Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 10th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

My hon. Friend has made an important point. We are working with Atos to ensure that as many centres as possible have ground-floor, accessible medical examination rooms, but when they are not accessible, we will try to make arrangements with claimants to ensure that they have access to suitable locations for their assessments.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

13. What plans he has to improve the Access to Work scheme for disabled people.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Esther McVey)]

We are undertaking a radical review of Access to Work so that it can help more disabled people into mainstream employment. We are implementing several improvements, including a fast-track assessment process and the removal of cost-sharing for small employers, as well as working with an expert panel to consider how the scheme can be further personalised and made to work more effectively for disabled people and their employers.

[Paul Maynard]

I welcome the Government’s continued commitment to the Access to Work scheme. May I draw the Minister’s attention to the report of the all-party parliamentary group for young disabled people, which I chair? One of its recommendations was that the scheme should be extended to both internships and long-term voluntary work placements. Will the Minister undertake to consider that recommendation?

[Esther McVey]

The policy intent of Access to Work is to support disabled people into paid sustainable work, and as such it is not offered for unpaid internships or voluntary work. However, from 1 October this year Access to Work has been available to young disabled people undertaking work experience under the Youth Contract. I would like to meet my hon. Friend to talk further about this matter.

Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

First, I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words about my coming into this new position. If Mr Speaker will indulge me, I want to say how delighted I am to be here, particularly at the close of the Paralympic games, which have been such a sensational success. As Sir Philip Craven, the international Paralympics president has said, these have been the greatest Paralympic games of all time, with more medals in more sports— 120 medals—for Team GB and record ticket sales of 2.7 million in London compared with 480,000 in Beijing.

Let me return to the hon. Gentleman’s question. I know how much work he has done on this and that he delivered a 100,000-signature petition to the Prime Minister. Further work and analysis is continuing to determine the stage 2 process for the Remploy sites. Work is going forward. He, like me—I have read the words he said—wanted a viable business. That is exactly right, and that is what we are looking for. Where there is a viable business, it will continue, because we are looking for sustainable, long-term employment for all those employees.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I, too, welcome the Minister to her position. Will she remind the House how many more disabled people will benefit from the transfer of funds from Remploy, which is getting more disabled people back into work than was the case under the previous system?

[Esther McVey]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. He is quite right. At the moment, the money for sustained employment for disabled people goes to just a fifth of the number of people it should. We are maintaining the budget of £320 million and we want it to work more effectively for more people. We are aiming to have people getting sustainable work as we move forward.

Specialist Disability Employment

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Tuesday 10th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

The hon. Gentleman will know that a list of the factories that are affected is attached to copies of the statement. I am sure that Mr Speaker, who I know wants to make progress, would not have thought that reading out a list of factories was the right thing to do.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that young disabled people have higher aspirations than to spend 40 years of their working lives in segregated employment, shut off from society, being sheltered—what a ghastly, offensive phrase that is. Segregated employment has no role in today’s society. What we want is equality of employment rights.

[Maria Miller]

I could not have put it better myself.

Minister for Older People

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) on securing this important debate, and I am glad to have an opportunity to raise the views of Blackpool here in the Chamber. Blackpool is in many respects a pensioners’ capital. We have just hosted the National Pensioners Convention, at which the Minister with responsibility for adult and social care, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), was due to speak. Unfortunately, however, he had to return to the Chamber to reply to an Opposition day debate. The NPC replaced him at the Winter Gardens with a cabbage. I am not sure what fruit or vegetable the pensions Minister might like to be represented by; he might tell us when he delivers his winding-up speech. I should warn him, however, that the banana has already been taken by the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband), so it is off the menu.

My hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) told us that his constituency had the most pensioners. I am trying to compete with him in that regard. As with most coastal towns, both Blackpool and Southend have large populations of retirees.

[Mr Amess]

Has there been any reaction yet among older people in my hon. Friend’s constituency to his winning the very special charity champion award last night?

