Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting) Debate
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Hannah Bardell
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Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)
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Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
Q 8 Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. Why should homeowners be forced into extra debt when the renting sector has access to housing benefit? That seems somewhat iniquitous given that many of those people are already struggling financially and are on benefits. Will the measure mean that people on low incomes and in insecure jobs will be disadvantaged or excluded from getting on to the housing ladder as a result of the change?
Paul Smee: On the first point, I think that the rationale is that the individual concerned has an asset, and that that asset is realisable and, at the moment certainly, appreciating in value. I can understand when, at a time when policy choices are being made, the argument is that, given the existence of that asset, it is better to have some claim back of any money that is paid out.
When it comes to getting on the housing ladder, particular checks are already in place to ensure that people do not over-borrow and get into financial problems. That is enforced by the regulators of the financial services system. I do not believe that the change in SMI proposals will in any way add to the protections or inhibitions that the current regulatory system imposes.
Paul Broadhead: I agree with what Paul just said. The only thing I would add is that, in a case where it is not repaid from the sale of an asset—either on death, on the sale of the property or whatever it may be—and someone moves back into work, it is vital that they are not put under undue pressure, having been in financial difficulty and got themselves back on their feet with their mortgage payment, to make contributions that are perhaps not affordable in their circumstances at that time. Because we are in primary legislation mode, the detail of that is not yet clear, but it is an important consideration for later down the line.
Hannah Bardell
Q 9 Do you think it is therefore very important that, if we end up with this in legislation, there are guarantees and stipulations on Government that people do not end up in that position? So many people’s circumstances change and fluctuate.
Paul Broadhead: In the way that mortgage lenders have requirements to assess the affordability of a mortgage loan when someone takes it out, that same mechanism ought to read across to their ability to repay the loan once they are back on their feet. If they can afford it, clearly they ought to be repaying it.
Amanda Milling (Cannock Chase) (Con)
Q 10 Welcome. Paul, I want to pick up on a point you raised about advice. Mortgages are complex, as are the legalities around housing. You talked about accessibility and ensuring that we give people channel preferences so that they can get advice. From an industry perspective and knowing this whole area, do you have any other advice in terms of things we need to consider? That question is for either of you.
Paul Smee: When we talk about channels of advice, it will be important that face to face is an option. I think a lot of people would want to receive this in a personal situation, and it will be important to have probably a single body as the focal point for providing that advice, which can then ensure that it is of the required standard and that those giving the advice have been trained appropriately.
Paul Broadhead: The other thing to consider when giving people this advice is whether it is in their best interests to remain in home ownership and wait for the 39 weeks, if that is right. It may well be that if they are in a situation where they cannot get back on their feet, and if they are in an environment where house prices are not rising and their debt is rising, nine months later they may be in a worse situation, having waited for that benefit, than they would be if they faced facts and took active steps to market the property and seek another form of residency. I do not think we should automatically favour remaining in homeownership as absolutely right for that person. They need to know the pros and cons to make an informed choice, because repossession or selling the property is not always the wrong thing for a borrower and their family.
Stephen Timms
Q 18 To clarify, in your discussions with Department for Work and Pensions officials, there is still the intention that those flexibilities will be available but your experience, in practice, is that they are quite often not?
Octavia Holland: Yes, absolutely. To clarify, it is even quite difficult to establish where in guidance those lone parent flexibilities are now. They are in disparate pieces of guidance that are given to jobcentres and work coaches. It is not like you can get your hands on one piece of guidance that says, “Look, if you want to support a single parent into a decent job, these are the kind of things you want to consider.” There is a real lack of clear information.
Hannah Bardell
Q 19 Thank you very much for coming to speak to us. On that point about lone parent flexibilities, do you not believe that those important flexibilities should therefore be brought into statute, so that they are very clear and people can understand them?
