Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

8. If he will conduct an evaluation of the effects of the judiciary providing the Department for Work and Pensions and appellants with reasons for their decisions in employment and support allowance appeals.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Shailesh Vara)]

As part of the implementation, which commenced in March 2014, we will look carefully at the effects of the provision of summary reasons by judges in the social security and child support tribunal. The Department for Work and Pensions will provide feedback to the judiciary on the way in which summary reasons have been used. The Government have no plans to conduct a formal evaluation.

[Sheila Gilmore]

In the report by the Work and Pensions Committee on employment and support allowance in July last year, we pointed out that there was little point in having summary reasons if they were not used to drive better decisions and, ultimately, to reduce the number of appeals. Surely having a proper evaluation on a clear time scale would be the best way to ensure that that is happening.

[Mr Vara]

As I have said to the hon. Lady on at least two occasions, the provision of summary reasons is having a positive impact. The Department for Work and Pensions is working with the judiciary and the quality of the decisions that it is producing is much better than before, which is leading to fewer cases going to appeal.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Of course, these changes do not affect the support we provide at inquests. My challenge to the Opposition is this: they have yet to give us any clear answers on how they would bring down the cost of legal aid. They campaigned at the previous general election for reductions in legal aid costs. They continue to oppose the difficult changes we have made, but offer no alternative suggestions.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

5. What assessment he has made of the consequences for future decisions by employment and support allowance tribunals of the provision by the judiciary to the Department for Work and Pensions and appellants of reasons for their decisions in appeals.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Simon Hughes)]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s interest in this subject. Last year, a pilot scheme was introduced in four places around the country where employment and support allowance appeals had the summary reasons issued at the time of the appeal judgment. This was extended in March across the country in relation to all ESA and personal independence payment appeals. There is no current plan to make a further assessment, but the Ministry of Justice supports fully what is a Department for Work and Pensions initiative.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I thank the Minister for that answer, but this is a hugely important issue for many individuals who face great stress and anxiety in going through the appeal processes. Will the Minister not commit to evaluating both the pilots and the ongoing process properly, so we can understand fully whether they are working and whether further improvements are needed?

[Simon Hughes]

We shall of course watch what happens. We expect the process to be extended this year to many other forms of appeal in the social security system. The evidence will show whether it informs people and we do not have as many appeals in the future because the decisions will have been got right in the first place. The level of appeals that she highlighted in a question on a previous occasion—nearly 45%—will then disappear. My objective is to get decisions right in the first place. The stress to which she refers should be removed from many people. They should not need to have to go to appeal to get the right decision.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Lady is of course right that there are fewer female prisons than there are contract package areas, but that is in many ways a good thing because it means that we have fewer women to incarcerate. She is right that we need to think about how the new system will work. The way we will do that is to ensure that rehabilitation providers have the opportunity to be located in a prison. It may not be a prison located within their own contract package area, but they will have a presence so that everyone coming through the custodial system and being released out of it will have the opportunity to speak to a rehabilitation provider and to make the necessary connections while in custody.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

5. What progress he has made in ensuring that the judiciary provide the Department for Work and Pensions and appellants with reasons for their conclusions in appeals against employment and support allowance.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Shailesh Vara)]

The hon. Lady will appreciate that the provision of this information is a matter for the judiciary. However, they have agreed to provide the Department for Work and Pensions and appellants with summary reasons for their decisions in employment and support allowance appeals. That approach was successfully piloted at four tribunal venues from June 2013 and will be rolled out later this year.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I thank the Minister for that answer, but the most recent statistics show that 45% of ESA appeals are successful. That is a slightly higher figure than in the previous set of statistics and suggests that the flow of information that could ensure that the decisions are right first time is still not happening. When will we see a published proper evaluation of what is going on?