[Paul Maynard]

Modesty forbids me from commenting, so we will draw a veil over that.

My constituency has the most people who live in a household with someone with a long-term medical condition, so carers policy perhaps matters more there than in any other seat. I am therefore as aware as any Member about some of the issues raised today.

In order to access carer’s allowance, people have to apply for pension credit, to which they may not be entitled. People might know that that application will be rejected, but they still have to apply in order to access carer’s allowance—an obvious anomaly in accessing benefits. Although we all know that many pensioners do not claim everything that they are entitled to, they are still not getting what they should be getting.

I know from my postbag and my surgeries that there would be no shortage of work for a Minister for older people. Almost every Government Department has some policy issue that matters more to older people than to any other group.

The Service Personnel and Veterans Agency is located in my constituency. I will spend the next three days attending various Blackpool veterans week events, because I know that matters, not least to my older constituents. My hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North talked about the Arctic convoys medal, too.

Buses are another key issue, as in my constituency they are used predominantly by elderly residents. There are also complicated matters such as the past presence test, about which we are arguing with the European Union, as well as eligibility for benefits when abroad, and what happens when people return. There is a long list of such issues—and I have not yet mentioned long-term care for the elderly and the Dilnot report.

I am something of a nostalgia specialist. I like to look back at the first post-war Labour Government, and try to do so with a degree of fondness because they knew how to use royal commissions as a policy-making tool. They managed to secure all-party support, and produced some of our greatest welfare reforms. Sadly, the last Labour Government turned their back on royal commissions as a policy tool. I remember the royal commission on long-term care. It was a gargantuan exercise—voluminous, colourful, pretty—yet it was utterly ineffective because nothing ever happened after it. The journey to secure reform of long-term care has been long, arduous and, hitherto, fruitless, yet I retain some optimism that the current Government might find enough coins down the back of the sofa to get things right this time; I have my fingers crossed.

As well as the range of issues Members on both sides of the House have raised today, it should be stated that we face a demographic challenge, which we must overcome. It is time that we thought about setting up a royal commission on the consequences for this country of having an ageing population. It would cover a much wider remit than trying to solve a specific policy problem. It would assess what the challenges are and what they mean for every Government Department.

A key issue in this regard is the consequences of having a population that is—to put it crudely, perhaps—dying more slowly. We no longer die rapidly from heart attacks or other such conditions that might hit us in our prime. Now, the decline is much slower and gradual, and it is much more expensive for the taxpayer in providing appropriate care. That deserves some analysis.

The specific proposal to have a Cabinet Minister in this area is an interesting one. This question is not so much about policy towards the elderly, but about government architecture: how do we make things happen in government? As many have pointed out, we have Ministers for the disabled and for children. Both positions are at Minister of State level and both cross more than one Department. We also have a Minister for pensions—the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), whom I am delighted to see on the Front Bench today—and a Minister for adult social care. Perhaps they could arm-wrestle each other for the title of being the Minister for older people. That Minister could sit across both the relevant Departments and perhaps could have the same effect that the Ministers for children and for the disabled are having. I do not think that someone needs to be in the Cabinet to achieve things. There is a grave danger of our being more concerned about the name and where this person sits than about what they can actually achieve. We have had a history of tsars—an entire palace of Romanovs was produced by the previous Government—all of varying effectiveness, which was often not related at all to where they sat or where their home was. What matters is what someone does.

It is worth looking at what is done abroad, because there are some instructive lessons. I do not normally take the French as a model of how to behave in any situation in life, but they have often had a ministry of solidarity between the generations, as they put it. That is an interesting concept. We often battle in this country, with some saying that the young are getting too many resources and others saying that the elderly are. That French Department tried to resolve the two, to bring them together and to work out how intergenerational solidarity is actually created. To be honest, I do not know whether it worked terribly well, but it is an interesting idea that is worth thinking about.

