UK Parliament / Open data

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

I am not going to give way, simply because we are short of time.

In my view, the Work programme has failed. One out of 100 people are moving off it. That is our failure, not the failure of the people on the programme. We all want a fix. We want to get as many disabled people who want to work back into work. We just disagree on how we achieve that. I hope our Green Paper will help the Government to publish their White Paper. I genuinely think we would not have been in this position if the White Paper had been brought forward already and we were not having to take on faith something we are not really sure is going to happen, who the Ministers will be, who will be in charge of the money, and how we are going to move forward for these disabled people.

I want to reassure my constituents in the ESA WRAG that the changes apply only to new claimants from 1 April 2017. There has been a lot of confusion about that in my postbag and I want to reassure my constituents on that.

I will vote against the Government tonight, but I hope it will be for the last time on this particular issue.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
606 c1052 
Session
2015-16
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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