Disabled People

Robert Flello Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I shall come back to his point slightly later.

The Opposition believe in reform of the benefits system and of support and care for disabled people, but we also believe in one thing more—that fewer, not more, disabled people should live in poverty in this country. During our time in office, we drove down the number of disabled people living in poverty from 40% to about a quarter. That was not an accident; it was because of the most ambitious series of reforms to help disabled people that we have ever seen.

There was the appointment of the first ever Minister for Disabled People, the Disability Discrimination Act and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. There were great programmes such as Supporting People, the new deal for disabled people, new strategies for disabled children and Valuing People, and, crucially, there was the Equality Act 2010. Poverty in disabled households fell under Labour and now that progress has gone into reverse.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

There is a fundamental difference in how the reforms have been heralded in the media, too. When we were in government and we put those reforms through, we did so in a careful and considered way, whereas because of how the current reforms are being pushed through, the media are characterising people in certain ways. A constituent who is on disability benefit for severe mental health problems came to my office the other day with his head in his hands saying, “I know I’m scum. That’s what I read every day. That’s the way I feel I’m treated.”

[Mr Byrne]

The whole House will have heard my hon. Friend’s powerful story. I am afraid that too often in the past three years we have had not the politics of national unity, but the politics of dividing lines—dividing lines after dividing lines. When has this country ever achieved great things when we have sought to divide one from another? We have only ever achieved great things in this country when we have pulled together, but I am afraid that that is not the policy of reform we see from this Government.

Today we have one third of disabled citizens in our country living in poverty. That proportion has increased every single year this coalition Government have been in power. That is a disgrace, and it is only surpassed by the Government’s attempts to make it worse.

Today I want to set out the great pressures that now confront disabled people and ask, in the words of our motion, that the Government, for the first time, put together

“a cumulative impact assessment of the changes”,

because the Secretary of State has an important duty to fulfil later this year. He has a duty before the autumn statement to set before the Chancellor of the Exchequer the combined concerted impact of the changes he is prosecuting on disabled people. These changes are big and they are well known. They affect the roof over people’s heads, the cash they receive, the care they enjoy, the help for their children and the help for their carers, and, of course, the systems that are currently failing to give disabled people the chance to lift themselves out of poverty by actually going to work.

Let me start with an issue that I know will be much in the news today: the hated bedroom tax. Two thirds of people hit by this tax are disabled. We know that council housing in this country is allocated according to need, and very often disabled people are given accommodation that is suited to their need. They may have a room that is available for a carer or for equipment, but the accommodation they were given was allocated according to need. Now disabled people face a tax on that spare room. Disabled people now face the distress of debt, being torn from their neighbours, and cut off from help very often if they are on disability living allowance. This is a cruel and unusual punishment meted out to the most vulnerable in our society, and this Government should drop it, and drop it now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hoban]

Bodies such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies have said that giving that level of detail is impossible and have stepped away from doing so. I know that the right hon. Gentleman has got into trouble on spending plans; he tried to dig himself out of a hole earlier and did not manage to do it, and there is a bit of chaff for him, but let us be very clear: this was a challenge when he was in government, and it remains a challenge.

Let me move on to employment. We all know that work brings self-esteem and dignity. It enables people, whether disabled or able-bodied, to look after themselves and their families. Nearly half of disabled people are in work. Only one in 10 working-age disabled people have never worked, and for those aged over 25 it is only one in 20. If we want to make a sustainable difference, we must do all that we can to help more disabled people who can work to get into mainstream employment and stay there. The spending review allocated £330 million to programmes and support for disabled people or those with a long-term health condition, so that they can move into and stay in work.

[Robert Flello]

I thank the Minister for giving way; he is being generous in taking interventions. Over the summer, will he get his Department to publish, as an example, the number of people who used to work in the Remploy factory in Stoke-on-Trent who have gone into work in the wider environment, and the number who are now unemployed and likely to be unemployed for the rest of their working life? That facility, to use the Minister’s exact words, provided work experience—not some segregated nonsense, but work experience that people enjoyed. I spoke to the people there time and again, and they really enjoyed working there. Will he publish those figures over the summer?

[Mr Hoban]

I shall give the hon. Gentleman some homework for the summer recess. If he goes back to Thursday’s Hansard and the statement that the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), made about stage 2 for Remploy factories, he will see that it sets out in detail the work that we have done to get people back into employment, and it gives the aggregate figures. The success in getting people into work after the closure of Remploy factories has outpaced what normally happens with redundancies. What we have seen demonstrates the important support given to get people into work.

