Mental Health: Assessment

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am grateful for the chance to contribute to this debate. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for securing this debate, for her excellent speech, and for the tireless work she is doing on behalf of her constituents and many others.

In my constituency office we have the equivalent of a full-time employee doing nothing but fixing mistakes made by the DWP in assessments. I have no reason to believe it is any better in other constituencies. We could be talking about an army of people funded by the taxpayer just to sort out the mess created by a Government Department. During my three and a half years in this place, one significant area that has generated a lot of work has been the appalling treatment of constituents if they have assessments based on mental problems or a combination of physical disability and mental health problems.

In theory and in principle, I agree with what the Government claim to be trying to do through the benefits system. In practice, what they are really doing is completely wrong and I cannot support it at all. Having said that, I will not hear one word of criticism against the people who work in my local jobcentres, because they are fantastic. They do everything possible to help people, but they are trammelled by the regulations that they have to work under. They are clearly restricted as civil servants, in that sometimes they cannot say publicly what they appear to feel privately. The support they tried to give to every constituent we have contacted them about has been outstanding, so I want to place on record the fact that the people in our local jobcentres are doing a great job, but they cannot do the job they want to do, because the rules will not let them.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman is addressing the nature and complexity of the changes. Many of us support the long-term objective. However, the number of times issues have been delayed and roll-outs have been put back, and the number of changes, amendments and adjustments all indicate a fundamental flaw at the heart of the concept. Does he agree that we need to address that, rather than tinker at the edges?

[Peter Grant]

My view is that the fundamental flaw was built into the system from day one, when the entire review started from the bottom line of financial saving and everything else was built on top of that. A benefits system cannot be built on a price tag, especially a price tag significantly lower than the current cost of the benefits system. That will guarantee that a significant number of people will be left a lot worse off than they were. A system has never been invented that ensures that the tiny minority of people who play the system are called to account and those who need to benefit are protected. Far too often, the system hits the easy targets rather than the ones who should be stopped from abusing the system.

What are the assessments for people with mental health problems in the benefits system supposed to do? They are supposed to give additional support to anyone living with a disability that makes it dearer for them to have the basic essentials of life. They are supposed to provide financial support for people who cannot get into work and help those who will be able to get into work to get there. We must recognise that some people will never be able to carry out enough work to support themselves financially. For those facing that reality, the system is supposed to help.

Instead, our system makes the situation worse for somebody with mental health problems that prevent them from working. We are talking about things that on their own might not seem that severe, such as anxiety, which can be made worse if they keep getting knocked back or psychologically beaten about. These people struggle just to carry on the usual social contact that some of us take for granted and lack the simple social skills that are essential to survive in the workplace.

For people struggling with those problems due to mental illness, which can be exacerbated by the way they are being treated, the worst thing we can do is force them through a system that makes them feel even less worthwhile than before they went in, even worse about themselves and even more anxious about their next assessment.

We would not assess a blind person with a paper form and we would not assess a deaf person over the phone, unless there was somebody at the other end to interpret for them. Why should it be any different when assessing somebody whose difficulties are related to severe anxiety and the inability to cope with going out the door and taking a bus on their own? They are told to go to an address they have never heard of, in a place they have never been to, to find their way there by a bus that they do not know exists, by a time set by the assessors, and to pay their own way there. By the time they get there, if they are lucky, an assessor will carry out the interview, but if the assessor does not turn up, that is okay. However, if the claimant does not turn up, they get their benefit stopped. Then we wonder why people think the system is rigged against them.

The whole work capability assessment is lengthy and demeaning. It treats people as numbers—as statistics. Sometimes it treats people as problems, instead of as human beings who need the support of a caring and civilised society. For example, most of my constituents are quite surprised, if not astonished, when they discover that it is not routine for the DWP to ask for a report from their GP or community psychiatric nurse, if they have been getting support from a nurse. They will sometimes ask for it, if the claimant themselves insists on them asking for it, but why do they not do it routinely? Surely the person’s own GP and the health professionals—those with qualifications in psychology or psychiatry—who have worked with this person, sometimes for years, have something important to say about their ability to work now and the realistic prospects of them getting back into work in the future.

Tomorrow, it will be exactly a year since I asked an urgent question in the Chamber about changes to personal independence payment assessment criteria. That followed a Government defeat in a case in the High Court where, in essence, the Court ruled that the assessment process the Government had put in place was illegal, because it discriminated between people with mental health problems and people with physical disabilities. On 23 November last year we received an update on that case: 140,000 cases had had to be reviewed and £4.5 million in benefits had been paid back to 1,000 people. I know that the succession of Ministers we have had in the DWP like to quote statistics about the percentage of people who like the result and the percentage of people who do not. In that case, 1,000 people were owed the money, which they needed just to have a decent standard of life. This Government had unlawfully withheld that money from them. We still do not know how many more people are due to get money back once the full review has been carried out. These are not the actions of a caring society.

