Welfare Reform

Natascha Engel Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

We will certainly ensure that we look at that suggestion.

[Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

There has been a huge increase in the number of people coming to my surgeries and saying that, having been on incapacity benefit, they have been reassessed as capable of working but on appeal that decision has been overturned. That applies to the vast majority of people, certainly in Derbyshire. Does the Secretary of State have figures available for the whole country? I hope so, because if he is planning on rolling this out nationwide, we need to ensure not only that people who are wrongly assessed as capable of working are not left destitute but that the tribunal system is prepared for the huge number of appeals coming its way.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Let me repeat the figures that I gave. Of all those who have been migrated through the system, about 5% have been successful in the sense that they have had their appeals upheld. There may be a slight change to that figure, because there is a backlog at the moment; we could probably make it up to 7% or 8%, but I do not think that it will get any higher than that. We should remember that all the people the hon. Lady is talking about represent the flow—that is, people who have not been in receipt of incapacity benefit until now but have been applying to come on to incapacity benefit and are being migrated through the process on to employment and support allowance or jobseeker’s allowance. The figure for those appeals is 5%, and that was part of the process that was started by the previous Government.