Welfare Reform (Sick and Disabled People)

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

Interestingly, all the statistics prove that people who are represented win their appeal in vast numbers, while those who are not represented are suffering. To be frank, it is no wonder that 84% of GPs have reported that patients have presented with mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety and depression as a result of undergoing or the fear of undergoing the work capability assessment.

For all those reasons, the BMA has called for an end to the WCA “with immediate effect”, believing that it should be replaced with

“a rigorous and safe system that does not cause avoidable harm”.

Such systems are used in other countries, so why can we not use one of them here? That is why the motion calls for the WCA to be scrapped.

People assessed as capable of work and put on employment and support allowance within the work-related group now lose their contributory ESA after 12 months. Some 700,000 disabled people are losing a total of £4.4 billion as a result of the 12-month cut-off. There has been a massive escalation in the use of sanctions against people who are on ESA or jobseeker’s allowance; some 900,000 people were sanctioned last year.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Is it not ironic, at the very least, that the people who are most affected by the one-year cut off are those who, for instance, have a working partner or small savings—the very hard-working people whom the Government say they want to protect?

[John McDonnell]

People thought that they were contributing to a scheme that they would see the benefits from. They now find that they have contributed, but that they will no longer get the benefits. That is unjust.

One in five of the people on JSA who were sanctioned is disabled. Sanctions mean the loss of benefits altogether for weeks or even months. That is compounded, as my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) said, by the increasing difficulty in securing advice or advocacy to appeal or challenge sanctions.

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[Mr Reid]

The hon. Lady’s question is based on the wrong premise. I actually voted against the bedroom tax. As I said in my introduction, I did not support every detail of the Government’s proposals.

It is interesting to note all the opposition from Labour Members to everything the Government are doing. I look forward to hearing what the Opposition spokesperson says about this later, because I understand that Labour do not propose to spend any more on welfare payments than the Government are doing. It will therefore be interesting to hear what the official Labour line is, as opposed to all the complaints that we are hearing from its Back Benchers.

As well as tackling the economic mess that Labour left behind, Liberal Democrats in government have blocked the excesses that a Conservative-only Government would have implemented. For example, we prevented the Conservatives from freezing disability benefits. Instead, they are going up by 2.7% this year. Assessment of applications for disability benefits is an integral part of welfare reform, and this Government have improved on the system left behind by Labour. Thanks to Liberal Democrat amendments to Labour’s Welfare Reform Act 2007, the Government are required to conduct five annual independent reviews of the work capability assessment. In government, we are now acting on those reviews to improve the system. Professor Harrington completed the first three reviews, and found that our efforts to improve the WCA were making a difference.

[Sheila Gilmore]

For the purposes of putting the record straight, the requirement for independent assessments of employment and support allowance was in the original legislation, pre-2010.

[Mr Reid]

I did not catch the year that the hon. Lady mentioned. The WCA was introduced by the Labour Government, and this Government have improved on it.

Following Professor Harrington’s reviews, the Government gave Department for Work and Pensions decision makers more flexibility to request additional evidence, such as a letter from an applicant’s consultant. The fourth independent review was completed in December 2013 by Dr Litchfield. He found that the DWP had made good progress on implementing recommendations from the previous reviews, which have made notable improvements. However, despite all the improvements to the system, and having a system that looks fine in theory, we all know from our constituency work that, in practice, Atos has failed miserably to carry out the assessment contract. Appeals have been upheld for 40% of the original decisions. That shows that there is something wrong with the initial assessments and that more improvements to the assessment system must be made.

We are all aware from our constituency case load of people waiting for many months for their assessment to be carried out. That applies to assessments for personal independence payments as well as for work capability assessments. The limit for PIP assessments is supposed to be 30 working days, but Atos is clearly failing miserably to meet that target. I was contacted recently by the Bute Advice Centre in my constituency. It pointed out that it, and the client, have three weeks from the initial phone call in which to complete and return the application form. The centre and the client have met the deadline on every occasion, but then the long wait begins. One client who has been waiting since 2 July 2013 has heard nothing from Atos. Two other clients on Bute have been waiting since early October. The advice centre tells me that phone calls to the Department for Work and Pensions get a helpful response, but the DWP puts the blame on Atos, and from Atos there is complete silence. That is utterly unacceptable.

Another constituent has e-mailed me to say that her current employment and support allowance claim started last May and she submitted her medical questionnaire in July. After many months of waiting, she was eventually told by Atos that her work capability assessment would be conducted two days after her contribution-based ESA ends if she is placed in the work-related activity group. Such delays make complete nonsense of the system.

It is true that any benefit awarded will be backdated but, as my constituent points out, a claimant may have been eligible for the support group at the time of their application. If their health improves over the year, they may be placed in the work-related activity group backdated to the time of their application, yet if the assessment had been conducted quickly, they may have been placed in the support group. If the person has savings, their ESA will stop after a year, and that may well be before it has even started to be paid. That just makes nonsense of the system.