Some of my constituents have turned up at assessments that were difficult and stressful to get to and found that the assessment had been cancelled. They had paid the cost of getting there, sometimes borrowing money to pay the bus fare, and the assessment was cancelled. At other times they have turned up and the paperwork had been lost or the person who had read the paperwork had phoned in sick. A different assessor had no idea who the person coming in to be assessed was. It is no wonder it creates the impression that, “The system really does not care about me. It does not see me as a human being. It sees me as a problem instead of as a human being with intrinsic value and the same rights to be treated properly as anyone else in our society.”

[Debbie Abrahams]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. Is he as concerned as I am about the York University report that came out today, which states that people with mental health conditions are two and a half to three and a half times more likely to have their PIP claim reduced or stopped than people with physical health conditions? Does he share the view of the Royal College of Psychiatrists that if there is parity of esteem for mental health and physical health conditions in the health service, there should also be parity of esteem in social security?

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s comments. I have not seen the report, but my impression has been that people with significant mental health problems do not always help themselves and act in their own best interest. As a society, we have not got a balance about how far we allow someone to be who they want to be and live their own life. At what point do we step in and say, “You are not doing yourself any favours”? I have met far too many people whose initial problem started with a letter saying they had to go for an assessment, but, because they were scared of an assessment, they did not go, and from then on the problems multiplied.

I had one recent case of a constituent whose behaviour admittedly sometimes was completely unacceptable. One of the ways that he responds to the fact that he cannot cope is by getting aggressive. In at least one instance, he caused damage in a DWP office. I cannot condone that, but it turned out that one of the things he was annoyed about was the fact that his benefit had been substantially reduced. He did not think he had seen a letter telling him why it had been reduced, and we could not find anything, either. It turned out the DWP had decided that because he might react badly to being told that, it cut his benefit, but decided not to tell him what it had done. So that information was kept in a part of the system that assessors could see, but he could not. The assessor was supposed to try to help him get back into the workplace. The DWP thinks he is capable of doing some work, so it thinks he is capable of all the stresses and strains and upsets that go with going out to work in the morning, or in the afternoon, but he cannot be trusted with information about his own claim in case he reacts to it in the wrong way.

I do not think anybody here would like to sit down and design the perfect benefits system from scratch. I do not suggest that I have all the answers, and there will always be difficult judgments to be made. There will always be cases when someone has to decide, “Is this somebody who knows how to work the system and is chancing it, or is this somebody who really needs help?” I would much rather the system was biased a little more towards accepting that a tiny minority of people can play the system in order to make sure that nobody who needs the support of the system is left behind, but the experience of my constituents is that it is very much loaded in the opposite direction. In numerous cases that I have raised with various Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions—more than six since I was elected—after a few months, the answer has come back that the person has abandoned their appeal and is not going through with the latest stage in the process. Some in the DWP see it as a success every time someone does not carry through an appeal, because that means they have accepted the result. They do not think it means they have given up because they simply cannot win against a system that they feel, and sometimes I feel, is designed to stop people getting what they are entitled to get.

If we look at what has been happening since some of the benefits system was devolved to the Scottish Government, they were criticised for not moving quicker, but the first thing they did was to embark on a major consultation and engagement process not only with the usual suspects, but with people who had been through previous processes. They went out and actively looked for people who had either got successful claims or had lost out under the previous system to find out from them what they thought the system should be like.

The Scottish Government have given an assurance that any benefits assessments they are responsible for will not be carried out by private companies, so any suspicion that there is something in it for the private assessor who says no instead of yes is immediately taken out. The DWP will always say that that is not the case, but if a private company hopes to get the contract in a few years’ time, there will always be that suspicion, especially in the minds of those who do not get the result that they want.

We need to go back to the basics of what people are entitled to get either from the benefits system or from any other part of the state. The Scottish Government have said from day one that their system will be based on fairness, dignity and respect. Every one of our citizens deserves that, whether they are dealing with a benefits application to the DWP or in any other interaction with the Government. At the moment, far too many of my constituents do not feel they are being treated fairly. They do not feel they are being respected as human beings and they definitely do not feel that they come out of the process with the dignity that each and every one of us is entitled to. Until that changes, I cannot support the system. I want to see it fundamentally changed or scrapped altogether so that we go back and start again.