Women’s Aid

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clarke]

I agree and I hope to deal with some of the issues that my hon. Friend raises. That was an excellent intervention.

As an organisation, Women’s Aid has supported women from all social and financial backgrounds and continues to do so. One in four women will experience domestic abuse at some point in their life. Two women a week are murdered by a partner or ex-partner. Women living with domestic abuse are five times more likely to suffer from depression. In 90% of domestic abuse incidents where children are present in the home, they will be in the same or the next room.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is citing horrific statistics that are all too familiar. In some areas of my constituency, there are spikes in the occurrence of domestic violence that are way out of kilter with the national or local average. I ask that Ministers look at the areas where there are spikes and find out why they are happening.

[Mr Clarke]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making an extremely significant point. On average, a woman will be assaulted 35 times before reporting it to the police. It is the case that 30% of domestic abuse either starts or escalates during pregnancy. Domestic abuse can account for up to 25% of all recorded crime.

Let me outline current practices and why they should be cherished. What is the present position in terms of access to benefits? The present position permits organisations such as Women’s Aid to go through proper procedures to ensure the safety and health of women who come to them. Here, as they recognise, is the tragedy: many women who are experiencing domestic abuse blame themselves for what is happening to them. Clearly, it is not their fault. The only person to blame is the perpetrator carrying out the abuse.

Monklands Women’s Aid, in its last annual report, shone a light on the scale of the problem. The contact made with Monklands Women’s Aid involved 4,310 women, 1,202 children—from birth to 12 years—and 1,056 young people aged from 13 to 19. If such an organisation did not exist, we would need to invent one.

As I have discovered, if a woman requests refuge, a risk assessment is carried out to ensure that the service and refuge will meet her needs. A home application and benefit check is completed for the user. A doctor is then put in place to assess the health of the woman. If necessary, women are taken to hospital immediately. Social workers, community psychiatric nurses or various support networks are contacted, with the woman’s permission, for continued support. If the woman wishes, the police are called. Throughout the process, workers from Women’s Aid offer continued support. If children are involved, relevant schools and nurseries are contacted and provision put in place to make the transition for the woman as seamless as possible. A children’s service is put in place as part of the outreach programme. When women are leaving the refuge, support workers help them to move to their new tenancy and offer much needed help and support.

Institutions such as the NHS and police services can do only so much in providing support to women who are in desperate need of help and protection. The refuge is the foundation for all services provided by this organisation, and it signifies the basis of a new life for many women. It is still desperately needed by many women in emergency situations—when their lives or their children’s lives are at risk. A refuge is a haven that, on multiple occasions, has saved lives.

In all candour, the proposed reforms by the Government are worrying. All the services that I have described will effectively be wiped out, thus leaving Women’s Aid with the sole service of signposting women to other support services—if they still exist.

Work Experience

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jones]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. For far too long a cohort of young people has been failed by the education system in this country, and we need to ensure that such people have the maximum opportunity to gain a high-quality education. Hopefully, we will reduce the number of people who need work experience. Until that happens, however, it is incumbent on us all to support the principle of work experience, because we need to reach that cohort. Figures from the International Labour Organisation show that, of the young people out of work in this country, more than 50,000 have never had a formal job and 20,000 have poor or no formal qualifications. If we are to reach out to that cohort of young people and if we are serious about getting them back into work and engaging them to become part of the mainstream work force, work experience is an essential tool to have in the toolbox.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Can the hon. Gentleman define the difference between work experience and an internship, because the two phrases are becoming increasingly blurred? There is definitely a difference and it is important to state it. What is it, in his view?

[Mr Jones]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. There is a distinction. With work experience, we are talking about a short-term opportunity for young people; they can be given some short-term experience of work to allow them to get into mainstream employment, often with employers who are keen to take on a certain number of those who have been on work experience and to put them into proper employment. There is a distinction from internships, which have traditionally been used as a method of giving people experience in this place, but also in law firms and all sorts of other professions. There is a distinction, and we need to be alive to that.

Over recent weeks, I have been pretty dismayed by the response to the current Work Experience scheme offered by the Government in partnership with many of our best companies in this country. I have been dismayed by the vitriol towards employers, who have not sought to create a free supply of labour but, on the contrary, have shown a genuine will to give experience and a chance to young people who, for whatever reason, have not been given that chance elsewhere.

