Working-Age Disabled People

Debate between Stephen Lloyd and Glenda Jackson

Thursday 25th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Lloyd]

I agree to a great extent. The way that some of the media, particularly some of the tabloids, have been reporting the issue has been disgraceful. I have said that more times than anyone can possibly imagine. However, the DWP and the Government have an enormous responsibility when they are introducing such a seismic change to a benefit. Some of the time, the Government and Ministers have been good and positive, pushing strongly and actively the social model and what they are trying to achieve; at other times, they have been guilty of pandering to people who are more focused on what I might term the tabloid agenda.

The Government have an enormous responsibility, and I would like them to be aggressive. If one of the papers—I do not even need to mention them; we all know the ones I am talking about—comes out with a particularly inaccurate story, I would like to see the Minister and the Secretary of State dealing with it aggressively on the airwaves.

[Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

Bylines in newspapers may not be the responsibility of the Government, but it is certainly the responsibility of the Government and the DWP to point out the fact that DLA is an in-work as well as an out-of-work benefit, which they markedly fail to do. They should also highlight the fact that more than 35% of families who claim housing benefit are in work, and that the reason they qualify for housing benefit is because their pay is so very low.

[Stephen Lloyd]

I agree entirely. A lot of people do not understand that the DLA was introduced to help to support disabled people in leading independent lives. I do not know the exact figures, but I know that an enormous percentage of people on DLA are in work. That is a very important point.

I retain doubts about whether that Select Committee recommendation has been followed, either by Ministers in their speeches or by the DWP, and urge that it be made a priority for the Government. However, I strongly support the steps taken by the coalition Government to involve disabled people in the process for devising and implementing PIP, which have proved effective. The DWP has continued to engage extensively with organisations that represent disabled people since May 2011, through its implementation development group, which has more than 50 members and represents a broad range of national and local disability organisations. Engagement at such a level should ensure that the operational design, implementation and ongoing operation of PIPs considers the informed perspectives of disabled people and their representative organisations.

As a consequence of advice and lobbying from me and other Select Committee members, the Department dropped its original proposals to end payment of the DLA mobility component for care home residents, after the Low review, and to extend the three-month qualifying period under DLA to six months under PIP.

I urge the DWP to continue to listen, consult and take on board advice from disabled people and their representative organisations, particularly about the descriptors in PIPs, which I shall come to later. For the record, the disability pressure groups and charities also have a responsibility to be factual in their advice, lobbying and media coverage, as much as the Government do. The victims of misreporting on both sides are disabled people themselves. That simply is not right.

I welcome the Government’s decision to support a three-month qualifying period for PIP, rather than extend it to six months as they originally intended. However, I support the Select Committee’s view that there is evidence of significant financial hardship caused during the current three-month DLA qualifying period, particularly for those with sudden-onset conditions. I ask the coalition Government seriously to consider the Select Committee’s recommendation to implement a facility for early eligibility, which could operate in the same way as that for terminal illnesses.

I welcome the changes made to the first draft of the PIP assessment criteria, which demonstrate that the Government have listened to concerns expressed by disabled people and their representatives. I have had a number of discussions with Lord Freud and his office, drilling down on how some descriptors written into the initial draft were inadequate. I look forward to the final draft, as does the Select Committee.

The DWP deserves credit for the way it has involved disability groups and disabled people in the co-production approach it has adopted to the development of the PIP criteria. However, thus far, mobility descriptors still concentrate too heavily on the ability to move a fixed distance and do not include barriers to accessing public transport, or the difficulties of some locations for individuals where routes to shops, public transport and so on are particularly challenging.

The PIP assessment criteria also tend towards the medical model of disability. This is an incredibly important point. I value the fact that the DWP understands, or appears to understand, the social model of disability and that it is about providing support for disabled people so that they may lead independent lives. However, within the PIP criteria, we seem to be slipping back to the medical model. I urge the Minister to watch that closely. For instance, those criteria do not properly take on board the barriers to being independently mobile that a blind person may have face. Yes, they may be able get to the shops or their workplace via a route they know, but the descriptors do not take into account the challenges that a blind person might face if they were travelling to a destination they did not know, which is not uncommon for all of us on a weekly basis. If I had a visual impairment and was using a route that I do not know, I would face a series of different challenges. The descriptors need to show understanding of that and to take it into account.

I was encouraged by the language used by the Minister’s predecessor, who described the PIP assessment as a conversation between claimant and assessor. It is vital that the PIP assessment does not take the same mechanistic approach, based on an inflexible computer system, as originally adopted for the work capability assessment by the previous Government. In time, though, I would like there to be a checking system or review system—call it what we will—that allowed PIP recipients to be reviewed without having to go through the stresses of face-to-face assessment. I suggest that a letter of support from a consultant or other expert in the field—someone with knowledge of their disability—should suffice once the face-to-face assessments have been completed.