Australia has a Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, who is No. 2 in the health Department. So the Australians do have a Minister for older people, although some might quibble about the linking of those two things. In Ireland, Áine Brady, a Fianna Fáil Minister in the previous Government, was Minister for Older People and Health Promotion. Sadly that particular Government left office—it was not sad for the Irish people, as this is democracy—and the current Government decided not to retain that title.

I note that the Labour party has a Front-Bench spokesman on this specific issue. I can go as far as to welcome that, but I note that in opposition we had a shadow Minister for coastal towns and that role did not survive the transfer to office. It is far easier in opposition for people to create the architecture around what they want to campaign on, rather than around the architecture of the Government buildings that they then have to slot into. So that provides a good example, too.

The example I pray in aid in particular is that of New Zealand, which does have a Minister for older people, sited in its Ministry of Health. New Zealand also has an office for senior citizens, situated in its Ministry of Social Development. That is a particularly interesting combination. Before Conservative Front Benchers start to worry that I am proposing yet another quango, I can tell them that they need not fear as nothing could be further from my mind. None the less, what both Ireland and New Zealand had in common was that they had first developed what they called a “positive ageing strategy”. So before they appointed the Minister, they ensured that the Minister had something to do. One of my concerns is that if we have a general Minister whose objective is to proof all policies so that older people do not experience a disbenefit, we will end up getting a bit fluffy and soggy. I would far rather have a set of very specific areas that affect older people that the Government should be focusing on; these would be certain policy areas that should be driven through.

As much as I love the Deputy Prime Minister—I adore him, I swear I do—I know that he is burdened by trying to cope with the problems of social mobility, which are being discussed in Westminster Hall at the moment. I am not sure that I would wish to give him older people to deal with as well, because he has to fit in trips to Rio; one man cannot do everything, surely. Rather than simply nominating one Cabinet Minister and tacking older people on to the end of their responsibilities, I would far prefer it if we created a new role that had a very specific remit, that had a positive ageing strategy behind it and that had only a handful of specific policy proposals to see through. In this country, we do not define the remit of a Government Department closely enough. We have aspirations, but often they read to me as waffle. A good example is HS2. One of the Department for Transport’s goals is to introduce HS2, which is fine, but it never says why that is particularly important. It states the goal, not the reasons for it. I would far rather we had a much narrower focus.

I welcome the debate and think it is an opportunity to put dignity at the forefront of everything we do in government. Sometimes, I am disappointed that Ministers do not always have dignity at the forefront of their minds in every decision they take. We should not need a new Minister to achieve that, but if that is what it takes then so be it. Once again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Portsmouth North on securing this important debate.

Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

The process that we have been undertaking involves all the individuals affected by the announcements that we have made. I have made it plain to the Remploy board that communication through this period of 90 days is very important; we have put a great deal of emphasis on that. Under the previous Administration, 29 factories were closed and none of them was taken forward outside Government control, whereas we are working hard and we have received 65 expressions of interest for Remploy businesses to move outside Government control. The House should welcome that.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

Does the Minister recall that the Sayce review stated clearly that there was “total consensus” among disabled charities and organisations that Remploy factories were

“not a model for the 21st century”?

Does the Minister agree that placing a concrete cap on the aspirations of disabled people, as some Labour Members wish to do, is morally wrong?

[Maria Miller]

I have to applaud my hon. Friend for saying things that Labour Members sometimes do not agree with. He is very courageous in that. The Government have set out their commitment to equality. It would not be right for us to see an increase in the amount of money being spent on segregated employment if we have equality at the centre of our thoughts—and we do.

