HC Deb 21 May 1991 vol 191 cc823-30

Lords amendment: No. 25, in page 10, line 10, leave out at least one of the eight weeks" and insert one or more of the 56 days

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security (Miss Ann Widdecombe)

I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Paul Dean)

With this it will be convenient to take Lords amendments Nos. 26, 27, 29 and 31.

Miss Widdecombe

I understand that the Opposition have requested that we debate this group of amendments with Lords amendment No. 28 and their amendment (a), but because Lords amendments Nos. 25, 26, 27, 29 and 31 are all drafting amendments intended to ensure that the Bill has the effect intended, I propose to concentrate on Lords amendment No. 28 and the Opposition's amendment (a). If there are any questions on the other amendments I will return to them at the end of the debate.

Amendment No. 28 clarifies the drafting of clause 6. People who have an income-related benefit and are also receiving a disability premium will satisfy the qualifying benefit test. It was pointed out in Committee that the original drafting appeared to require such people to satisfy additional conditions. That is not our intention. We had a further look at the clause and decided that an amendment was necessary to make that clear.

The power to prescribe the circumstances in which a claimant with an income-related benefit satisfies the qualifying benefit test is necessary because the disability premium is described in regulations rather than in the 1986 Act. The disability working allowance regulations must cross-refer to those.

However, the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Morris) would have a different effect. It would make a small but significant dent in the rule that all DWA claimants must be getting a long-term disability benefit before they claim DWA.

That rule—the qualifying benefit rule—has been debated at length in the House and in another place, and it has been accepted that there are good reasons for keeping the rule intact. In particular, the rule helps us to devise a streamlined method of deciding claims so that people who are entitled to DWA will get their money quickly. That is obviously essential for any benefit which is designed to encourage people to try work.

We have agreed in previous debates on DWA that it is essential that claims should be decided quickly and that claimants should have confidence that the money will be available in a few days. One of the obstacles to speedy administration of claims to disability benefit is the need to establish that the claimant is disabled. We have been able to simplify the test for DWA and to base it to a considerable degree on self-assessment, simply because every recipient will already have passed a disability test in respect of another benefit for long-term sick and disabled people. The simple fact that he or she has qualified for a disability benefit in the past or at the time of applying will establish that a long-term disability is present. In other words, it is a passported benefit. We believe that that is the way to get the money quickly and simply to the claimant.

It is also essential that claimants should understand the conditions and be able to fulfil them easily. I believe that disabled people will welcome being able to do without medical examinations, which have bedevilled so many claims for benefits in the past, and that it will make an enormous difference to speed, efficiency and simplicity.

Mr. Michael Meacher (Oldham, West)

The Minister will not be surprised to learn that we support Lords amendment No. 26 which cuts out any reference to disability premiums on the face of the Bill, but we have our reservations about Lords amendment No. 28, which apparently allows the Government to bring them back through regulations.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Morris) for his ingenuity in moving an amendment in lieu which, after 20 years in Parliament, I did not know could be done in respect of Lords amendments. My right hon. Friend has effectively helped us to make our point.

The whole point of amendment (a) is to provide an alternative way of qualifying for the disability working allowance for all disabled people on benefits. The functional test already proposed by the Government to identify whether someone is disabled could also clearly be used for the initial claim of DWA for those disabled people on income support, housing benefit or community charge benefit not receiving the disability premiums.

I stress that that will entail only a minimal amount of extra administration—that was not the objection that the hon. Lady brought forward—because it will simply be applying the standardised test which adjudication officers will already be using, especially when disabled people repeat their claims for DWA every six months.

The amendment will produce consistency throughout the different claiming periods and it will ensure that all disabled people claiming benefits can take advantage of the DWA scheme and will not be allowed to fall through the net.

I am not persuaded by the Minister's argument that the Bill should be preserved as it is simply on grounds of speed. I do not believe that that can justify a rejection of our amendment, but, quite apart from that—I am not persuaded that the procedure could not be speeded up—the real objection is that a lot of disabled people will otherwise fall through the net.

When people claim DWA for the first time, they have to show that they are disabled, provide proof of qualifying for benefit and show that they are at a disadvantage in getting work, all of which we have gone through many times. Unfortunately, one of the main problems is the extremely narrow way in which the term "qualifying benefits" is defined. It is difficult to believe that that is not the reason why the Government are so keen to keep it.

