Oral Answers to Questions

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

I assure my hon. Friend that we apply a habitual residence test to see whether people moving from other EU states are entitled to means-tested benefits. We will continue to look at that test and at what more can be done to strengthen it.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State consider introducing a compulsory jobs guarantee for people who have been unemployed for two years or more?

[Mr Hoban]

The hon. Lady should be commended for trying to trot out a policy that I thought the Opposition had dropped two or three weeks ago. When such a scheme was piloted under the previous Government, it demonstrated that it was not good value for money or good for the unemployed. The hon. Lady should welcome the measures the Government are taking to get people into work. That is why record numbers of people are in work and unemployment has continued to fall for 11 months in a row.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins]

I will take further interventions, but I would like to crack on a bit now.

The 1% increase comes on top of a raft of difficult choices on benefits, including housing benefit cuts, tax credits cuts and council tax benefit cuts, at a time when there is increasing poverty, including severe poverty and child poverty. Specifically, there is an increase in poverty among those in work. That is the context in which this debate is held, and the reason why the Labour party has taken the stance it has. No one should be in any doubt that, in taking that stance, the Labour party recognises that there is tremendous contention about benefits, and that many feel just like the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) and his constituent. I recognise that many people in many communities feel that way, and therefore how difficult it was for my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) to take that principled stance.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am not sure whether my hon. Friend could hear the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) say a second ago from a sedentary position, “What’s your solution?” Surely the Opposition’s solution is to help families such as the 8,600 families in his constituency who receive in-work tax credits. The hon. Member for Gloucester seems silent now.

[Toby Perkins]

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. Perhaps Government Members’ strategy is to follow Mitt Romney, who said that anyone who receives any welfare should be written off because they will never vote for the right-wing party. It did not work particularly well for Mitt Romney, but perhaps that is the electoral strategy of the hon. Member for Gloucester.

Oral Answers to Questions

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

3. What assessment she has made of the differential effect of unemployment across age groups.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

6. What assessment she has made of the differential effect of unemployment across age groups.

--- Later in debate ---

[Esther McVey]

I believe that is only part of the story, and in the past, false breaks in unemployment statistics—particularly under the new deal—skewed figures. The Work programme has removed that anomaly, providing a true reflection of the facts. Youth unemployment is down, and the Government are doing significant things to help with 250,000 more work experience places, 160,000 more wage incentives, and 20,000 more apprenticeship grants. We are doing as much as we possibly can and, as I said, unemployment is significantly down under this Government.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Youth unemployment in Clwyd South is up 157% from this time last year. Does the Minister accept that her weasel words simply will not wash with those young people, and will she confirm how the Government intend to help them? Surely the Government should take the utmost action to get them back into work.

[Esther McVey]

They are not weasel words. Clwyd South’s statistics show that unemployment is down whether for 18 to 24-year-olds or for all claimant counts. We are doing significant work to support young people.

Employment Support

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

As the hon. Gentleman will have heard in my comments earlier, I understand the value of residential training colleges and I will be delighted to accept his invitation.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Can the Minister tell the House when she envisages that the factories will start closing? I know that there will be a great deal of distress about this in north-east Wales. We do not see it as a state-subsidised industry. We see it as to do with disabled people in a very challenging economic situation.

[Maria Miller]

I understand the hon. Lady’s commitment to supporting disabled people in her constituency. There is a 90-day consultation period, so that will be completed and then we will talk to disabled employees about their futures. I hope we can continue to keep her up to date on that progress.

Unemployment

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I know that, like me, hon. Members will have read last year’s letter to the right hon. Gentleman from Sir Michael Scholar. The letter was very assertive about the way the right hon. Gentleman had used statistics before. I am happy to lay the letter before the House for those who have not seen it. I am also happy to show the Minister figures produced by the House of Commons Library, which show that since January long-term youth unemployment has risen by over 90%. That is a badge of shame for this Government, and the Minister should be doing more to get our young people back to work.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my view that the Government seem to be stuck in an ideological Tardis in their view of the public-private divide in the economy? A case in point is what they have done to the solar panel industry. We have seen massive job losses in the private sector because of a loss of private and public sector contracts. It is amazing that the Government cannot seem to get hold of this concept.

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We were promised that this was going to be the greenest Government ever, but a wide group of green and conservation organisations now say that the Government are comprehensively failing to meet that commitment. We all know that one of the key growth sectors for the future has to be low-carbon industries. The Government should therefore be doing more to get people into work in these sectors, not least by providing some regulatory certainty about the future.

