Employment and Support Allowance (Limited Capability for Work and Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity) (Amendment) Regulations 2011

Baroness Masham of Ilton Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, most of the points that I wanted to make have been made, so I will be brief. I emphasise the serious concerns that have been expressed by disability organisations, most particularly that these changes are premature. As we have heard, the second phase of the independent review led by Professor Harrington is still under way, and the advice on refining the mental, intellectual and cognitive descriptors has not yet been seen by Ministers, so in all likelihood we will be faced with two major, costly and confusing changes to the WCA to be made in a single year.

I emphasise that the cost of these changes has not been covered. The cost of people having to go to tribunals when their assessment needs to be overturned is enormous in terms of stress, worry and consequent ill health, but it is also a waste of time and money for the country. As the CAB has pointed out, the current WCA assessment routinely fails to identify disabled people’s genuine needs and inappropriately allocates them to jobseeker’s allowance, only to have that decision overturned on appeal. Currently 40 per cent of cases are overturned on appeal, which must cost the state a considerable amount.

According to the Welfare Reform Bill documents, almost £20 million was spent in 2009-10 on appeals to the tribunal service and, according to figures from the Disability Alliance, that means that roughly £8 million was spent on appeals to rectify the failings in the current WCA. There is now a nine-month backlog for appeals in some areas. If the new descriptors go ahead as planned, these changes could lead to even greater pressure on the system, especially since, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, pointed out, new ESA claimants will be joined by an estimated 10,000 people per week being migrated off incapacity benefits from April 2011.

The Government’s expert independent body, the Social Security Advisory Committee, has recommended that these plans are not implemented now. I urge the Government to follow their advice.

[Baroness Masham of Ilton]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, for bringing up this matter. He understands these matters so well and I support what he has said. This is a complex matter. Disability is complex, as it differs in so many ways.

There is great concern from many disability groups, as has been said, as well as the national AIDS group, which has not been mentioned. HIV is a very complex condition. People with it have to live on drugs for the rest of their lives. On some days they are better than on other days, and some drugs work in different ways on different people. This is a complex matter.

I hope that the Minister will get these regulations right. I have two questions for him. Who will be doing the assessments? Will these people be adequate? This is of great concern to many people, and this debate has illustrated how very complex the whole matter is.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)]

My Lords, this is an important opportunity to discuss the regulations. A lot of points have been raised and I will try to deal with as many as possible. However, I take this opportunity to lay out the position coherently. I take the criticism of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that communication has been less than perfect. I shall try to describe what is happening to reinforce that communication programme and I commit to ensure that it is maintained.

There is still a lot of misunderstanding about the assessment and what we are doing to make it fairer and more effective. The first point to make is that these regulations seek to take the first step in improving the work capability assessment. They were developed in conjunction with technical experts and with considerable input from specialist disability groups. As noble Lords have acknowledged, they will ensure that individuals awaiting, or between courses of, certain chemotherapy will be placed in the support group without face-to-face assessment. They will expand the support group to cover people with severe disability due to mental health problems and communication problems—that includes people with autistic spectrum disorder, about whom the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, was concerned—and they will ensure that the descriptors take account of someone’s adaptation to a condition or disability so that we can provide them with the right support.

Before proceeding to debate the finer points of the regulations, I would like to put the reform into a context. The legislation before us today is part of a far broader commitment by the Government to tackle worklessness and intergenerational poverty. This is a very real and very urgent problem for us all, especially given that there are now 2.6 million working-age people claiming incapacity benefits, of whom some 850,000 have been claiming for a decade. This is a massive brake on the economy, costing the taxpayer billions of pounds every year, but that is not the most important point. The true cost of this level of inactivity is paid for by individuals left languishing on long-term benefits without hope or opportunity for a better life. I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said about the scourge of inactivity. If we abandon these people, we fail in our duty as Members of this House. For too long, too many people have had to pay for our failure to act.

Before the recession, there were 63 consecutive quarters of economic growth—that is the longest growth period the economy has enjoyed, as historians can best work it out—and the economy created 4 million additional jobs. Yet under the previous Government—I am not being political—just over half those jobs went to foreign nationals. The result was that, even before the recession hit, we still had 4 million inactive people. Millions of people were without jobs in a growing economy, yet the system was trapping them. That is why we were sucking labour from abroad. The system offered too few people the opportunity to escape and to make a better life for themselves. We must not fail them again, because the country cannot afford it, and neither can the individuals, their families or our society.

Studies have shown that welfare dependency, social isolation and lack of purpose in life have a debilitating affect on individuals. Decades ago, the late Aaron Antonovsky argued that the purpose in life—what he called coherence—was crucial to understanding human health and well-being. More recently, Waddell and Burton’s excellent review of the issue, written four and a half years ago, reinforced the evidence that showed that work is generally good for you. There is ample evidence that prolonged periods of inactivity and unemployment contribute to declining mental health. That is why the welfare reforms that we are introducing are so important, and that is why the regulations are such an essential element in transforming the lives of millions of people at risk of being abandoned to welfare dependency.

These reforms are the key to providing the lost with a path out of the cycle of dependency and poverty, and helping them on to the path to new opportunities. That is why we are embarking on a large-scale re-evaluation of those on incapacity benefits through the work capability assessment that will take in some 1.5 million people—not the 2.6 million on incapacity benefit who the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, mentioned —over the next three years. It is also why we are introducing the universal credit to make sure that work pays, and why we are introducing the largest welfare-to-work programme that this country has ever witnessed.

This is designed not to badger or bear down on the vulnerable but to give them a road map to a better life. It is only by tackling welfare dependency and starting to dismantle the benefits trap that we can help people escape the huge social costs of worklessness, social exclusion and intergenerational poverty. Many noble Lords will know how difficult it is to wrestle with the issue of child poverty without this kind of route.

Those who cannot work will of course continue to get the support they need. However, for those who can make the journey back towards the workplace, we will offer them structured support to become work-ready. This will provide real help for many of those who have previously been abandoned by the system—those who were simply labelled as incapacitated and largely ignored, whether they wanted to work or not.

The work capability assessment was introduced in October 2008 as a key part of the assessment process to determine entitlement to employment and support allowance. It replaced the personal capability assessment and represented a significant and overdue change in assessing an individual’s ability to work. It was developed in conjunction with technical experts, along with considerable input from specialist disability groups.

However, it was clear from the outset that, unlike the PCA, the WCA should be subject to an ongoing process of review, evaluation and refinement. Indeed, it was this House that passed the amendment that introduced the requirement for an independent review of the WCA for the first five years after its introduction—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. It was the only amendment from this House that made its way into the original legislation for the work capability assessment, and it received support from all sides. That was slightly before my time, but I know many noble Lords will remember it well.