, the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse, acknowledged in part, namely that, while this disease has massively affected areas of heavy industry—I understand fully what many Members from the north-east have said—it does not cherry-pick. It is possible for someone to glance past an area with asbestos one day, pick up the disease and not know about it for another 40 years. As has been said, many people who are in work do not know that they have been in contact with asbestos. In some cases, their employers might not even know, especially if they run the emergency services.
I am reminded of my former colleagues in Glasgow and the work they did over the weekend. They would not have thought about whether there was asbestos in there; they would have gone straight in, quite rightly, and dealt with it. What their employers have to do—I completely agree that it is much easier for the public sector to do this than the private sector—is address their own responsibilities. I agree with the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) that the unions and employees should have a register. Had they had a register, a lot of the issues under discussion would have been addressed a lot earlier.
Mr Anderson
I take exception to the Minister’s comments. Why should it be easier for public sector employers to do this than private sector employers? They knew the dangers, they knew the risks and they were insured. Why should the way they manage this be any different?
Mike Penning
The hon. Gentleman makes an enormously important point. I can remember being in an asbestos suit not long ago, and the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse is a little older than me, and was in the fire service before me. So many lessons can be learned, and they need to be learned, because people have the disease and are suffering.
I think almost 100 different questions—some were very technical and nearly all of them were very important—have been asked during the debate, and it would be impossible for me to answer them all in the time I have been given. I will therefore write to hon. Members who have spoken, and for the benefit of those who have not taken part I will put the answers in the Library of the House so that everyone has an opportunity to read them.
I have listened very carefully to the debate, and I have tried not to be party political or partisan in any way, but nobody watching would think that the previous Administration had been in government for 13 years. The issue has been known about for many years and, as I said in my opening speech, Administrations should have dealt with it.
It is worrying that we have been asked why the Government have taken two years to sort out the problem. The consultation was very wide ranging, and no one would have known from it what the previous Government wanted. I cannot find out exactly what they wanted, because we are not allowed to see their papers. The consultation came out in February 2010, just before the general election, after which we had the purdah period, and then we came into office, and without knowing exactly what was intended, my predecessor and the very dedicated Lord Freud, the Minister in the other House, worked with the Secretary of State to bring forward this Bill.
Nothing is perfect, and I fully understand that hon. Members on both sides of the House want to table amendments in Committee and probably on Report. What is very important, however, is that the Bill is passed and regulations are laid, and that compensation gets out to the victims of this terrible disease and their loved ones. If even some points that have been discussed were put in, the Bill would have to go back to the Lords and that would mean a period of ping-pong. [Interruption.] I said some, not all points.
It is absolutely imperative to get the Bill through, or people who have waited for compensation, in some cases for decades, will not get it. If there is ping-pong on the Bill, we will be into the new year—the Leader of the House is sitting next to me—and although I will be as open minded and pragmatic as I can, the Bill needs to be put on the statute book.
Mr Hepburn
What about the 6,000 victims prior to the cut-off date? Why should they be victimised?
Mike Penning
I am good friends with the hon. Gentleman, and I know him well. I do not see it that way, as he knows, but I understand why he does. There has to be an arbitrary cut-off date, and the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said that the date will be arbitrary whatever we do.
We have been in deep negotiations—there is no argument about that; it will all come out—but the insurance companies did not just stroll up to Lord Freud’s office and say, “By the way, can we do a deal?” They were dragged there, otherwise that would have been done under the previous Administration. The Bill is not perfect and it probably can be amended, but it must not be delayed.
Mr Kevan Jones
I am interested that the Minister says there has to be an arbitrary date. No, there does not; there has to be a date that is justifiable, and the only such date is the 1965 date of knowledge.
Mike Penning
That would be an arbitrary date too, because, as the hon. Gentleman said, mesothelioma was known about before 1965. Whatever happens, if we get bogged down in a legal argument, it will delay the Bill, and the compensation that everyone has worked towards for so many years will be massively and dramatically affected.
Chris Bryant
I am sorry to intervene on the Minister, but he seems to be saying that he will not countenance any amendment to the Bill—despite our having had a debate in which everyone who has spoken has said they want amendments—because such amendments would delay the Bill beyond Christmas. With his timetable, however, I cannot see how he can possibly get it out before Christmas anyway.
