Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Linden and Tommy Sheppard

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

7. What recent discussions he has had with the Welsh Government on the proposal for a Welsh EU continuity Bill.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

11. What recent discussions he has had with the Welsh Government on the proposal for a Welsh EU continuity Bill.

Work Capability Assessments

Debate between David Linden and Tommy Sheppard

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[David Linden]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady and will come back to how the assessments are conducted, because that forms a major part of my speech.

At this juncture, I want to commend to the House the excellent report by Rethink Mental Illness entitled “It’s broken her”. It was published just last week and makes truly harrowing reading. The report lays bare the full extent of the challenges for people with mental illness when facing assessments for both ESA and PIP. Drawing on findings from a series of interviews and focus group-style discussions, the report finds that the assessment can be “traumatising and anxiety-inducing” for the following reasons: there are numerous issues with the paper forms that claimants must submit, including their complexity and length, and the inflexible nature of the questions they ask; claimants must collect their own medical evidence, which is extremely burdensome, often expensive and time-consuming; the staff who perform face-to-face assessments frequently have a poor understanding of mental illness; and, finally, delays in mandatory reconsideration and appeals to the tribunal mean that claimants may have to wait many months for the correct result.

The report concludes that the current PIP and ESA assessment procedure

“inherently discriminates against people with mental illnesses”.

It sets out a number of policy recommendations to

“dramatically improve the benefits system for people with mental illnesses, as well as saving the Government the vast costs that are currently incurred due to persistent incorrect decisions made early in the process.”

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. May I bring to his attention the case of my constituent, Adam Brown, a 51-year-old man who suffers from epilepsy and cerebral palsy and has a learning disability? By the time Adam came to see me, he had been trying to get a work capability assessment for nine months with the assistance of benefit agencies, and had not got it. We had to intervene and got it within 10 months. It is surely shocking that it takes the intervention of a Member of Parliament for people with disabilities to get fair treatment.

[David Linden]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. I am glad that his office was able to help on that occasion, as mine was in the case of my constituent David Stewart. It is all well and good that as Members of Parliament we can intervene in individual cases, but so many people are affected throughout the entire process that our being able to help on a one-off basis is not good enough.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between David Linden and Tommy Sheppard

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

It never ceases to amaze me just how complacent many Government Ministers and those in the political leadership of this country appear to be with regard to addressing the underlying economic catastrophe that the country is facing. To paraphrase Kipling, “If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, you probably don’t appreciate the seriousness of the situation.” There is now an amazing disconnect between their arrogance and glibness—and in the case of the Foreign Secretary, bombast and pomposity as well—and the real economic facts on the ground that are shaping the lives of millions of citizens of this country. This is not so much about driverless cars as a driverless Government.

We look now at the global dimension of this Budget. The first thing we should consider is the image of this country in the world. What does this Budget say about our character? How will others judge us for it? How will they judge a country that now lies 31st of 34 OECD countries in the economic growth table? How will they judge a country where, by their own admission, the Government say that by 2022 real wages will not be back up to the level they were in 2008? There has been a decade and a half of wage stagnation in this country: a decade and a half of austerity, adversity and struggle for many working people in this country trying to make ends meet and seeing their own hopes and those of their kids dashed because they cannot do so.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that the Budget did very little on pay for those who are under 25? Indeed, the rate of pay for apprentices rose to a meagre £3.70 an hour.

[Tommy Sheppard]

Indeed I do. That was the third observation that I wanted to make about how people might see us—how we treat our own people.

Let us remember that this Budget does nothing to cancel the attacks on the poor that have been contained in the past few Budgets. We still have the bedroom tax. We still have the cuts to employment and support allowance. We still have, albeit with some mitigation, the roll-out of universal credit and the visiting of penury on the poorest and the most disabled in our country. Any country will rightly look at us and judge us according to how we treat those who are least able to defend themselves. When they look at the record of this Government, I think they will judge them harshly.

Brexit clearly overshadows the whole debate about Britain in the global economy. I remind colleagues that we have not left the European Union. We have not even begun to leave the European Union. Indeed, we do not, as of today, yet have a plan to leave the European Union. All we have is a stated intention—the idea of Brexit, and already the idea of Brexit is having a material effect on the ground. I refer Members to page 14 of the Red Book, where paragraph 1.19 is a harbinger of what is to come. It points out that the drop in the projected growth in GDP is not just because of the per capita drop but because fewer people will be contributing to the economy due to a net drop in migration of 20,000 people. This is only the beginning. If we tell young people from Poland, Spain and Greece that they are not welcome to come and live and work here, not only will our public services be in jeopardy but we will not be able to collect their taxes, and that will have an economic effect on paying for those public services in the first place.

Already the European Medicines Agency and other institutions are leaving just because of the idea of Brexit. Not a mile away, across the City of London many financial organisations are preparing to make an exit and shift their European regional headquarters to another place. The effect of that will be dramatic, and it is irresponsible in the extreme for the Government of the day to come to the House and present a Budget that has no contingency whatsoever for those possibilities. The Government are planning for a series of options on Brexit, one of which is a hard Brexit with all the attendant tariff controls and trade barriers, and yet they have made no contingency for what might happen. That is the height of irresponsibility.

In the final 20 seconds, I want to mention the situation in Scotland. We welcomed the Government’s decision to scrap VAT for police and fire in Scotland, but if it was the right thing to do today, it was the right thing to do a year ago and the year before that. It is intellectual banality for the Government to base their policy on who makes the argument rather than the content of it.