House of Commons Hansard Debates for 5 Dec 1996 (pt 17)

Sir John Hannam (Exeter): Does my hon. Friend recall that in July I discussed with him and with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State the hardship cases which may arise as a result of the new Motability arrangements? My right hon. Friend agreed to write to the chairman of Motability to ask him to show understanding and flexibility in the arrangements so as to help such hardship cases.

Mr. Mitchell: My hon. Friend is right--I remember those discussions. As my hon. Friend knows, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has undertaken to keep the matter under review, and to discuss any difficulties with the chairman of Motability.

We anticipate that in any one year 5,000 people with Motability agreements will be protected. I am pleased to tell the House that Motability has advised me that there has been virtually no adverse impact on its customers since the changes were implemented. To answer my hon. Friend's specific point, in only three cases has there been a problem due to a breakdown in communication.

Mr. David Lidington (Aylesbury): My hon. Friend may recall that we exchanged correspondence about the difficulties experienced by people who are not part of a Motability scheme, but who have made private arrangements for the use of a car or wheelchair. Did his Department undertake research into the means of people with private arrangements when it was decided that they should be treated differently from those who are party to Motability agreements?

Mr. Mitchell: Yes, we carefully considered that precise point, which my hon. Friend has raised with me before on behalf of a constituent. For the reasons that I have given, the changes relate to the direct link with Motability and do not apply to private arrangements.

Mr. Roger Gale (North Thanet): I appreciate that interventions are tiresome, but I assume that my hon. Friend wants us in the Lobby with him tonight. With regard to the private purchase of a vehicle through the mobility allowance, will my hon. Friend assure me and my constituents that the change will not be retrospective? He referred to people who have already entered into contracts, and I am sure that he shares my abhorrence of retrospective legislation. I fully appreciate that people may make different arrangements in the future, but does the change apply to people who have already entered into contracts?

Mr. Mitchell: I fully understand my hon. Friend's point. I assure him that current Motability agreements are protected.

In the current financial climate, we have to question the use of a social security benefit to enhance provision already made from public funds. Indeed, measures relating to the vast majority of benefits specifically exclude anything that smacks of double provision.

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In closing, let me make it clear to the House that DLA is one of the fastest growing benefits in the social security system. The figures are on the record and show more eloquently than any words the full extent of our commitment. Spending on DLA alone has increased again this year, by £550 million. Following my right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor's Budget, it is set to rise next year by a further £670 million. That takes us to more than £4.25 billion.

That level of extra support and help--which, as the House knows, is not means-tested--can be sustained only if we are clear-sighted about who should receive it. The Government have taken this difficult but fair decision, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State deserves credit for that. Because we have made such decisions, the growth in social security expenditure is now contained, and is less than the rate of growth in the economy as a whole. If we do not take tough decisions, we shall end up in the same position as France and Germany, where strikes and riots accompany welfare reforms, precisely because tough and necessary decisions were not taken at an earlier stage.

The Government are proud of the help that we are giving to 1.5 million people through the mobility component of disability living allowance. The changes have affected about 14,000 people, half of whom have received a degree of protection. I commend them to the House.

6.13 pm

Mr. Alfred Morris (Manchester, Wythenshawe):

"It's nothing short of a scandal that this major reversal of policy should have taken effect without the opportunity for Parliament to debate these amending regulations: it's a betrayal of trust."

They are not my words. They are quoted from a statement made to Ministers last summer by Lord Rix, whose long and distinguished services to disabled people, more especially those with severe learning difficulties, have won him the abiding respect of both sides of both Houses of Parliament.

As this House knows, I was the architect of the mobility allowance, from which the mobility component of the disability living allowance derives, when I became the first Minister for disabled people in 1974. That is my credential for intervening briefly in this debate. I do so with deep misgivings about the effect of the regulations in hampering the rehabilitative process, not least in the case of newly disabled people in special hospital units, and damaging the quality of life of patients more generally.

I ask anyone who wants to vote tonight on the merits of these regulations to reflect, before they do so, on their effects on the lives of two young disabled people. The first is a severely disabled girl in her teens, who lives with three other young people in a bungalow on a main road in an area south of London. She has never lived in a hospital. The mobility component of her DLA--which in her own word has now been "slashed"--enabled her mother to visit her and take her home every week, and the staff to take her on outings not covered by the funding of her residential home. But it so happens that the home is funded by the NHS, so she is one of the losers.

Only a few miles away a young woman, also severely disabled and in an almost identical home, but one funded by the local social services authority, still keeps her

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mobility money in full. How can such sharply contrasting treatment be defended? Merely to cite the two cases is to condemn the regulations, and I most strongly urge the Minister to stop piling handicap on handicap for extremely vulnerable youngsters solely because they are in accommodation funded by the NHS.

It is against natural justice for the two cases to be treated so differently, and it is demeaning of this House for the Government to seek, by the use of a three-line Whip, to force these regulations through tonight. For many long-term patients in NHS accommodation, the mobility component of the DLA, creatively used as I intended it to be when legislating for the mobility allowance 20 years ago, has been the only means of enhancing their mobility. My fear now, like that of the Disablement Income Group, is that, without recourse to the full mobility component, their quality of life will suffer, that they will have less contact with the outside world and become more isolated. How can anyone in this House possibly justify the imposition of a three-line Whip to achieve that result?