Disability Benefits and Social Care

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that cuts to support for disabled people and carers pose a potential risk to their dignity and independence and will have wider social and economic costs; regrets that the Department for Work and Pensions has dropped the aim of achieving disability equality; whilst recognising that the disability living allowance (DLA) needs to be reformed, expresses concern that taking the DLA from 500,000 disabled people and contributory employment and support allowance from 280,000 former workers will take vital financial support from families under pressure; expresses further concern at the Work Programme’s failure to help disabled people and the mismanaged closure of Remploy factories; notes the pressing need for continuing reform to the work capability assessment (WCA) to reduce the human cost of wrong decisions; agrees with the eight Carers’ Week charities on the importance of recognising the huge contribution made by the UK’s 6.4 million carers and the need to support carers to prevent caring responsibilities pushing them into ill-health, poverty and isolation; and calls on the Government to ensure reform promotes work, independence, quality of life and opportunities for disabled people and their families, to restore the commitment to disability equality in the Department for Work and Pensions’ business plan, to conduct a full impact assessment of the combined effects of benefit and social care cuts on disabled people and carers, to reform WCA descriptors as suggested by charities for mental health, fluctuating conditions and sensory impairment and to re-run the consultation on the future of Remploy factories.

Once upon a time, the Conservatives liked to tell us that we were all in this together. Those words ring rather hollow today. After a Budget that gave us the granny tax and cuts to tax credits while giving a tax cut to millionaires, I think we can assume that the Chancellor was simply taking us for a ride. Yesterday, Bob Holman—the man who introduced the Secretary of State to Easterhouse—said it all. He said that he now had so much confidence in the Secretary of State’s belief that we were all in it together that he thought the Secretary of State should resign. Today’s debate is about many of the people Mr Holman stood up for. They are the one in four of our fellow citizens who are not all in it together with the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. They are not part of the Chipping Norton set. They do not get to go to the kitchen suppers. They are Britain’s disabled citizens. They are parents of disabled children. They are former workers, now disabled, who have paid in and paid their stamp and now find a Government determined to renege on a deal that they believed in.

In today’s debate on what I hope will be a consensual motion, there will be interventions from those on the Treasury Bench asking which cuts the Opposition support, and that is a perfectly reasonable line of argument. Let me deal with it at the outset. We do not believe that the spending review set out by this Government was wise. We warned of the risks of cutting too far and too fast. We also warned of the risks of a double-dip recession, and now we have one. The cost is astronomical. That is why the Chancellor had to explain to the House, in his last Budget, that he had to borrow £150 billion more than the Office for Budget Responsibility said Labour would have borrowed, as set out in our last Budget. In the Department for Work and Pensions, the bill for jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefit is now running out of control as a consequence of the Secretary of State’s failure to get people back into work, and £9 billion more than was originally forecast is now projected to be spent. Someone has to pay that bill, and the Government—the Cabinet and those on the Front Bench today—have decided that it should be paid by Britain’s disabled people.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has mentioned the disabled. Will he explain why Labour supports segregated employment—apartheid for the disabled—in Remploy? Are the disabled community not full members of society too?

[Mr Byrne]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, and I will talk about Remploy at length later in my speech. I hope that he will intervene on me again at that stage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

Those are precisely the kinds of worries that the House should reflect on because this is a very difficult and sensitive area of policy. The Government are not attempting to prosecute reform with any kind of consensus at all. That is why charities are resigning and resiling from their administration.

To the picture of ESA reform, I am afraid we have to add the Work programme. Once billed as the greatest back-to-work programme designed by human hand it is now missing its target for disabled people by 60%. Charity after charity says that the number of people referred to them for specialist help to get back to work is minuscule and tiny. St Mungo’s and now the Single Homeless Project have even gone to the lengths of resigning from the programme altogether.

This Government’s contempt is not reserved for disabled people without a job. There is plenty of it to go around for people with a job, including those Remploy workers in factories to whom the Secretary of State said, “You don’t produce very much at all. They are not doing any work at all. They are just making cups of coffee.” I hope that, in the course of this debate, the Secretary of State will take the opportunity to resign—I mean apologise. [Interruption.] I may not give way to calls on that point, but I congratulate the Sunday Express on its campaign, highlighting the disgraceful treatment of Remploy workers. We all know that Remploy has to change—that is the point I would make to Conservative Members—but this Government have decided to press ahead, closing these factories at breakneck speed. These factories are in constituencies where twice as many people as the national average are chasing every single job. How can it be right to say to these factories that they have until Monday to complete a business plan that, if it is not successful, will see the closure of factories in communities that need jobs and cannot afford to lose them?