Let me finish my point about the collapse in the rate of people flowing off benefits and into work. There is a very basic test. The Minister’s plan is not working unless it is getting more people off benefits and into work, unless the unemployment bill is coming down, and unless it is really making a difference—and right now, he is failing on every single count.

Disability Hate Crime

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) on securing this debate on a very important issue.

I, too, met the family of Gary Skelly on Monday, and we watched the 15-minute video they have put together as part of their FACE Facts campaign. Gary Skelly, a 53-year-old man who lived in Norris Green, Liverpool, was attacked just over a year ago—punched for no obvious reason, and killed. The perpetrator was sentenced to seven years for manslaughter, so, unfortunately, even the amendment that the hon. Lady and I have tabled to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill would not have given him the sentence I feel he deserved. What happened left the family not just bemused and confused, but greatly distressed. They simply could not understand what had happened to someone about whom they, and many in the community, cared greatly.

I consider myself relatively fortunate in Blackpool, in that I have an excellent third-party reporting centre and the Disability Hate Crime Network is very strong. The hon. Lady has already mentioned Stephen Brookes, one of my constituents, who helps up and down the land in ensuring that the fight to have this form of hate crime recognised is prosecuted as widely as possible. Yet I can still be shocked. About six months ago, a father and his son came to one of my constituency surgeries. The son, in his early twenties, had had a serious car crash a few years previously and now has a developmental learning disorder. He was trying to go to college, but faced abuse from neighbours and cat-calls as he walked there, and was now dropping out. I thought, “My word, even in Blackpool, where we are really trying, this is still occurring.” But what really shocked me most was that it was occurring not in my constituency, but in my own road, where I live, and had been going on for many months without my being aware of it, not 100 yards from my front door. Such incidents are hidden in plain sight, as the title of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report makes clear. It is probably happening in very close proximity to where we all live, and we might not be aware of it.

I want to focus today on an aspect of disability hate crime that does not yet get sufficient attention: the needs of many people with learning disabilities, who are subjected to what is increasingly being called mate crime. Why has it developed? Some 50 years ago, society’s answer for many people with learning disabilities was to shut them away out of sight—hide them away, so society did not have to confront them. Ensuring, rightly, that they live fulfilling lives in their local communities, participating in everything we all do, has put them at risk from a few ignorant individuals who do not understand what a learning disability is. That makes them vulnerable.

The hon. Lady mentioned the types of press coverage that we see. I welcome the fact that serious examples of disability hate crime are now being covered and referred to as such, but what we do not hear about every day is the so-called friend who relieves someone of a £10 note. That might not seem a particularly large crime, certainly not in financial value, but if a so-called friend of someone with a learning disability abuses their trust, that is a far greater crime, in human value, than if they were stealing £1 million. It is not just a financial crime; it is an attack on the person’s humanity and identity.

Something that the Skelly family stressed to me on Monday—indeed, we began the discussion by talking about it—was the labels that people put on others. Yes, society is very complex, and I am sure that we all find it difficult to deal with at times, but it is much more difficult for someone with a learning disability. We apply these labels to try to help ourselves to simplify the world around us and to help us to understand things that might be at the margins of our understanding, about which we know we ought to think in a particular way. We put the labels on them, then think we understand them. The labels are often the beginning of a prejudice—a way of assuming that someone acts in a certain way or that they are a particular way because of how they are. That is perhaps the most dangerous thing we do in our society. We cope with the people at the margins—people we do not quite understand—by just putting labels on them.

Two or three months ago, we heard about the sentencing of the murderers of Gemma Hayter, a lady in Rugby with a learning disability who had gone to visit her so-called friends and had been tied up, locked in a toilet, forced to drink her own urine, led to a railway line, wrapped in plastic bags and stabbed to death. Her attackers got the sentence they deserved, but sadly they could not face the 30-year tariff, which I believe such people should face, proposed in our amendment. That incident brought home to me the vulnerability of such people.

There are things that the Government can do, and I urge Ministers to consider them. It is vital that the Government take on board, as Mencap is requesting, the Law Commission proposals to extend the definition of harm to include exploitation, particularly financial exploitation. I hope that when we see a social care Bill, we can put the adult safeguarding boards on a statutory basis. Sadly, no organisational structure can stop evil occurring in a person’s head, but we can try to do something to ensure that when we identify people at risk, the different agencies involved are at least made aware of what is going on. If people are talking to people, and agencies are talking to agencies, we will at least have some hope that, just maybe, solutions can be found.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) for securing the debate. Is he aware of a recent case in, I think, Bristol? A gentleman with learning disabilities went into a barbers, and the barber thought it amusing to shave “fool” on his head—an unbelievable story. I cannot remember the details, but the punishment was lamentably low.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Lady for that classic example of how unfeeling and insensitive individuals can be. I hope that the punishment is that the local community boycotts that barber, because he does not deserve to have any customers if that is how he treats them.

