Cost of Living: Financial Support for Disabled People

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petitions 610300 and 617425, relating to the cost of living and financial support for disabled people.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Robert. I congratulate Rachel Curtis, Abigail Broomfield and Katy Styles for creating the petitions. Abigail and Katy are here today, and more than 40,000 people have signed the petitions. I put on the record my thanks to the Petitions Committee staff for all their work, Inclusion London and Disability Rights UK for meeting me last week, and the many organisations that sent briefings and provided advice, including Oxfam, Scope, Mencap, the Royal National Institute of Blind People and Citizens Advice.

Ahead of today’s debate, the Petitions Committee launched a survey, which 10,854 people completed—one of the biggest responses to a Petitions Committee survey. The plight of disabled people should concern every Member, as the proportion of the UK population reporting a disability has risen to 20% over the past decade. As a disabled person myself, I know how intense it can be for someone to share their story, so I thank each and every person who completed the survey for sharing their experience. In response to the ongoing cost of living emergency and energy crisis, 93% of respondents have had to limit their use of energy, 76% are limiting their use of transport, and 60% have limited their use of specialist equipment. Over half have had to reduce their use of medication.

Those results are shocking. Unsurprisingly, testimony of poor mental health was apparent. Some respondents described feelings of despair. Others even reported being pushed to consider suicide. One respondent wrote:

“My life is hard. I survived childhood cancer to become a disabled adult. I had so many hopes for my life but now each day I regret not dying of cancer. My life is not dignified.”

A mother wrote:

“My son…is allergic to the cold. He has EpiPens and I have had to use them this winter as I can’t afford the heating on all the time or I can’t afford special clothing for him. I feel like a failed mother.”

A person who regrets not dying of cancer, and a mother who feels like she is a failure; I ask the Minister how that is acceptable in the UK in 2023. Nearly half of those living in poverty in the UK are disabled or live with somebody who is disabled.

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. She is right about the figures around poverty: one in three disabled people live in poverty—twice that of non-disabled people. While I applaud the petitions’ aims, particularly the call for one-off payments as a temporary measure, does she agree that the real issue is the adequacy of social security support for disabled people, which has become emaciated over the last 12 years, and that we need to incorporate the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities into law? We have been a signatory to it since 2009, but are failing to provide adequate social protection.

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She is absolutely spot on. We need a wholesale review of social security but, more importantly, the Government should commit, as Labour has done, to fully incorporate the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, so that we are protecting their civil and human rights.

It is a fact that disabled people incur extra costs. Scope’s latest Disability Price Tag report found that the average disabled household faces an extra £975 a month in costs, with that figure rising to over £1,200 if accommodating the inflationary costs for the period from 2022 to 2023. The Resolution Foundation found that the gap in household income between adults with a disability and adults without a disability was 30%, including disability social security, and that the gap rises to 44% if disability social security is not included. That was across the period from 2020 to 2021. Citizens Advice data for May 2023 shows that since the first quarter of 2022 the largest cohort helped was either permanently sick people or disabled people. The Trussell Trust has reported that disabled people are hugely over-represented in food poverty demographics. And 73% of families who took part in the recent survey by the Disabled Children’s Partnership said that the cost of living crisis will have a significant impact on their disabled children.

The spending of disabled households is particularly exposed to the ongoing energy crisis, given that energy bills for medical issues, and spending on specialist equipment and food, make up a disproportionate share of all spending. In response to the Petitions Committee’s survey, 48% of respondents said that they had extra costs due to the use of specialist equipment.

In my view, there is no question that the blame lies with the successive years of a Conservative Government, whereby they have created a hostile environment for disabled people. That was compounded by the pandemic and the current cost of living crisis.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Robert, to follow the hon. Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) and, indeed, to have a second bite of the cherry in speaking about this topic, given that last Tuesday I could not make it to the debate secured by the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows). It is always good to have a second coming, I have to say—although in my case perhaps not. We have had an eloquent debate so far.

I am sure that we will hear many numbers in the course of the debate. Two stick out to me. One comes from Kidney Care UK, which cites the average annual extra cost to an individual facing dialysis as £1,918. The second big figure comes from the charity Contact a Family, which works with disabled children. It says that the average cost of the energy needs for the disabled children that the charity works with is £1,596. That covers such matters as pumps, monitors, hoists and electric wheelchairs, all of which are related to an individual’s health condition. That is one type of extra cost that the disabled face in regard to energy needs.

The second type of cost does not really relate to health needs but is a consequence of a person’s disability. I chair the all-party parliamentary group for assistive technology. Many people with profound and severe disabilities, particularly cerebral palsy, rely on computer or some sort of IT aids to engage with the wider world. They are vital to their quality of life. Such aids can be voice recognition software, eyeball-controlled software and so on. All that relies on electricity, which of course costs money as well. Those needs are a consequence of their disability but are not health needs per se.