[Paul Maynard]

Let me give the right hon. Gentleman another chance to answer the question put to him earlier. How many of these factories were closed under the last Labour Government? I know what the figure is; I wonder whether he knows what it is.

[Mr Byrne]

I will not deny the fact that a number of factories were closed under Labour, but that was part of a reform programme that saw £500 million added in support for the future of Remploy. The point for the House this afternoon is this: the time given to help Remploy factories figure out a future is too short.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Eleven people are chasing every single job in my constituency, and there is no point in the Secretary of State going to Merthyr to tell people to get on a bus to Cardiff because there are no jobs in Cardiff either. After the last round of redundancies in the Remploy factory in the Cynon Valley in 1988, only one man ever found a job again. With unemployment now running at 9% in my constituency, I ask the Secretary of State again: where are the jobs? Tell us: where are the jobs for disabled people?

[Paul Maynard]

rose—

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend speaks powerfully. This underlines the importance of a series of tests that the Government must pass on Remploy. I shall come to that, but I give way for the last time to the hon. Gentleman.

[Paul Maynard]

I am listening carefully and I promise not to intervene again. Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify something for me? Is he arguing that disabled people should not be expected to be able to work in the wider workplace? The implications of that are a lowering of the expectations of the disabled community and suggest that all we all are fit for is to have a label placed around our necks and then be put out of sight and out of mind? Is that really what he is suggesting?

Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)]

9. What steps his Department is taking to support families and individuals facing multiple disadvantages.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

10. What steps his Department is taking to support families and individuals facing multiple disadvantages.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

13. What steps his Department is taking to support families and individuals facing multiple disadvantages.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Duncan Smith]

It is true that voluntary sector organisations tend to deal with the whole person, rather than, like Government Departments and even sometimes local authorities, considering specific issues while forgetting that many of them knock on to each other. Such organisations have an important role to play. We should not ignore the fact that local authorities and Government Departments have to get their act together and make sure that when dealing with families with multiple problems, they talk to each other—always, there is a tendency for them not to do so. The good authorities hub up all the services around the family, which is at the centre, so Health, Work and Pensions, Education and all the Departments involved start to co-ordinate their activity, rather than spend all that money and get nowhere.

[Paul Maynard]

One of my wards, Claremont, is, according to the latest DCLG statistics, the fifth most deprived ward in the country, and I see daily the hurdles that families have to overcome to deal with some of the entrenched problems they face. I realise that no single agency can solve them, nor indeed can any single Government Department. Will the Secretary of State explain what he is doing with other Departments to ensure that all troubled families get a whole-of-Government approach, rather than a series of unconnected initiative-itises?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

My hon. Friend raises a good point. That is why the Prime Minister asked specifically that Louise Casey operate and head up a unit, reporting to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, which is looking at the 120,000 worst affected, most difficult families. The idea, as I said earlier, is that, working with her, local authorities nominate the families. She wants them to hub up services to make sure that the pooled amount of money they get is spent on life-changing actions, not the tokenistic box-ticking that too often takes place.

Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

20. What steps he is taking to reform bereavement benefit.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)]

A public consultation was launched in December 2011, seeking views on options for reforming bereavement benefits to ensure that they provide effective support to those who lose a husband, wife or civil partner. The consultation closes today and we will publish an official response to it in due course. That will summarise the comments received and outline the Government’s plans for reform.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the Minister for that reply. Bereavements clearly cause a period of great stress for the families involved, and I welcome the Government’s review to ensure that we have a suite of payments that are fit for purpose and easy to understand. Will he bear in mind the problem that a number of my constituents have encountered, which they are struggling to understand? Benefits allowances are payable based on either the national insurance contributions of the deceased person or the widow’s or widower’s status, whereas the bereavement payment is based only on the NI status of the deceased person, and in the depth of their grief many people struggle to understand what seems to them to be an anomaly.