At first sight, it may seem that there is a fairly lengthy list of benefits. It includes those claiming disability living allowance, severe disablement allowance, invalidity benefit and the disability premiums associated with income support, housing benefit, or community charge benefit. However, most people who claim disability premiums are allowed to do so only because they are in receipt of one of the other benefits listed. Given these pretty stringent rules and the enormous pitfalls that there are in defining disadvantage, the Bill as drafted will effectively exclude thousands of disabled people who may otherwise have been helped by the benefit. That is our concern in pressing the amendment.

We believe—this is at the heart of the issue—that the key principle should be that the burden of proof in qualifying for disability working allowance should be whether or not a person is disabled, not whether a potential claimant happens to have the right kind of benefit at the right time.

Other amendments have been proposed throughout the passage of the Bill. We have sought firmly to establish this principle by seeking to include disabled people who are not necessarily claiming these benefits. Unfortunately, our amendments have been repeatedly rejected by the Government on certain grounds. A new ground has been introduced tonight—speed. Furthermore, the question of cost was raised in another place, a point to which I shall return. In addition, reference was made to the anticipated administrative difficulties in defining disability.

The amendment would overcome those problems. It would incur less expense. A disabled person wishing to claim DWA would still have to be in receipt of income support, housing benefit or community charge benefit. It would also be relatively easy to define disability because the functional test, which will already be used for some claimants, could also be applied to those disabled people who do not necessarily have a disability premium.

I repeat that the main point is that the Bill, as drafted, will attract only a very small proportion of disabled people who wish to make the transition from surviving on benefits to employment. The Government's calculation of the potential claimants of DWA—I believe the figure is 50,000 —is pretty small compared with their own estimate of the number of disabled people wanting work. The social and community planning research figures, which many people believe are very conservative, show that there are at least 285,000 disabled people wanting work, which is more than five times the number of people who are expected to claim DWA.

There are several categories of people who, if we leave the Bill as it is at the moment, will be left out. I intend to spell out those categories and to ask the Minister to address them. I refer, first, to people who have received incorrect advice and who, therefore, are not receiving disability benefits, even though they are entitled to them. Secondly, there are those people who initially failed to qualify for DWA on income grounds but who, for a number of reasons, have suffered a drop in their income. They may well be entitled to housing benefit, community charge benefit, or even income support, but they will have forfeited their right to a premium. For instance, a person with a fluctuating disability may need to reduce the hours that he or she works. Hence, the earnings would drop. If, however, that person received the premium longer than eight weeks ago, he or she still cannot claim DWA.

Thirdly, there are those people who are in the process of claiming a qualifying benefit but who have not yet received proof of entitlement. The Minister made a point about speed. I make a point about exclusion, which is much more important. For example, this category includes blind people who are waiting for their registration certificate to come through. A fourth category consists of people who do not qualify for the qualifying disability premiums, not because they are not disabled but because the rules for these benefits are so narrowly defined. For example, disability living allowance, which will be one of the main routes to receiving the disability premium, does not necessarily provide for all people with severe disabilities.

I have been circulated—as have, I imagine, other hon. Members—by the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux. It has provided a number of examples, collected from individual citizens advice bureaux, of people who, as the Bill is drafted, will for these reasons be excluded. I intend to refer to a few of them. There is the case of a single man with grand mal epilepsy who had been homeless for over a year. The local authority refused to accept him as being in priority need under the homelessness legislation. He had not obtained work throughout this period because of ill health, but he could have obtained a doctor's sick note declaring him unfit for work in the past 28 weeks—a condition that would have led to him qualifying for the disability premium. The exclusion of homeless people from entitlement to premium meant that this would have been a fruitless exercise. He would have been excluded under the Bill, as drafted.

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Another example is that of a single parent who suffered a serious criminal assault and had to give up work. She was told by her local social security office that she did not have to worry about submitting sick notes because she was a single parent and therefore did not have to sign on as available for work. That meant that until the citizens advice bureau intervened—which I am glad to say it did —she did not receive a disability premium. Therefore, she would have been ineligible to claim disability working allowance.

Those are clear examples, provided by the Spastics Society and NACAB, of significant and important groups of people who will be excluded.

On the question of the functional test, we and many others believe that there is a strong case to be made for the value of self-assessment—in other words, disabled people defining their own disabilities. The Government have proposed a six-month functional test for some people claiming DWA to establish that they are still disabled—and also for a few initial claimants. Surely that test could also be used in the initial claim by disabled people who, for the reasons outlined above, do not have the disability premium. At the moment, a disabled person may well be able to pass the six-month functional test but is unable to claim DWA because he or she does not have the proper qualifying benefits.

