HC Deb 28 January 1958 vol 581 cc329-40

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Colonel J. H. Harrison.]

9.42 p.m.

Miss Jennie Lee (Cannock)

I wish to raise an issue of which I have given the Minister previous notice. He was kind enough to ask me to inform him in advance rather more specifically of the particular problems with which I was concerned. My concern this evening is not with men and women who are fully disabled; though that is a tragic and important subject, I am not inquiring about that on this occasion. I am concerned with men and women in industry who have been partially disabled, who are certified as fit for light work, who set about finding light work, but who far too often discover that there is no employment whatever available to them.

I raised this matter last in November, and the reply I then had from the Government Front Bench was that a person certified as fit for light work, provided he was fully insured, could draw unemployment benefit for nineteen months. The Minister seemed to think that that was a satisfactory reply, even in cases where workers had lost arms or legs, suffering severe disabling injury. Incidentally, I should like to include, though they are not now included, men suffering from pneumoconiosis or severe bronchitis, which plague us particularly in the mining areas. If a man is injured or disabled and has to live with his disability, not for nine or nineteen months but for the rest of his life, not only on compassionate grounds and out of a concern for the individual but on social and economic grounds, much more should be done for him than is done at the present time.

I particularly want the Government spokesmen to tell me how the Government think it is possible or why it is just to ask any man to face the future, when his statutory benefit is exhausted, with absolutely nothing except National Assistance benefit. Until recently, a husband and wife in this position were able to draw 67s. a week, and a rent allowance—a few shillings have been added—but I should like to know what the Minister thinks is a reasonable sum to live on when, because of their employment, they are no longer able to continue to work and to earn at the level they enjoyed before the illness.

My next point is one that is becoming an increasingly nervous issue with many of our people in the Midlands. What provision is being made to see that employment is made available? There is a very wonderful paragraph which I hope all hon. Members have seen in the 1956 Report of the National Assistance Board. This official document answers, in a very splendid sense indeed, those who like to call the people of this country work-shy and abuse them in every possible way. Referring to unemployment, the Report says: …it is pertinent to ask why people apparently fit to earn their own living should be drawing assistance at the end of more than a decade of full employment. This is, of course, the 1956 Report. Unfortunately, we always have to deal with reports that are a little out of date, but the essential facts are still as stated. The Report continues: With this in mind, the Board examined closely the personal and family circumstances of about 32,000 persons who were under 60 and had been out of work for more than a few weeks. The results of this examination are recorded…. They disclose many problems, but do not support any suggestion that workshyness is extensive, since three out of four of those interviewed, and more than four out of five of those who had been out of work for three years or more, were found to be under some sort of physical or mental handicap. I think that is enough to show what is the essence of this problem. It shows that people are willing to work and have tried to find it but, because of some disability—sometimes physical, sometimes mental—they have not been able to find it. I have in mind a number of cases affecting mining families, although I am not raising this as either a constituency or a mining issue but as a general question.

Why we are particularly nervous at the moment in the Midlands is that whenever there is unemployment, or the fear of it, or a situation in which overtime has all gone and men in Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton feel that they are down to minimum wages, we get the repercussions in the neighbouring areas. It is bad enough in ordinary circumstances for men to find employment, but it is doubly bad for the handicapped man or woman. I would therefore be very grateful if I could get a statement from the Government Front Bench as to why it is necessary for a person certified fit for light work and willing to do it to have his benefit stopped and to have to go on National Assistance.

The second question arises particularly when there is fear of rising unemployment, and there is a growing amount of evidence to support that fear. What steps are the Government taking to protect those suffering from handicaps—the most vulnerable and exposed of all the unemployed seeking work?

9.50 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour and National Service (Mr. Robert Carr)

The hon. Lady the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee) has raised the question of the problems of a category of people with whom we must all have very great sympathy, and I am sure that we all want to do everything we can to help in these difficult cases. As I hope I shall show later on, and as I am sure the hon. Lady will recognise, we have done a great deal over the last ten years or more in this country to solve this sort of problem. That the problem is not yet completely solved is undeniable, and it must be our aim to improve still further, but, as I hope to show, a great deal has been done already.