Octavia Holland: At Gingerbread, we absolutely feel that the lone parent flexibilities should be in regulations, as they were previously, because that makes it very clear to jobcentres and work coaches the best way they can support single parents into employment. Single parents are generally very keen to work and over 60% of them do, but you do need to consider the fact that they are not going to have childcare in the evenings or the weekends. You do need to think about that kind of thing. Yes, we do support that they should be back in regulations.
Stephen Timms
Q 20 This is a question mainly for Tony. We are told that there is evidence that the benefit cap has encouraged some people to go into work who would not otherwise have done so. Can you tell us how compelling you think that evidence is, and how big an effect there appears to have been from the application of the benefit cap?
Tony Wilson: The Department published some ad hoc analysis about a year ago on the estimated impacts of the benefit cap. That was peer-reviewed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. That was a good piece of work and it did show a statistically significant positive impact on some people in households affected by the benefit cap, on the likelihood of their moving off benefit and in to work. It showed some interesting things. It showed that those impacts were greater where the financial impact of the cap was greater. They were greater in London than in other parts of the country, so things you would intuitively expect to see.
However, there are a couple of points. One is that the total numbers moving into work are very low. This is a group where the likelihood of entering work, where you have been capped, is very low. A percentage increase in the likelihood of moving into work, you might see a 30% or 40% increase in likelihood of entering work. But if your likelihood was originally one in 20, then that might increase to only about one in 15 and still look like a very large impact. The research found percentage points. If you like, the absolute impact of the cap on the likelihood of entering work was pretty small—it was three or four percentage points. In other words, out of every 100 people capped, an additional three or four may move into work. That was the average. It was greater where the financial impacts were greater, which is what one would expect.
The benefit cap is probably one of the only measures in the last Parliament that created a really strong financial incentive to move into work. Out of all the welfare reform measures, if you move into work, you get your benefit back, essentially. You get your £200 or £300 income back. To some extent, it might be surprising that there was not a greater impact. The impact in terms of actual numbers was relatively small.
More interesting still, we evaluated a programme called the Brent Navigator. Brent Council invested in adviser support to help capped households back into work. We used a statistical technique to try to find the additional impact of that, and we estimated that that had about a 50% positive impact. Having intensive, adviser-led support to help people move back into work led to a larger-again impact on the likelihood of people moving into work. It highlights the importance of joining up the support you deliver and ensuring that those who are affected by reforms also get access to appropriate support to move back into work.
With the lowering of the cap, there will be more people with quite small losses compared with what happened under the previous cap. In those groups with small losses, the evidence found a far smaller impact. It was a negligible—pretty much a zero—impact on people whose losses were £10, £20 or £30 a week. That is consistent with the impacts of many of the other reforms such as the spare room subsidy, or the bedroom tax, or the lower uprating of benefit, which add quite small impacts and probably did not have a behaviour effect.
Emily Thornberry
Q 26 I appreciate that. I just wondered how much your thinking has influenced the Bill when you are here giving evidence in relation to the Bill. It is important to see it in that context.
Charlotte Pickles: Sure. We published our paper on this just after the election, so I think it would have been early June. I assume that would have been significantly after when conversations started taking place about what to do, but certainly in the conversations I have had with people, both on and off the record, most would say that there is a perverse financial incentive built into ESA as it currently exists.
Hannah Bardell
Q 27 I have a number of concerns about the kind of language and terminology that is used. First, you are saying the perception is that ESA programmes are successful and hugely ambitious. I am not sure that a 10% success rate would be deemed by me or anyone else on this side of room a success. When the number of people being sanctioned on the Work programme is twice as many as those getting employment, I would again question whether that is a success.
I put this to everyone on the panel: we are not clear about the impact that the cap has had already, although we have a lot of concerning figures, particularly about single-parent families. Before we cap people further, should we not be looking at the Work programme and having a full-scale review of it to make it more effective for people moving off ESA, before we cut their benefits?
Hannah Bardell
Everyone.