I return to my central point: that the situation which I have described is totally illogical. In its present form, the Bill will result in people with similar disabilities being treated completely differently, with one group receiving DWA because they happen to have the right proof at the right time, while others, who are no less disabled, will be prevented from claiming this benefit. Our amendment is designed to remedy that defect.

I expected the Minister to raise my last point—cost. Perhaps I ought to leave it out, since she did not do so. I believe, however, that I ought to refer to cost because the matter was raised by a Government Minister, Lord Henley, in another place. He claimed that the net cost would be about £200 million. Since DWA is supposed to save the Government money—£10 million a year—I am extremely sceptical as to how that figure is reached. I do not believe that Ministers have given details of how it was calculated.

Our amendment is narrower than previous amendments. It is restricted to people who are already in receipt of means-tested benefits. In some cases, if they are awarded DWA, I should expect their total benefit to be less and in some cases I should expect it to be more, depending on their circumstances and earnings.

Moreover, one of the purposes of DWA—I stress this point to the Minister, since all Ministers have tended to forget it—is to provide short-term rehabilitative help in the transition from employment to full-time work. That is surely the objective of all of us. The net cost of DWA, will diminish in that circumstance, in accordance with the success of the rehabilitation. I ask the Minister to comment on the cost. I ask her not only to cost our amendment but also to give the basis of the Government's apparent calculations.

If Lord Henley is right, the huge sum that he mentioned will serve only to show the large number of disabled people who have a disability which puts them at a clear disadvantage in the labour market but who will not be helped by the Bill. That is the clear implication of the sum of £200 million—if Lord Henley is right. That sum is the cost associated with not helping those whom we would help. If the sum is anywhere near £200 million, a substantial number of people must be excluded from the provisions of the Bill.

The amendment is designed to ensure that several thousand disabled people who could have the advantage of DWA are enabled to benefit from it. I do not accept that speed and administration can possibly justify excluding several thousand people who otherwise would be included. On that basis, I hope that the Minister will reconsider the amendment.

Mr. Gordon McMaster (Paisley, South)

I support the amendment to which my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) referred. I have some experience of disabled people. For two years before I entered the House last November, I worked for a project in Glasgow by the name of Growing Concern. It sought to put disabled people into employment. The problems that my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West outlined are very real ones. As he said, four fifths of disabled people who want to return to work could be affected. As the Bill is drafted, disability working allowance will not assist those people.

The Growing Concern project covered the whole of Strathclyde region and dealt with a population of 2.5 million people. I had not been involved with disabled people until I joined the project. One thing that I learnt was that emphasis must be put on ability rather than disability. I am worried that the way in which the Bill is worded puts an emphasis on disability and complicates it in a way that will not assist disabled people.

There must be a relationship between the Bill and other legislation. I cannot see such a relationship. For example, under the quota system 3 per cent. of the work force of all major employers should be disabled people. Last week I tabled a parliamentary question to the Scottish Office and was astounded to find that the health service in Scotland achieves only 0.2 per cent. employment of disabled people. That is worse than 10 years ago when it achieved only 0.5 per cent. On top of that we have the spectacle of the Department of Employment awarding Fit for Work awards to major employers for not achieving the quotas. Something could be done about the proportion of disabled people in the work force and I wish to relate that directly to the amendment.

The problem of definition has been highlighted. Disabled people are forced to register in order to qualify for certain benefits or to be assisted by the Department of Employment. The fact that they have to register puts a lot of disabled people off. They do not want to do so. They do not want to carry that label around. That could be simply altered by making people who are eligible to be registered qualify for assistance. The amendment has much the same aim.

Germany has imposed a far higher quota than Britain for several years. There is no escape from the German quota. No one can argue that the quota has damaged the buoyancy of the German economy. If employers do not achieve the quota, they must sub-contract a proportion of their work. If they do not do so, they must pay money to a national rehabilitation fund. Or the employer can do a combination of those things. There is no escape. The quota does not affect competition in Germany. Many disabled people, like everyone else, would swap the economy of Germany for that of Britain, even with the troubles that Germany has been through.

Even more importantly, there is a great untapped resource of disabled people who have the potential to make a contribution to the community and to lead a better quality of life than they are allowed to lead at present. The Bill misses out four fifths of them. As a result of marginal tax relief, people could lose 96p in the pound.