Mike Penning
That is the second time the hon. Gentleman has talked about my timetable. The Opposition insisted on three days in Committee; we said they could have less.
Mike Penning
If the hon. Gentleman talked to his own Whips, he might get some sense. That is exactly what happened.
At the end of the day, however, some parts of the Bill can be amended without it going back to the Lords. Some parts, particularly on the percentage—[Interruption.] It is for regulations. It is not actually part of the Bill. If the hon. Gentleman reads the Bill, he will understand what is going on. He is trying to score party political points on a really serious issue, and he is wrong. We need to ensure that what can be amended, is amended, but I will not have the Bill, and therefore the compensation, delayed. With that, I hope the House will give the Bill a Second Reading and that the Opposition will vote for it this evening. It is important that we get the Bill through the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7)),
That the following provisions shall apply to the Mesothelioma Bill [Lords]:
Committal
(1) The Bill shall be committed to a Public Bill Committee.
Proceedings in Public Bill Committee
(2) Proceedings in the Public Bill Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Tuesday 17 December 2013.
(3) The Public Bill Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.
Consideration and Third Reading
(4) Proceedings on Consideration shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which those proceedings are commenced.
(5) Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.
(6) Standing Order No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on Consideration and Third Reading.
Other proceedings
(7) Any other proceedings on the Bill (including any proceedings on consideration of any message from the Lords) may be programmed.
DWP Offices (Fylde)
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
It is a pleasure, Mr Dobbin, to serve under your chairmanship with a new portfolio; I am in my third position in the past 18 months. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). I understand he was first reserve or last reserve—whatever reserve it was—and it is right and proper that he was ready to represent his constituents. Given that this is a half-hour debate, he has done well to get colleagues from across the House to talk about this constituency issue.
As I am relatively new to my portfolio, a lot of what I say will have been written for me by my civil servants. I will challenge that as we go forward; if some of the things I say do not match my colleagues’ local knowledge, they should let me know. I intend to visit this wonderful part of England in the near future to look at the points that have been raised and carefully consider what we can do. I cannot draw a line in the sand on the Norcross site because demolition is taking place as we speak. I hope I can, however, alleviate some of my colleagues’ concerns about what is going on with other parts of the site.
I have a piece of paper in front of me from the MOD on the part of the site that is not within my portfolio. It has shared services from the DWP and the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency, an executive agency of the MOD. That piece of paper says that that part of the site is not part of the redevelopment plans and is there to stay. It is a completely different set of buildings and their quality is completely different from the pre-war prefabs, which would have cost us a lot of money to refurbish and would not have given us any degree of longevity. I hope I can alleviate any concerns on the shared services.
The other thing I want to address is the concept that a civil servant is a civil servant. They are not completely interoperable. They are a bit like us, in many ways; there are many different sorts of MPs and we all do things in a slightly different way. Inside the civil service, people have specific jobs to do. It is not the case that because closer desks are available, those civil servants could have automatically gone to them. I know that it is logical that if there are closer desks, they should move to them, but it does not always work that way.
Given the skills that we need from civil servants in the Fylde, we could not just have moved them to the closer premises, not least because I have a responsibility to the taxpayer to ensure that we get best value. If we look at how the Government estate, for want of a better word, has been managed and operated around the UK over the years, we see that there has been, to say the least, a lack of joined-up government, no matter who has been in power. That is because the estate is complicated.
Demolition is taking place on the Warbreck site. We are not the owners of the site, but we have a contractual agreement on the site. We have a financial interest in what is developed on the site, once it is levelled and redeveloped. After costs, we will get an income into the Department from it.
Mike Penning
As soon as I said it, I knew I had said the wrong one. It is the Norcross site; Warbreck is a completely different kettle of fish and we are using it to its fullest capacity.
Coming back to Norcross, which is what I was supposed to have been talking about, demolition has started and it would be expensive for us to row back from that. It would have cost in excess of £30 million to do it up to a standard that would have given us any longevity. It would have cost us £100,000, should we have had a problem.
The costs are immaterial—we are where we are. There would have been legal costs and a new negotiation, because we are not the freeholders but the tenants. An income to the Department is built into the redevelopment, although we do not yet know what the exact amount will be, because we do not know how the market will perform. There is an exciting future for the Norcross site and things will move forward. [Interruption.] This is where the note comes through saying, “Minister, you might have said the wrong thing.” The cost of redevelopment would have been £20 million, not £30 million as I said, so I apologise and put that on record.
