Work Capability Assessment Consultation

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I take this opportunity to encourage all those who are interested to give input to the consultation. To pick up on my noble friend’s point about GPs, a key principle is that the WCA considers what impact the person’s disability or health condition has on them, not the condition itself. To clarify, the department does not ask claimants’ doctors to make decisions about their patients’ capability for work. This is because the doctor diagnoses and treats a patient’s illness, whereas the WCA healthcare professional’s role is to assess the effects of the claimant’s illness on their ability to perform everyday work-related activity. It is important to make that distinction.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, my question is informed by a study published this May by a group called INvolve, which spoke to 500 UK employed adults with invisible disabilities, including visual impairment and chronic pain. Two-fifths said they were not getting the support they needed at work, particularly as businesses cut back under the current economic challenges; two-thirds said it was up to them to sort out their own support, as they were not getting help from their employer; one-quarter said they had a workload that they simply could not manage; and one- fifth said they were considering leaving their job as a result of their difficulties. The kinds of things these sick and disabled workers were seeking were flexible working hours, training for other employees to understand their situation and assistive technologies and tools.

This government action is focused entirely on people suffering from sickness and disabilities, but they are going out into a workplace where there is clearly significant discrimination. The Statement makes a lot of the move towards working from home, but quite a number of businesses have been heading in the opposite direction, trying to force staff now working from home to come back into the office. Do the Government plan measures of a similar scale to those in this Statement to crack down on discrimination in the workplace and to ensure that employers offer conditions in which the people this Statement refers to can work?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point, which allows me to emphasise the dependence on employers. The noble Baroness will know that we have reached out considerably to employers to encourage them, and we continue to encourage them to take on those who are disabled. ONS data from September 2022 to January 2023 shows that 44% of working adults work from home exclusively or at least some of the time each week. If that is translated into those who are disabled working for employers, that is quite encouraging. We encourage everyone to input into the consultation.

The noble Baroness may know that recent published data suggests that disabled people are more likely to work in the health, retail or education sectors. As of July 2023, these three industries have a combined total of 350,000 vacancies. There is a tremendous opportunity there, and we need to work through that.

Universal Credit

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 18th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I think I made my position clear on the two-child limit, as I have over my three months in this role. Obviously, putting children first is extremely important, and that is why we have given huge support, as I said—a total of £94 billion over this year and the next—to help households and individuals. The focus on children is a very important point: that is key.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the Centre for Health Economics found that the cost to the NHS of poverty in in-patient care alone was £4.8 billion. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said that poverty was costing the NHS and social care, collectively, £28 billion a year. Putting aside the social and human cost, are the Government not being penny-wise and pound-foolish by not providing an essential guarantee, which would take a huge amount of pressure and cost off our schools, our NHS, our criminal justice system and so many other parts of public services?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I made clear the Government’s position on essentials earlier, and I do not want to go over that again. On the noble Baroness’s point about poverty, I remind the House that in 2021-22 there were 1.7 million fewer people in absolute poverty after housing costs than in 2009-10, including 400,000 fewer children, 1 million fewer working-age adults and 200,000 fewer pensioners.

Rent Officers (Housing Benefit and Universal Credit Functions) (Modification) Order 2023

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Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I am very pleased to take part in this short debate. I would like to add my support to the Motion proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, and along with others wish her a speedy recovery. I am grateful for the impressive way in which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, took this on at very short notice.

I declare my interest as set out in the register, I am the owner of one apartment, in Birmingham, currently privately let. I echo the concerns of other noble Lords. I had intended to add further statistics—I am a mathematician by background—but I think noble Lords have had enough numbers in this short debate already.

It is my privilege to chair the Manchester Homelessness Partnership, which brings together our city council along with public sector bodies, the private sector, universities, the blue light services, health services and charities. We have fought hard and long and we have actually got rough sleeping down in our city since its peak in 2018. But increasingly, my colleagues and I are finding that those who end up on the streets are not there for the usual reasons, such as the breakdown of a marital relationship or leaving the parental home after a dispute. It is also not just about mental health, although that is still a major concern. Increasingly, it is simply because they have lost a private tenancy due to being unable to pay the rent. We have heard how rents have gone up, but homelessness carries a huge cost. It is a heavy drain on public funds, as we have heard, but even more critically, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has said, it wrecks the lives of ordinary, decent members of our communities. It does not take long to end up homeless, but it takes years to get out of the pit you have fallen into. It is a long, slow and painful process, as I know from having befriended people who have been rough sleepers on the streets of my city.