[Steve Webb]

My hon. Friend is right to point out that different bereavement benefits, allowances and payments have different contribution rules. One of the issues on which we are consulting is whether they should be aligned in a more accessible way and although the consultation closes today, I shall take my hon. Friend’s question as a submission to it.

Welfare Reform Bill

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

That is absolutely right; that is how the Government are changing the system. Disabled young people, in recognition of their particular circumstances, have been assured since the 1970s—under Governments of both parties—of an independent income from the state. This Government are taking it away from them. As a result of this change, they will lose that security in exchange for very little saving at all to the Exchequer. The Child Poverty Action Group points out that the current arrangement helps

“young disabled people who may be vulnerable to forming unsuitable relationships, or may avoid forming a suitable relationship due to fears about losing an independent income”,

as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) correctly said. The current arrangements give the chance of a more secure and independent life to people who would, through absolutely no fault of their own, find that very difficult otherwise. At less than £10 million a year, that is a price worth paying for the independence of severely disabled young people. I urge the House to reject the Government motion.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am pleased to welcome the vast bulk of what the Government are doing. It is a pleasure to hear that people are not being defined by their condition and are not being forced to have decisions taken about them on the basis of a label or a particular condition. That is why, as I say, I strongly welcome much of what the Government are doing.

I would, however, like to reflect briefly on amendment 23, which relates to the youth passport. It is not that I particularly disagree with what the Government are doing, but I wish to focus on a few questions, which I hope the Minister will answer, about how we intend to ensure that these young people are given, as it says in the impact assessment, the “equal footing” that the Government rightly want them to have.

My primary concern is that these young people have not been able to acquire national insurance contributions because they are severely disabled. I would welcome some clarity about the expectation that they will accrue these contributions and be protected in the welfare system at the point at which they become an adult. Despite reading the impact assessment and all the debates in the House of Lords and listening carefully to what has been said today, I am still not entirely clear how that will be achieved.

[Chris Grayling]

Before my hon. Friend moves on and in case I do not have a chance to respond at the end of the debate, I would like to draw his and the House’s attention to the fact that people who leave contributory ESA will still be able to accrue national insurance credits in the same way as happens today for those who are not on contributory JSA. Ultimately, they will still have the same pension entitlement they would have done had they been in work.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the Minister for that helpful clarification.

Secondly, I want to reflect on the comments pre-empted by what was said by the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) and perhaps go beyond the implementation of this system to look at the wider impact on the ability of individuals to form independent relationships.

As the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) has recognised, we are talking largely about the impact on human behaviour. I am concerned—it is possibly a mistaken fear—that if people were to enter into a relationship and cease to be an independent household, they might become dependent on their partner’s income. That could be a deterrent to forming a meaningful relationship. I may be a simple Member of Parliament who fails to understand this complex issue, but the all-party parliamentary group for young disabled people, which I chair, has asked me expressly to raise this issue, which is at the heart of its concerns about this amendment. I would welcome some clarification of how the Government think people will behave in real life as opposed to in the benefit system.

I shall not detain the House any longer. The Government have my full support on these amendments, but I would like more clarity about how they view their implementation.

[Dame Anne Begg]

Let me say from the outset that I support the Lords amendments and do not agree with the Government’s motion to disagree. I shall talk about two main aspects: one is the time limitation and the second is the can of worms that I have managed to open this afternoon about the youth rate.

The time limit is unfair to people who have worked all their lives, done the right thing and thought that part of their payment of national insurance would provide them with some kind of insurance scheme so that if an unfortunate accident or ill health befell them, they would qualify for an income replacement benefit—in this case, employment support allowance—regardless of their actual income. People believed that it would work like any other insurance policy and would pay out if the unfortunate happened. The Government are breaking that link between the concept of an insurance policy and how much and for how long it will pay.