Tony Wilson: The 10% is a good example of what I was trying to describe earlier, probably in a slightly confusing way, about percentage versus percentage point impact. You might think of it as potentially a successful programme if what you would have achieved was 8% of people into work. You would say, “Actually, we got an extra 2% into work, so we’re a quarter more successful than we were,” and we would probably pat ourselves on the back and think we are doing a good job. But the reality would be that nine out of 10 people would be going through two years of employment support and coming out the other side without a job. Many of those may not be any closer to a job than they were when they joined.
Do we need to be more ambitious? Do we need to understand what works much better? Do we need to be more systematic in how we test, trial and learn from what works? Yes. Do we need to make sure that, alongside changes to welfare and reductions in benefit, we are offering appropriate employment support? Absolutely, yes. One of my biggest concerns here is that people who are affected by welfare changes, quite apart from whether those changes are right or wrong, are not, for example, automatically entitled to support through the Work programme. Many of them will not be supported through the troubled families programme. Many of them will not have access to advice or support. Many of them will be outside the ambit of Jobcentre Plus.
Hannah Bardell
Q 28 Specifically on that, what would be the cost of providing a radical, tailored, personal employment service, because clearly that is what is needed? These are some of society’s most vulnerable people who need that support.
Tony Wilson: But it need not necessarily be—to be honest, unit cost is not necessarily the issue. The Work programme is very tightly funded.
The other substantive point I want to make is that we just do not help very many people. We are talking about ESA and disability. Fewer than one in 10—we published research on this last year—disabled people who are out of work are receiving any kind of employment support, whether that is through the Work programme, Work Choice or anything else. Nine out of 10 simply are not in programmes. When we talk about ESA claimants in the Work programme, it is 300,000 over two years against a case load of 2.5 million. People on ESA are not in the Work programme. People on ESA are mostly in the support group, and they are in a support group where they get no support—they do not get employment support. They do not go to Jobcentre Plus. They do not have a personal adviser. They have voluntary access to programmes that they do not enrol in because of the negative perceptions of those programmes and their effectiveness.
There is a lot more we can do in terms of bringing programmes to people and being much more proactive about how we engage with people and how we make programmes voluntary and supportive. Yes, that does mean investment, but it also means, for example, looking at social investment models, at invest-to-save models and at how we recycle some of the savings we would achieve if we did actually engage with disabled people who are a long way from work. At the moment, we are not engaging with those people at all, quite apart from whether they are finding work in the Work programme.
Hannah Bardell
Q 29 Should we not have that first, though, before we drive more of the more vulnerable people into poverty?
Tony Wilson: We should do both, in my view, ideally. Let’s not let one be the enemy of the other. We should do both.
The Chair
Some of the questions and answers are getting a little long. Octavia is very keen to come in, and then we will go along the panel because this is an important question.
Octavia Holland: I want to pick up on the reference you just made to the benefit cap and to single parents, to make sure that everybody is clear on the stats. Over 60% of people capped so far have been single parents; 70% of them have children under five and 34% have children under two. DWP’s own research shows really clearly that the younger the child is when the parent is capped, the harder it is for them to get into work.
When we are talking about the benefit cap and supporting people into work, we really also need to be looking at the contradiction between the benefit cap and the conditionality policy that exists and the one that is being proposed. If you are capping up to 20,000 single parents who have children under two, there is no childcare support available for that group at present. There is also evidence that there is a real shortage of childcare available, so there are really clear reasons why that group of single parents will not be able to go into work. DWP’s research, again, has shown that where those people who are capped do not find work, it is likely that 40,000 more children would be pushed into poverty. When we are looking at the benefit cap we need to look at the circumstances of the family and the age of the child.
Helen Whately
Q 48 The point about the implementation of that 30 hours is important—how it is done.
Octavia Holland: It is. I think a lot of lessons need to be learnt from the 15 hours. There are providers who will say, “Okay, I’ll offer the 30 hours, but I’ll offer only two 30-hour-only places. The rest will be full-time at a much higher rate.” If you are trying to help low-income families, you really need to address those issues.