The long delays are very unfair to claimants, putting them under increased financial pressure and stress. Their suitability for work could be wrongly assessed as the assessment is completed such a long time after the application was made.

As I have said, the system looks fine in theory, and the Government have made improvements, but Atos has clearly completely failed. As we all know, it has announced that it wants to throw in the towel. The Government must get the mess created by Atos’s abject failure sorted out as a matter of urgency, appoint a company that can do the job properly and get the backlog cleared as quickly as possible. People applying for disability benefits deserve their application to be assessed speedily and accurately.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for the clarification, but, to be honest, it does not make much difference. In my view, benefits should be payable on the basis of need, not on the basis of an arbitrary cap. It is on precisely that point that the official Opposition and I part company. It will be deeply disappointing if the official Opposition abstain on this motion. There is a lot of sound and fury from Labour Members, but that must be followed through in a vote. I cannot understand why the official Opposition would not vote for this motion.

[Sheila Gilmore]

Does the hon. Lady agree that there are some forms of welfare spending that we should bring down? In my view, one of those is the excessive amount that is paid to private landlords through housing benefit. I am certainly in favour of reducing that form of welfare spending. Is she not?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am very much in favour of that if the hon. Lady wants to put it under the heading of welfare spending, but I am not sure that most people would. We can argue about the precise language, but the official Opposition will demonstrate later this afternoon that they are sitting on their hands. That is a great shame.

Let me make some progress, because the purpose of my speech is not primarily to attack the official Opposition, but to attack the Government. This afternoon, the Government have witnessed hon. Members giving case after case from their own experiences of the impact of the welfare reforms that the Government have introduced. I will talk about what the figures mean for Brighton and Hove, and tell the House about the local advice agencies in Brighton and Hove that came together to produce a powerful report on their experiences of working with ill people and people with disabilities. Those agencies include the local citizens advice bureau, Advice Brighton and Hove, Age UK and the Federation of Disabled People.

To illustrate the reality behind the figures, I will talk about two local case studies from Macmillan that were included in the report. It mentions Mr C, a 56-year-old single man who, following cancer of the spine, lost his mobility and became confined to a wheelchair. Mr C was forced to stop work owing to ill health and constant pain. Macmillan made contact to start the PIP application process last September. To my knowledge, it is still not resolved. At the same time, an application was made for ESA. That application followed a similar path to the PIP application. Mr C is still being paid the assessment phase rate of just £71.70 a week, with no information from Atos as to when it will assess him further. Four months on, we are still counting and he is still waiting.

Macmillan also relayed the story of Mr J, a 32-year-old who is suffering from advanced bowel cancer and who came to the charity for help. It took more than 10 weeks for him to be assessed. His wife was acting as his full-time carer because he was so ill. She was also looking after their baby and young child. The report states:

“Throughout this process both Mr and Mrs J were very anxious and suffering serious financial hardship. Mr J at this time was seriously ill, vomiting day and night plus major issues re fatigue due to chemotherapy etc. Both also felt throughout the period that they were not believed and had been labelled scroungers and benefit cheats by the DWP.”

The work by Advice Brighton and Hove makes it clear that people who are applying for PIP—some of the most vulnerable people—are being left without adequate finances. That is having a massive impact on their physical and emotional well-being. The cases in the report are dreadful, but they are no longer surprising. I have multiple examples of sick and disabled constituents who have been awarded no points, but have then been assessed for benefits under the Government’s regime.

The DLA regime is being tightened, even for disabled children such as my five-year-old constituent who has cystic fibrosis and needs constant 24-hour care to prevent her from falling and being a danger to herself and others. Her DLA has been cut from the higher to the lower rate. Just before Christmas, her parents asked for that to be reconsidered, but it still has not happened. As well as the loss of essential financial support, the family have lost their eligibility for things such as the blue badge.

Another of my constituents has, at last, got a date for a medical assessment in March, after submitting her application in August last year. In the meantime, funding for her electric wheelchair has been stopped. She managed to get funding for three months through the council’s discretionary fund, so she has not lost it yet, but she is extremely worried about what will happen if her claim is not processed in time.

I hope that the House will forgive me for taking up a little more time, but I want to give the example of a constituent who suffers from severe mental ill health. After months of delays, which caused her extreme anxiety, and with support workers very concerned about her suicidal state, an application for benefits that was submitted in August last year has only recently been resolved. She has rightly been placed in the support group, which means that the DWP recognises that she is definitely unable to work. Despite that, she was put through months of unnecessary anxiety.

Many people feel that the system is extremely counter-productive, in the sense that it makes people who are already ill much more ill. We hear example after example of that. I hope that the Government will not ignore them. If advice agencies are getting together to assess these problems, it must be about time that the Government looked at the impact of their own policies.

