Welfare Reform Bill

Amendment No. 48, which has been tabled in my name, is in this group. In speaking to it, I shall speak also to the amendment tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, which was so successfully moved by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, in her unavoidable absence. I spoke to her yesterday, and I regret to say that it looks as though she will not be returning to us for at least a month. We will miss her expertise in this area. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, the noble Baroness’s amendment was suggested by Macmillan Cancer Support; my amendment was also suggested by that organisation. The amendments aim to improve provisions to ensure that claimants are placed in the correct group. Macmillan Cancer Support is particularly concerned about which cancer treatments will be considered sufficiently debilitating to warrant being moved to the support group. As the noble Lord said, it is not just cancer patients who may find themselves in this position. There are other diseases and ailments that have just such invasive treatments. I note that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has introduced a Bill on palliative care that covers a wider group of disabilities than just cancer. Although we all welcome the Government’s proposals that terminally ill patients and those undergoing certain invasive forms of chemotherapy will not be subject to conditionality, Macmillan is concerned that the assurances are not wide enough. In particular, radiotherapy and non-invasive forms of chemotherapy can be just as debilitating and can result in a patient being unable to undertake work-related activity. There can be added complications, such as a high risk of infection. Given the difficulty of predicting the side effects of many of these treatments or of anticipating the disabling fatigue that many patients suffer, can the Government assure us that they will consider including people undergoing active-type cancer treatment as well as terminally ill patients in the support group? My amendment was designed to raise many of the same points. In particular, I would like to clarify a few points about the frequency of the PCAs. I understand that the time before the next PCA will be decided at the previous PCA. Is that correct? Can the Minister expand on how much flexibility the assessors will have in deciding how long it should be before the claimant is reassessed and what criteria they will use to select an appropriate length of time? Without a fair and transparent system of reassessment, claimants are in danger of being consigned to the support group without the encouragement and incentives of work-related activity from which they would benefit or of being subjected to needless and stressful PCAs at arbitrary intervals. There is a fine line to be drawn between those two possibilities, and I would be interested to hear where the Government intend to draw it.