I understand why the coalition Government are going through the process of face-to-face assessment—some people have not been reviewed for many years—but it is important that the DWP take on board the profound worry and stress that many disabled people and their families are going through because of the proposed changes. If the Government do not take this on board, they will be perceived as uncaring and their stated desire—our stated desire—to support the social model of disability and to provide additional support for those who need it while being properly careful with the public purse will turn to nothing. I for one will become not a supporter of the Government’s objectives, but a highly vocal opponent. I really do not want this to happen.

My many years in the field of disability lead me to recognise that the system is not good enough. An annual overpayment of more than £600 million and an underpayment of almost £200 million show that it is heavily flawed, but I request that the Government do all they can to ensure that we replace DLA with something better and fairer, and that works. PIP could be that, but it is not yet. I believe it can be and profoundly hope that it will be, by the time it is rolled out in the pilot scheme in April 2013. The coalition Government must get this right, because people’s financial security, their level of comfort and their daily lives heavily depend on it.

Amendment of the Law

Debate between Stephen Lloyd and Glenda Jackson

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I must tell the hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) that her speech was a bit like “all our yesterdays”. The one thing that she did not seem to think would create jobs in this country was slashing the national minimum wage, and I was surprised that she did not suggest that.

Today’s debate opened with one of the most lamentable speeches that I have ever heard the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions deliver, in which he presented—as have other Government Members—the rosy view that the Government’s proposals will automatically create jobs, that there will be people who will be qualified to fill them, and that the future will be golden. If we look at the Red Book, which Government Members have waved in our faces on many occasions, we see that what the Government are setting in train is a Budget that will create a vast increase in unemployment. Unless they intend to abolish the whole benefits system at a stroke, an astronomical amount will have to be spent on unemployment benefit and passported benefits—although, of course, they may wipe all those out as well.

Government Members have the audacity to accuse us of frightening some of the most vulnerable people in our society, but it is not us who are frightening them. In my constituency and in those of Government Members, it is the Government who seem to look at nothing but the bottom line. It is they who introduce swingeing policies which, nine times out of 10, do not mesh, and the Secretary of State responsible for delivering those policies does not know what impact they will have on the ground.

A precise example from today’s debate was what I understand to have been the initial proposal from the Department for Work and Pensions in regard to jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefit. It was proposed that 10% should automatically be slashed from the housing benefit of anyone who had failed to find a job after 12 months on jobseeker’s allowance despite doing everything demanded by the Government—and that is housing benefit which is being capped.

It is to his shame that, in his opening speech, the Secretary of State ran again with a canard that he is on record as saying he hoped would not be fulfilled: that the majority—he did not use the word “majority”, but it was implied—of people on housing benefit are living in properties where the rent is £100,000 a week. Everyone in the House, and certainly the Secretary of State, ought to know that the majority of people claiming housing benefit are pensioners, people with disabilities, or people on very low pay.

Many hard-working families in this country are entirely dependent on housing benefit. Nowhere is that more marked than in constituencies such as mine in central London, where housing, travel and training costs are vastly above the national average. However, nothing in the Budget appears to acknowledge regional variations, which will of course affect the potential for people to find jobs even if the private sector is capable of providing them.

Another remarkable feature of many speeches from Government Members was their contempt for public sector workers. It seemed that none of them wanted additional nurses in their hospitals, additional doctors in their surgeries, or additional teachers in their schools. Certainly we know that they do not want more policemen, because their numbers are being slashed all over the country, as will be the very people on whom the most vulnerable in our society depend.

That, of course, is the other great canard. This Government came into office saying that they would take tough decisions. They said the road was bumpy, but that they would protect the most vulnerable. They have betrayed the most vulnerable, however—the very young, the very old, people with disabilities. Women are a marked target for this Government. We women are clearly expected to have the broadest shoulders in the country because the cuts will fall on us. The Government are expecting women to go back to work—if there is a job to go to, of course—while at the same time taking away child care support, which is the absolute bedrock that enables a woman with children to go back to work.

The Government have markedly failed to think through their grievous policies. This is not a Budget for investment or growth. Rather, this is the Budget of a group of people who have markedly failed to understand the realities of the situation facing millions of people in this country who do want to work, who wish to take this country forward, and who have optimism and believe in all of us. The people who do not believe in the people of this country, or indeed in this country itself, are the Conservatives.

[Stephen Lloyd]

rose—