The important point made by my hon. Friend was that we must work much harder on the concept that someone sitting in Sheffield, London or Timbuktu can look at Google Maps and think, “That’s a great idea. We’ll do it that way.” Anyone who knows my previous roles—I know that my hon. Friend was on the Select Committee on Transport—will know that when I made the decision on the future of the coastguards, I specifically did not do things in that way. I looked at the needs, where it could be done and the economic effects on that part of the community. I assure him that that is exactly what I will do as we move forward.
The debate on this topic back in 2006 or 2007, secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace),was the right debate. He managed to secure a commitment from the Minister to visit. Ministers get huge demands on their time for visits around the country, but it is important that they are seen not to be London-centric—that they actually go out and understand what is going on in the community and see the effects of decisions.
I also want to praise the civil servants in the Department for Work and Pensions. The welfare reforms have been a massive transformation. There has been a lot of uncertainty, which I fully understand, as we have moved from the disability living allowance to personal independence payments, but the civil servants have done a brilliant job and the enthusiasm I have found in offices around the United Kingdom has been overwhelming. They have asked for a chance to get on with it, because they now know where they are and how to move forward.
Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)
I have two things to say on that point of reform. I want to put in a bid for the Fylde to be seriously considered as a location for a universal credit hub as it is rolled out across the country. As the Minister rightly said, we have excellent civil servants, who could operate it brilliantly. It is therefore even more important that we do not have just a civil servant, but a senior-grade civil servant like a camp commandant, who can provide answers. Much of the work force feel disjointed from the management in Sheffield and London, because they cannot get the answers locally as the senior grades that they should have are not there.
Mike Penning
That is an enormously important point. Both my hon. Friend and I come from the military, so I understand exactly the concept of ownership—the feeling that someone is part of a bigger picture. We will certainly look at the issue that he raises, as services come on stream. There is a huge amount of work still to be done, particularly in my portfolio—this issue is not all mine, even though the Department estates we are talking about are very much mine; the DLA to PIP transfer is also mine.
In conclusion, I have huge admiration for the staff involved; I will personally come to the area and thank them. In the meantime, I would be grateful if colleagues thanked their constituents on my behalf. I come with an open mind as to where we can go forward, but I cannot rewrite the books. We are where we are, and we need to move forward with this particular development.
Question put and agreed to.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Penning Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
1. What plans he has for the future of the independent living fund.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
We will consider the Court of Appeal judgment carefully and will announce plans in due course.
Hywel Williams
I declare an interest, in that my brother is enabled to live independently in his own community by the ILF, and I am extremely grateful that that opportunity is afforded to him. Will the Minister assure the House that when the Government come to consider their future plans, there will be full consultation this time with disabled people and disability groups in Wales, the regions of England, and Scotland, and specifically with the Welsh Government?
Mike Penning
I greatly respect the hon. Gentleman, but the conclusions of the Court of Appeal were nothing to do with consultation. It was a process issue, in that the Court felt that the Minister had not been given enough information, based on the information that was put in writing. The Court went on to say that there was evidence that the Minister
“consulted personally with many affected groups”
and it had
“no doubt that evidence of hard cases would have been forcefully drawn to her attention.”
That is what the Court ruled. It had nothing to do with consultation.
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
The Department for Work and Pensions annual report was due to be published in April this year. When will we finally see it?
Mike Penning
With due respect, the Court ruling did not have an awful lot to do with that so I cannot answer the question. The annual report will come out in due course.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
2. How many people in Kettering constituency claim ESA; how many such claimants have had their claim turned down in the last year; and how many are appealing that decision to the first tier tribunal.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
In Kettering 4,400 claims started between October 2008 and February 2013. Of those assessed, 49% were deemed fit for work. Appeals data, I fully accept, are running very slow, especially in my hon. Friend’s constituency, which he has been campaigning hard for. We will be looking to recruit more judges as we go forward.
Mr Hollobone
Benefit appellants in the Kettering constituency are being told that they now have to wait up to 40 weeks for a first-tier tribunal hearing. This is more than twice the national average and is completely unacceptable. Will my hon. Friend speak with his counterpart in the Ministry of Justice and get the situation sorted out?