I am also concerned by the opaque nature of explanatory material on this SI, provided by the Department for Work and Pensions. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s report states that the explanatory material laid in support of the statutory instrument

“provides insufficient information to gain a clear understanding about the instrument’s policy objective and intended implementation”.

Indeed, it does not do much more than to state that,

“for 2021/22 and 2022/23, all rates were frozen at the same cash levels that were set in 2020/21”.

That is not an explanation—and there is no understanding of the policy in that. As the committee’s report states, this makes the House’s scrutiny role much more challenging. We need to know why something is being done if we are to scrutinise it properly.

To conclude, I add my support to the noble Baroness’s Motion and echo the calls of many in the housing sector, as well as noble Lords in this debate, who are urging the Government to unfreeze local housing allowance now.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to offer the Green group’s support for this regret Motion and to echo others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, wishing her all the best and thanking the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for his excellent introduction.

In formal terms, this is a Motion to Regret, but what is very clear from this debate is that it is really an expression of horror at the infliction of poverty, inequality and deep suffering on people who are in that situation through absolutely no fault of their own but as a result of—as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said—decades of government policy that have seen housing treated primarily as a financial asset rather than homes that should be secure, affordable places for people to live in. That includes the great privatisation of the right-to-buy policy, the failure to keep building council homes and the reliance on a handful of private sector builders whose profits keep going up while the rest of us suffer—a structure that reflects so much of our economy.

Health and Disability White Paper

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Monday 20th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I hope I can help the noble Baroness by saying two specific things. She will know that we have the national autism strategy, which was launched in 2021. As to what we are doing now with the recent announcements, it is very important to highlight our Disability Confident programme. It is incredibly important that we work ever harder to persuade employers to take on those with these conditions, because there is no doubt that many of them are able to work and can offer huge benefits to employers. This disability gap needs to be closed.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, having spent years of my political life supporting disabled people campaigning against the dreadful Atos and its application of the work capability assessment, I find myself with some surprise echoing the concerns we have heard from all sides of your Lordships’ Chamber about this proposal. My question to the Minister is a fairly simple one. James Taylor, chief executive of Scope, said in responding to this White Paper:

“The Government has got a mountain to climb to win back the trust of disabled people.”


Does the Minister agree with that assessment?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I certainly do not. Having said that, we are not complacent. There is an awful lot we have done, some of which I have mentioned already, for the disabled cohorts, and it is incredibly important that we do even more to encourage those who are disabled to come into work. Having produced some surveys, we know already that 20% of those who are disabled want to work, and actually, 4% of that 20% want to work right now. So there is an awful lot we can do, but the picture the noble Baroness has painted is neither fair nor accurate.

Universal Credit

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Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for securing this debate.

I started by contemplating £20. What does that mean to different people in our society? Like the right reverend Prelate, I focused on food. I thought about the people in this Chamber and those who live around us here in Westminster. I looked at some of the restaurants around us here in Westminster. At the Corinthia London Hotel, just up the road, you can get a baked fig starter for £18. At the Ivy restaurant you can get a shepherd’s pie for £19.50. If you have lunch at the Ritz, you can get a veal sweetbread starter for £28.

Also visiting us here briefly at Westminster were people testifying to the Work and Pensions Committee, telling it what £20 meant to them. Anthony Lynam said that it means,

“do I go hungry, do my kids go hungry?”

Amina Nagawa said that already with the £20 she goes without food and her son cannot eat something nutritious. Gemma Widdowfield said that she would buy essentials on her credit card and just stack up the debt.

The right reverend Prelate talked about the need for structural change. We have a crisis of inequality in our society. £20 means the world to some people or a veal sweetbread starter to others. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies, just said, this involves not just individual households but whole communities. Citizens Advice assessed the community impact of this cut as the Government appear not to have done. It worked out that for each £1 of investment that the Government might put in their levelling-up fund, £1.80 was being taken from local economies targeted by the levelling-up fund, the poorest in our society.

We come back to food. We think about what people might be eating in Doncaster, Wigan or Merthyr Tydfil. If they are eating out at all, it might be spending £2 in the café for a pie and chips. They probably will not be eating out at all but shopping around in supermarkets to find the cheapest possible thing to put food into people’s mouths. The people dining at the Ritz and the Ivy are taking the food out of the mouths of the children who cannot eat now. Twenty pounds is not much, but taking it away as well is absolutely unconscionable.

