Welfare Reform Bill

I hope that I will be able to clear up some of the questions around the timing of assessments. In addition to making my remarks today, it would perhaps be sensible for me to write to Members of the Committee after this sitting so that we can be as helpful and as clear as possible. The revised PCA will assess three separate, closely related things, as the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has already suggested: limited capability for work; limited capability for work-related activity; and the work-focused health-related assessment. These three assessments deal with different issues and consequences. The first deals with entitlement to employment and support allowance generally; the second deals with whether a person will receive either the support component or the work-related activity component; and the third identifies the residual capability that a person may have and how best to help them build and improve those capabilities. As these three assessments test three different things and provide for different consequences, they must be set out, as we have already noted, in different clauses in the Bill, and the Bill must identify them as separate assessments. In practice, however, they will operate as three different strands of one overall assessment process. We have no wish to place additional burdens on our customers by requiring them to attend multiple examinations if that can be avoided. The Committee has already noted that point. It is our intention that both the assessment of limited capability for work and the assessment of limited capability for work-related activity will be carried out during the assessment phase. That is to ensure that those customers who are eligible for the work-related activity component or the support component get the rate they are entitled to as soon as the assessment phase comes to an end, without delay. To pick up on a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, there will be flexibility about the timing of the work-related health-focused assessment. That is an important point to note. We believe that we will be able to identify the vast majority of people with limited capability for work-related activity; that is, those who are going into the support group on the basis of paper evidence. Those people will not then be required to go on and have the final part of the assessment. However, we cannot be confident of identifying everyone in that way. We will therefore need to be free to arrange a medical examination to determine the limited capability for work-related activity. That is to ensure that no one is unfairly denied access to the support group. Where we need to examine a customer to test whether or not he has limited capability for work under Clause 8 and we also need to examine him to test whether he has limited capability for work-related activity under Clause 9, the customer will, as I have said, be called to a single appointment. Both assessments will be carried out at the same time in one single examination, with the same healthcare professional. From the customer’s perspective it will be a single, seamless process. I shall pick up on some of the important points that have been raised. First, with regard to Atos doctors, as I think I have referred to them in the past, Atos employs trained healthcare professionals on a contract basis. My honourable friend Jim Murphy was talking in another place about another phase of the whole process that we have not discussed in this mini-debate; that is, the work-focused interview. That will be undertaken by the personal adviser, not a healthcare professional. That is the person who has the ongoing customer-handling relationship in Jobcentre Plus.