Employment and Support Allowance

Patricia Gibson Excerpts

Tuesday 18th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and, to her credit and in her typical way, makes her point well. The Government have suggested that there will be a 12-week window in which recipients of ESA in the WRAG may well be able to return to the previous rate; I suggest that that is not enough. If the Government will not reverse the cut, there should be a longer grace period to allow people the opportunity to return to work and to attempt to sustain that work, which is not always easy for some of these people to do.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is being generous with his time. Does he agree that despite the 12-week pause—this window that he has talked about and that the Minister has mentioned—the sanctions imposed on the people who are losing this money will push them further and further away from the prospect of work, further and further into poverty, and therefore further and further into social isolation and away from the job market?

[Neil Gray]

Absolutely. I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, because that point has been made by the expert disability charities. They do not see this cut as an incentive for people to find work; rather, it hinders their opportunities for getting back into work, if they are able to do so as part of a timely process.

In November, in response to the debate on a cross-party motion on this subject that I introduced in this Chamber, the Minister committed to ensuring that a replacement system of support would be in place for ESA recipients in the WRAG before the cut was to take place, but we have no clarity over what that system is or will look like. She said that support would be provided and an additional £15 million invested in the flexible support fund, but, of course, the flexible support fund is a discretionary fund used by jobcentres to help those in receipt of unemployment benefits to find work. It can be used to help with the cost of travel to interviews, childcare, clothing or uniforms to start work. However, the flexible support fund has been heavily criticised by the National Audit Office, the Work and Pensions Committee and others, because of its complexity and under-utilisation.

There have been allegations that jobcentre staff have been pressured into not using the fund. It is also one of the best kept secrets in Whitehall as information about it is not available on the Government’s own website. What concerns me most is that there is no detail over how the flexible support fund, which will total only £83 million after the additional allocation, will directly support ESA WRAG recipients. Have jobcentre staff been told to target the flexible support fund on disabled people?

Another commitment made by the Minister was to secure better deals with service providers to help disabled people financially. She was going to broker deals with energy companies and telecoms suppliers to help sick and disabled people with their bills, but how many people will be able to afford a BT TV package or Sky broadband on even the higher rate of ESA WRAG? Even if she has managed to secure better deals on energy or insurance costs, we have not been told about them. How much will they aid disabled people? Will they make up the shortfall? Who are the deals with? When will they come into force? Will the Government promote them?

The Minister also committed to having personalised support packages in place by now—either a place on the Work and Health programme or Work Choice. Of course the Work and Health programme has yet to start and Work Choice is not new support. Additional places were also to be provided on the specialist employability support programme, which is a very small project, with only 1,700 members in 2015. Another idea was on job clubs, but we have not had any further detail on that. There is also the drive for work experience places with wrap-around support for young people, but again there have been no detail on whether this will be available for WRAG recipients.

Increased funding for the Access to Work mental health support service has also been mentioned. It has been launched, but is available only if a person is in work or signed off work sick, so it will not help those on ESA WRAG. All in all, we have had many different ideas. There have been different, tentative and ultimately detail-free announcements. In the end we have no detail and no way of knowing how the Government plan to live up to their promise of ensuring that ESA WRAG recipients are not punished financially or how they intend to halve the disability employment gap by 2020, as was promised.