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Mr. Hayes: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling: Not now. I shall make some progress and then I shall give way.
The single gateway is part of a wider strategy to ensure that people have the opportunity to work. The Bill introduces two further measures to help people into work. Clause 48 requires joint claims to jobseeker's allowance from young couples who do not have children, so that both will have access to support and advice from the Employment Service and, if they have been unemployed for more than six months, to the new deal for young people. Clause 49 provides for the new £112 million programme of employment zones to cut through red tape and focus resources on areas that suffer from persistently high unemployment, such as those to which my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South referred.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment is taking steps to ensure that, using the new personal job accounts, we shall be able to help unemployed people aged 25 or over to improve their skills and get extra help in finding work.
By pioneering a different approach, we are doing far more to help people get into work. Of course, that is just one part of our overall strategy. We are determined to do more for people who cannot work, so the Bill also reforms and modernises support for disabled people.
We consulted on all our proposals. More than 300 responses were received from local and national organisations and individuals, including Members of the House. The disability benefits forum, which the Government set up in 1998, played a particularly important role in that consultation. Even though members of the forum did not agree with us in a number of key areas--which is not surprising in some cases--their advice was helpful and they have asked to meet us again during the Bill's passage through Parliament.
We are doing a great deal to improve the opportunities and support available to disabled people, but before I describe the ways in which we are doing so, I shall give way to the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes).
Mr. Hayes:
The right hon. Gentleman will know that I am, proudly, a joint chairman of the all-party disablement group. Although the forum was welcomed by all members of the group, he must surely acknowledge, and apologise to the House for, the fear and trepidation caused by a
Mr. Darling:
I find the hon. Gentleman's remarks a bit hard to take. He should perhaps read his deputy leader's speeches to Tory party conferences in the late 1980s and 1990s. The hon. Gentleman was not a Member of the House when the benefit integrity project was set up, but he might care to remember which Government introduced that.
We are taking measures across the board that will go a long way towards helping people with disabilities. For example, we are investing in the new deal for disabled people and introducing the disabled person's tax credit, which, from October, will provide a guaranteed minimum income of at least £150 a week for a single disabled person moving from benefit into work. The new disability income guarantee is worth at least £128 a week for the most severely disabled people under 60 who are getting income support. We are building on our commitment to comprehensive civil rights with the Disability Rights Commission.
All those reforms are an essential part of our overall approach. We want to do more to help people into work, but we are conscious of the fact that there are many people who cannot work. I make it clear today, as I did when I made my initial statement on these matters last October, that no one receiving benefit will lose their benefit entitlement as a result of the changes when they are introduced. We want to provide opportunity where once there was none.
I shall draw attention to a number of issues that I know hon. Members will want to debate. Clause 50 ends the incapacity benefit all-work test and the assumption that everyone on incapacity benefit cannot and will not work. The new assessment introduced by the Bill will consider what people can do, not just what they cannot. No disabled person will be forced into work, but together the single gateway and the new assessment will help disabled people to identify their options and plan for a return to work, where that is possible.
If we want to do more for the people who need help most, we have to ask ourselves how we use our resources, and we are making changes to the incapacity benefit regime. Clause 52 introduces a fairer partnership between the state and individuals by changing the way that occupational or personal pensions are treated for incapacity benefit.
In 1953, only 28 per cent. of people had an occupational pension. Today, 86 per cent. of men and 77 per cent. of women working full-time have one. As a result, about a third of people receiving incapacity benefit also get payments from an occupational or personal pension and some of them receive a pension of more than £150 a week--yet incapacity benefit was intended to replace lost income from work. It was never intended as a top-up to income in early retirement, which is what it has become in many cases. A quarter of men over 60 are on incapacity benefit and many of them were channelled into claiming that benefit by the Conservatives inthe 1980s to hide what was happening with the unemployment figures.
We want to reward thrift and saving. People should be rewarded for making their own pension provision, so under our proposals people will be able to keep the first £50 a week of any early retirement pension paid, but their incapacity benefit will be reduced by a taper of 50p for every additional £1 of pension received. That is reasonable when one bears it in mind that people would need an income from their occupational pension of nearly £10,000 a year before they lost all their incapacity benefit.
I can tell the House also--this matter was raised during consultation--that the £50 threshold will be kept under review to ensure that it remains at a fair and reasonable level.
Dr. Ian Gibson (Norwich, North):
First, does my right hon. Friend agree that removing the 14 physical descriptors would be major step forward in scrapping the all-work test? Descriptors that define how people can lift sacks of potatoes and cartons of milk are not consistent with the modern medical world. They must be removed if the Government are to introduce factors to determine what people can do.
Secondly, will my right hon. Friend consider the iniquity of medical doctors receiving £78 for each session, the duration of which is ill-defined and which often last for between one and five minutes? By my calculations, by doing those tests five days a week and seven months a year, they can earn about £140,000. It is always the same doctor whom clients in my surgery say they have met. Is not £140,000 a lot of money for taking a few pence away from people who are severely inconvenienced?
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. Interventions are becoming very long and many hon. Members are waiting to speak. I ask hon. Members to be brief in their interventions.
Mr. Darling:
I shall try to be brief in my reply.
If my hon. Friend has a doctor in his constituency who is earning £140,000 a year for seeing patients for one minute at a time, I ask him to write to me and I shall deal with that. I should be interested if someone were doing so because I certainly have not come across such a case. Perhaps everyone is keeping very quiet about it, but I should be surprised if that were so. My hon. Friend raised a second point about descriptors--
Dr. Lynne Jones (Birmingham, Selly Oak):
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Darling:
If my hon. Friend will contain herself, I shall give way in a moment. I am mindful of the fact that I have been speaking for nearly half an hour and I have by no means finished.
On descriptors, we have considered the medical side of the new personal capacity assessment. I have considered it on a number of occasions. My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) has a medical background and he will know that, whatever system is used for making assessments, it is always possible for someone to say that it is unsatisfactory and deficient in some respect.
We have compared the system with what happens in other parts of the world. Members of the disability benefits forum are also considering it. We want to get it right
because it is not in our interests to have a scheme that does not enjoy people's confidence. Introducing a scheme that has 100 per cent. support will be difficult, because in my experience anyone who falls foul of a scheme tends to find something wrong with it. People who get through a system tend not to think that it is too bad.
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