Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform (Disabled People)

Debate between Tom Clarke and Anne McGuire

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

I am delighted to be called, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I am not going to shut up. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, so she knows that neither of us are prone to shutting up when the issues are important.

I agree with the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who has just left, that a bipartisan approach has been the best way to move the agenda forward for disabled people. We have to be careful, however, not to rewrite history. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was actually a hard-fought campaign. My right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) was one of the champions of that debate. I give credit, as I have on more than one occasion, to the Leader of the House, who, in the teeth of opposition from the Conservative party and with the support of the then Prime Minister, John Major, helped to manage this House to a position where it accepted the claims and the campaigns of disabled people, including the campaign conducted by my right hon. Friend. So we should not rewrite history, but there has previously been a bipartisan approach.

The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), was part of that when he was my shadow and accepted the basic tenets of the 2005 report published by the Prime Minister’s strategy unit on improving the lives of disabled people. That report challenged us all to examine how we accepted our responsibilities to break down the barriers preventing disabled people from fulfilling their potential in education and employment, and to encourage them to make an active contribution to their local community. Work was the cornerstone of that new agenda. But a statement of a right to work does not in itself deliver the right to work, and we need to be clear that the right to work for disabled people has been further undermined by the failure of this Government’s employment programmes to deliver the necessary support for disabled people. They can brush it off, but the Work programme is seen by many disabled people as inflexible, baffling and little more than going through the motions.

[Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for her kind remarks. Is she aware that only a few weeks ago Citizens Advice Scotland published a compelling document detailing case study after case study on the issues she is raising? Does she agree that that is important to this debate?

[Mrs McGuire]

Let me hark back to the comments made by the hon. Member for Thurrock and say that it is not some weird conspiracy of charities, Labour politicians and disabled people that is creating the environment where people are suffering because of the ways in which the Government have carried forward their employment programme.

I congratulate our two Labour Front Benchers today, my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), because they have recently put on the record how the Labour party would devolve responsibility for some of the support for disabled people, taking a new approach and ensuring that it is more locally based within the employment market. We need to ensure that the new approach of our party is not top-down; if we do not involve disabled people in the planning and development of programmes that have an impact on their lives, we will have lost our way. I am sure that we will take forward that particular model of involvement of disabled people.

The Minister made great play of the talk about cynicism. May I say that disabled people have for the past four years been the subject of the most cynical campaign in modern social political history? They have been subject to a campaign that vilified them from the beginning. It started with a premise that disability benefits were the subject of widespread fraud and that, by definition, disabled people were cheating the system. It progressed by plucking an arbitrary figure—some 600,000—out of the air and saying those people would lose their benefits. It ended with a mess, where disabled people no longer know what benefits they will get, how long it will take to get a decision and whether they can apply in the first place. The Minister is a nice person but it takes some brass neck to come to this House, acknowledge there is a problem, forget that the Government created the backlog and then try to take the credit for reducing the very backlog that their policies have made happen. I hope that he will reflect on what he said.

Let me deal briefly with Lord Freud’s comments, because they show just how much we have lost in the past four years. The fact that the Government’s Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform thought that some disabled people could work for £2 an hour was not just a “mis-speak” but was more attributable to a mindset. No amount of apology from the noble Lord could disguise the fact that not only did he “mis-speak”, but his comments challenged a vision that disabled people thought they had agreed with us: that they can work where possible and they should be treated equally in that regard. If we start to finesse the payment for work, where will this stop? A minimum wage is a minimum wage is a minimum wage; the Government cannot start to segment it.

I felt desperately sad when I read Lord Freud’s comments. I want to say to him that rights cannot be traded. They are not given but are intrinsic to us all as members of a democratic society. Lord Freud showed by his crass “mis-speaking” that he has failed to understand that, and, as such, he should have had the integrity to resign. As he failed to do that, the Prime Minister definitely should dismiss him.