Covid-19: Work-related Cases

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 5th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, following on from the questions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Janke and Lady Wilcox, will the Minister acknowledge that of 52,000 proactive site visits over Covid, only 12,000 were conducted by trained inspectors? This is less than a quarter: the rest were handled by outsourced contractors. Will she acknowledge that ventilation was not on the script of those outsourced contractors? Given what we know about aerosol transmission and our increasing understanding of the problem of ventilation, does she agree that this is yet another example of where outsourcing to less experienced, skilled and trained staff has really damaged the quality of service that people have received?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I ask the noble Baroness to allow me to go back to the department to talk about her outsourcing points. I would be very surprised if we outsourced to people who were not up to the job, but I will write to her.

Child Poverty: Ethnicity

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Thursday 27th May 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, for securing this debate and for so powerfully introducing it. The noble Lord referred to the lived experiences of systemic racism, something which has been built on centuries of discrimination, discrimination that very much continues, as powerfully testified by the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin.

In this debate, I feel that I need to respond to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, particularly in the light of the fact that your Lordships’ House has recently spent a great deal of time and energy on the Domestic Abuse Bill. It is important that we do not send any kind of message that we need to continue families no matter what, given the damage that might be done to the individuals within them. We should acknowledge the impact of discrimination and poverty on the rate of family breakdown.

However, I want mostly to focus on two positive solutions. To ensure that I was taking a different approach from other noble Lords, I went to two research institutes in Sheffield. Both are associated with the University of Sheffield: SPERI, the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, and the Institute for Sustainable Food. I want to focus on one sentence in a report from SPERI in December 2020 on food vulnerability during Covid-19. The report said that

“it is important to revisit, once again, the heated debate around the role of food charities as frontline responses to a lack of economic access to food.”

That has been carefully phrased in the form of academic discourse, but I put it to the Committee that, in the context we are talking about, none of us should rest until the last foodbank closes because of a lack of demand.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, food poverty is poverty. The underlying problem is a lack of income. She also talked about maintaining the boost to universal credit; that is a start, and the Minister will be well aware that I would much prefer universal basic income, but we need to look at incomes.

Secondly, the Institute for Sustainable Food focuses on the local as the site of food security resilience. I would like to point here to a group in Sheffield called Kenwood Community Growers, which was set up at the start of the pandemic and has been supplying community kitchens in Sharrow and areas with a large BAME community. What are the Government doing to focus efforts towards local food production and local growing, with people being able to produce food for themselves and have access to land and the resources that they need? Our BAME communities have skills, talents and energy that need to be utilised, supported and encouraged.

Universal Credit (Transitional Provisions) (Claimants previously entitled to a severe disability premium) Amendment Regulations 2021

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Thursday 11th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy. Her outline of the structural problems of universal credit was excellent and her testimony of the suffering in our communities was powerful.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on her regret Motion and offer the Green group’s strong support for it. I also endorse all her asks in providing a basic, decent level of benefits.

Many noble Lords may have seen a photo that was shared widely on social media yesterday. It showed a queue for a food bank in the snow in Glasgow. People were so desperate to get the basics of life that they endured those conditions. It is very clear that our economic and welfare systems have utterly failed.

The Minister may be aware of the McKinsey & Co report that came out this week. It made an interesting international comparison and showed that countries with minimal welfare provision, such as the US and the UK, have had to pay out huge amounts more in the conditions of the pandemic. We are, of course, in an age of shock and can only expect more shocks. Not providing basic, decent benefits on a regular basis ends up costing a great deal indeed.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, for making the case for a simpler benefits system. She highlighted the difficulties in what you might call the “old regime” of a mix of benefits. We also heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, about the incredible complexity that disabled people face with the severe disability premium, which we are addressing today. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, laid out very clearly the case for a universal basic income. I have one direct question for the Minister, to which I would really appreciate an answer: are the Government finally considering this obvious, simple, clear, fair solution that means that no one falls through the gaps?