People suffering from cancer are often used as an example of a group that will fall into the work-related activity category of ESA: cancer patients will often not be well enough to go back to work within the year. Other groups of people have fluctuating conditions and some have slowly progressive neurological conditions. From everything the Minister said today, the assumption seems to be that people in the work-related activity group will move towards work, but some will be on the opposite journey, moving further and further away from work as their condition deteriorates.

Because we assess people not on their condition but on how their condition affects them when they go through the assessment, someone with multiple sclerosis or in the early stages of Huntington’s disease might not qualify for the ESA group, might end up in the WRA group and might qualify only some time in the future. They are likely to be a group that has already been in work and will have fallen out of work precisely because they have been diagnosed with these conditions. Although many of us—and probably those people, too—want to be in work, we live in the real world where employers will often not take the risk of employing someone with that type of condition, especially if the person has already lost one job precisely because of it.

I think the time limit is arbitrary and unfair, and I wish the Government would look at it again. The two-year provision is arbitrary as well—[Interruption.] In fact, I do not agree with time-limited provisions at all, but this is the best we have; it is twice as good as the Government’s proposal. [Interruption.] I am sorry that some Conservative Members at the back of the Chamber find this so funny. The people with Parkinson’s disease and MS do not find it funny. It is their lives that are being undermined, and it is they who will not have an independent income. It is my constituents—and, indeed, those of Government Members sitting at the back of the Chamber—who, because they have saved all their lives, will not qualify for income-related ESA and will suffer as a result. They will lose their independent incomes, and their household incomes, although they may have been cataclysmically affected, may still be too high for them to qualify for income support. Despite what those Government Members sitting at the back may think, income support levels are very low, and the actual level of income on which such households will have to live will therefore not be what they may have expected.

Disability Hate Crime

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) on securing this debate on a very important issue.

I, too, met the family of Gary Skelly on Monday, and we watched the 15-minute video they have put together as part of their FACE Facts campaign. Gary Skelly, a 53-year-old man who lived in Norris Green, Liverpool, was attacked just over a year ago—punched for no obvious reason, and killed. The perpetrator was sentenced to seven years for manslaughter, so, unfortunately, even the amendment that the hon. Lady and I have tabled to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill would not have given him the sentence I feel he deserved. What happened left the family not just bemused and confused, but greatly distressed. They simply could not understand what had happened to someone about whom they, and many in the community, cared greatly.

I consider myself relatively fortunate in Blackpool, in that I have an excellent third-party reporting centre and the Disability Hate Crime Network is very strong. The hon. Lady has already mentioned Stephen Brookes, one of my constituents, who helps up and down the land in ensuring that the fight to have this form of hate crime recognised is prosecuted as widely as possible. Yet I can still be shocked. About six months ago, a father and his son came to one of my constituency surgeries. The son, in his early twenties, had had a serious car crash a few years previously and now has a developmental learning disorder. He was trying to go to college, but faced abuse from neighbours and cat-calls as he walked there, and was now dropping out. I thought, “My word, even in Blackpool, where we are really trying, this is still occurring.” But what really shocked me most was that it was occurring not in my constituency, but in my own road, where I live, and had been going on for many months without my being aware of it, not 100 yards from my front door. Such incidents are hidden in plain sight, as the title of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report makes clear. It is probably happening in very close proximity to where we all live, and we might not be aware of it.

I want to focus today on an aspect of disability hate crime that does not yet get sufficient attention: the needs of many people with learning disabilities, who are subjected to what is increasingly being called mate crime. Why has it developed? Some 50 years ago, society’s answer for many people with learning disabilities was to shut them away out of sight—hide them away, so society did not have to confront them. Ensuring, rightly, that they live fulfilling lives in their local communities, participating in everything we all do, has put them at risk from a few ignorant individuals who do not understand what a learning disability is. That makes them vulnerable.

