Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I, too, support the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, in her amendment. I read the whole of the information sent to us yesterday and I was pleased to see that ME/CFS, in which I am interested, was raised in two examples, and that the difference between the two conditions was shown. I am concerned not just for people with ME but for those who can almost function normally and will not meet the criteria for getting DLA. For example, there are those who, because they have an endocrine problem, cannot cope with the cold. They need extra heating and clothes. If they are working, they are probably on a minimum salary because they are not very well. Therefore, they need extra money. They might also need extra clothing. If they are incontinent, they may need to be able to change their clothing regularly. They may need incontinence pads, which—as everyone knows from questions in the House—are extremely difficult to get from the National Health Service. My mother-in-law, who died a few years ago, could not go out of the house because she was worried about wetting herself in public. If she could have afforded incontinence pads, she would have been fine. She was not going to tell her children or her daughter-in-law about her problem and we had to extricate the information from her to find out why she was not going out. Such people get confined to their homes and become desocialised, and it is very difficult to get them back into society. We must take all these things into consideration—not just whether they can cook or wash themselves—when we think about what they need to keep functioning on a relatively normal basis.