The third sort of extra cost is that those with any sort of disability need to maintain their home at a higher temperature than might otherwise be the case merely to keep themselves warm. On that point, I give a small plug to my Westminster Hall debate at 4 pm on Wednesday, which is about furniture poverty and affordability. One area that I will focus on is the fact that all too often new tenants move into social housing and find that floor coverings have been removed, and they cannot afford to replace them. They end up with a much less well-insulated property, which for many of them affects their health. Those are the three areas that we need to consider.

What?

The hon. Member mentioned the Retail Energy Code Company only briefly, and I wanted to talk a little more about it because the detail in it is actually quite interesting. I am not mocking the hon. Member at all, I just have the time to cover it in more detail, whereas she had more to cover. I urge her not to take offence unnecessarily.

The Retail Energy Code Company advises energy companies on the code of conduct they must adopt towards their customers. Given some of my casework, I am not sure how much the energy companies are listening to it, but that is its role within the energy sector. Andrew Mower, who has been working with it on a set of proposals on how to deal with energy costs for disabled people, has done a superb job in exploring this area and finding some of the flaws in the proposals that have been made in recent months.

In particular, it is worth looking at the NHS schemes that exist at the moment for those on oxygen concentrators and dialysis machines. It is a perfectly good model; I am glad to see the NHS recognising that it has to help people meet energy costs, but it is not universal. It goes back to my old friend the postcode lottery. In addition, the subsidy does not go up when energy prices go up, so people are always playing catch-up. People are paid in arrears, so they have to stump up the cash to pay their bills in the hope that they will get the money back at some future date. That money may not actually reflect the bill they have to pay.

It is interesting how the NHS model, which we think may be the answer to many things, actually causes as many problems as it solves. Similarly, with social tariffs, Mr Mower points out the immense difficulty they have found in the broadband sector when trying to come up with a social tariff that actually works and does not disrupt the market in perverse ways with unintended consequences that could see social tariffs costing more than the one that is available on the market to families now. Social tariffs by themselves are quite difficult to get right and need to be extremely flexible. I am not convinced that Ofgem spending hours each week reinventing what this week’s social tariff should look like every time the energy cap changes is actually the answer either.

The hon. Gentleman is very informed and detailed on this topic so I defer to his superior knowledge, but does he not agree that the Retail Energy Code Company, Ofgem and all those involved in the market are clearly failing the most vulnerable in our society? I have vulnerable and disabled constituents who are turning off their energy just so they can survive, yet the disaster of the structure and the standing charges—which the hon. Gentleman mentioned —means they are no better off, but they are freezing cold.

I share the hon. Lady’s view about the reality that her constituents, and indeed mine, are facing. I share some of her criticisms of the energy companies themselves. The Retail Energy Code Company is trying to provide an answer, which I hope the energy companies will listen to and I hope might just persuade her that it is worth a second look, but I do not know. Time will tell, perhaps.

When coming up with proposals for the disability sector, many charities emphasise the broadness of eligibility and auto-enrolment. That is entirely logical and sensible for them to do. They have learned from the reality of the priority services register. In my constituency, I find that the people who really ought to be on that register are the least likely to be on it, so charities are right to be concerned about whether some sort of voluntary enrolment would actually get to where we want it to go. At the same time, they are missing out the potential for a more tailored scheme, which goes back to my earlier point. Everybody’s energy costs are going to be different, and one-off payments do not necessarily meet that challenge.

The hon. Gentleman is making a very thoughtful speech about a complex issue. Does he accept that having some money, while imperfect, has to be preferable to being left without that amount of money?

Something is better than nothing. However, part of the art of speech making is building an argument, as I hope the hon. Lady understands. I have not yet culminated my argument in what I think we should do. By all means, she can agree or disagree with my critique of what is being proposed, but I am about to come on to what I think should be done, which I hope might just persuade her yet again.

Mr Mower looked at what is being done in the Australian states. They have gone into great detail on this topic, looking at all the different forms of medical equipment that people are using and their energy intensity. Each piece of equipment has a different energy consumption rate. It cannot just be measured by minutes or hours; some of them are more energy intensive than others. Australian states have done calculations enabling them to oblige energy firms to discount the energy at the point of consumption. There is then no need to request a rebate from an energy company, or some supplementary top-up, because it occurs at the point of consumption of that energy. That helps to solve the problem of how we support those with energy-intensive equipment needs. However, I agree it does not meet the needs of those who have to heat their properties generally for their own health benefits.

The hon. Member for Battersea briefly mentioned the issue of the warm home prescription, which the Energy Systems Catapult has been introducing. It has had a limited roll-out in Gloucestershire, and I think it is now operating in four areas as a pilot. It has great potential, but where I issue caution is that we need to understand, if we do not already, whether it is actually saving the NHS money. The idea is that a social prescriber looks at a person’s energy consumption, the insulation in their home and their energy needs, and works out whether a form of prescription to help with energy prices is a way of forestalling more expensive treatment for more severe health conditions at some future date. That is quite hard to capture in a short period of time because we have not seen the long-term consequences yet, but that measure seems positive to me. It would deal with the issue of people needing to warm their homes over a longer period of time, so it is a twin-track approach.