There are two main aspects of this question. The first affects the provisions under the National Insurance Act for stopping payment of sickness benefit when it has been certified that a man or woman is fit for light work. The second aspect is that of finding suitable employment for these workers on being so certified. Let me say, and I am sure that the hon. Lady agrees with this, that work is far better for these people than any benefit, however generous, and that has been the whole theme of our effort since the war in dealing with disabled and otherwise handicapped people.

I think it is recognised that we have had great success in that direction. Let me also say that, in our experience at the Ministry of Labour in trying to find employment for disabled and handicapped people, we find little or no evidence of any unwillingness to work. The greatest desire of all but a very tiny number of these people is to find a job, not only for their own material well-being, but for their psychological and mental satisfaction—the feeling that they are doing something useful and are active members of the community. The number of laggards, who exist here and there, is quite infinitesimal in any evidence that I have ever seen.

I am in some difficulty about replying to the first, and, as I take it, the major question which the hon. Lady asked, because it concerns the provisions of the National Insurance Act, and, as she knows, they are both technical and complicated. I feel that they ought to be pursued with my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance rather than with me.

The hon. Lady quite rightly said that she had been in touch with me before this Adjournment debate. I wanted to get in touch with her because, having seen her Question last November, I felt that one of the main points which she wanted to raise might be more concerned with the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance than with the Ministry of Labour. It turns out, of course, as is inevitable, that at least part, if not the major part, of what the hon. Lady wishes to pursue is in that field. I hope that she will appreciate that my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to that Ministry has been here to listen, and, of course, that if I cannot cope with that side of it tonight, not only will my hon. Friend have heard the case, but the hon. Lady herself will not be debarred from following up that side of it on another occasion.

All I want to say about the National Insurance aspect is that any decision to discontinue sickness benefit under this procedure is based on medical advice from independent medical review authorities, and this advice is given after consultation with the family doctor of each applicant. In this way care is taken to ensure that people are not signed off sickness benefit and thrown on to the labour market unless they are genuinely fitted for light work.

The continuation of unemployment benefit, once they have been so signed off the receipt of sickness benefit, is again a National Insurance point, although there are many people who, because unemployment benefit is paid by the local officers of my Ministry, regard my right hon. Friend and myself as the appropriate people to question; in fact, we are merely agents of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in this matter.

Another point which I should like to make about the rôle of the Ministry of Labour is that, although the regulations are a matter for the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, where a person's sickness benefit is stopped and he is certified as fit far light work, his case is handled by the Ministry of Labour, first to pay him unemployment benefit and then, more importantly, to find him suitable work. Therefore, the efficiency and humanity of the services which such a man or woman receives depend upon the Ministry of Labour's local officers, and I assure the hon. Lady that we do our best to take that responsibility seriously.

In 1956, a few cases came to light in which gaps had occurred between the stoppage of sickness benefit and the payment of unemployment benefit, and applicants had had to have recourse to National Assistance during that gap. They had also been inconvenienced and, I am afraid, possibly distressed by being summoned to repeated medical examinations over quite short periods I should like to assure the hon. Lady that, when these cases came to light, prompt action was taken by my Department. As far as we know, the matters complained of have been entirely put right and we have since had no similar incidents reported to us.

I know that that is off the main point which the hon. Lady has raised, but it is important to these people to feel that when these changes are made in their status they are carefully looked after. I wanted, first, to admit that we had found these cases a few years ago and had done our best to see that they were stopped. As far as we know, they have been.

What is the scale of the problem which the hon. Lady is raising? She has made it clear that she was not raising it on any narrow constituency level and, although I shall say something about Cannock at the end, I also want to treat the matter first on a national level. Throughout the country about 14,000 cases such as the hon. Lady has in mind, where sickness benefit is stopped, are reported to us annually by the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. In passing, I might add that in Cannock there were 19 such cases during 1957. But, of course, the numbers who come to us in this way after stoppage of sickness benefit do not constitute anything like the whole of our register of people needing employment and fit only for light work. They are only a proportion of the number of people for whom we need to find light work.

A high proportion of those who come to us are, of course, either on the register of disabled persons or would qualify to be on it. I noted that the hon. Lady said that she was not referring to the seriously or severely disabled people. I understand that but, nevertheless, from the Government's point of view, in weighing up the scale of the problem, the size of the register of disabled is probably the only guide that we have to the problem which we have to meet. Although the people to whom the hon. Lady particularly refers may not be the most severely disabled, I should be surprised if the majority of them are either not on or qualified to be on the register of disabled persons. Therefore, the best measure of the unsatisfied need for light work to which we can point is the total number of unemployed on the disabled person's register.