[Mr Vara]

The pilot programme is now being rolled out and we need to see its full impact. The DWP has found the information it has been given very useful and as a consequence it is in the process of revising the guidance for decision makers. It is to be hoped that the decisions taken as a consequence will be of a much better standard.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

My hon. Friend will know that, in relation to sentencing options, the courts have a number of choices they can make over mental health disposals. On the point he makes about co-ordination, he is right that the best thing we can do is ensure that people with mental illness are diverted away from the criminal justice system as soon as possible. To that end, we have been working with the Department of Health on liaison and diversion programmes. We are spending a considerable amount of money on that this year and over the next couple of years. We expect to have full coverage of all police custody suites and courts in the next three years or so.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Given the continuing high level of tribunals overturning Department for Work and Pensions decisions, particularly in employment support allowance cases, why did the Department offer up to the Deregulation Bill a provision that would take away the duty on the Senior President of Tribunals to report on the standard of decision making? Surely reporting on that might lead to better decisions being made in the first place.

[Mr Vara]

The hon. Lady will be aware that the Ministry of Justice, Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service and the Department for Work and Pensions have been working very closely to ensure that decisions by tribunals on social security and child support matters are passed on to the DWP. That is happening and, as a consequence, DWP decisions are being influenced and its decision-making guidelines have been changed.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I can certainly give my hon. Friend that assurance. We are looking carefully at our own contract management approach and at the contracts that we hold. It is worth reminding the House, however, that the issues that are being referred to, and the contracts that we are looking at, date back to the time of the last Government.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

We have several years of experience of multi-purpose companies that appear to bid for anything and everything, regardless of whether they have any particular expertise, and that is happening again with the roll-out of the personal independence payment. Promises that were made about the service that would be delivered are simply not being fulfilled. Is it not time for a complete review of contracting of this kind?

[Chris Grayling]

I am very much in favour of a broader supplier base and the arrival of new organisations to work with the Government. I think it important for us to work with third parties, as, indeed, the last Government did. I believe that when, in the near future, we publish the list of organisations that have passed the pre-qualification questionnaire stage in respect of the reforms of the probation service, every Member in the House will be encouraged by the mix of organisations that have put their names forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call Sheila Gilmore to ask her question, lastly and very briefly.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

In May, the now Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), announced a new pilot in which tribunal judges would give detailed explanations to the Department for Work and Pensions of their reasons for allowing employment and support allowance appeals. When can we expect an evaluation of that pilot?

[Chris Grayling]

We are engaged in detailed discussions with the DWP. We are now providing it with much more detailed information, and paying close attention to the lessons that are learnt from that information.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I do not like the concept of automatic early release at all. My hon. and learned Friend will be aware of the financial limitations that we face at the moment, which is why I made a start with the most serious and unpleasant offenders, but it is certainly my desire, when resources permit, to go further on this.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

A few months ago, in response to a question from me, the Secretary of State or one of his Ministers suggested that he would be setting up a new system for ensuring that tribunal judges dealing with work capability assessment appeals would give good reasons. Has that new programme been instituted, and when can we expect a statement on how it is working?

[Chris Grayling]

This is specifically the responsibility of the Department for Work and Pensions, but I can tell the hon. Lady that extensive work has been done. Much more detail is now being provided to the Department for Work and Pensions by the Courts and Tribunals Service, and we will continue to explore ways in which we can ensure that decision makers in Jobcentre Plus understand fully the reason for a decision in a tribunal.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hugh Robertson]

I find myself in complete agreement with my opposite number. Of course, the slight complication with the Tour de France is that it is run by a private organisation, not by the international federation, and it therefore relies on sponsorship and other things. There are a number of factors to sort out, but the central point that the hon. Gentleman makes is absolutely correct—this should be competed for by men and women alike—and I will do everything I can to help.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

3. What steps have internet companies taken in response to the meeting with Ministers on 18 June 2013.

[The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Maria Miller)]

I called the summit to explore, with industry, the Internet Watch Foundation and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre further actions to remove child abuse material from the internet. A zero-tolerance approach was agreed, and good progress is being made across a number of measures. That will see a real change in the way this issue is dealt with in the UK.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I thank the Secretary of State for her answer, but will she be a bit more specific and say what steps have been taken to put age verification in place at the level of filters of browsers, to prevent children from viewing indecent material?

Protecting Children Online

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, but writing algorithms to do that on millions and millions of websites simply cannot be done correctly. I shall come back to that, although I know that the hon. Lady and the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham are not concerned about the errors that would be made.