This Government remain convinced of the need to maximise the opportunities available to disabled people to enable them to realise their employment aspirations. The principal objectives of our disability employment strategy are to increase the employment rate for disabled people, and to maximise the opportunity for disabled people to realise their employment aspirations and thus achieve greater economic independence. We will publish our strategy later this year. We need to make sure that money is targeted more effectively, to ensure that support continues to be available to those who need it most, that there is a lasting impact and that interventions provide a fair deal for the taxpayer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tom Greatrex]

If the Minister will not see my right hon. Friend, how can he know of the level of constructive engagement that the group is offering? The judgment he made at the start of that exchange was precisely that he would refuse to see it because he did not want to engage with it. I will leave the matter to my right hon. Friend, who I am sure will wish to speak about it. That is the point I am trying to make in relation to a number of consistent examples. I hope the Minister will reflect on it today and over the summer.

The National Audit Office commented last summer on the DWP’s failure to apply the penalties or service credits within the WCA in relation to Atos Healthcare’s underperformance and failure to seek adequate financial redress. It was almost as if it just did not want to apply them, because that would indicate that there was a problem in the system.

[Robert Flello]

My hon. Friend is making an extremely important speech. I am sure that his experience will be the same as mine: when constituents come to see me, time and again they mention Atos. That is the only word I seem to hear some days because of the nightmare that that company is and the problems it causes to my constituents.

[Tom Greatrex]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; he makes an important point. It is partly about Atos Healthcare, which has delivered the contract appallingly, but it is also about the deficiencies in the contract, which this Government, particularly—it gives me no pleasure to say this—since the current Minister has been in place, seemingly refuse to deal with.

Dr Greg Wood is a doctor who was employed by Atos until he left its employ at the start of May this year. In the middle of May, he made a series of serious and very specific allegations about his experience as a doctor working at an Atos centre and the way in which the work capability assessment was carried out. For the record, he suggests not that we should get rid of the assessment, or even that it gets cases wrong at either end of the scale, but that people in the middle are being caught because of the flawed way in which the system is designed and implemented. He said that

“claimants are often not being assessed in an even handed way… HCPs are not free to make independent recommendations, important evidence is frequently missing or never sought in the first place, medical knowledge is twisted and points are often wrongly withheld through the use of an erroneously high standard of proof”.

He said that if Atos assessors

“show deviation from the official line the HCP is instructed to change the report”

and:

“In about a quarter of assessments important documentary evidence is missing but the assessments go ahead regardless.”

He said that training of new HCPs creates an environment where they

“expect that they will see in the course of their work score too few points to qualify for ESA. This is often the de facto starting hypothesis, with the effect that the claimant usually faces an uphill struggle before the assessment has even begun.”

He said that HCPs often “begrudgingly” score claimants and that an attitude is drilled into them

“which leans towards finding reasons not to award points”.

Those are very serious and specific allegations that I would have expected the Government to take seriously, given the warm words we frequently hear from the Minister and the Secretary of State, who has now left his place, about improving this process and constantly being vigilant about making it better for people.

I wrote to the Prime Minister on the same day asking him to investigate the allegations. He passed the correspondence to the Secretary of State, who wrote back to me on 22 June. I got back a one-page letter—I have it here—that made absolutely no reference to any of the specific allegations. It did not say that there was a problem; it was just a standard response. The Government wanted to brush it under the carpet. That attitude belies the problems that exist.

On the same day, the Secretary of State’s private office e-mailed me, by mistake, a copy of a letter to another Member of Parliament—a Government Member—raising an individual’s case to which there was a much more systematic and detailed response. That is perhaps because the initial letter came from me, or from a Labour Member. I very much hope not, because they were very serious allegations that the Government decided to ignore completely.

This is not just about the frustrations of seeking information from the Government, although I admit that I do get frustrated about that. It is not just about the waste and inefficiency in a programme that is costing £110 million a year for the Atos contract, and now up to £70 million this year in the appeals process to correct the mistakes. It is not just about an attitude, although I say again that I have found the Minister to be dismissive, evasive and sometimes partisan in our engagement on this issue. It is also about the experience of real people in every single part of this country who often have to adjust their life circumstances due to events completely beyond their control due to illness, accident or incident. It is about people who will have seen a system that is not working properly because the Government rolled out the migration from incapacity benefit without taking into account the lessons identified in the pilot projects, with the consequences that we have seen since. Most of all, it is about decency, compassion and helping people, not hounding people. The system is wrong and it needs to change.