A more fundamental issue that concerns me is that the Government are not approaching properly the philosophical status of day care centres. That might seem like a slightly abstruse point to make, but in many social services departments these days, the day care centre seems to be an unfashionable creation. Some want people to be out in the community all the time, as though a day care setting somehow denied them the right to be in the community. That concerns me greatly. For many people with a learning disability, particularly those of an older generation, a day care setting offers the very support network that so many of them crave, and in pursuit of which they often put themselves at risk from so-called friends.

I urge the Minister to consult with her colleagues to ensure that day care centres are not written out of the picture. We have an excellent one in Blackpool called the Rock Centre, which is indeed a rock for many in the community. Although the activities that people there engage in might not strike us as terribly meaningful—

Pensions Bill [Lords]

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

I notice that the hon. Lady dismisses the odd billion here or there again as of no great consequence. We have to make these decisions in the context of the real world. That is the difference between government and opposition. The hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O’Donnell), who spoke in the debate, said that it would take guts—that was the expression she used—to support an unfunded £11 billion promise, which the Opposition know they will never have to fund and would not implement if in government. That is a very odd definition of “guts”.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Is the Minister suggesting that the coalition agreement, which is fundamentally different from what is proposed in the Bill, was not made in the real world? That is what some of us suspect, but is he confirming it?

[Steve Webb]

As the hon. Lady knows, the coalition agreement referred to the possibility of raising the state pension age for men from 2016 and for women from 2020. Obviously, what we have done since that coalition agreement was produced is sought expert legal advice. We were advised that delaying the equalisation between men and women would have been illegal under European law. That comes to the heart of one of the questions that has rightly been asked, which is, why do the changes affect women more than men? The reason is that they are two separate changes brought together.

The first is the more rapid equalisation, and the second is the equal treatment of men and women from 65 to 66. The equal treatment of men and women from 65 to 66, not surprisingly, affects men and women equally, so the thing that affects women more is equalisation. That is what the Pensions Act 1995 does. It leaves men’s pension age at 65 and equalises women’s pension age, raising it from 60 to 65. Lo and behold, that Bill affected only women, because equalising the pension age so that women get the pension at the same age as men rather than earlier affects women. Not surprisingly, a change that was happening in any case, which we have speeded up and which affects only women, added to a change that affects men and women equally, produces the expected result.

Pensions Bill [Lords]

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I am intrigued by the debate thus far. A range of hon. Members have followed a number of themes. The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) and others argued that the poorest will be affected by the changes that the Government are making, but they are already affected by the lack of good, sustainable state pension provision, which is one of the major issues that the Bill addresses.

I welcome the Bill and congratulate the Government on it. In my view, it will transform the pensions landscape. As we have heard, in recent years, there have been significant increases in longevity and changes in how we lead our lives. Things are changing at a dramatic pace. That will not stop, and nor should it; frankly, we should celebrate it. Not only are we living longer, but our expectations of quality of life in retirement are changing beyond all recognition compared with those of previous generations, as is how people spend their retirement. With increasing life expectancy, it is vital that our state pension age increases.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady rightly makes the point that we are living longer, which is of course something to celebrate. However, we are not living that much longer than we were when the coalition agreement was formed.

[Priti Patel]

I thank the hon. Lady for her remark. It is a fact of life that we are living longer. At the end of the day, there are serious pressures on public finances and on funding for our state pensions. The Government are seeking to address that serious issue. Ultimately, this is about the future of a sustainable state pension. The Bill is not about today or tomorrow, but about future generations. It is right that the Government tackle this fundamental, serious issue in the way that they are. Furthermore, we have all seen from Department for Work and Pensions figures that more than 10 million people in the UK can expect to live to see their 100th birthday. This reform is therefore clearly long overdue.

People are living longer and healthier lives, but we simply cannot ignore the pressure that this puts on the state pension system. In my view, increasing the state pension age is the only fair and sustainable option. We have heard a range of quotes in the Chamber today from various organisations. There are experts in our society who understand how our pensions are funded, and it is worth noting that the chief executive of the National Association of Pension Funds said:

“Our ageing population means increases in the State Pension Age are unavoidable. This rise in the State Pension Age to 66 from 2018 to 2020, as implemented in the…Bill, is a sensible move.”