Work Capability Assessment

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Sheila Gilmore]

I do share that concern, and the recommendation, which the Government indicated initially that they would accept, was that there would be such champions in all assessment centres. I appreciate that some centres are small and isolated, but two in the whole of Scotland is low, and it will be difficult for them to make a significant impression on the system.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

A distressing case recently at my surgery was a constituent who was in tears and crying hysterically because she believed that she had been placed in the wrong work-related activity group. She is appealing, but the appeal process in Nottingham takes an average of 56 weeks. She is really struggling in that group—she is asked to carry out role play and interviews when she believes that she is in the wrong group. I thank my hon. Friend for raising the issue, and hope that she will press the Minister to address my constituent’s case.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I thank my hon. Friend for her helpful intervention.

On the current descriptors, Michael would be unlikely to score any points. Because of the multi-dimensional nature of the proposed descriptors different aspects are looked at, including the severity of an applicant's difficulties with social engagement, the degree to which that varies between familiar and unfamiliar people, and how frequently that occurs. Those separate factors are scored, and are then multiplied together, with final points being allocated accordingly. The view in the report is that someone such as Michael would be expected to be awarded around nine points rather than none.

The purpose of the proposed descriptors is to account better for fluctuations in impairment that are commonplace in such illnesses, and the amount of support a person might need to overcome their impairment. They are structured in such a way that they could be used as the direct basis for the questions and would be better understood by the claimant.

Those were the recommendations in the report, but what about the Government’s response? As Professor Harrington made clear when he passed his report to the Government, he endorsed the proposals when writing his second review. To date, however, the Department for Work and Pensions has decided not to introduce the new descriptors, arguing either that there is insufficient evidence that the current descriptors are not working—that seems surprising given that that point was made in Professor Harrington’s first review and was accepted by the Government—or that the new ones would work better. In response, the Government said that the Department would “consider” a gold standard review that would take place in the first half of 2012.

The charities that are involved in these matters accept that more research is needed, but in the run-up to this debate they expressed their concern that no gold standard review has yet been initiated. Will the Minister confirm whether such a review will take place, and if so, when? Have DWP officials met with Professor Harrington, Mind, Mencap and the National Autistic Society regarding the establishment of such a review?

The charities have also expressed concern that a number of civil servants on the employment and support allowance team have recently moved on and have not yet been replaced. As a result, the DWP claims to have insufficient staff to initiate the review. Will the Minister ensure that staff are allocated to the ESA team to carry out the gold standard review? If the DWP is unable to provide staff to carry out that review, the charities have suggested that such work could be contracted out to an independent organisation. If that were to happen, would the Minister accept the findings of that review?

The Government accepted a suggestion about revising the ESA50 questionnaire that people fill in when making an initial application, and the idea was to reconsider and adapt, although not change substantially, the wording of the existing descriptors. Will the Minister tell us what progress has been made on that?

More broadly, my fear is that the Minister might use the cover of the gold standard review to kick the proposals into the longish grass because looking at a better way of assessing mental, intellectual and cognitive functions would shine a light on the whole work capability assessment process. That was illustrated by the Minister’s response to an oral question from my hon. Friend the Member for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon) on 24 October 2011. She asked whether the Government would be implementing the recommendations in the report and the Minister replied:

“The challenge facing us is that the recommendations will involve a complete change of the work capability assessment, not simply for mental health issues, but for physical issues, and is therefore a multi-year project. We are considering whether we can incorporate elements of the recommendations into the current approach much more quickly.”—[Official Report, 24 October 2011; Vol. 534, c. 8.]

Perhaps that is the crux of the matter. The Minister appears to be saying that a substantial change of approach is needed to the whole way that assessment is carried out for issues of physical as well as mental health. The longer the process takes, however, the more people are at risk of being wrongly assessed as fit for work, with all the stress and emotional turmoil that that causes. That is not a small matter for the DWP given the high rate of appeal and the cost and effort involved.

In conclusion, I urge the Minister to press on with the gold standard review for mental, intellectual and cognitive function. In doing so, however, he should not shy away from confronting the real issues that exist with other aspects of the work capability assessment.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)]

I have a sense of déjà-vu because the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) and I are continuing a debate, albeit on a different subject, from an hour ago.