At last December the number of disabled unemployed was 46,090, which represents about 6 per cent. of the total register of disabled persons and compares with about 63,000 in 1950. I will come back to more figures in a moment, but I think those figures worth giving at this stage because they show that, as far as we can measure it, the seriousness of this problem has been decreasing and certainly not increasing.

How do we tackle the problem of placing all those who need light work? In the Ministry of Labour, as the hon. Lady knows, we cannot, unfortunately, create new jobs because we have no means of doing that. What we can do—and we try to do this as well as we can—

It being Ten o'clock, the Motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Colonel J. H. Harrison.]

Mr. Carr

What we can do is to make the best use of the opportunities which exist. To that end, we have built up over the years a specialised placing service for these disabled and handicapped people. The spearhead of that service is our corps of disablement resettlement officers. I think that the hon. Lady can take it for granted that the kind of people she has mentioned tonight would come under the care and attention of these officers. In all our employment exchanges there is at least one officer who has a special responsibility for this work. That is important, because it is specialist work and specialists are doing it.

We have, also, facilities for rehabilitation and training. This is an obvious point, but it is one that has borne great fruit since the war. If we can give special rehabilitation and training to many of these people it will be found that they can be fitted for categories of work which not so many years ago would have been considered right outside their Scope and ability. About 10,000 people are now admitted to our industrial rehabilitation units every year, and of them no less than 80 per cent. are recovering from recent sickness or injury. In other words, this industrial rehabilitation service is particularly important to the category of persons whom the hon. Lady has in mind, and has proved of immense value in helping this kind of person.

Beyond the actual rehabilitation there is the question of training. Since 1945, an average of about 4,000 disabled persons per year have been trained under the vocational training scheme and placed in employment. Our disablement resettlement officers, our industrial rehabilitation units and our various training centres are the main weapons which we have at our command in the Ministry of Labour in trying to help these people. The statistics show that whilst, as I said at the beginning, there is a problem still remaining, we have not been by any means unsuccessful in making inroads into it.

The achievement is shown perhaps most clearly by the decrease in the number of registered disabled unemployed. In 1948, that number was about 75,000 and at the end of 1957 it had fallen to 46,000. Of course, still more dramatic has been the reduction in the number of severely disabled, which has fallen from an average of 10,600 in 1948 to only 3,700 at the end of 1957. Although I realise that the hon. Lady has in mind categories other than the official registered disabled, what has been happening as regards the disabled is the best guide—and I think it is a good guide—to the success that we have had in finding suitable light employment for people who are handicapped either by some permanent disability or for shorter periods by the after effects of illness.

Although there has been some slight rise in recent months in the unemployed disabled the end-1957 figure of 46,000 is still encouragingly low by comparison with the past years, and is, in fact, about 17,000 lower than it was in 1950. Therefore, whilst we must not be complacent about the problem which remains, it is fair to say that we have achieved a great deal of success in finding employment for those people capable only of light or limited work, and the problem is much smaller than it was a few years ago. When the hon. Lady asks what are we doing about it, all I can say to her is that we shall continue to use the same methods as we have been using with success in the past.

The hon. Lady expressed fears about what might happen in areas where the unemployment position gets more difficult. Of course, those are fears which we must all have and I am, frankly, ready to say that I have watched this point with some concern during the last year, for example, in the Midlands area when there was a recession in the motor industry.

One of the encouraging signs which we have found is that, on the whole, there has been no tendency for employers to put off the handicapped or limited capacity workers in preference to the others. That is something which many of us feared might happen if ever there were a setback, but the evidence has been most encouraging in showing that that does not occur. While, of course, the general employment position must affect our opportunities for placing people who need limited work, nevertheless our experience so far has shown that temporary setbacks in employment do not have any undue effects on the employment of this sort of person.

I freely admit that the problem of finding work for disabled persons or people capable of only light work is more difficult in mining and heavy industry areas than it is elsewhere, but successive Governments have done much to encourage industries to set up factories in these areas and numbers of handicapped people have found employment in the new factories. One has only to visit South Wales to realise what has been achieved in that way and that it could not have been achieved in any other way.

