Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, the time-limiting of ESA is one of the most emotive issues in the Bill, as we have heard. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, people affected by severe illness in their working lives who have paid national insurance for many years expect to be protected by the state. As I said in Grand Committee, by bringing in this change in policy, the Government are acting like a private insurance company that changes the rules when a person makes a claim. However, as we know, the comforting words ““national insurance”” are really a myth, as many are about to find out when those in the WRAG who have been receiving ESA for a year by this April will have their money stopped immediately. Of course, some will go straight on to income-based ESA, but according to the impact assessment about 40 per cent will find their income dropping by a staggering £90 a week if they have modest savings or a partner earning only about £148 a week. The key question is whether it is fair to cut the benefits of those too ill to work, in this time of austerity, when the highest spending department in Whitehall has to take its share of deep cuts in expenditure. As we know, the change to universal credit, which we discussed at the beginning of the Bill, is going to be very expensive initially before savings will be made. Presumably the Treasury demanded this measure as a quid pro quo for finding the money to pay for universal credit. What troubles many people, and certainly troubled the Lib Dem conference last year, is the arbitrary nature of the one-year cut-off. As we have heard, the DWP’s own figures show that 94 per cent of longer-term claimants were on ESA for more than a year. The many briefings that we have all received tell us that most people with severe but not necessarily rapidly deteriorating conditions struggle to be well enough after a year. I welcome the Government’s amendment, which would mean that those with deteriorating conditions will have a reassessment with a view to them migrating from the WRAG to the support group after a year. What about the others? Will everyone be entitled to ask for a reassessment at the end of the year or only those with deteriorating conditions? For example, what about people who have had quite severe strokes? Their condition may not be deteriorating but they may be a very long way from the jobs market although that will be their eventual destination. If reassessments are to be allowed, at what point will people be asked to be reassessed? If it is too near the one-year cut-off point, I can envisage such a backlog that it may be many months before the reassessment is carried out. Is the answer Amendment 38 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, to allow two years in the WRAG instead of one—another arbitrary time limit? I understand that this would be prohibitively expensive. The figure of £1 billion over the next few years has been mentioned. If this amendment is successful, the House of Commons will almost certainly claim financial privilege, which will mean that this House cannot even debate it again. A vote for Amendment 38 might lead to ping-pong, if it were to be won, but only to ping, not to pong. It would therefore be a merely Pyrrhic victory as the amendment would not go any further. The work capability assessment is at the heart of this debate, and Professor Harrington’s reviews of it are most welcome and instructive. He advises patience, saying that the changes he has asked for and which the Government have accepted are taking time to bed down. I quite understand that, which is why I am so opposed to what I still wish to call the retrospective nature of this part of the Bill, even if strictly speaking it is not retrospective as it is not actually clawing money back from people. However, stopping someone’s claim the minute the ink is dry on the statute book, having warned them in a round robin letter, is pretty sharp practice. The Government maintain that people have been given enough notice of the April 2012 cut-off date because they could have read about the proposal in the small print of the comprehensive spending review in October 2010. How incredible is that? If the Government were to wait, even if only for six months rather than a year, it might give Professor Harrington’s recommendations for improving the WCA a chance of being implemented consistently around the country; if six months would be too expensive, what about three months? I am sorry that the Government are including the 13-week assessment phase in the year because that is paid at the lower JSA rate rather than the WRAG rate. If they ignored this phase, it would at least give people 15 months instead of 12 months, and again those three months could be useful in concentrating minds on improving the work capability assessment. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, we have all received the CAB report, which is pretty damning about the work capability assessment right now. One of Professor Harrington’s recommendations is that DWP decision-makers should look independently at the Atos Healthcare assessments, in particular the person’s medical reports, and then make their own minds up; in other words, they should not just rubber-stamp the Atos recommendation. I wonder whether that now happens routinely across the country and whether and how it is being monitored. The Government should pull out all the stops as a matter of urgency to make sure that the Harrington review proposals are being implemented in full throughout the country as the payback for bringing in this policy so soon. Does my noble friend the Minister know whether this is happening? I believe that the number of appeals about the WCA is beginning to drop, but I fear that there will be many more appeals when this policy is brought in from people wanting to migrate from the WRAG to the support group. Even the impact assessment reckons that 50 per cent of those affected by time-limiting will appeal, of which 20 per cent might be successful. Many of us are uneasy about the whole policy because of the unintended consequences that we expect to flow. Low-paid partners may be tempted to give up work so that means-tested ESA can be claimed, while the category with the highest claimants—those with mental health conditions—could give up in complete despair. Those with modest savings will wonder why they are being penalised if they are saving for care in their old age. However, I reiterate that voting for Amendment 38 might make us all feel better but it could be seen as a rather cynical move because we know that it will not stick and it might be reported as a great victory. I would rather vote for a more modest amendment such as Amendment 40A, which leaves out the assessment phase, which has more of a chance of success. However, I shall listen to my noble friend’s winding-up speech with great care.