It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Sir Robert. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) on leading this important debate. We know that the serious implications of rising prices for fuel, transport and food have fallen much harder on some people. People with disabilities face a higher risk of poverty. The poverty rate for individuals who live in families where someone is disabled is 28%—nine percentage points more than those who live in families where no one is disabled. They are also less likely to be able to make savings on their bills for reasons related to their disability. We have heard a great deal about how the size of bills impacts many people.

I will talk about one of the petitioners: Katy Styles, who is here today. She is an unpaid carer for her husband who has motor neurone disease, and she is a campaigner for improved support for carers. She put it like this:

“It’s not a question of putting on an extra jumper for us. When someone has a muscle wasting disease their ability to stay warm is compromised, so homes need to be heated for longer and at higher temperatures. Not heating your home can lead to chest infections and in turn this can lead to a stay in hospital”.

We are focusing an awful lot on households with someone with a disability, but the extra costs for heating are borne by not only the person with a disability but their unpaid carers. Well over a quarter of all unpaid carers are living in poverty, and research from Carers UK found that more than three quarters of carers said that the rising cost of living is one of the main challenges that they would face in 2023, which is hardly surprising.

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning my fantastic constituent Katy Styles. Does my hon. Friend agree that campaigns such as We Care and people such as Katy make a real difference to us because they talk about the impact on real lives, and how the decisions that we make here affect them on a daily basis? It is not just statistics that we receive from charities and others: we know how each decision that we make here impacts on people’s real lives.

I very much agree. It is good that Katy Styles is here today, because I have learned a lot from her about the role of carers. It is something that I care deeply about. Like her, I would like to see improved support for carers.

Returning to the point about maintaining higher temperatures in the home, people with disabilities, as we have heard, are also being hit with the increased costs of vital high-energy equipment, additional laundry and bathing needs, and transport for visits to medical appointments, which can be very costly. As my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea said, the charity Scope has found that, on average, households with at least one disabled adult or child need an additional £975 a month to have the same standard of living as households without somebody with a disability. In fact, those extra costs—she gave this figure too—rise to £1,122 a month after accounting for inflation. In this debate, we are throwing around the amounts of £150 and £650, but we should think about those figures, because £150 is nowhere near the increased costs.

The petition asked for disabled people and unpaid carers to be included in the one-off £650 cost of living support payment. We should reflect on the fact that unpaid carers are more likely to live in poverty than those without caring responsibilities: 29% compared with 20%. The Government responded to both petitions for today’s debate stating that 6 million people in receipt of a qualifying disability benefit would receive a £150 payment last September, but only those in receipt of a qualifying benefit would receive the £650 payment. I understand that that excluded 568,000 personal independence payment and disability living allowance claimants and 523,000 carer’s allowance claimants. Carers such as Katy Styles and the We Care Campaign argue that although the one-off £150 payment was welcome—as discussed earlier, any extra amount is welcome—given the additional energy costs that disabled people and their families are bearing, it was completely inadequate in the context of the ongoing cost of living crisis. We have all seen our bills: £150 hardly goes anywhere. The We Care Campaign recommends that the Government introduce a social tariff for energy that discounts energy bills for those most in need, automatically enrols eligible households and is mandatory for all suppliers, as advocated by the charities Age UK and Scope.

It is a pleasure to serve with you as Chair, Sir Robert. I thank the Petitions Committee for arranging this important debate.

We know that many people are struggling at the moment as a result of the cost of living crisis generally, but, as we have heard, disabled people are struggling more than most, and households that include someone with a disability spend more on food, face higher energy costs and are more likely to have a lower household income. It was really interesting to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) talk about a survey that showed some tragic results for those experiencing such conditions, and I thank her for referring to that.

As we have heard, analysis by the disability charity Scope suggests that, on average, disabled households need an additional £975 a month to have the same standard of living as non-disabled households. That rises to over £1,100 if we account for this year’s inflation.

The figures account for disability payments such as PIP, which are designed to help address those costs. For some families, the costs have a shocking impact. Disabled people are almost three times as likely to live in material deprivation than the rest of the population, and 80% of households with a disabled person say that Government cost of living payments are just not enough to meet the increased costs that they face. Families might accrue costs due to expensive dietary requirements, running medical equipment or being unable to cut back on their heating because they need a higher temperature. Low temperatures can have adverse effects on the vulnerable.

This time last year, many of us would have attended a Marie Curie drop-in. Marie Curie published its report “Dying in Poverty” a year ago, which presented its research on the impact of poverty on terminal illness. At the drop-in, I and others met a lady with a terminal cancer diagnosis and her husband. They had a water meter and, without me asking, they said that they were running up huge costs because of the need to do constant washing in order to limit the risk of infection. What struck me from that meeting was how little is known about the help that is available for people through water companies and other initiatives. It is not enough to meet the general need, which is a tiny proportion in that case. Some people have much more significant costs than others.