It is absolutely right to provide tools for parents to control what is happening. They should be the ones empowered to look after their children. I would rather trust the parents to look after their children than require state-level controls. It is absolutely right to have those available for people to use and to make them easy and clear to use. I think there should be no default because I think we should encourage parents to engage with the question before they make a decision. They should be faced with a box that they have to tick, but they should be in charge. The Byron review was very clear that a false sense of security could be created if we just tell people that everything is safe.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

The problem here is that we are not dealing with simply looking at a book or magazine and deciding whether it is suitable for a child. We are dealing with something that many people have said—this has been the focus of much of the research—they find very difficult to operate. The outcome is that many parents are not able to use those filters.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Lady is right, which is exactly why we need simpler filters. The work done by Talk Talk and others provides precisely that. There should be simple clear filters with simple clear questions so that parents can have a look and make a simple clear decision. I do not want to force parents to abdicate that responsibility because there are other consequences of these filters.

Any filtering system will have large errors. There will be errors that mean it does not filter out some things that we might want it to filter out because it cannot be sorted out perfectly. There is no way of indentifying automatically what counts as pornography and what does not; what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. That is simply impossible to achieve, so stuff will get through that we are not expecting to get through. There is also the problem of filtering some useful things out. There are already many cases—when it comes to advice for lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, for example—where mobile phone providers automatically filter out the content, which can cause serious harm to young people trying to get advice. Trying to get advice about abortion services is another problem. There are a whole range of such issues that are automatically filtered out by many mobile phone providers. If we are telling children that we do not want to let them have appropriate information, that can be damaging.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

While we are all patting ourselves on the back and saying that there is widespread agreement—and there clearly is widespread agreement—we should also bear it in mind that there is a considerable campaign against the taking of steps in this direction. It has not really been represented in the House today, but it is clear from earlier debates, and from communications that we have all received, that there is another point of view which is very different. There are people who want a degree of freedom in society that can actually be damaging, and we must be prepared to have a proper debate about that as well.

The issue of freedom is very important in the history of events such as the women’s movement, but there has often been a confusion between freedom in a fairly abstract sense—for instance, the sexual liberation of the 1960s—and the effect that some material can have on, in particular, those who are vulnerable. Much of what appears on the internet and elsewhere is damaging because of the way in which it portrays women, the way in which it portrays relationships between men and women, and the way in which it allows people to see a version of human relations that is deeply damaging.

People sometimes say that such material will not be harmful to many people, but it probably will be. It is interesting that the same argument is never advanced about advertising. People do not advertise because they think that advertising does not work; they advertise because they think that advertisements influence us, and indeed we are all clearly influenced by them. We have all found ourselves going into a shop and buying something that we may not have meant to buy because we saw or heard an advertisement for it, and thought “That sounds like a good idea.” I am not suggesting that someone who stumbles across pornography, online or anywhere else, is bound to turn into a violent person, but there will be some people whose attitudes, particularly their attitudes to what is acceptable between men and women, will be affected by it.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend has made an important point about the availability of images on the internet. There are more child abuse images circulating on the internet now than ever before. As a result of freedom of information requests by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, about 26 million images were seized in two years by five local forces. Does my hon. Friend agree that the availability of such material is leading to a potential normalisation of it, and that that is one of the most important problems that we must tackle in the interests of our children today?

[Sheila Gilmore]

I agree that we should take that problem very seriously, and should take action to deal with it.

This is not only about protecting children, although that is extremely important. It is also about protecting older young people, and about protecting adults and, hopefully, changing their views. I think that if certain types of behaviour are normalised and become commonplace, they will eventually be seen as broadly acceptable, and the relationships that are portrayed between men and women will be considered not unacceptable, but something that women themselves are almost expected to accept.

I think that it is important to deal with this. I thought that it was important many years ago when groups were campaigning about, for example, pornography in magazines, but this type of pornography is pervasive in a way that even that was not. Going to buy a magazine in a shop was a more difficult transaction for many people than what we now see happening in our homes.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

Does my hon. Friend also think that ISPs have a vested interest in that regard? If adults had to opt in to view adult sites and pornography, that would almost certainly have an impact on business and the number of people choosing that option.