While I do not want to dodge the issue, the division of responsibility for employment among Departments has its difficulties and the distribution of industry is a matter for the President of the Board of Trade. I can assure the hon. Lady that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour is consulted about these problems and does advise about them. I can assure her that we do not wait until we are asked for advice. We regard it as one of our main jobs in the Ministry of Labour to make sure that information about the employment trend and problems in an area is forcibly brought home to my right hon. Friend, or to any other Government Department capable of taking action.

I have spoken about the figures on a national scale and, finally, I will deal with the position in the Cannock Exchange area. There are 38 men and six women disabled and unemployed and of the disabled men, 32 are regarded as suitable for light employment. Seventeen happen to be ex-coal miners and 25 are 50 years of age or more. Over the last twelve months, as I mentioned, 19 cases of persons whose sickness benefit has been stopped were notified to the Cannock Exchange and there are nine persons of that category unemployed at the moment.

To put the problem into perspective, it should be recorded that against these figures of unemployed, during 1957, the Cannock Exchange placed 46 disabled persons in employment and during the last three months, that is to say, November, December and January, placed 16 people in light industrial jobs in the Cannock area, besides which we know that at least six others found light jobs for themselves. The number of placings when related to the number of cases arising and the number remaining unemployed is not unsatisfactory and shows that there is a reasonable amount of placing activity in this field.

While the figures as a whole may be satisfactory, I know that among the small number of unemployed there may be particularly hard and difficult cases of persons who have long been in need of jobs. While, too, there may be some comfort in the figures, I assure the hon. Lady that I realise that the good average and overall figures do not bring comfort to the few less fortunate persons who provide us with a particularly difficult placing problem. That is the position in the Cannock Exchange area.

I repeat that we understand the importance of this problem. It is fair to say that our success over the years in finding light employment has been considerable, as a result of which the overall number of Unemployed in need of light employment has been steadily falling. I can only assure the hon. Lady that we shall do our best, both in her area and throughout the country, to use our placing service in the Ministry of Labour with energy and imagination, and will try to keep up the progress which I have been able to record as having been made since the war.

10.10 p.m.

Mr. H. Boardman (Leigh)

I do not wish to detract from the splendid work which the Ministry of Labour has done in connection with the employment of disabled people. I was closely associated with it at one time, and it is a job of which the Ministry can be proud. On the other hand, we should be deluding ourselves if we thought that all was well; it is not, especially in the case of the more severely disabled.

Several cases have been brought to my notice, and I happen to have with me the papers concerning one of my constituents who is severely disabled with arthritis in both arms. The case papers say: His right arm cannot be straightened at the elbow and is permanently bent at about 120 degrees…right arm has little strength in it…He cannot use a table knife properly, handle a pair of scissors with it or lift a cup for drinking without assistance from the left hand. The left wrist is incapable of movement and is quite stiff, but he has the use of his left hand and fingers. This man was self-employed, and he has been signing the disabled register at the employment exchange. Because he was self-employed he cannot draw unemployment benefit, but the tribunal which heard his case says that he is not incapable of work within limits.

I would ask the Parliamentary Secretary what kind of employment we can hope to find for a man like this, who is literally paralysed in both arms. What is the use of saying that he is capable of light work, or that he is capable of work within limits, when it is known by the people who made that designation that a job cannot possibly be found for him?

It so happens that my constituency employs about 70 per cent. of its insured population in the cotton mills and coal mines. The cotton mills demand nimble fingers and the coal mines require great physical strength. Therefore, seven out of ten jobs are closed to this man from the word "Go." If we take into account all the other industries comprising the remaining 30 per cent., we see that it is quite obvious that if we take out the retail distribution services and the public services there can be no opportunity for this man ever to be employed again. I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will look at this label, "Fit for light work". Before such a label is attached to a claimant one should have some regard to the ability of local industry to employ a man who is so physically incapacitated.

The case that I have cited is not mealy an odd one. What is happening is not doing any service to the claimant. In fact, it is cruel because this man is denied employment benefit unless he can go back on to the sick register. It is doing the hon. Gentleman's Department a very great disservice. People are now coming to regard the disabled persons' register in the same cynical way as they regarded the appointments register for a very long time.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at fourteen minutes past Ten o'clock.