"I pay tribute to the hon. Member, who has been brilliant at championing the need to make changes, with which the Department agrees as part of its review to raise awareness of support, improve consistency with other services and, crucially, change that six-month rule. We will be able to make …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"Absolutely. I am grateful to all the stakeholders and those with real-lived experience, including disabled people themselves, who have been working with the Department on: the proposed changes to SRTI; our forthcoming health and disability Green Paper, which will look at both disability benefits and support and disability employment, of …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"On 18 March 2003, the UK Government formally recognised that British Sign Language is a language in its own right. Provision for accessing services by users of BSL are already covered by the Equality Act 2010 and the public sector equality duty...." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"I thank the hon. Member for raising that matter; I encourage her also to raise it with our Treasury colleagues, because it sounds like additional support is needed. On the broad principle, I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper), who has a great deal …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"The disability employment gap has narrowed by 0.3 percentage points in the year to March 2021 and now stands at 28.6 percentage points. The Government remain committed to seeing 1 million more disabled people in work by 2027, despite the challenges of covid...." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"The hon. Member has been an absolute superstar in her role as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for disability. She organised a brilliant event to incentivise, encourage and cajole MPs from across the House to lead by example by signing up to be Disability Confident employers, and we …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"Volumes of new PIP claims awarded have remained stable since the introduction of covid-19 restrictions. Official statistics show that since April 2020 some 225,000 new PIP claimants have had awards. Over this period, we have continued to assess all claims on the basis of paper evidence or telephone assessments, where …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"Although the vast majority of assessments—we have had over 4 million PIP assessments —are right first time, there are serious implications for those involved where they are not. As part of the forthcoming health and disability Green Paper we will be looking at claimants’ ability to get good-quality supportive evidence; …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"We are currently reviewing the application process for all personal independence payment claimants. Building on our covid response PIP 2 online service, whereby claimants can receive and submit their PIP 2 online, we are in the early stages of developing a new end-to-end application process and plan to test it …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech
"I am conscious that my hon. Friend has raised some specific cases directly with me. As we return to normality, we have received more claims than normal. We are working hard to get through those as quickly as possible, with average clearance times slightly up from 16 to 19 weeks. …..." Justin Tomlinson - View Speech