Charlotte Pickles: Can I answer that? The 30 hours, and the increase from 70% to 85% coverage in UC, is a very positive step forward. However, I agree that, if the 30 hours is a term-time only offer, it is a problem, given that you do not just work in term time.
However, to go back to your point about Jobcentre Plus and the flexibility and freedoms that individual jobcentres have, I would say that more work needs to be done to understand the difference in quality of that provision from jobcentre to jobcentre. Some jobcentres are excellent, provide fantastic support and do everything that they possibly can using their flexibility and discretion to do positive things with all sorts of cohorts. Some jobcentres are doing a lot less. One challenge I encourage the Department to look at is measuring jobcentres based on job outcomes and not off-flow from benefits, because we are holding providers to account in a way that we are not holding jobcentres to account. That is a real problem for understanding the performance of jobcentres.
Octavia Holland: I just wanted to point out that over two thirds of single parents enter the three lowest-paid occupation groups, and that training to upskill adults has been cut by 20% over the last five years. Actually, what needs to be looked at is the quality of jobs that people are moving into, and how that benefits their long-term independence and the support that they can give their families. Talking about work is obviously important—single parents want to work—but if it is a low-skilled job and they will be trapped in a low-income job with no prospects for moving on, the benefits that that will bring their family are not as profound as they could be.
Charlotte Pickles: Can I add briefly to that? It is absolutely true that we need to support people to progress when they are in work, but the evidence clearly shows that a job is better than no job, so I do not think we should be disparaging entrance in to low-skilled jobs, but we should be focusing on helping people progress once they have gone into them.
Hannah Bardell
Q 49 Should we not be stipulating that it be decent and fair work, rather than any work? The current statistics are one hour in any work in the week before. Should the legislation not stipulate another term of reference?
Charlotte Pickles: I do not think so. I think you need to focus on getting people into work. As we know, for some people, doing a few hours of work is a very positive thing. Also, the evidence base shows us that a job is better for people’s wellbeing than focusing on trying to get a—[Interruption.]
Hannah Bardell
Q 53 Very briefly, this was a question I asked of the previous panel but we did not get a chance to come on to it. On the two-child policy in limiting child tax credit, one aspect that I and my colleagues are very concerned about, though there is no detail, is that there will be exceptional circumstances for rape. As we understand it, we are potentially going to be in a position where women are questioned and have to justify if they have a third child as a result of rape, or indeed if their first or second child was a result of rape and they go on to have further children. What are your views on that and its implementation, even at a basic human level?
Octavia Holland: From our perspective, limiting the number of children for whom a family can receive tax credits, or in future universal credit, is obviously problematic. There are all sorts of reasons why you can often have a single parent who would not have anticipated that they would be a single parent and in receipt of tax credits. There are a number of reasons why people have not necessarily planned that they were going to have a higher number of children, and they definitely should not be penalised for it.
In terms of single parents and the cuts that are going to be made to tax credits and universal credit, our analysis, which we commissioned through the Institute for Public Policy Research, has shown clearly that the reduction to the work allowance is going to have a really severe effect on incentives to work. That is very concerning because the analysis shows that the loss for a working single parent is going to be more than the loss for a non-working single parent. In terms of support for people going in to work and incentivising that, it is not adding up at the moment.
Tony Wilson: It is really concerning. There are no answers to it, are there?
Hannah Bardell
Q 54 Leave it out?
Tony Wilson: Yes, not to do it is the simplest one. It will be a really tough one for the Committee to grapple with. We know that rapes tend not to be reported; we know that prosecution rates are very low. How do you do it in a way that does not rely essentially on the outcomes of criminal cases? It is quite unpalatable to think how that might work in practice. I do not think there are any easy or straightforward ways to resolve it.
Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)
Q 55 I will be brief. I just want to clarify a couple of figures, if I may. The latest figures I have for the number of ESA claimants in the work-related activity group is just shy of 500,000, I think. Do we have any figures for what percentage of people successfully come off WRAG and get into paid employment?
Kirsty McHugh: We could look at the Work programme figures and ERSA collates job start figures as well as the job outcome figures, which are produced by the Government. We can share all of those with the Committee if you want us to.
The Chair
Colleagues, we are approaching the end of our time for this session, and you have all been fairly well behaved. Are there any final questions?
Hannah Bardell
Q 61 On that final point about adults and working families, the evidence is that the impact of some of these cuts, particularly the benefit cap, is going to be on 200,000 children versus 81,000 adults. How can we justify that? How can we balance that without saying that this is going to disproportionately affect children and young people through the cuts that are going to happen to their parents? They have no way of protecting themselves in those situations.
Octavia Holland: That is absolutely right, which is why it is particularly shocking that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation research and the IPPR analysis have shown that, actually, the benefits for working families are less significant than for those who are not working. The impact of those cuts, as you say, will more often be on families that have children, so it is a real concern.
Tony Wilson: We will end up where we end up on the benefit cap. One thing I really hope we see is that those parents who are affected by the cap are given access to employment adviser support that is available through the troubled families programme, which they currently do not have. They should be prioritised for the Work programme, which they are currently not. They should be given an adviser in Jobcentre Plus, which they are not. Discretionary housing payments, which at the moment are basically just cash transfers to patch up a short-term problem, could also be invested in people, advisers and resources to help people to get into work or to deal with their housing problem.
There will be a lot of debate and political argument about whether the cap is right—fine—but let us make sure that those affected by the cap actually get support to move back into work, to change their housing situation or to deal with the consequences. Yes, let us try to exempt those with very young children, where this is not going to be practical or desirable. There is research on negative impacts on the wellbeing of adults with very young children when they move into work, but there is also a lot of research that says that work is good for your health. It is not a straightforward thing.
The Chair
Thank you very much indeed to all four witnesses. This has been a very interesting discussion. Thank you for your evidence, Charlotte, Kirsty, Octavia and Tony. We are very grateful to you. The next session will start in five minutes. We will have a very short comfort break.
The Chair
Matt, do you want to have a final say on this?
Matt Oakley: Yes, just a quick one. I am sure we will talk about lone parents and other groups later, but the general point is that any changes you make to benefits are going to have an impact on people. The key question is how the Government, the Opposition, people in jobcentres and people in the sector can work together to make sure that those impacts are mitigated, that people are moving back towards work, that people have the support they need when they get into a crisis and that people have the support they need to tackle the barriers that they face to getting into work. That, for me, is the much bigger question, because you could equally raise that kind of question for any of the groups that we talk about today, whether they are disabled, lone parents or in work. So the key question for me is this: how do we tackle that? How do we mitigate the impacts? How do we improve the chances of someone finding work, staying there and getting more pay?
Hannah Bardell
Q 65 Thank you very much for your contributions. On those points and the work programmes, would it not therefore make sense to do a wide-scale review of the work programmes and how we enable people with disabilities of all types to get back into employment before cutting their benefit and reducing it to the level of JSA?
Sophie Corlett: We would be very keen to see much better support to help people back into work. The Work programme does not—
Hannah Bardell
Or, indeed, not cutting them at all.
Sophie Corlett: Yes, definitely. The Work programme is not successful for people with mental health problems: 8% of people with mental health problems are helped back into work through the Work programme; that is not a great result. Other methods that people use include IPS—individual placement and support—which is a voluntary scheme. It works with people on their aspirations. In a very key way, it looks at what the other barriers are that stop them getting to work, and it works with employers to help them to overcome the stigma of employing people with mental health problems, because employers are not keen to take people on. It looks at all these things. It works with people in a voluntary way, without all the threat of sanctions, which can be very worrying for people.