The hon. Lady mentioned the types of press coverage that we see. I welcome the fact that serious examples of disability hate crime are now being covered and referred to as such, but what we do not hear about every day is the so-called friend who relieves someone of a £10 note. That might not seem a particularly large crime, certainly not in financial value, but if a so-called friend of someone with a learning disability abuses their trust, that is a far greater crime, in human value, than if they were stealing £1 million. It is not just a financial crime; it is an attack on the person’s humanity and identity.

Something that the Skelly family stressed to me on Monday—indeed, we began the discussion by talking about it—was the labels that people put on others. Yes, society is very complex, and I am sure that we all find it difficult to deal with at times, but it is much more difficult for someone with a learning disability. We apply these labels to try to help ourselves to simplify the world around us and to help us to understand things that might be at the margins of our understanding, about which we know we ought to think in a particular way. We put the labels on them, then think we understand them. The labels are often the beginning of a prejudice—a way of assuming that someone acts in a certain way or that they are a particular way because of how they are. That is perhaps the most dangerous thing we do in our society. We cope with the people at the margins—people we do not quite understand—by just putting labels on them.

Two or three months ago, we heard about the sentencing of the murderers of Gemma Hayter, a lady in Rugby with a learning disability who had gone to visit her so-called friends and had been tied up, locked in a toilet, forced to drink her own urine, led to a railway line, wrapped in plastic bags and stabbed to death. Her attackers got the sentence they deserved, but sadly they could not face the 30-year tariff, which I believe such people should face, proposed in our amendment. That incident brought home to me the vulnerability of such people.

There are things that the Government can do, and I urge Ministers to consider them. It is vital that the Government take on board, as Mencap is requesting, the Law Commission proposals to extend the definition of harm to include exploitation, particularly financial exploitation. I hope that when we see a social care Bill, we can put the adult safeguarding boards on a statutory basis. Sadly, no organisational structure can stop evil occurring in a person’s head, but we can try to do something to ensure that when we identify people at risk, the different agencies involved are at least made aware of what is going on. If people are talking to people, and agencies are talking to agencies, we will at least have some hope that, just maybe, solutions can be found.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) for securing the debate. Is he aware of a recent case in, I think, Bristol? A gentleman with learning disabilities went into a barbers, and the barber thought it amusing to shave “fool” on his head—an unbelievable story. I cannot remember the details, but the punishment was lamentably low.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Lady for that classic example of how unfeeling and insensitive individuals can be. I hope that the punishment is that the local community boycotts that barber, because he does not deserve to have any customers if that is how he treats them.

A more fundamental issue that concerns me is that the Government are not approaching properly the philosophical status of day care centres. That might seem like a slightly abstruse point to make, but in many social services departments these days, the day care centre seems to be an unfashionable creation. Some want people to be out in the community all the time, as though a day care setting somehow denied them the right to be in the community. That concerns me greatly. For many people with a learning disability, particularly those of an older generation, a day care setting offers the very support network that so many of them crave, and in pursuit of which they often put themselves at risk from so-called friends.

I urge the Minister to consult with her colleagues to ensure that day care centres are not written out of the picture. We have an excellent one in Blackpool called the Rock Centre, which is indeed a rock for many in the community. Although the activities that people there engage in might not strike us as terribly meaningful—

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend for allowing me to make a quick point; I very much support what he says. One challenge of disability and learning disability is that people in Whitehall and the professions often think that they know best. For the past 15 years, the direction of travel has been to reduce day care. I endorse totally what he says: for a lot of disabled people, particularly those with learning disabilities, the reduction in day care centres has reduced their quality of life. I support him in pushing the Minister to ensure that that understanding filters through to the professions and Whitehall.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment and agree wholeheartedly. It struck me when I spoke to users of the Rock that they feel happy, fulfilled and, above all, safe and secure in that environment. That is surely what we want for the most vulnerable in society: that they feel safe and secure, that they are not placed at risk and, most importantly, that anyone who dares to presume that they can inflict their prejudices and their crippled attitude to human life on those vulnerable individuals feels the full force not just of the law but of the local community’s criticism and condemnation.