Consideration of Lords amendments in the Commons
- Quote
- I beg to move, That this House agrees with the Lords in the said amendment.
- Time
- 14:17
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Mr. MurphyLabour- Quote
- I am pleased to report to the House that just as the Bill left this place in a good condition, with a strong consensus, that approach was maintained in the other place, where all of those with a keen interest in this important issue played an important part in helping to maintain that consensus. There has been continued engagement with stakeholders, disability organisations and others. It is fair to say at the outset that that has been assisted by the consensus approach across political parties in this and the other place. The one exception is the Scottish National party, which played no role whatsoever in our proceedings at any part of the process. Indeed, today SNP Members have not shown up to their work. There are five areas of the Bill and its policy aims that are the subject of amendment. I would like to talk about each briefly in turn. First, I will talk about the issue of the annual report on the operation of the revised personal capability assessment. Amendment No. 1 concerns the operation of the new benefit, the employment and support allowance. The amendment introduces a requirement for the Secretary of State to lay an annual independent report before Parliament on the operation of the revised personal capability assessment. As I previously confirmed, it has always been our intention that there should be ongoing monitoring of the effectiveness of the revised PCA. I gave an undertaking on Report that there would be ongoing independent monitoring by the technical working groups for the first two years following implementation of the revised assessment. My noble Friend Lord McKenzie of Luton gave a similar undertaking in the other place and made a further commitment that monitoring would continue for the first five years following implementation and report to Parliament. That is reflected by the duration of reporting required by the amendment. Lords amendments Nos. 2, 13, 15, 16 and 55 relate to health care professionals other than doctors carrying out a medical examination to provide information used in making a decision on entitlement to benefits. From the outset, the Bill provided for the use of heath care professionals in assessments for ESA. However, shortly after the Bill left the Commons, it became clear that the current legislation did not include the power to make full use of health care professionals in the provision of medical services for customers claiming other benefits, such as disability living allowance, attendance allowance and industrial injuries benefits. Lords amendment No. 13 will enable us to take full advantage of the skills that health care professionals offer in the delivery of medical services for purposes involving social security benefits. Lords amendment No. 2 will commit us to using only health care professionals who are members of regulated professions. It gives a consistent definition of a health care professional across the benefit system. All health care professionals will, of course, be given full training. They will need to be approved by the Secretary of State before they are able to carry out assessments. Lords amendment No. 55 will ensure that all health care professionals carrying out medical examinations will be bound by the same duties of confidentiality as departmental staff with respect to information about individual customers. Lords amendments Nos. 3 to 7 relate to the contracting out of welfare to work services. They will ensure that the Secretary of State cannot authorise a contractor to undertake decision making that could lead to sanctions under the ESA conditionality regime. The Government made such amendments to the Bill in response to concerns expressed about the possible problems associated with the contracting out of sanctions decision making. While, of course, there are potential advantages in moving decision making closer to front-line services, we accept that there is more to be done before we will be aware of how that will work in practice. We will thus not take such a power in the Bill. The fourth group of amendments covers sanctioning following an eviction for antisocial behaviour. Lords amendment No. 9 relates to the housing benefit sanction following an eviction for antisocial behaviour and a refusal to accept support. We believe that the sanction will be an important power for local authorities to use in tackling antisocial behaviour in our communities. The amendment provides for a limit to the piloting period. The Government will thus be allowed to press ahead with piloting the scheme, but if there is to be a scheme in place after 31 December 2010, further primary legislation will be required. We have made a commitment that piloting will be a key element of our plans. If the measure works as we intend and the threat of sanctions encourages antisocial households and families to engage in support programmes, the end date of 31 December 2010 that is specified in the amendment will mean that we will have sufficient time to learn lessons that could inform national design and possible implementation. The fifth group is, by necessity, made up of technical drafting amendments. The Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee reported on the Bill and we tabled appropriate amendments following those reports. Lords amendments Nos. 8, 22 and 23 will mean that the regulations that will be made under the identified powers relating to entitlement to components and the loss of benefit will be subject to the affirmative procedure. Lords amendments Nos. 10 and 11 make it explicit that the powers in clause 40 relating to the use of social security information are to be used solely to encourage people to claim the benefits to which they may be entitled. Lords amendment No. 17 to schedule 3 will ensure that the Secretary of State will have an obligation to review the relevant ESA amounts in each tax year to determine whether they have retained their value. Lords amendments Nos. 21 to 54 will amend schedule 4 to provide a power to migrate those with an existing award of a benefit relating to incapacity or disability to ESA. The amendments do not affect the policy position that we have taken previously on the migration of existing customers. I urge the House to agree to the Lords amendments to this important Bill. During the Bill’s passage, we have managed to maintain a remarkable degree of well-considered consensus between both sides of the House. Together we can be confident that the Bill will make a real and lasting change to the lives of many people who were written off for so long in the past.
