Disability Benefits and Social Care

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that cuts to support for disabled people and carers pose a potential risk to their dignity and independence and will have wider social and economic costs; regrets that the Department for Work and Pensions has dropped the aim of achieving disability equality; whilst recognising that the disability living allowance (DLA) needs to be reformed, expresses concern that taking the DLA from 500,000 disabled people and contributory employment and support allowance from 280,000 former workers will take vital financial support from families under pressure; expresses further concern at the Work Programme’s failure to help disabled people and the mismanaged closure of Remploy factories; notes the pressing need for continuing reform to the work capability assessment (WCA) to reduce the human cost of wrong decisions; agrees with the eight Carers’ Week charities on the importance of recognising the huge contribution made by the UK’s 6.4 million carers and the need to support carers to prevent caring responsibilities pushing them into ill-health, poverty and isolation; and calls on the Government to ensure reform promotes work, independence, quality of life and opportunities for disabled people and their families, to restore the commitment to disability equality in the Department for Work and Pensions’ business plan, to conduct a full impact assessment of the combined effects of benefit and social care cuts on disabled people and carers, to reform WCA descriptors as suggested by charities for mental health, fluctuating conditions and sensory impairment and to re-run the consultation on the future of Remploy factories.

Once upon a time, the Conservatives liked to tell us that we were all in this together. Those words ring rather hollow today. After a Budget that gave us the granny tax and cuts to tax credits while giving a tax cut to millionaires, I think we can assume that the Chancellor was simply taking us for a ride. Yesterday, Bob Holman—the man who introduced the Secretary of State to Easterhouse—said it all. He said that he now had so much confidence in the Secretary of State’s belief that we were all in it together that he thought the Secretary of State should resign. Today’s debate is about many of the people Mr Holman stood up for. They are the one in four of our fellow citizens who are not all in it together with the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. They are not part of the Chipping Norton set. They do not get to go to the kitchen suppers. They are Britain’s disabled citizens. They are parents of disabled children. They are former workers, now disabled, who have paid in and paid their stamp and now find a Government determined to renege on a deal that they believed in.

In today’s debate on what I hope will be a consensual motion, there will be interventions from those on the Treasury Bench asking which cuts the Opposition support, and that is a perfectly reasonable line of argument. Let me deal with it at the outset. We do not believe that the spending review set out by this Government was wise. We warned of the risks of cutting too far and too fast. We also warned of the risks of a double-dip recession, and now we have one. The cost is astronomical. That is why the Chancellor had to explain to the House, in his last Budget, that he had to borrow £150 billion more than the Office for Budget Responsibility said Labour would have borrowed, as set out in our last Budget. In the Department for Work and Pensions, the bill for jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefit is now running out of control as a consequence of the Secretary of State’s failure to get people back into work, and £9 billion more than was originally forecast is now projected to be spent. Someone has to pay that bill, and the Government—the Cabinet and those on the Front Bench today—have decided that it should be paid by Britain’s disabled people.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has mentioned the disabled. Will he explain why Labour supports segregated employment—apartheid for the disabled—in Remploy? Are the disabled community not full members of society too?

[Mr Byrne]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, and I will talk about Remploy at length later in my speech. I hope that he will intervene on me again at that stage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

Those are precisely the kinds of worries that the House should reflect on because this is a very difficult and sensitive area of policy. The Government are not attempting to prosecute reform with any kind of consensus at all. That is why charities are resigning and resiling from their administration.

To the picture of ESA reform, I am afraid we have to add the Work programme. Once billed as the greatest back-to-work programme designed by human hand it is now missing its target for disabled people by 60%. Charity after charity says that the number of people referred to them for specialist help to get back to work is minuscule and tiny. St Mungo’s and now the Single Homeless Project have even gone to the lengths of resigning from the programme altogether.

This Government’s contempt is not reserved for disabled people without a job. There is plenty of it to go around for people with a job, including those Remploy workers in factories to whom the Secretary of State said, “You don’t produce very much at all. They are not doing any work at all. They are just making cups of coffee.” I hope that, in the course of this debate, the Secretary of State will take the opportunity to resign—I mean apologise. [Interruption.] I may not give way to calls on that point, but I congratulate the Sunday Express on its campaign, highlighting the disgraceful treatment of Remploy workers. We all know that Remploy has to change—that is the point I would make to Conservative Members—but this Government have decided to press ahead, closing these factories at breakneck speed. These factories are in constituencies where twice as many people as the national average are chasing every single job. How can it be right to say to these factories that they have until Monday to complete a business plan that, if it is not successful, will see the closure of factories in communities that need jobs and cannot afford to lose them?

[Paul Maynard]

Let me give the right hon. Gentleman another chance to answer the question put to him earlier. How many of these factories were closed under the last Labour Government? I know what the figure is; I wonder whether he knows what it is.

[Mr Byrne]

I will not deny the fact that a number of factories were closed under Labour, but that was part of a reform programme that saw £500 million added in support for the future of Remploy. The point for the House this afternoon is this: the time given to help Remploy factories figure out a future is too short.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Eleven people are chasing every single job in my constituency, and there is no point in the Secretary of State going to Merthyr to tell people to get on a bus to Cardiff because there are no jobs in Cardiff either. After the last round of redundancies in the Remploy factory in the Cynon Valley in 1988, only one man ever found a job again. With unemployment now running at 9% in my constituency, I ask the Secretary of State again: where are the jobs? Tell us: where are the jobs for disabled people?

[Paul Maynard]

rose—

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend speaks powerfully. This underlines the importance of a series of tests that the Government must pass on Remploy. I shall come to that, but I give way for the last time to the hon. Gentleman.

[Paul Maynard]

I am listening carefully and I promise not to intervene again. Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify something for me? Is he arguing that disabled people should not be expected to be able to work in the wider workplace? The implications of that are a lowering of the expectations of the disabled community and suggest that all we all are fit for is to have a label placed around our necks and then be put out of sight and out of mind? Is that really what he is suggesting?