[Sheila Gilmore]

In many ways, I would hope that that was not the case. I do not know where the ISPs make their money, but many of us are critical of their reluctance in this matter. One or two Members have suggested today that, because some of the proposals would not be perfect and would not screen out everything and because some organisations and people might be clever enough to get around them in various technical ways that we do not necessarily fully understand, we should not take those steps. As in so much of our political and social lives, we should not make the best the enemy of the good. If we can do something to improve things, we should do it.

[Alun Cairns]

I want to highlight that I am a strong advocate and fan of filters, but I think it is very dangerous to give the impression that they are the whole answer. The solution is far more complicated than that and we must be clear about it.

[Sheila Gilmore]

We must not approach this at cross purposes. I do not think that anyone is saying that any of the proposals are perfect; we are merely seeking to improve the situation and to give greater protection. I have no doubt that there will be some very clever people who can find ways around all sorts of things—we know that that happens—but to say that we should not put such measures in place for that reason would be wholly wrong.

Let me address some of what the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) said. He seemed, perhaps surprisingly, to be setting the state against the parent in a way that is not helpful. Of course parents should be making decisions for their children, but there are many circumstances in which we have to rely on others in schools and in the wider world to protect our children. That is not an abdication of parental responsibility, because parents cannot be with their child all the time. They will not be able to supervise every social contact they have. As a parent, I would certainly prefer to be confident that I could let my children out into a world that I could regard as reasonably safe—whether that was the physical or virtual world—than to be unable to do so. Perhaps that is not what the hon. Gentleman was suggesting, but that was how it came across to me. Suggesting that such an approach somehow does not leave things to the parents and that it wants the state to step in is a wholly wrong way of considering the matter.

[Dr Huppert]

The concern is that the filters will be easy to bypass and that a huge proportion of young people will be able to get past them. If parents are led to believe that such things mean that their children will not be able to access inappropriate material when they are up in their room on their computer, that will lead them to make the wrong decisions about how best to look after their children. It is not that parents do not know how to do that—as we know from when parents were asked about the subject by Ofcom, this is a question of supervision, which is far more effective than a misleading sense of security.

[Sheila Gilmore]

One of the practical problems with that approach is the notion that someone is, in any sense, going to be there supervising their children through all this—we all do our best. We attempt to instil the values and behaviours that we want in our children, but it would be wrong to suggest that that will always work, even for those of us who think, or hope, we are or have been very good parents. Children grow older and they are out in that wider world—in friends’ homes or out in all sorts of other social contexts. I want my children to be protected from being able to buy alcohol when they are too young to buy it. I do not want to have to accompany them everywhere to make sure they do not do that; I want to be sure that they are, within reason, protected. However, I know that that can be got round as well, because I know that children are very good at getting fake IDs. That does not mean that we should just abandon the attempt to control these things.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I very much welcome the discussions that are taking place. Support is being provided by the Cabinet Office, including financial support, for those members of our probation teams who want to set up their own spin-offs, and I would positively encourage them to do so.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

3. What progress he has made on improving the feedback from tribunal judges to the Department for Work and Pensions on the reasons for overturning employment and support allowance refusal decisions.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mrs Helen Grant)]

The provision of feedback on reasons for tribunals’ decisions is always a matter for the judiciary. As the hon. Lady will be aware, new arrangements for this were put in place in July 2012. Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service is continuing to work with the judiciary, the Department for Work and Pensions and the other organisations involved to find ways of improving feedback.

[Sheila Gilmore]

The problem is that the feedback mechanism, which involves the use of a drop-down menu, is very brief. For example, the reason given for 40% of the overturned decisions was “cogent oral evidence”. That does not give decision makers in the DWP any real help in understanding how they can make changes that would result in fewer appeals. Surely it is necessary for the Department, which bears the cost of the appeals, to do something about this.

[Mrs Grant]

We are continuing to work hard across Government to improve initial decision making, with the ultimate aim of reducing the number of appeals. A new pilot is being considered, and I will be happy to write to the hon. Lady with details of that.