The conclusion of the report by my local advice agencies is that people are going through what they call “awful experiences” while waiting for their claims to be processed. Advisers are spending disproportionate amounts of time making calls to the DWP and the privatised PIP providers. That is frustrating and is a drain on resources. Claims that need to be followed up are taking more than double the amount of time that is usually allocated to such work. The advice sector in Brighton and Hove has made it very clear that the situation is untenable. It is looking to the Government to sort it out. In the meantime, it is asking for local contacts within the DWP and Atos so that organisations do not have to keep wasting huge amounts of time contacting DWP and Atos nationally. I hope that the Minister will respond to that specific request. It is quite a small one, but it would make a huge amount of difference to the time that is spent following up claims.

Finally, other hon. Members have given the shocking figures on the number of people who are dying while appealing against a decision that they are fit to work. Not every death will be related to fitness for work or to the stress of an unfair or wrong assessment. If a link could be proven, there would be a case for corporate manslaughter. However, Ministers cannot ignore the strong likelihood that significant numbers of people are being assessed as fit for work by the Government when, in reality, they are very close to death. That has to change.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Like other Members, I have supported the call for a cumulative impact assessment and voted for it in this House. I do not know why it is so difficult for the Government to work out the impact of their policies. The people who are affected know what the impact is.

Jean and Jim are in their 50s, which is a typical age for illness to strike and is the age that has the highest uptake of many benefits. They are losing ESA because Jim’s contributory benefits are running out. Jean has part-time employment. That is another reduction of £91 a week in their household income after they have already lost his earnings. They have also been affected by the bedroom tax, because they are in a two-bedroom house. They have put a lot of money into that house over the years. When they first applied for discretionary housing payment, they were turned down because, with Jean’s earnings and Jim’s DLA, they had too much income to be eligible, despite his clear disability. I am glad to say that that has changed, due to extra money being made available.

That is what is meant by an impact assessment. That is the kind of interlocking effect that we are asking and reasonably expecting the Government to look at. Governments should look at what is happening to people. A piece of research was commissioned by the previous Government and published in 2011, but it has never been followed up by this Government. One very worrying statistic from that research is that 43% of the people who had been found fit for work were neither in employment nor on any out-of-work benefit after a year. The percentage of that cohort who were in work after a year, 23%, was hardly higher than it had been after three months, at 22%. That is a whole lot of missing people, and those are the sorts of facts and research that a Government should commission. It is disappointing that the Government chose not to follow through on those sorts of studies.

I will pre-empt what I know the Minister will say, which is, “Labour introduced the WCA, you introduced Atos, and therefore it is all your fault”, but that is not good enough for a number of reasons. In my maiden speech I mentioned ESA and WCA, and said that whoever formed the Government, I would be raising that issue. There have been points over the past nearly four years when the Government could have changed tack. They did not have to extend Atos’s contract or proceed with the migration of people from incapacity benefit to ESA as fast as they did, without looking again at what the first few years had told us.

The Government have been adamant until now that they had to carry out frequent reassessments of people, and they would not stop even when cases were clear cut. “Oh no, we have to do these reassessments”, we were told, but now they are suddenly in a panic because the assessors cannot cope, and it is, “Actually we don’t need to do these reassessments after all, but we won’t bother telling people that they might not be called up in the next few months. We won’t even bother telling MPs.” The Minister was here on Monday for Work and Pensions questions, and he never breathed a word about it.

The personal independence payment, however, is entirely this Government’s baby, and the problems go back to the beginning. This change was driven by finances, not by any research or understanding that a change needed to happen, and it had to be geared to financial savings. There was an urgent—and shortened—consultation on the changes, which many people complained about at the time. Despite the demographic changes, the straw man of too many people receiving DLA was erected, and there were assertions that DLA was granted constantly without medical evidence and that hardly anyone was ever reassessed. That ignored the big changes that had taken place in the previous 10 years, and the fact that increasingly, new awards were time limited.

If we start with poor evidence, and with arguments and assertions rather than fact, we end up with a flawed proposal. In 2013 we saw the start of the personal independence payment, and the delays and assessments have been growing exponentially. It is not just Atos, because Capita is having exactly the same problems. The flaw is in the system that has been set up.

People in the Government and elsewhere have said a number of things about why that is happening, and in December the Minister said to the Work and Pensions Committee that every single assessment for PIP was being audited internally. That suggests either a lack of training or a lack of confidence in their own staff. We are now told that each individual assessment is taking twice as long as expected, and that far more face-to-face assessments are having to take place. Might that be because the forms are not very good and the information is not coming in? Those are all things that a proper pilot would have tested. Instead of that, however, many thousands of new applicants—not just a few hundred—are being treated like guinea pigs in a system that the Government did not scope out or test properly; they did not look to see whether the people they had asked to do the assessments had the capacity to deliver them.