If you have really good systems, people who want to get back into work can get back into work, but to have a system that is both punitive on people as if it is their fault and then does not actually help them is grossly unfair.
Gareth Parry: The Department did lead a pretty comprehensive review in 2013, when it produced the disability and health employment strategy. There is quite a lot of good content in that strategy, but it does seem to have lost the focus a little bit over the last 18 months. Our organisation would recommend going back to that strategy and seeing what was in there that could still be progressed, because that was sort of the review you are talking about.
Matt Oakley: I was there for a speech the Secretary of State made a couple of weeks back, and it seemed very much to be the start of a new discussion about how we can help disabled people and people with illnesses first of all to stay in work where that is appropriate, and secondly, when they leave work, to get back in more quickly—when they are out of work, to get back to work. I would be a huge advocate of significant changes to the Work programme to make sure it is putting more money into those people who need the greatest help. At the moment, it is not targeted enough; it is not personalised enough. We need to make sure we are targeting as much money as possible at those people furthest away from the labour market, of which this is one of those groups.
Kate Green
Q 66 The Government had hoped that the number of people on long-term incapacity benefit and employment and support allowance would be reducing. In fact, it has been increasing, and particularly the numbers in the support group have been increasing. What is your analysis of the impact of a very sharp distinction between the level of benefit that you will receive in the support group and the level of benefit that you will receive if you are not in the support group? Is there any incentive, perhaps, to present yourself as more severely unwell or disabled, and therefore having to go into the support group?
Elliot Dunster: We have to look at the confidence in the WCA as well. The speech that the Secretary of State made a few weeks ago, which has been mentioned already, talked a little bit about that. Disabled people are concerned about the WCA and how accurate it is. In Scope’s view, this will mean that people will continue to appeal those decisions because of this slightly more binary distinction.
We agree with the Secretary of State’s assessment that it is not very helpful to think about people being fit for work or not fit for work. That is not a particularly helpful way of looking at things, but of course we have an assessment in which we have to try to draw lines, effectively, about what support people receive. We would like to see the WCA reformed along a number of principles that we have submitted to the Committee, which would make it much more about back-to-work support. However, we think that making a slightly binary distinction between jobseeker’s allowance and ESA will make people more likely to appeal decisions if they think they should have been awarded the support group rather than the work-related activity group, because there is a financial incentive for them to appeal.
Emily Thornberry
Q 79 But you have just accepted that there are people who will be. It is your own evidence I am picking up on. It was your evidence that said you accept there will be people who are unemployed because of their physical or mental disabilities for a number of years. Given that you recognise that, all I am asking you is: as a matter of humanity, is it not wrong to push those people on to a level of jobseeker’s allowance and expect them to live on it?
Matt Oakley: What I am saying is that there will be people in the ESA WRA group who are, under the current system, likely to be unemployed for an extremely long time. There are similarly people in the JSA group who are classed as ready for work but who will be unemployed for a very long time. I am agreeing with other people on the panel that we should stop classing people through a basic system of “ready”, “not quite ready” or “ready for work,” and start looking at tackling their barriers in a much more flexible way. That means re-targeting employment support and the very hardest to help.
Elliot Dunster: It is really important to remember that people in the work-related activity group are disabled people, and disabled people face additional barriers to get into work. There is nothing wrong with that person; they don’t need to be fixed. They just have additional barriers that they face to get back to work. That can be employers’ attitudes. That can be structural barriers where they live—perhaps the transport infrastructure is not accessible and they find it difficult.
The biggest barrier that disabled people tell us they find is a lack of flexibility in the workplace and the right jobs available. If you have an injury and have done a manual job all your life, you are probably not going to go back to that same job, and you will need a period of rehabilitation. The statistics bear that out: 10% of unemployed disabled people are unemployed after five years. That figure is only 3% for people on jobseeker’s allowance, so there is a difference and it is because of the additional barriers that disabled people face to get back to work.
