Disability Benefits Assessments

[Sir Gary Streeter in the Chair]

I remind Members to observe social distancing. Before I call the Member to move the motion, I will make a short statement about the sub judice resolution.

I have been advised that the Government have applied to appeal the findings of the High Court on the lawfulness of the UK disability survey. Those proceedings are therefore live before the courts, under the terms of the House’s sub judice resolution. However, Mr Speaker has exercised discretion to allow reference to the issues concerned, given their national importance. Nevertheless, Members should remember that those matters are still before the courts, and they are encouraged not to discuss those legal proceedings in any detail.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered disability benefits assessments and the Government’s health and disability green paper.

It is a pleasure to be here under your stewardship, Sir Gary.

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have come along today to debate this important issue, which affects many of our constituents. I thank all organisations that have supported disabled people and provided briefings for this important debate, including Z2K, Sense, Marie Curie, Mencap, the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, Rethink Mental Illness, the Young Women’s Trust, Scope and the Charities Aid Foundation.

I also say a special thanks to Citizens Advice Wandsworth, the South West London Law Centres and the Wandsworth food bank, which have supported people in my constituency. I pay tribute to the tens of thousands of disabled people who have been victims of the cruel and callous assessments for the employment and support allowance and the personal independence payment.

In the short time I have been an MP, I have raised the question of social security for disabled people on many occasions. The system should act as a safety net that is there to support each and every citizen in need, as envisaged by the Beveridge report of 1942, which was about strengthening the social contract for those facing hardship in our society by removing the five social ills. However, there is an ever-growing link between poverty and disability, and social security is no longer seen as a basic right.

Disabled people are usually in receipt of employment and support allowance, universal credit, disability living allowance or PIP. As is the case for ESA, disabled people claiming universal credit must undergo the work capability assessment in order to be found to have limited capability for work. PIP is designed to meet some of the extra costs of living with a disability. Since its introduction, however, almost half of those who were previously on DLA and were reassessed for PIP have either completely lost their award, or had it reduced.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. We have all had constituents come to see us who have been through an assessment and been denied, and we know the distress and pain that causes them. The latest figures show that 67% of appeals to the tribunal against a PIP assessment, 65% of appeals against a DLA assessment and 54% against an ESA assessment have been successful. Does she share my view that if those were the rates for the overturning of Crown court decisions—people who were found guilty, and then found innocent—there would be an uproar? Does she agree that the Government, and all of us, need to look at why, in so many of the cases that go to the tribunal, the original decision turns out to be wrong?

Order. Marsha, before you respond, I remind everyone that interventions should be brief.

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. He is absolutely spot on; it is so important that these decisions are got right first time around. I will come on to that issue later in my speech.

The overwhelming body of evidence shows that the assessment frameworks for both ESA and PIP are not fit for purpose. They use a series of points-based, functional descriptors and a tick-box approach. PIP looks at an individual’s ability to carry out a series of everyday activities relating to daily living and mobility, and the WCA is supposed to test someone’s capability for work, based on various activities. Its main flaw is its failure to include real-world factors, and it takes no consideration of how carrying out work could affect a particular person’s health. For example, I heard from one person who was asked to touch their toes, no matter how much pain they were in or how such an activity relates to their doing work.

For more than a decade, there has been a growing mistrust of assessors as a result of the errors in reports, and many people do not feel that they are being treated fairly. Research by Demos revealed that WCA assessors assume that people are not telling the truth or are exaggerating their condition, and many people report being treated as if they are making a fraudulent application.

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for bringing this important issue to the House. Like other Members, for years I have been receiving heartbreaking stories from constituents in Hampstead and Kilburn about the degrading tribunal process that they are forced to sit through just to access the disability benefits that they desperately need. One constituent told me that she had been to a tribunal on four occasions. She won each time, but while she was waiting for each decision she lost all her other benefits. That included her specially adapted car, leaving her trapped at home. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Green Paper lacks ambition on this issue, and that it is fundamentally unfair that anyone in that situation should lose their social security benefits?

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She is absolutely spot on. The knock-on effect of someone being turned down for the support they are entitled to leads to their losing other forms of support, as was the case with her constituent who lost their Motability vehicle.

Assessors often do not have an adequate understanding of the specific disability, impairment or health condition that is being assessed. Although it is accepted that no one can be an expert in all these conditions, it is essential that all assessors receive appropriate disability awareness training and have access to condition or impairment-specific expertise and tools. The charity Scope has rightly called for the categorisation of assessors into groups for specialisms such as mental health, learning difficulties and so on.

