Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I support the broad thrust of the amendment. My perspective is that of a chairman of a mental health trust. As such, I am regularly involved in committees, where we make every effort to involve service users. However, it is incredibly difficult to persuade service users to become involved in our work. As I understand it, one key issue making it so difficult is the consequence of small payments on people’s benefits. Most of our service users receive income support and a disability premium. Most have never been well enough for long enough to qualify for the contributory incapacity benefit; therefore, they are subject to a very tight earnings disregard—precisely £5 per week in many cases. As a result, their benefits are affected if they attend more than one meeting a week. That terrifies people. Any change of circumstance can cause all sorts of problems, with which I know the Minister is familiar. Our people simply cannot cope with all that uncertainty and fear; therefore, they keep their involvement down to a level where their benefits will not be affected, and that, as you might imagine, is minimal. Please excuse my throat; I am losing my voice. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, argued, some way needs to be found to disregard those small earnings of people with severe and enduring mental health problems, for whom building up the capacity to take a job is a complex and often slow process. I am not suggesting a general increase in earnings disregards, as I realise that that would be extremely costly. I understand the implications of that. I appreciate that what is right for this group might then be demanded for others. However, I think that some special arrangements would be reasonable for those with enduring and severe mental health problems—and perhaps for one or two other small groups with particularly difficult problems and fluctuating symptoms—who are so difficult to reintegrate into work. Another development might be directly affected by this amendment, and it would be very sad if it were. We plan to develop a team of service users to operate our foundation trust membership office. We thought we would need four full-time people, all of whom would be service users, but we want to take on six, eight or even more, depending on the degree of their disability. The aim is that they will work part time for as many hours as they can manage but that the required number of people will be available each day to cover the work. We hope that, over time, people could increase their hours gradually, ultimately getting back into employment. The team would provide ongoing opportunities to gain work experience. If it worked, it could be repeated across the trust and, no doubt, across the country. We have a capacity to try to assist the Government’s welfare reform agenda in preparing people with severe and enduring mental health problems for work. At the beginning, we can perfectly reasonably pay the permitted earnings and no more. I think we can argue that. However, over time, as people began to build up their capacity to contribute more fully, it would be incredibly unfair to pay just that tiny amount. If their benefits are adjusted to take account of small increments in income—and, in many cases, on a very irregular basis, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, said, together with all the uncertainties that that entails—our job preparation project and, no doubt, many others like it simply will not happen. I have to confess that it is hard to imagine the benefit system coping with such initiatives in a constructive and flexible way. However, could the Minister’s department consider an approach to severe and enduring mental illnesses and explore whether some method can be found to enable us to overcome the difficulties that we see? If flexibility could be achieved for the most disadvantaged groups, more severely mentally ill people could find their way back into a normal life. As I have suggested, a similar approach might be available to other very small, particularly disadvantaged groups. It is of the utmost importance that, regardless of what is done about benefit disregards, service users in our membership office group and others like it who undertake small pieces of work must not be deemed capable of work and expected to apply for jobs before they are capable of managing. The fact that someone can work 15 hours a week in a mental health trust as a service user does not mean that they are ready to take a job. Our trust and others like it will make all sorts of allowances by having extra staff to cover for late arrivals at work, underperformance or absences. If sanctions are applied in that situation, the ability of the mental health trust, as I have suggested, to contribute to the Government’s welfare reform agenda would simply be destroyed. As a mental health trust our objective will be to place such service users in open employment just as soon as we feel that they can cope; in fact, we take them on ourselves as members of staff. It will be important for the DWP and trusts to work together to ensure that the entire project and others like it are not torpedoed by the use of blunt benefits instruments. The question for the Minister is therefore whether the legislation can be sufficiently flexible to allow sensible decisions on the ground. I look forward to hearing his response to this important amendment.