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, referred to some personal accounts and experiences and I should like to do the same. I have an account from someone who suffered a traumatic brain injury and spent a year in hospital. It is posted on the North Staffordshire Green Party website—I will tweet out the link. This is a long story, but it is the kind of experience that many people with a severe disability premium payment would have gone through. This man received the disability living allowance in 2004, not after the original application but after being forced to go through an appeal process. The payment was awarded for life. A decade later, that was replaced by the personal independence payment and the man had to reapply. I will now quote a few of his own words because we should listen to these experts from experience. He said:

“We entered a small dimly lit room with a young male assessor. He told me he had worked in mental health for several years to which I replied—good, you’ll be able to understand my brain injury. I left the assessment extremely tired but rather dazed … It was only a few weeks later when the award letter arrived, I realised why I was feeling dazed—everything in the assessment conclusion letter was a blatant lie—I wasn’t bothered that I had been declined—I felt demoralised and degraded. I revealed to the assessor some of my most intimate moments. As I was reading the assessment I felt as though I had been contradicted with some of the information being made up. It was this moment I realised I had been interrogated not assessed. This sent my mental state of mind tumbling into an abyss of depression—you can appeal, I was told. How can you appeal blatant lies, I thought; and did not appeal.”


Many Members of your Lordships’ House will be well aware that recipients of the severe disability premium have been through experiences such as that, often again and again. Yet we are subjecting them to the level of complexity that the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, outlined.

The payments exist because our society is discriminatory, as it does not exist in ways that meet peoples’ needs without their requiring the special extra payments because of their disability. As I pointed out at Second Reading of the Financial Services Bill, if we make a society that works for those who are vulnerable, we make a society that works well for everybody. All of us are only one accident, one medical emergency, one crisis away from needing payments like this. Knowing that those payments are there—reliably, certainly and sufficient—is vital to us all.

Chemicals (Health and Safety) and Genetically Modified Organisms (Contained Use) (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

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Wednesday 9th December 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann. I share her concerns about the Health and Safety Executive’s resourcing—something that there has been considerable public concern about in the context of Covid-19 and the many other threats that we see, particularly to workplace and public safety.

I feel that I should warn the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, who will follow me in this debate—as she did in the debate on the previous statutory instrument, where she made a particularly excellent contribution—that I plan to be brief. I have two brief sets of questions.

My first question relates to the Explanatory Memorandum to the statutory instrument that this statutory instrument amends. It states:

“Each Administration of GB will continue to be able to make its own decisions about the release of GMOs in its territory. The existing processes for each Administration reaching its own decisions at national level will continue as now.”


I am aware that, as we speak, the internal market Bill is still the subject of debate and negotiation, we might say, in the Chamber, but I wonder whether the Minister can tell me how the rights to control the release of genetically modified organisms and the sale of products containing genetically modified organisms will relate to that Bill and the rules being made around it. Also, of course, there is the inevitable complication of how this will affect products going between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

Also, that Explanatory Memorandum talks about the release of genetically modified organisms. Of course, no one can control the spread of genetically modified organisms and the genes that they contain; it is worth highlighting that point given that we share extensive borders. No Administration on these islands can control the spread of those genes or, potentially, those organisms.

Briefly, my second point addresses the biocidal products side of this statutory instrument. I note in particular research published last month in the peer-reviewed Science of the Total Environment journal that refers to the insecticides part of this statutory instrument. This research showed that two products—fipronil and imidacloprid—widely used in flea treatments for domestic animals, particularly dogs and cats, were showing up in very high levels in our rivers. Fipronil showed up in 99% of samples in 20 rivers, and in one case it was measured at 38 times the safe level. Are the Government looking at this issue, and indeed many other broader issues, as a matter of urgency?

One issue that is increasingly being thrown up by the science is what is known as the cocktail effect: the potential impact that the mixing of different chemicals, and interactions between antimicrobial resistance and different chemicals, might have on antimicrobial resistance, on human bodies and on the environment in general. It is very much rising up the agenda.

Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Act 2013 (Remedial) Order 2019

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Thursday 3rd September 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her introduction to this order, and I offer my thanks to all the members of staff who have made this Committee possible with all their hard work.

Today, we are addressing an order that rights a legal wrong, and an illegality, that was committed twice by the Government. The Joint Committee on Human Rights tells us that, finally, the illegal government acts started under the Jobseeker’s Allowance (Employment, Skills and Enterprise Scheme) Regulations 2011 are righted by this order, almost a decade after the issue arose. On the narrow point of today’s debate, I can only be guided by the committee’s expertise, and I thank it for its comprehensive report. I therefore support the order.