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; she is making a powerful case, as she often does on issues relating to disability. I wonder whether she could comment on another aspect of the system that is broken, namely the backlog on work capability assessments. I challenged Ministers—not the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), who will be responding to the debate—about that in November, and I was told that they were working flat out to resolve the problem. In December, there were still 335,500 cases, which are waiting an average of 150 days to be dealt with. I have constituents who are £128 to £340 a month short because of this, and that is having a crippling impact on their family budgets. Does she agree?

I absolutely and wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend’s comments. I really hope that when the Minister responds to the debate, she will set out how the Government intend to tackle this backlog so that disabled people receive the vital support they need at the right time and do not experience such severe delays.

As I was saying, how can it be right that someone who had been assessed by a physiotherapist for their mental health condition was awarded zero points, despite providing evidence from their psychiatrist and their doctor about their condition? At an appeal tribunal, they won and were awarded 45 points, but it should never have got to that stage. I know that many of my hon. Friends who are here today have constituents who have experienced exactly the same thing.

Evidence is an essential part of the assessment process, and it is vital that assessors engage with it. They should make best use of all pre-existing evidence from experts, including healthcare professionals. At present, anyone who undergoes an assessment is not provided with a copy of their assessment report, and that should be an automatic part of the assessment process. Who knows? That could lead to better decisions being made.

I congratulate my hon. Friend not just on securing the debate, but on everything that she has done on disability issues since she came to the House. Does she agree that we need to support calls for an independent public inquiry into the deaths of claimants, including those who have gone through the work capability and PIP assessment process? We do not know the causes or the scale of those deaths. Surely that work needs to be undertaken as quickly as possible.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I commend her for her impeccable work on the rights of disabled people and tackling inequality. I will come on to the point that she raises, because she is absolutely right. We have long supported the call for an independent public inquiry into these deaths, because it is a scandal that that has not been addressed to date.

People should have a choice about how assessments are carried out, be it face to face or by audio. The process has to be accessible and inclusive. The Disability Benefits Consortium rightly calls for the establishment of an independent regulator of social security assessment, with the power to compel evidence from the Department for Work and Pensions and properly hold the Government to account.

Assessments are carried out by private contractors including Atos, Capita and Maximus. Last November, DWP announced that it would spend £2 billion on disability assessment contracts with private profit-making companies over the next five years. Given the millions already spent, it is clear that these private companies are not providing the best value for money. Labour has long called for all assessments to be brought back in house. That would provide for better scrutiny, accountability and value for money for the taxpayer. Does the Minister agree, and will she take action to address that?

Post assessment, the aim must be to get the decision right first time, but time and again, that has not happened. By the end of 2020 in Battersea, one in five disabled people in receipt of PIP had had their awards reduced, and one in three had their awards completely stopped. Citizens Advice Wandsworth shared the experience of someone who was assessed for both ESA and PIP within three days of each other. In their WCA, they were found to have limited capability for work as they could not walk 50 metres. However, they were awarded zero points for mobility in their PIP assessment, which concluded that they could walk 200 metres. This resulted in them losing their Motability car, so they could no longer drive to work, and they now have to claim universal credit. Surely that is not how the system should work.

Colleagues, the winding-up speeches will begin at 3.28 pm. We therefore have 38 minutes to get 10 people in, so you are aiming for 3.8 minutes, whatever that is in seconds.

It is a privilege to speak in this debate. I greatly credit the hon. Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) for calling this debate on such an important topic.

I welcome many of the comments in the Green Paper because they echo my experience as a constituency MP in Watford and, I am sure, the experiences of many others around the House. One of the key parts of the paper is on the need for greater flexibility and removing the rigidity in the system, especially around assessments. I have worked in this space for many years. Twenty years ago I was writing about the digital divide and working with charities on online accessibility, and I saw at first hand the impact of barriers. When barriers are removed, enabling people to live a fulfilled life and to fulfil their ambitions—and especially when people with disabilities are given opportunities to live their lives fully—it makes a difference not just to them, but to society. That is at the heart of what I read in this Green Paper; it is about an ambition to ensure that we look after people in the right way, and do not base assessments on how good they are at filling out a form.

A challenge that I have seen over many years when it comes to the state interacting with individuals is that it comes down to a lot of check boxes and form filling. If someone is very good at that, they can get through, but if they cannot get through, they are stuck. I see in the Green Paper—I hope that the Government will take this forward in the White Paper—the idea of putting a person at the heart of the process, and, irrespective of their disability, enabling them to live a full life.

In my constituency of Watford, I am particularly proud of the number of amazing organisations that work with charities, and the charities that work with people with disabilities. A few weeks ago, I was pleased to invite the Minister to Watford Workshop, where she saw people working in a fantastic space—very much a normal working environment—in which they have full-time jobs, and are supported and encouraged to live full lives. I hope that she will reflect on that in her comments later, but I think what she saw were happy people, living normal lives, getting on, and having the opportunity to meet others.