Exportable Benefits

I commend the hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) on his passionate speech, in which he described many detailed and moving cases. I also congratulate him on his long track record on this matter, and on everything he has said today. He has done more than anyone to highlight what is an all too familiar tale of a Department that is willing to use every trick in the book to avoid meeting its legal and moral obligations. The hon. Gentleman has done an excellent job in framing the issue today, and I do not wish to go over ground that he has already covered. However, it is worth re-emphasising what we are not dealing with here. As he said, this is not a tabloid-friendly tale of people from other European countries arriving in the UK and claiming benefits, as has been reported in some quarters. The men and women affected are from here and have paid their taxes here, but are having their entitlement denied to them when they need it most. As has been said, they are not wealthy people. This cannot be spun as part of a wider Government crackdown on wealthy non-doms; the 2,000 to 3,000 or so people who are affected are generally elderly and manifestly in poor health with advancing disability. They have paid their taxes and national insurance contributions and have earned the right for help with their disabilities. Many of them have moved abroad not out of choice but on medical advice. The reason to move to some place with warmer weather at this time of year should be self-evident—it is tempting for the younger and the able-bodied, let alone for those who have worked all their lives, such as an older couple I know who lived in Scotland. The man had worked for the Ministry of Defence until he retired at 65. When he retired he was living in MOD housing, and he and his wife decided to look around for warmer weather and a reasonably economical place to live; they decided to head for Spain. He had paid his dues all his life and had never asked for a penny, and for the Government now to put so much effort into avoiding their responsibilities to them in this way is shameful. The Government are avoiding those responsibilities, but the job of Government is to provide fair and decent treatment, particularly to the vulnerable and the disabled. When I was a local councillor, I had experience of a local authority trying to deny individuals fair treatment. When elderly people fell in the streets, the first response they would get would be from loss adjusters who would try to put them off and imply that it was their fault. Most people gave up and went away. We have a Government with a track record of denying for years a fair deal to investors in Equitable Life, despite the ruling of the ombudsman. Today we are dealing with benefits paid for by those who have worked all their lives—many of them never taking a penny. Many of them are ill and some are disabled, and they have gone to live abroad, many for health reasons. They are being denied not something that can be argued about, but an entitlement. The question has been taken up at European Court level. This is an entitlement, not something that is up for debate. The Court has decided: the Government were found guilty, and in the run-up to the election the Minister has a lot of explaining to do. The European Court of Justice ruling on 18 October 2007 was very clear. It said that those eligible and in receipt of the care component of DLA, attendance allowance and carer's allowance should be able to continue to receive those benefits when they leave the UK. That was because they were classed as "sickness cash benefits" under EU law. That ought to have been the final word on the issue, and the Government should have accepted the ruling and paid out the benefits. Instead, it seems that the ruling itself has been warped by the Department to create yet another loophole. We are now in the farcical position whereby claimants cannot have their benefits reinstated if they had them removed before the European Court of Justice ruling, because the Government will not admit that their decision to remove benefits before then was wrong. The ruling by the European Court was that people should be entitled to receive those benefits. People who had their benefits removed by the Government before the date of the ruling should have them reinstated immediately, with backdating and a full apology. Instead, they are told that unless they appealed within 13 months of losing their benefit, they have no grounds for their benefit to be reinstated. Essentially, if they took the Department for Work and Pensions at its word and made the mistake of assuming that the Government would act within EU law, they would miss out. Not only that, but when someone writes to the Government to request that their benefit be reinstated they have to meet the eligibility criteria of having been resident in the UK for at least 26 weeks out of the past 52. The very fact that their benefits were removed, means that they are already living abroad, so there is little prospect of meeting that criteria at any time. If I have misunderstood the situation, I invite the Minister to clarify it, but it seems as if every possible effort has been made to construct artificial loopholes and roll after roll of red tape to keep vulnerable people from receiving the help to which they are entitled. I agree with the hon. Member for North Thanet that the Minister is a decent individual, but he is trying to defend the indefensible. It seems that Ministers have been making up the rules as they go along, and that is quite deplorable behaviour. In the Minister's winding-up speech, we need to hear that this shameful saga will not be allowed to drag on into the next Parliament, although I doubt he will have much say in that matter. It is an embarrassment that the European Commission has seen no other option but to take the UK Government to court to try to force us to meet our obligations. I appeal to the Minister to save the time, expense and embarrassment of battling another court case, and to instead announce today that the benefits will be reinstated without further argument or details hidden in the small print. I would also like a firm answer on how many people stand to be affected, and how much this will cost the Government—how much money the Government have withheld from them so far. I would not be at all surprised if the money spent fighting a legal battle in the European Court of Justice, and now fighting the Commission, was not too different a sum from that being held back from UK citizens. Will the Minister also publish a copy of the Government's response to the Commission's letter of 9 October 2009, giving formal notice of legal proceedings? The Government have refused to make the letter public, citing confidentiality. Frankly, it is not a matter of national security. Those people—possibly thousands—missing money that is rightfully theirs deserve to know whether the Government are still attempting to wriggle out of their obligations. The Government have so often professed to be interested in fairness; it ought to be a matter of shame for Labour Members here today that the matter has still not been resolved. People on low incomes who depend on such benefits to make ends meet do not have time for endless pontification from the DWP. As we heard this morning, some who have fought the battle have lost not only the battle but, in the meantime, their lives. I hope that today's debate will have pressed home to the Minister how far there is to go before fairness is delivered to those people. I cannot help but feel that if the time and energy spent by civil servants and the Government in devising ways to avoid their obligations had been invested in finding a fair solution, we would not be debating the issue today. I hope that this is the last time that we do so.