Welfare Reform (Disabled People and Carers)

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) on securing the debate.

I am going to pre-empt the Minister, because I expect her to say in reply to the debate, as she keeps saying, “You”—not meaning any of us personally, but the Opposition—“did not have a cumulative impact assessment when you were in power.” However, I cannot think of a time when so many things have been happening simultaneously. The roll-out of incapacity benefit to ESA is still going on. We will have the change from disability living allowance to personal independence payment. We have housing benefit changes and universal credit. The reason we want a cumulative impact assessment is that what is happening is unprecedented. We need to know what will happen to people like my constituent who is 59 and has lived in her home for 30 years; she has severe back and hip problems and has just received a letter telling her she will lose housing benefit in April unless she can find somewhere to move to. Currently her grandchildren stay over for part of the week, which helps her family out. If she cannot do that any more, it will have an impact on their living and working arrangements. A ripple effect happens.

I have not yet dared tell my constituent that almost certainly she will in due course lose severe disability premium, which she currently gets because she is in receipt of income support and has no carer in the household. That, doubtless, is still to come, but I do not want to make her too fearful. The things that she does know about are happening already. They are not a myth being created by us or the disability movement.

When people become ill they experience a fantastic loss of income anyway, and an increase in costs. The Government appear to be oblivious to that. If a couple have been working—one full-time and one part-time—and the one who worked full-time suffers a stroke and must give up work, they go down to half an income and ESA. At the end of a year, if the person in question ends up in the ESA work-related activity group, their income falls again: the ESA will be lost because it is contributory; they will not qualify for the non-contributory version—even though they have worked and paid in all their lives they will not get that—so their income will go down to that of a part-time employee. Again, there are ripple effects and cumulative effects on people at a time when they are incurring greater costs. Someone who is at home more than they were when they went to work will have increased fuel and transport costs to meet. The person who is ill and has a disability may always have been the driver for the household, so there will be taxi and increased public transport costs. People in that position already have a substantial reduction in income.

I am glad that the Minister realised that the initial plans for rolling out DLA into PIP were totally unrealistic, and that the time scale has been extended, but there will still be clear losers. Our accounts are not scare stories. The information comes from the Government’s figures: 170,000 people, on reassessment, will lose DLA altogether before October 2015. That is a lot of people. That, apparently, is reality in the Government’s terms. I ask the Minister please to agree to a cumulative impact assessment.