I shall bring my remarks to a conclusion because I am aware that we are short of time. I stress that if one word is important to disabled people, it is the same word as is important to us all. It is "dignity". All disabled people should be brought within the provisions of the Bill. They should not have to register and meet several conditions. I do not accept the Minister's argument that without the amendment implementation will be quicker. Unless the suggestions made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West are adopted, the measure will be to the disadvantage of many disabled people and their dignity, but, above all, it will leave an untapped pool of talent in our disabled community.

Miss Widdecombe

This has been an interesting debate and several important points have been raised. The crucial aim of disability working allowance is to help people who are trying to transfer from incapacity to work. The incapacity must be one which prevents the person from working or does so to an extent that would normally be recognised as reasonable for an able-bodied person. DWA is not about disability per se. It is not about whether someone is deaf or blind, but about whether, as a result of those disabilities, he or she is unable to work. That is the crucial point.

First, we should make it clear that a large range of benefits—of which the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) mentioned only a few—act as qualifying benefits or passports to DWA. They are invalidity benefit, severe disability allowance or a disability premium in income support, housing benefit or community charge benefit, disability living allowance—if the claimant is in receipt of it—an analogous benefit such as constant attendance allowance in the war pensions and industrial injuries scheme, attendance allowance for those over 65, mobility allowance for claims made in the four weeks before A day or the allowances given to people who have an invalid carriage or car under the National Health Service Act 1977. We have sought to build a comprehensive range of qualifying benefits.

The hon. Member for Oldham, West raised several specific points. The first was the functional disability test. He suggested that what we are devising for repeat claims could be used for initial claims. We shall send a short questionnaire to about 40 per cent. of people who claim a further award. Such people will mostly be those who were receiving invalidity benefit before they claimed DWA and who have not passed a disability test for another benefit recently. But they will all be people who at one time had a long-term illness or disability which was recognised by such a benefit. That fact has been taken into account in devising the questionnaire. I am not convinced that the test that we have devised for people who have at some time had a long-term illness would be suitable for anyone who happened to be on an income-related benefit.

The hon. Member for Oldham, West also raised an important point about people who have a claim in progress which has not yet been assessed. I understand that, in their case, if the claim is ultimately decided in their favour, DWA will be backdated to the date of the claim.

As the hon. Member for Oldham, West said, some income support claimants cannot qualify for the disability premium. Homeless people do not receive premiums. People in residential care and nursing homes have their benefit calculated in a special way. But most people will probably satisfy the qualifying benefit test in a different way because they are already getting DLA.

I believe that it would be a complex business to devise rules to ensure that anyone with a theoretical entitlement to a premium, but no actual entitlement, could claim DWA. Potentially, large numbers of people on income-related benefits who had never established an entitlement to a disability premium could ask to be assessed. To be assessed when there is no automatic passport would mean a medical assessment. It would mean a detailed examination of the individual's circumstances. There is no way in which that could be done speedily or efficiently. It would take a very long time, not only in administrative terms, but in terms of establishing that the claim was justified. That is the very thing that we have to avoid. I should not like to see the very efficient system that we have built in here corrupted in any way by a long-term, cumbersome, difficult procedure which a medical assessment of somebody who had never before established an entitlement to a disability premium would involve if there should be claims on any scale.

In that connection, I turn to the final point that was raised by the hon. Member for Oldham, West—the cost. Obviously we cannot say that there is a definitive cost. With any new benefit, we can only make calculations. We are not talking here about people with flu; we are talking about long-term disablement, about poeple with problems arising from incapacity for work. If they did not have to demonstrate incapacity through recognition in respect of a previous benefit, there would be potentially a very large number of claimants, with all that that would involve in terms of administrative cost, quite apart from the benefits themselves if they became payable.

Amendment (a) in lieu of Lords amendment No. 28 would not be helpful. It would probably result in a very much more complicated and slow procedure than the one that we have devised, which is efficient and quick, and recognises, without any question or any further need to establish a claim, the right of anybody who has already established an entitlement to disability benefit.

Question put and agreed to.

Subsequent Lords amendments agreed to, some with Special Entry.

Committee appointed to draw up reasons to be assigned to the Lords for disagreeing to their amendments Nos. 1, 2 and 3 to the Bill; Mr. Graham Allen, Mr. Frank Haynes, Mr. Michael Meacher, Mr. Secretary Newton, Mr. Irvine Patnick, Mr. Nicholas Scott and Miss Ann Widdecombe; three to be the quorum.—[Mr. Scott.]

To withdraw immediately.

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