Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of reducing disability benefit on the health of people with long term and fluctuating conditions.

Information on the impacts of the Pathways to Work Green Paper will be published in due course. An important consideration in the case for abolishing the Work Capability Assessment is the inappropriateness of its binary distinction between “capable of work” and “not capable of work” for people with fluctuating health conditions.

A further programme of analysis to support development of the proposals in the Green Paper will be developed and undertaken in the coming months.