Mike Penning
My hon. Friend has been campaigning hard on behalf of his constituents and we have been working closely with the Ministry of Justice, which is why I can announce that there were six sessions per month in June 2012 and there are now 18 sessions per month, a 300% increase, and we intend to do better.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
People in Kettering and claimants elsewhere might be able to get a quicker resolution of their cases if the testing of the new descriptors for mental health and fluctuating conditions were brought to an end. It is more than two years since Professor Harrington suggested action. When will we see the results?
Mike Penning
I am sure that in the hon. Lady’s constituency as well as in Kettering, we are working very hard to bring down the time it takes, particularly in the tribunals. We have been working closely on the area of mental health, and we will continue to work to make sure that everybody gets a fair deal from the process.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
3. What comparative assessment he has made of the number of people in full-time and part-time employment.
Mr Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow) (Lab)
10. What recent representations he has received on compensation for people with mesothelioma.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
In the short time I have been the Minister of State with responsibility for this matter, I have had the pleasure of meeting the all-party group and victim support group representatives to discuss the Mesothelioma Bill currently before Parliament.
Mr Hepburn
I thank the Minister for bringing forward this much-needed Bill. Does he agree that thousands of working-class people have been killed through being negligently exposed to asbestos in the workplace and that their families have been denied financial security, while the insurance industry has got off with almost £1 billion in unpaid compensation payments? I urge him to reject the proposals from the House of Lords for the insurance industry to be responsible for 75% of compensations payments only, and to make them pay the full 100%. Let the vultures in the insurance industry pay.
Mike Penning
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on campaigning on behalf of his constituents and others. People have been suffering from this abhorrent disease for many years. The issue was discussed extensively in the House of Lords and will be discussed extensively in this place. Our discussions will not be quite as extensive, so that we can pass the Bill and the people who need it may receive compensation. Governments—I stress Governments—have turned their back on these people. We are not going to do that.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
25. What steps he is taking to improve the quality of medical services reports on claimants of benefits.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
This Government take the quality of assessments very seriously. That is why, before I became the Minister, when the Government saw a drop in the quality of work capability assessments, Atos was instructed to implement an improvement plan to ensure that assessment reports meet the high standards that the Department needs. That plan is now complete.
Kevin Brennan
My constituent Mr Robert Shafer suffered an injustice as a result of a rogue medical services report from many years ago. Will the Minister undertake to take further steps to improve the quality of medical services reports, and arrange a reply to my latest letter to the Secretary of State, to which a response is overdue, on behalf of my constituent?
Mike Penning
On the latter point, not only will I ensure that the hon. Gentleman receives the letter he requires, but if he wants to meet me, I will be more than happy to do that. The Department has commissioned four independent reviews. We know we need to get there; we know we need to do more. We have made changes to help cancer patients and are carrying out an evidence-based review of criteria, which is being overseen by Professor Harrington. I expect to see that report quite soon.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
My constituent Matthew Moore, who has a severe mental health condition, was told that he no longer qualified for employment and support allowance. He appealed and months later saw the decision in his case overturned in a few minutes. The tribunal chair said that he was shocked that ESA had been withdrawn in the first place and had no hesitation in awarding 30 points. Is that not yet another example of the incompetence of the many people paid to carry out assessments of some of our most vulnerable people, and of why the Government need to get their act together, have some compassion and ensure that such people are treated fairly?
Mike Penning
Individual cases are understandably quite emotional for individual MPs and their constituents. If the decision in that case was overturned, we will look carefully at what the tribunal said. We need to do that to ensure we get it right. However, this process was started by the previous Administration—it is nothing new for this Government—but we will get it right where, I am afraid, they got it wrong.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
Can the Minister tell us how many people have died as a result of illness or suicide between their being declared fit for work and the hearing of their appeals? If he does not know, does he not think that he has a duty to collect those figures?
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)
I think that we should be very careful about scaremongering. There will be people to whom that applies, but such figures are not collected centrally. I know the hon. Lady very well, and I do not think that the House expects scaremongering of that kind from her.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
I congratulate the Secretary of State on introducing a benefit cap. The feedback that I receive from my constituents suggests that they thoroughly support the principle of the cap, but feel that its level is too high. Will the Secretary of State encourage them by announcing that he will consider lowering the level, perhaps to a figure beginning with 1?