- Time
- 14:17
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Mr. David Ruffley (Bury St. Edmunds) (Con)Conservative- Quote
- I welcome the Minister’s remarks. The modern Conservative party supported the principles of the Bill, the details of which required non-partisan, thorough and vigilant scrutiny in Committee here and in another place. I believe that it has been given such scrutiny. It has been hugely assisted by the advice, wisdom and insight of many groups and bodies that work hard and tirelessly to help those who need the support of a modern welfare state. I pay tribute to them as the passage of the Bill draws to its close. The key purpose of Lords amendment No. 1 is to ensure that the scrutiny of the Bill’s operation continues long after it has been passed. The requirement for annual reports will put Ministers to the test when they explain how the new ESA is benefiting—as we hope and trust that it will—many claimants who are able to work, but need support to get back into work. We know that many such people want to work. A welcome improvement was made to the Bill in the other place—Lord McKenzie was the Minister—through the insertion of a provision requiring the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament an annual independent report on the operation of the limited capability for work test and the limited capability for work-related activity assessment for the first five years after they came into effect. I welcome the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform’s decision not to disagree with that proposition of the Lords. However, it is important that we underscore concerns that are being expressed by outside bodies about the new PCA. There is worry that the early stages of the design of the PCA have, albeit in a well-meaning way, been subject to dummy runs. It is clear we must get right something as important as a gateway to a new incapacity benefit—ESA—because it will affect millions of people. The Government have promised that the PCA will be rigorously evaluated. The Minister has explained that a two-part evaluation is being carried out to ensure that the revised PCA constitutes a fair, robust and evidence-based assessment of limited capability for work. However, we must be vigilant. We believe that the annual reporting requirement will deliver rigorous scrutiny.
- Time
- 14:17
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
- Mr. Jim MurphyLabour
- Quote
- I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. Even at this stage, it is important to reassure him and others who consider our proceedings carefully. The revised PCA test seems to be working as expected. However, to clarify intentions, there has been a need to refine some of the wording of physical function descriptors and mental health function descriptors. Some of the scores also have to be refined, so it is clear that we are learning as we go on. In the spirit of co-operation that has existed throughout the passage of the Bill, I will be happy to continue to share such information with the hon. Gentleman, as will the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs. McGuire), the Minister for disabled people, who has played a remarkable role in the formulation of the policy over the past few months.
- Time
- 14:17
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
- Mr. RuffleyConservative
- Quote
- I thank the Minister for that. I associate myself with his charitable and generous comments about the work of the Under-Secretary. It was a delight to debate matters with her in Committee, and I think that our debates generated a lot of light. It is important to remind ourselves as proceedings on the Bill draw to a close of the critical importance of the PCA and the vital need to ensure that its operation is not just looked at over a long period of five years but is evaluated annually. The disability benefits consortium has made the point that genuine evaluation must include examination of whether the assessment of capability to work was accurate, as it does not believe that there is a check to achieve that objective under the current arrangements. It suggests that health or social care providers who know the claimant could be asked whether they believe the new score to be a fair assessment, and it asks whether that could be designed into the new PCA. It says that claimants themselves could be asked whether they agree with their new score, and that members of the PCA could be asked to convene technical groups to interview people who are disqualified by the new PCA, but who qualified under the old PCA, to gain a fuller sense of whether they should, or should not, be considered to have limited capability for work.
- Time
- 14:17
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham) (LD)Liberal Democrat- Quote
- I am new to the deliberations on the Bill. I do not claim to know as much about the Bill or the arguments behind it as the Minister or his Conservative shadow, but my colleagues who do and who have been involved with it have asked me to convey their appreciation of the fact that a consensus approach has evolved and that many of their concerns have been dealt with. As is often the case, the other place has significantly improved the Bill. There were several specific areas of controversy that concerned my colleagues, each of which has now reached a reasonable end point. The first is Lords amendment No. 1, which relates to the evaluation of the new personal capability assessments. As we all know from our constituency work, the process of assessment is stressful and difficult. We all have numerous cases of constituents often with complex and variable conditions who, on the basis of a perfunctory interview with medical staff from the Department for Work and Pensions, have lost their benefits and begun a long and difficult process of appeal. It is a stressful business. Under the new system there will be two basic changes, one of which is the shift from incapability to capability, which is in one sense progressive, but in many respects is more difficult to test. Also, as we know from the statistics, the number of people involved in invalidity benefits of one kind or another is increasingly people suffering from mental conditions, rather than physical disabilities. Those, as we know, are often very difficult to capture, vary from time to time and are complex and difficult to measure. The processes that will have to evolve will therefore have to be more sophisticated and more robust than has been the case in the past.
- Time
- 14:30
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