Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I start by picking up the point that the lower rate is being thrown out so everyone on the lower rate will no longer get DLA or PIP. That is absolutely not the structure of what is happening. We are looking at the needs of people from the ground up and designing a support mechanism in PIP to look after people who have disability needs. Clearly, anyone who needs support, on the grounds of a rigorous and consistent assessment, will get it. Many of those people will get more. In fact, we think that the proportion of people who will be in the group with the greatest need, in the highest group, will rise under PIP compared to those in the standard group. The difference between PIP and DLA is that we are trying to strip out the complexity of all the different rates and boil it back down to eight rates—by the time you take the two components on the two different rate levels. The amendment replicates the complexity of the structure of DLA and moves it back up from eight to 11 components, making it more difficult to administer coherently. I pick up the specific point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, on the Dilnot review, and reassure her that the DLA reform proposals published in April 2011 were shared with Andrew Dilnot’s review of long-term care funding, which was published a couple of months later in July. Andrew Dilnot said that universal disability benefits should continue, based on need and not on means. We are doing PIP exactly on those grounds—it is not means-tested but based on needs. He did not say that that benefit should go on unreformed. We have designed the PIP assessment criteria to take broader account of the impact of disabilities than simply care and mobility, which are still of course very important factors. In our most recent draft of the assessment criteria—I remind noble Lords that we are still consulting on this process; this is work in progress and we are still listening very hard to the responses that we are getting—care and support needs feature very strongly. If someone needs attention with things such as washing, bathing, going to the toilet, dealing with medication, cooking food and eating, that is taken into account. We have amended the draft assessment criteria so that they now include supervision, whereas before they just considered whether someone needed assistance and prompting. Finally, I should make it clear that the constituent parts of the current DLA cooking test have, in effect, been retained in the first activity relating to preparing food and drink. Therefore, again, individuals’ needs in relation to this are taken into account. It is clear that by moving to a two-tier structure we are not withdrawing support from those who require levels of support which we would expect to be covered by the criteria for entitlement to the lowest-rate care component of DLA. We are moving to fairer, more transparent and more objective criteria against which to assess people. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, if I did not give him enough time regarding the thresholds. In future, I shall try to make information available a bit earlier, as I know that there is much to absorb. This is a huge Bill and there is a great deal of information on it, so I acknowledge that getting that information out on a timely basis is important. On the assessment of the thresholds, we have now launched a further formal consultation to gather views from disabled people and their organisations, particularly on the weightings and the entitlement thresholds. This consultation will run for 15 weeks, during which time we aim to get all the information we can, and it will end on 30 April. Of course I understand the noble Baroness’s concerns, but these amendments would not restore the DLA status quo and they fail to address the more fundamental questions of how, and for whom, support is prioritised. I repeat that we are trying to make sure that the scarce resources that we have go to the people who need them most. We know that under these changes there will be shifts in provision. Some people will receive less support—