Cost of Living: Financial Support for Disabled People

Debate between Rosie Duffield and Baroness Keeley

Monday 22nd May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Sir Robert. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) on leading this important debate. We know that the serious implications of rising prices for fuel, transport and food have fallen much harder on some people. People with disabilities face a higher risk of poverty. The poverty rate for individuals who live in families where someone is disabled is 28%—nine percentage points more than those who live in families where no one is disabled. They are also less likely to be able to make savings on their bills for reasons related to their disability. We have heard a great deal about how the size of bills impacts many people.

I will talk about one of the petitioners: Katy Styles, who is here today. She is an unpaid carer for her husband who has motor neurone disease, and she is a campaigner for improved support for carers. She put it like this:

“It’s not a question of putting on an extra jumper for us. When someone has a muscle wasting disease their ability to stay warm is compromised, so homes need to be heated for longer and at higher temperatures. Not heating your home can lead to chest infections and in turn this can lead to a stay in hospital”.

We are focusing an awful lot on households with someone with a disability, but the extra costs for heating are borne by not only the person with a disability but their unpaid carers. Well over a quarter of all unpaid carers are living in poverty, and research from Carers UK found that more than three quarters of carers said that the rising cost of living is one of the main challenges that they would face in 2023, which is hardly surprising.

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning my fantastic constituent Katy Styles. Does my hon. Friend agree that campaigns such as We Care and people such as Katy make a real difference to us because they talk about the impact on real lives, and how the decisions that we make here affect them on a daily basis? It is not just statistics that we receive from charities and others: we know how each decision that we make here impacts on people’s real lives.

[Barbara Keeley]

I very much agree. It is good that Katy Styles is here today, because I have learned a lot from her about the role of carers. It is something that I care deeply about. Like her, I would like to see improved support for carers.

Returning to the point about maintaining higher temperatures in the home, people with disabilities, as we have heard, are also being hit with the increased costs of vital high-energy equipment, additional laundry and bathing needs, and transport for visits to medical appointments, which can be very costly. As my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea said, the charity Scope has found that, on average, households with at least one disabled adult or child need an additional £975 a month to have the same standard of living as households without somebody with a disability. In fact, those extra costs—she gave this figure too—rise to £1,122 a month after accounting for inflation. In this debate, we are throwing around the amounts of £150 and £650, but we should think about those figures, because £150 is nowhere near the increased costs.

The petition asked for disabled people and unpaid carers to be included in the one-off £650 cost of living support payment. We should reflect on the fact that unpaid carers are more likely to live in poverty than those without caring responsibilities: 29% compared with 20%. The Government responded to both petitions for today’s debate stating that 6 million people in receipt of a qualifying disability benefit would receive a £150 payment last September, but only those in receipt of a qualifying benefit would receive the £650 payment. I understand that that excluded 568,000 personal independence payment and disability living allowance claimants and 523,000 carer’s allowance claimants. Carers such as Katy Styles and the We Care Campaign argue that although the one-off £150 payment was welcome—as discussed earlier, any extra amount is welcome—given the additional energy costs that disabled people and their families are bearing, it was completely inadequate in the context of the ongoing cost of living crisis. We have all seen our bills: £150 hardly goes anywhere. The We Care Campaign recommends that the Government introduce a social tariff for energy that discounts energy bills for those most in need, automatically enrols eligible households and is mandatory for all suppliers, as advocated by the charities Age UK and Scope.

I am afraid I will not be able to get into all the ins and outs of the argument we heard earlier from the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). To a certain extent, I disagree with him: it does not matter how many hours Ofgem spends on this issue. Ofgem should be spending time on it, because it is vital that we have a solution.

I want to talk a little about the work by Age UK. Research by Age UK found that cost of living pressures this winter led to more than half of older people cutting back on heat and power, and more than a quarter feeling too cold at home most or all of the time. Around 800,000 older people had left their home to seek warmth in a public space, such as a shopping centre or library. I heard from older constituents who were using their free bus passes to ride around in buses during the day, just to keep warm. That is a scandal. It is also not an option for some people, because people with disabilities and their carers will not be hopping on and off different buses just to try to keep and warm.

I turn to eligibility for the warm home discount, which is important. The We Care Campaign recommends that the Government extend eligibility for the warm home discount to include people with disabilities and unpaid carers. The warm home discount was changed by the Government this winter, but it was not extended to include people with disabilities and unpaid carers; in fact, quite the opposite. Money-saving expert Martin Lewis estimated that 290,000 existing claimants who have disabilities and who claim only personal independence payment, attendance allowance or disability living allowance, which are not means-tested, will no longer get the warm home discount.

As a constituency MP, my experience of the changes made by the Government is of being contacted by constituents who formerly received the warm home discount but found that they were no longer eligible. In most cases, the reason given by the Government was that the discount is now targeted on properties that have a high energy cost score based on their characteristics. In my experience, however, some newer properties can be cold and difficult to heat, so we cannot just base it on the age of a property. I understand that the procedure involved using Valuation Agency-set characteristics and then pushing them through an algorithm, but Martin Lewis has shown that that is mistaken.

I say to the Minister that I know from my experience that some people on very low incomes have been denied the warm home discount this winter. I feel that the changes are wrong, and I urge the Government to look at this issue again. It is time that there was extra support for people with a disability and their unpaid carers to help them cope with the unprecedented financial pressures due to the energy bill crisis and the cost of living crisis, and I hope the Government will think again after this debate.