Welfare Reform Bill

moved Amendment No. 3: 3: After Clause 1 , insert the following new Clause— ““Public involvement (1) This section applies where a person in receipt of employment and support allowance who is a service user is asked by a public, charitable or educational body concerned with health or social care to advise on service standards and delivery. (2) The Secretary of State may make regulations providing that— (a) a person who provides advice under subsection (1) shall be treated as having limited capability for work under section 8 in relation to the activities undertaken in pursuance of subsection (1) if he would otherwise be so treated; (b) in the case of contributory allowance or an income related allowance, any fee received in recognition of the service undertaken shall be subject to such disregard and averaging as may be prescribed; (c) in the case of contributory allowance or an income related allowance, reimbursed expenses shall be disregarded as income in such cases as may be prescribed; and (d) regulations made under section 16(3)(a) shall not apply in relation to advice undertaken in accordance with this section. (3) In this section ““service user”” means a person with current experience of using or requiring public services relating to their ill-health, disability or caring responsibilities.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, this is very similar to the amendment that I moved in Grand Committee. I seek to clarify the problem and set out what I believe is the solution. The Minister said in Committee that the amendment was unnecessary as the Bill contained relevant powers, but I was not reassured by his response. That is why I have tabled the amendment again. I shall first explain what ““public involvement”” is in connection with the Bill. It is involvement in the planning and delivery of public services by someone in receipt of disability benefits. That could be membership of a committee that monitors the quality of services or that seeks to develop good practice standards; it could mean participation in a focus group or research projects, social work training or staff recruitment panels; it could also mean participation in inspection teams and social care and health services by advising on what is important to people using those services. The amendment is important because involvement is a statutory requirement for all public bodies concerned with the delivery of social care and health services and must now include all people who use those services, which includes disabled people. There are, of course, disabled people who willingly take part in all those activities who are not on benefits; the problem that the amendment addresses does not lie with that group of people. The amendment is important because it tries to remedy real injustices uncovered in the sort of participation that I have described for those on benefits. Before going any further I must explain that the kind of public involvement that I spoke about is likely to be intermittent. Meetings of these bodies are nearly always occasional; if they are regular it might be for a few weeks or months, or even six months, but they are never as regular or often as, say, once a week for a year, so this involvement must never be confused with paid work. This is not ““therapeutic work””, which was the term used to describe work that people on incapacity benefits were allowed to do up to 2002; nor should it be muddled up with work-related activity under the Bill. Involvement might lead to work-related activity but, in itself, should be regarded as an entirely separate matter. The amendment puts forward four remedies. The first is that disabled service users are not ready to come off benefits just because of their public involvement. Job centres often believe that, if a disabled person agrees to public involvement, especially if the committee sounds rather grand, it means that they are no longer incapable of work. That misunderstands the whole reason that a person has been asked to participate, which is their ill health—which is often severe—or their disability. The amendment therefore makes it clear that a person who is so involved cannot have their benefits taken away simply because of this involvement. It puts them on the same footing as local authority councillors, who cannot be taken off incapacity benefit just because they are councillors. The second remedy is to allow a modest payment to be made to people on means-tested benefits—under the Bill, income-related ESA—within the amount allowed by the permitted work rules. Those on a contributory strand of ESA are allowed to be paid up to £86 in any one week, but the poorest people, those on means-tested ESA, can be paid only £5, £10 or £20 a week, depending on their circumstances, before their benefits are reduced. Under the amendment, payments received would be averaged over an appropriate period and the amount for those on means-tested benefits raised as prescribed in regulations. This would mean that the poorest people on benefits would not be excluded from offering their advice on public services. The third remedy is to reimburse expenses incurred by a disabled person attending meetings of a public body. Unbelievably, reimbursed expenses for travel to meetings for those on benefits are treated as earned income, and so are deducted from such a person’s benefits unless that person has volunteered. Under the amendment, reimbursed travel expenses would be just that and could be accepted by those receiving a modest payment for involvement. The final remedy that the amendment seeks is to disapply the notional earnings rule for service users participating in meetings. At present, if service users volunteer to help by involving themselves in the ways described, they must tell Jobcentre Plus staff, who must ask them whether they could have been paid. If the answer is yes but they decided not to accept payment because they did not want any benefits deducted, this amount is deducted anyway from their benefits. I shall repeat that because it is so outrageous: an amount that the person in question has not received is deducted from their benefits as though it had been received. That extraordinary state of affairs is called the notional earnings rule. The amendment would disapply it for such a group of volunteers. As was pointed out in Committee, local authority councillors do not have to worry about whether they will be allowed to keep their benefits, as they are specifically singled out for special treatment under the Bill, as is the case now. Council work is treated as exempt and may not be used to assess capacity for work. What is more, reimbursed travel expenses for the journey from a councillor’s home to the place of their duties are ignored. Why should those who participate in advising public bodies be treated differently? One of my correspondents wrote: "““It is a classic case of no joined up thinking in government. They want more disabled people in public service but won’t consider the benefits implications””." It is difficult to estimate how many people we are talking about, but it could be around 10,000. This is of course a tiny percentage of the 2.7 million people who currently claim incapacity-based benefits. Will this be a cost to the public purse? No, it will not, because, in practice, people decline involvement rather than risk having their benefit continuity disrupted. The current rules mean that every other person on the public body is likely to be able to receive modest payment for their participation, but that a disabled person on means-tested benefits is barred for the reasons that I have given. I have not wearied the House with illustrations from the files of the Disability Rights Commission, but I have many with me which show that this is a growing problem. The amendment is modest, but it is important, and I urge the Minister to consider it sympathetically. I beg to move.