To address your question about the additional funding available, we have a range of ideas that we suggested to the Committee through our written evidence. One of them, which we would like the Committee to explore, is to join up “holistically”—to use your word—across Government and to look at the Chancellor’s focus on devolution, for example, and regional growth. What can we learn from some of the youth unemployment programmes in the last Parliament? We should target some of that money at areas where there is high unemployment among disabled people, and use some of the things we already know to work—for example, small disabled people’s organisations working with disabled people intensively to find them jobs that they can stay in, progress in and build careers in. That is where we think that money should go.
Laura Cockram: Just briefly, I think it would be useful to address the issues we talked about earlier in terms of the work capability assessment and reforming it. Actually, if we are assessing people correctly to go into the right groups that is a very good use of the money that is extra there.
Hannah Bardell
Q 80 I will follow on from Emily’s points, because my question is really very similar. The numbers from the House of Commons are that we have 492,000 people on the ESA WRA group, and half of them—250,000— have very serious mental or behavioural issues. They have very different requirements and some of them will probably never work. How can we justify in any kind of humane way putting them on to a level of income that they will have no option of getting off, because they will never be able to work?
There is a bit about categorisation, and while I realise we are talking about all being in it together, and there are some very good ideas coming out, we have to look at, for example, a radical vision to provide employment support that is tailored and personal. We do not have that at the moment, as many of you have already suggested; so surely we have to look at that first, before cutting anybody’s benefits. People have to have the opportunities and the support has to be out there before we put people further into poverty.
Sophie Corlett: Absolutely we do, but I think we also have to recognise that for some of those people it does not matter how much help you provide them with, because they might not be well enough; and a cut in their benefit not only may subject them to poverty, but it may subject them to worse mental health, for which they are then punished, for not getting more of a job. So there is a responsibility not just to give people a decent amount of living, but to give people an opportunity for good health. We know that having appropriate work is good for people’s wellbeing, but actually having enough money not to be socially isolated, to be stress-free about whether you pay the rent, the heating, or put food on the table—those things are important for people’s wellbeing.
Gareth Parry: I think, if I may—it is not helpful to talk about people who will never work. That shows a culture of a lack of aspiration. Everybody should have the potential to work—
Hannah Bardell
Okay, let me rephrase that, because I do not want to be misquoted: people who will not be—
Gareth Parry: No, let me finish, please. I think that there is something about a culture of aspiration around disabled people, families, advocates, parents and the professionals who work round them, and society generally, that says there is a culture of dependency—that there is a lack of aspiration. I am not going to get drawn into a political decision on where a benefit should be cut, or not. What I would say is we have all got collectively to have a greater level of aspiration for disabled people in our communities and our society; and we have to put the support processes in place, and the labour market opportunities in place, for them to have somewhere to go; and we do not focus enough on that. We focus on the negative stuff; we do not focus enough on the aspirational stuff.
Hannah Bardell
And I do not want to be misquoted in any way; so what I am talking about is those people who will find it very difficult, or not be able to do it, because of a physical or mental disability. I am not denying that we need to be more aspirational or have greater ambition. However, there is a very great difference. You say you do not want to get into political discussion. We are talking about those people who have found it very difficult to get into work having benefits cut and having very little quality of life in comparison with being supported to a level where they could have a quality of life, and they will be able to engage better in society. That is specifically what I am talking about.
The Chair
Okay, this sitting is about asking questions. We will have the debate when we get into Committee properly.
Roy O'Shaughnessy: I completely agree that there must be a safety net for those that are the most vulnerable. We see them every day and none of us wants that to be left out. I guess that is the whole point of this process—to look at how we get that safety net. We cannot deny that the support group has gone up from 10% to 65% through June 2014; so how we achieve the halving of the disability unemployment rate and how to be a responsible civil society—that is the challenge that we face. So I too want to qualify that I did not mean that there should not be a safety net for the very kind of individuals that you are talking about.