Ministers never tire of saying that they have improved the incomes of disabled people. They pat themselves on the back with a frequency that could endanger their health. But the overall impression they seek to create is phoney. It leaves out of account some huge cuts in spending on disability benefits, of which recent parliamentary questions have established the facts.

Take the example of a question that I tabled about the cost to disabled people of breaking the link I forged in 1975 between invalidity benefit and increases in average earnings. What the Minister's reply showed on 11 November--at column 90 of Hansard--was that, in the last year for which figures are available, 1994-95, disabled people lost over £1 billion in consequence of that one retrograde decision. The reply also showed that, since the decision to break the link first took effect in 1980, the cumulative loss to disabled people by 1995 was £5.99 billion. By now it must exceed £7 billion, which is more than three times the Government's total annual expenditure on the mobility component.

That figure was never volunteered to this House by Ministers. It had to be forced out of them by a parliamentary question, but they cannot be allowed to keep on throwing dust in people's eyes with selective information. These regulations are, in the view of all the organisations of and for disabled people, about cutting public expenditure, and not

"a logical tidying-up of the benefits system"

as Ministers so misleadingly claim.

"Far from being logical, the reversal of policy these regulations seek to confirm is insane; and Parliament should say so."

Again, they are not my words. They, too, are from Lord Rix articulating, as he does so well, the depth of the concern of all the disability organisations to see these regulations rejected by this honourable House tonight.

6.18 pm

Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling): I do not have any difficulty with the theory advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Gelding--[Laughter.]--I apologise to my hon. Friend the Minister. His

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constituency is, of course, Gedling. I also have no difficulty with the proposition that the Government should avoid double counting on any benefit. I fully endorse the policy that he enunciated, which is the concentration of benefit payments on those who most need them.

My concerns about the regulations stem, first, from the fact that the Government proceeded with them after a study of their likely impact, based on what appears to be a very limited sample of practitioners. In the Command Paper to which my hon. Friend the Minister referred, I was struck by the reference to the fact that only six national health service trusts were part of the Department's fact-finding exercise. That seems a limited amount of fact finding on such a sensitive and important issue.

I have conducted my own fact-finding study, as far as I can, in my constituency. I approached the four hospital trusts that cover my constituency--that represents a sample two thirds the size of that used by the Department--and the responses that I received are instructive. Two of the trusts are acute hospitals and two are in the non-acute sector.

Senior staff of the two acute NHS trusts--Kent and Sussex Weald NHS trust and Mid-Kent Healthcare trust--said that the regulations would not give them a problem in regard to the level of care for each patient. I got a different picture from the two non-acute trusts. The Weald of Kent Community NHS trust expressed concerns that a number of its patients, particularly those who had entered into long-term hire purchase or lease agreements for disabled people's cars--those commitments continue while a person is in hospital--would certainly be exposed as a result of the regulations and the withdrawal of the mobility component, unless they had a Motability agreement. There is great concern about that group of people, but my hon. Friend the Minister made light of it.

My most significant concerns were aroused when I spoke to the fourth trust--Maidstone Priority Care NHS trust--which has a number of long-term, severely disabled people in community care, including a number of quadriplegics. We discussed a unit that I know well in Brook street, Snodland, for extremely disabled young people.

I was struck by one sentence in the explanatory memorandum put out by the Department to justify the regulations. It features in appendix 3, paragraph 15 of Command Paper 3233, to which my hon. Friend the Minister referred, and states:

"Patients do not use their DLA for mobility purposes but use the money to buy tobacco, cigarettes, sweets etc."

I most sincerely hope that that unqualified statement does not represent the general views of the Treasury Bench team, because it is not justified.

The severely handicapped people in the unit to which I referred regard that statement is complete bunkum. That severely disabled group of people use the mobility component to finance mobility helpers, who are critical as, almost without exception, all members of the group require one-to-one help every time they leave the unit. If they go anywhere by wheelchair along the pavement, or if they go to the local park or the shopping centre, they require one-to-one help, which means mobility helpers. If they go out in the minibus further afield, they still require such help.

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The chief executive of the NHS trust confirmed, sadly, that as a result of the regulations significantly less money will be available to the trust to provide mobility helpers for severely disabled people. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will take careful note of that consequence of the regulations. I do not suggest for a moment that that is the generality of the situation, but among some small, but exceptionally deserving and vulnerable groups, that will be the consequence. If my hon. Friend wants to visit Brook street in Snodland, I shall be available to be there with him at any time, so that he can see for himself the situation and the consequences. The Government would have been well advised to conduct a much wider fact-finding exercise, as the Social Security Advisory Committee recommended, before proceeding with the regulations.

On the detail of the regulations, first, I do not accept the logic that the cut-off date for the withdrawal of the mobility component should be the same as that for the care component. The two are inherently different. I accept that when a person goes into hospital, it can safely be assumed that the hospital will, from day one, be responsible for his care. I can certainly understand why it is right to withdraw the care component within four weeks of an adult going into hospital.

Surely the mobility component is different. People can go into hospital, but have continuing liabilities--in terms of both mobility requirements and liabilities--particularly if they have entered into lease or hire purchase arrangements to purchase a disabled car or an electric wheelchair.