Let me start by saying that it is of paramount importance to get right issues of mental health in the work capability assessment process. That is the most difficult challenge, because in many respects mental health can be the most intangible of the various areas that we need to assess when we seek to understand what people can and cannot do, and there are clearly many people with mental health problems who cannot possibly be expected to work. I do not have detailed knowledge of the case highlighted by the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), but people will appear in our surgeries saying that something is not fair or right, or that they are in the wrong group. Some people will genuinely believe that they cannot return to work, but that will not always be the case.

A few weeks ago, I sat with a woman in one of our Work programme centres. She had arrived having been mandated to the Work programme after 14 years off work with chronic depression, and she said that on the first day she was in tears, did not believe that she should be there and that she was protesting bitterly. I met her about eight weeks later, by which time she had started doing voluntary work in a charity shop and had begun to apply for jobs, and she said that that was the right thing to do after all. We will not always get it right, but we are taking some people down a path that can be right for them, even if they are reluctant to follow it at first.

[Gloria De Piero]

I accept what the Minister says, but does he agree that to decide whether someone is in the right group and has the right of appeal—which in itself acknowledges trial and error—56 weeks is too long?

[Chris Grayling]

I completely accept that, and we have started to reduce the backlog of cases. It is a big challenge, and we have put extra resources into the tribunal service for that. We have also tried to strengthen the reconsideration process in Jobcentre Plus, so that new medical evidence seldom appears at appeal stage. In his first report, Professor Harrington stated that one key reason why so many decisions were being overturned on appeal was that new evidence was appearing at appeal stage. We have tried hard, both at the start of the assessment process and the reconsideration stage, to ensure that such evidence is in place.

I ask the hon. Member for Edinburgh East to step back for a moment because it is tempting to take what the charities say at face value. Charities do good work and have long experience, but they do not always get it right and the internal review was the clearest example of that. I sat through meeting after meeting with the charities at which they said that we should not proceed with the internal review because it would lead to more people with mental health problems being found fit for work and that all the evidence suggested that it was the wrong thing to do.

Work had been done by the previous Government using the approach that the Department always takes to such matters, which is to take a batch of cases, put them through a new methodology and see what difference that makes. Our team of officials advised that, although there were fewer descriptors, the changes would lead to an increased number of mental health claimants in the support group. The charities protested and said, “That won’t happen; you’re wrong. That is not the case and you shouldn’t do it.” A few months later, however, that internal review led to an increased number of mental health patients in the support group. Indeed, the support group as a whole has got bigger. It is easy for groups that advocate change to existing systems to say, “We’ve got the experience; we’re right and you must do this,” but that is not always the case. It was certainly not the case for the internal review.

Benefits Uprating

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Children’s well-being does not just depend on benefits; it is often about child maintenance, too. So what is fair about charging single parents to use the Child Support Agency?

[Steve Webb]

The Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller) brought forward proposals only this week to make child maintenance more effective, because, as the hon. Lady rightly says, getting child maintenance paid is crucial. We believe that far too little is paid and the cost of collecting it is disproportionate to what we receive, so we need an efficient child maintenance system, and that is what we propose to bring forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I must say to the hon. Gentleman, as I have said to many others, that these problems with youth unemployment are deeply regrettable but, most importantly, while we in government look after the economy and want to see greater levels of growth, he, like all his colleagues, needs to take account of the fact that we are here because of the mess that his party left the economy in and the debts and the deficit—which we have to get rid of.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

A constituent of mine has been taken off disability living allowance and was told in May that his appeal was ready to be heard at a tribunal but that the backlog meant that it could not be heard until April next year. That is an 11-month wait; does the Minister think that is an acceptable length of time?

[Maria Miller]

I am very happy to discuss an individual case such as that with the hon. Lady if she would like to talk to me at another point.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Monday 14th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I would not dare do otherwise, with my hon. Friend breathing down my neck on this one. It is due to his hard efforts and pressure that we have made this particular change, and I think that it is for the good. Of course, it is important that it does not become a substitute for anything else, but it will certainly be there if people feel that they need that extra assistance, and there is no reason why we should not do it.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Has the Secretary of State made any representations to his colleagues about the proposed closures of voluntary organisations that support and train people to return to work, such as the Diamond centre in my constituency?