Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, at this late hour I will try to be brief. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, who put his name to the amendment, apologises for his absence; he is at Davos. I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, expressed sympathy with the sentiments of what I am about to say in support of the amendment. I appreciate that and hope that we can move forward. I start with a shocking fact; more than 1 million people are on incapacity benefit by virtue of mental illness. The condition may not be curable but it is treatable. Noble Lords may be interested to know what proportion of these people are in treatment. The figure is 52 per cent. This comes from the official psychiatric morbidity survey. It is the number of people receiving any form of treatment. Of those, half receive medication only, without any form of counselling or talk therapy. This tells us everything that is wrong with our current situation. We pay people money because they are sick but we do not have a process to ensure that they get treated. There is not a lot in this Bill that we can do to change that—that is the way it is—but if somebody is drawing benefit because they are sick, they should surely either be in treatment for that sickness or immediately be offered treatment. Anything else is a shocking waste of taxpayers’ money, apart from anything else. It is of course true that, in the course of the work capability assessment, the claimant is invited to bring a letter from their preferred health professional. This is a good thing, but it is not adequate for a number of obvious reasons. Above all, that clinician has not managed to make the person better. It is quite possible that even if the person is getting treatment, the treatment is not the right one, and here is the one chance to address that situation. I urge that in parallel with the work capability assessment that is available for people with mental health problems there be also a professional health assessment—a diagnosis. This amendment proposes that such people are put in contact with proven mental health providers that can provide this diagnosis, be it within the generic context of NHS-commissioned mental health services, such as the already available increasing access to psychological therapy services, or within the work programme, where prime providers have access to specialist mental health employment subcontractors, of which Turning Point is one. I should have declared my interest right at the beginning. Turning Point is a subcontractor, among many other not-for-profit organisations, in the work programme. I apologise to the House for not saying that straight away. For these people, a key benefit of this approach would be that a person with mental health problems would be diagnosed and treated by the same professional. The diagnosis should be compulsory but, as with all healthcare, the treatment should reflect patient choice. I urge the Minister to go further and give this idea serious consideration and, I hope, produce an appropriate response. The statistics speak for themselves, but I will leave noble Lords with one that is quite worrying: mental health conditions are incredibly costly to the economy and are now the most common reason for claiming health-related benefits, with 86 per cent remaining on benefits for more than three months compared with 76 per cent of other claimants. Those figures come from the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions report Working our Way to Better Mental Health: A Framework for Action. Recent estimates put the cost of mental ill health at £30 billion to £40 billion attributed to lost productivity and NHS costs. I beg to move.