That it has taken a decade to provide full remedy for an illegality in a regulation is, I suggest, something we might reflect on in other work around the House, from the Agriculture Bill and the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill to the immigration Bill next week, in all of which cases the Government seek to provide only a skeletal framework of their intentions, promising to fill them in later with regulation. I fear there will be decades of work in cleaning up the results.

The Minister said that she expected it would take 12 months to identify and recompense the affected individuals. I can only hope that that is delivered, given that what is happening with the Windrush scheme is not encouraging. Can she say what progress reports the House can expect over that 12 months? It would be good to have progress reports to see how this is going forward.

Today’s Committee provides a chance also to reflect on some of the broader issues, as noble Lords already have. I associate myself with the strong concerns about universal credit and sanctions expressed by both the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted, and the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, in particular the five-week wait, the impact on child poverty and mental health, and the huge damage done to lives by sanctions.

It is also worth taking this opportunity to reflect on the importance of human rights legislation as a balancing force for an individual against the overweening and potentially overwhelming power of the state. Some 5,000 individuals are affected in this case, on the account of the Minister. Anyone might need to use human rights legislation; I doubt that either the young graduate or the HGV driver with whom this whole saga started ever expected to make personal use of human rights legislation, yet, in choosing to bravely stand up, this mechanism was available to them to ensure that the state was not allowed to force them into illegal temporary slavery—for workfare applied illegally can be described only as that.

Secondly, in the context of Covid-19 and the potential economic situation we face in the coming years, it is important to reflect on the damage done by forced work being imposed on people. Let us not forget that a Department for Work and Pensions analysis in 2013 found:

“There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers.”


Over the past decade, we have seen many such schemes and heard horror stories such as the mandatory work activity and community work placement, and various localised trailblazer schemes for young people. They have been withdrawn. There was of course significant community backlash against companies participating in many of these schemes, but campaigners suggest that a more disguised, less visible form of workfare continues. Can the Minister inform the Committee, either now or perhaps by letter, how many people are now in work placements arranged by the Government? I do not include the word “voluntary” in that question, for we all know that there are wide degrees of voluntariness. I also ask the Minister to report to us on the use of “skills conditionality”—claimants being forced to attend a skills training provider, further education college or other adviser with potential benefit sanctions for non-participation.

These are issues that are close to my heart, because over the years I have seen so much damage done by such forced activities. In Ashton-under-Lyne, outside a jobcentre that was then known as being particularly harsh, I met a young woman who had been sanctioned for failing to complete an unpaid work placement. She suffered from agoraphobia, and would have had to take a long bus journey to the placement: she simply could not do that. She also suffered from acute uncontrolled diabetes, and she was reliant on feeding herself from a food bank. I dread to think where that young woman might be now. I think of a woman I met at a WASPI demonstration in support of women born in the 1950s affected by the increase in the pension age for women. She had been an office manager for decades, and was insulted and deeply disturbed by being forced by this system to go on a one-day course on how to write a CV.

We had companies that benefited significantly financially from these placements, and communities where large numbers of these placements meant that the income into the community from what should have been waged work was significantly reduced. As we face the potential significant rise in unemployment, it is important that we do not forget what damage was done by blaming individuals for the state of society, that we do not see any return to the disastrous and utterly appalling “strivers versus skivers” rhetoric that caused so much social division and heartache. We also need to focus on how this “job or activity at any cost” approach causes broader damage. There is lots of focus on all sides of politics on our productivity problem. I would question what we mean by productivity, particularly in the service and care sectors: when it comes to people-to-people contact, what constitutes productivity? There is also the question of people ending up in the right job, the optimum job for them and for society. Forcing people quickly into a new job that is a bad fit, with sanctions and the threat of starvation or having to seek the charity of a food bank, is in no one’s interest, yet that is the entire way our system is slanted.

That is where we come to trust: trusting individuals to know what is best for them, giving them the space, time and resources to develop their human potential, grow their experiences and find the way they can best contribute to society. It will not surprise the Minister to learn that I will briefly mention universal basic income. As a society and community, we should be helping people to find their way in the world, providing support through advice on study, careers guidance and practical support in making choices. But the best person to find the way forward, to identify the skills and experience they need, is the individual concerned. Giving them the space, time and security to do that through an unconditional payment that meets their basic needs is, I suggest, the way forward.

Removing compulsion to the dictates of the state and bureaucracy, and providing instead individual freedom and choice, is something that might find significant support even on the Government Benches.