Thank you, Dr Huq—a double thank you for your late substitution this morning, for which we are all very grateful. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), who clearly demonstrated a real passion for this important subject. I think her constituents would recognise that she is a real champion for those who need a voice in this area, and I pay genuine tribute to her.
I also pay tribute to the Minister, who I know will respond in full. He has immersed himself in the details of his role and has always shown himself willing to engage with stakeholders. I think we would all agree that there is a wealth of knowledge and expertise in local and national organisations, and the Minister is passionate to utilise that wherever possible. That has come through very clearly in his time as a Minister.
I pay tribute to local and national organisations up and down the country that provide people with advice and support in accessing the often complex and daunting layers of support that are potentially available. For example Tim Saint, of the Swindon Carers Centre, does a huge amount of work in our community to help people access support. During my time as a Minister, I was surprised to see how many people miss out on the various forms of support that we have all voted to give them, often because they are faced with a complex and daunting system.
We have made progress. Under PIP, including the legacy benefits of DLA, and attendance allowance, we are now spending £12.5 billion more in real terms on help for those with disabilities or long-term health conditions. Under the old legacy system of DLA, only 16% of claimants would access the highest rate of support. A few years ago, that figure had reached 33%, and for some health conditions, in particular mental health conditions, people are now six times
more likely to access the higher rates of benefits. So we are very much heading in the right direction, and there are further opportunities to turbo-speed improvements with the forthcoming White Paper.
There are two key lessons the Government can focus on: speed and specialisation. First, on speed, there are lessons that can be learned from the welcome changes to the special rules for terminal illness. We were able to apply a policy change that was co-designed by stakeholders, their policy teams and end users—people with real-life experience. Using the same principles, we can widen the severe conditions criteria in the PIP system, removing up to 300,000 unnecessary assessments or reassessments each year.
The principle behind that is that we would look at specific conditions. We could then be fairly confident about the trajectory of that condition and set in place a timetable of support. For those people whose condition has perhaps changed more quickly than expected, there would still always be the option to have a light-touch assessment to speed up their access to the increased rate of support.
There is a sort of principle around this, which already exists with universal credit and the industrial injuries disablement benefit. An independent panel could look at these conditions, and one example would be motor neurone disease—I cannot understand what the point would be of putting somebody with MND through an assessment. Where we can be fairly confident of the deterioration of health conditions, we could put in place an automatic right to support, with the backstop that, if somebody’s condition, sadly, deteriorates more quickly, a light-touch assessment could then move them to the higher level of support much more quickly. Removing 300,000 people a year would mean we have more resources available to speed up the process for those who would go through the more standard, traditional route.
During covid, we made sure we kept the gateway open for new entrants, and it is a tribute to staff up and down the country that disability benefits continued. We used video and telephone assessment, a further benefit of which is that it allows for greater specialisation in terms of the assessors. Rather than relying on a fixed number of staff in each geographical location, we can assign someone with a particular health condition via telephone or video to other locations in the country. That also helps with the point about making sure that the assessments are right first time, so that people do not have to go through an appeals process further down the line.
I know that these broad themes are being considered as part of the White Paper, but they are a real win-win and they are probably things that people could rally around, regardless of which political background they are from. I certainly know from my time working with our very knowledgeable stakeholders and policymakers that there would be huge support for them.
A broader point is that not everything is black and white. As much as I admire the passion and drive of the speech by the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw, there was a presumption that everything the Government do is terrible and that everything the Scottish Government do is good. I say that because I have a brother who is a proud Labour party supporter, another brother who is an SNP supporter, a sister who is a sort of Lib Dem/
Conservative and a cousin who is a Green, so we cover all the bases, and I was very much brought in the belief that things are not black and white.
To their credit, the Scottish Government identified that we could and should have made changes to the special rules for terminal illness and to PIP, which is the main disability benefit. The Scottish Government have had challenges; they had hoped to complete both those tasks many years ago, but that has proved a lot more complex, particularly when we start to unravel the complicated machinery behind those benefits.
In my former life, I attended inter-ministerial meetings with Scottish officials and Scottish Ministers, who were always a great pleasure to work with, and I absolutely admired their end goal. However, they also had that presumption that the system was completely broken and had to be completely changed. Therefore, they sometimes would not listen to stakeholders and policy experts in disability and health charities who wanted changes but not necessarily the changes the Scottish Government had settled on.
For example, there is a principle that the Scottish Government do not like assessors. I understand that, given a lot of the media coverage of the earlier years of PIP, in particular. However, there is a reason why, under DLA, only 16% of claimants got the highest rate of support, compared with 33% under PIP. Many of the people who navigate the system are the least well equipped to do so. Therefore, we are relying on a system where, in effect, their evidence—self-supplied—is the only basis for them to get DLA. However, assessors tease out additional things and fill in the gaps, which is why we have gone from 16% to 33%.