Health and Disability White Paper Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Work and Pensions
Stephen Timms
Main Page: Stephen Timms (Labour - East Ham)Department Debates - View all Stephen Timms's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
Health and Disability White Paper
Stephen Timms Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
There are very welcome measures in the White Paper, although a lot of the detail is still missing. The work capability assessment is to be scrapped, starting in three or four years’ time, and replaced with
“a new personalised health conditionality approach”
to assess entitlement to what the Minister just referred to as the “health top-up” in universal credit. That sounds like a new assessment of some kind. Can he tell us what it means?
Tom Pursglove
I suspect that these issues will come up when I appear before the Select Committee along with my hon. Friend the Minister for Employment in a few weeks’ time. I look forward to that opportunity to delve into these reforms in some detail. The detail of our proposed approach needs to be worked through. I am clear that stakeholder engagement, working with disabled people and hearing views from this House will help to inform that. I want people to feel that they can engage with the programmes announced in the Budget, as well as with the existing provision. That will happen on a voluntary basis, but we need to move the reform forward in a pragmatic way. We will say more about it as we move forward with implementation.