My Lords, I beg to move Motion B1 as an amendment to Motion B. I shall speak also to Motion C1. The proposed amendments set out in Motion B1 provide that cuts to ESA should not come into force until the Secretary of State has laid a report before Parliament, while the amendments set out in Motion C1 make similar provision in relation to the limited capability for work component, the equivalent component in the new universal credit which will replace ESA and a number of other benefits. My remarks will mainly be directed to Motion B1 but they should be taken also to apply to Motion C1 mutatis mutandis.
When the matter was debated during consideration of Lords amendments in the other place last week, Jeremy Lefroy said from the Conservative Benches that he hoped that the House of Lords would have taken up the idea which he moved as an amendment on Report that the Government should carry out an assessment of its impact before implementing a cut of £30 a week for those in the work-related activity group of ESA. These amendments in lieu are what Mr Lefroy was looking for. The case for removing Clause 13 and the £30 cut from the Bill remains as strong as when we did that on Report on 27 January, but the amendment in lieu, drafted in the same terms as the amendment
moved by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, in Committee, recognises that the Commons have reasserted their commitment to Clauses 13 and 14 by reinstating them and attempts to find a compromise by simply providing that the cut should not come into force until the Secretary of State has laid before both Houses of Parliament a report giving an estimate of the impact on the,
“physical and mental health … financial situation, and … ability to return to work, of persons who would otherwise be entitled to start claiming the work-related activity component of employment and support allowance”.
The Government have brought forward no more evidence for their central contention that reducing benefit support incentivises people back to work. In the debate in the other place last week, Dr Eilidh Whiteford MP said:
“If someone is seriously sick or disabled, reducing their income will not make them better quicker. There is not a shred of evidence to support that ill-founded fantasy, but there is plenty of evidence that financial worries and the stress associated with work capability and PIP assessments have a negative impact on people’s health. A large and growing body of evidence suggests that hardship and stress slow down recovery and push people further away from the labour market”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 236.]
Indeed, several of those who spoke in the debate made the point, supported by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that abolishing the WRAG component of ESA could strengthen the incentive for claimants to try to get into the ESA support group. Taking the disincentive thesis head on, Paul Scully MP said that,
“61% of people in WRAG want to go back to work. The majority of people who are out of work want to go back to work”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 226.]
Stephen McPartland said:
“I do not accept that £30 a week is an incentive for somebody not to go to work. Most Conservatives do not accept that. Most Conservatives consider it to be their proud duty to look after the disabled. Ideologically, we have no issue about providing a welfare system that is a safety net for those who need support when they fall on hard times, to help people back into work”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 232]
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Heidi Allen MP made the case positively for retaining the ESA WRAG component. She said:
“I do not believe mentoring and support alone will heat the home of someone recovering from chemotherapy or help the man with Parkinson’s who needs a little bit of extra help. I remain unconvinced that these people do not also have financial needs. The DWP states that many people stay stuck in the WRAG for too long—up to two years—but I would question its conclusion that they are financially incentivised to stay in that group. For me, the fact that they are stuck in that group says more about the failure of DWP processes than about claimants’ active choices”.—[Official Report. Commons, 23/2/16; col. 214.]
The Minister argued that the WRAG was not working. She said:
“While one in every five JSA claimants moves off benefit each month, this is true of just one in 100 ESA claimants in the work-related activity group”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 195.]
However, Dr Philippa Whitford pointed out that,
“people in the ESA WRAG have been classed as not fit for work, unlike those on jobseeker’s allowance, so one would not expect the same success rate”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 229.]
Dr Eilidh Whiteford said:
“In contrast to ESA, jobseeker’s allowance is for the most part a short-term benefit. Depending on the state of the economy, the vast majority of jobseekers move off JSA in a few weeks or months, but those with long-term health conditions and disabilities are far more likely to face long-term unemployment”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 236.]
Finally, the Minister made reference to the White Paper that the Government are working on that will set out plans to improve support for people with health conditions and disabilities to further reduce the disability employment gap and promote integration across health and employment. Neil Gray, from the SNP, spoke for several in the debate when he asked whether the Minister was,
“not approaching the matter the wrong way round? Should she not introduce the White Paper first and then look at making changes to ESA?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 195.]
Heidi Allen acknowledged,
“that a taskforce drawn from the Department and charities will be set up, but that should have happened before decisions were made to reduce financial support. I am uncomfortable about agreeing to the cuts until I know what the new world will look like for such people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/16; col. 214.]
That surely brings us to the nub of the matter, and why it is right to be bringing this moderate amendment in lieu. It does not seek confrontation with the House of Commons.
Just before the debate, I was handed a letter from the chief executive of the EHRC to Roger Godsiff MP. She writes: “We consider that the Government’s impact assessments make very little attempt to set out comprehensively how the three aims of the equality duty have been considered. On 16 September 2015, the commission wrote to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to set out our concerns about the impact assessments for the Welfare Reform and Work Bill. We believe the assessments would benefit from a more detailed consideration of the likely impact of the proposals on people with different protected characteristics. They contain very little in the way of evidence, and this limits the accompanying analysis and the scope for parliamentary scrutiny and informed decision-making on the proposed legislative changes. In relation to the impact assessment covering the proposed changes to ESA and the WRAG group, the analysis is very limited. There is, for example, no attempt to break the limited data down to understand how the proposals will affect people with different forms of disability. This makes it difficult to understand whether the changes will affect, for example, people with some types of physical disability more or less than people with particular types of poor mental health or who experience bouts of ill health and may therefore be in and out of work. It is also unclear whether applying the changes to new claimants will mean they have a more significant impact on younger disabled people or new migrant workers. These are the kinds of matters that we might have expected a more thorough analysis to have considered. Without this level of evidence, the assessment does not, in our opinion, sufficiently support consideration of alternative options which might have less of an impact on people with particular protected characteristics”.
In the face of such a devastating critique, your Lordships may consider that my humble amendment in lieu is moderate indeed.
The Commons disagreed with the amendment we passed on Report on grounds of financial privilege. I do not think that my amendment falls foul of the rules on that. We are not seeking just to send the same amendment back. Rather, we have brought an amendment in lieu with which the Government should be able to comply in the time before implementation without adding to costs. The Minister said it would be an expensive and time-consuming matter to provide the information my amendment calls for, but I would say that if the Government do not already have this kind of information they should not seek to implement such a drastic cut to ESA in the first place. I react to the Minister’s blood-curdling predictions a bit like those who want to leave the European Union and say that the scare stories put out by those in favour of remaining in are simply that—just scare tactics, and not to be taken seriously.
Before I conclude, I pay tribute to the Minister for the way that he has conducted this discussion. In keeping with his usual style, he followed an extremely open process. He has given most generously of his time to meet several groups of your Lordships to discuss the matter. Most to the point, he clearly listened and laboured valiantly within government, as we heard, to find concessions or commitments he could make to blunt the force of a cut to ESA. So it is no disrespect to the Minister when I say that his concessions are just not enough. I genuinely thank him for his efforts, but the concessions are really just at the margins. Against a reduction in the incomes of disabled people of some £640 million by the end of this Parliament, I estimate that the Minister’s concessions would return only about £25 million or £30 million to the pockets of disabled people. I am afraid that that is just not enough. From the passages I quoted from the debate in the House of Commons last week, it is clear that the Government may have had the votes but they clearly lost the argument. That is why it is right for us to make the argument again today.