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Mr. Darling: I have no intention of following the hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) very far down the road he took. His arguments against the means test might just have a little more substance if it were not for the fact that the Conservatives doubled means-testing during their 18 years in office. The only thing that I found interesting in the hon. Gentleman's speech is that he has confirmed that the Conservative party is against the minimum income guarantee for pensioners. That means that 1.5 million poor pensioners would lose out if the Conservatives were ever to get back into power.
I should first speak briefly to Government amendment No. 31--which is a drafting amendment to clause 54, removing an unnecessary cross-reference to the definition of personal pensions. I shall not say anything more about it, as no one else has.
I should like to set the debate in context, deal with all the points that have been made and, of course, deal with the points that have been made on our proposed reform of incapacity benefit. However, I should first make the
preliminary point--especially for those outside the House who will read reports of our proceedings--that the debate has, on both sides of the House, been very good natured. I realise that right hon. and hon. Members hold different opinions on these matters, but they have very temperately expressed those opinions. It has been a very good quality debate.
The proposals that we published last October, and which essentially are made in the Bill, have two overriding objectives. First, we want to ensure that we provide every possible help to enable those who can work to do so. Work on a decent wage--which we are ensuring through the national minimum wage--is the best way of combating poverty, the causes of poverty, and especially persistent poverty, which is one of the main problems that we have inherited. Disabled people want to work--2 million already do, and 1 million more on benefits say that they want to work. We want to help them to do that.
Our second overriding objective is to provide far greater security than we have provided in the past for some of the most vulnerable people in society who will never work in their lives. The proposals in the Bill are a key part of that strategy and mark a radical change of direction from what the Tories did in their 18 years in office.
I do not want to say much about the Tories. However, I find it very hard to take when they parade before us as the party of the dispossessed, the poor and the disabled, an advocacy that they masked particularly well in their 18 years in office, and when the hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) tells us that they have all been to Damascus--it is just as well that it is not in Europe, or they could not have gone there at all--and tries to tell us that he now stands shoulder to shoulder with my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Audrey Wise).
Mr. Letwin:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling:
Let us hear about Damascus.
Mr. Letwin:
Is the right hon. Gentleman advancing the argument that two wrongs make a right?
Mr. Darling:
The hon. Gentleman was wrong for 18 years, and he is wrong again today.
We remember how the Tories filibustered and tried to block the Bill sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Mr. Berry) to give rights to disabled people. It is this Government who introduced legislation--which was recently given a Second Reading--establishing the Disability Rights Commission.
For the Tories, it did not really matter whether someone was unemployed, sick or disabled. Indeed, forthem unemployment and sickness were completely interchangeable--it did not matter. That is why they cynically moved people--a whole generation of people--from unemployment on to incapacity benefit. That is why one quarter of men--double the number of 20 years ago--over 60 are now on incapacity benefit. Those people were only statistics to the Tories, whose record speaks for itself. Therefore, some of us find it very hard to take the Tories' protestations and invitation to some of my hon. Friends to stand shoulder to shoulder with them in the Lobby today.
I do take seriously many of the concerns expressed, both inside and outside the Chamber, by many of my hon. Friends, and I realise the sincerity with which my
hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood and, particularly, my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge and Chryston (Mr. Clarke) expressed their views. However, I profoundly disagree with them, for reasons that I shall explain later.
We are changing the culture of the system. The hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) said that we needed a change of culture. I hope that he has noticed the single gateway, which will ensure for the first time that everyone of working age gets the help that they need, with a personal adviser to help them improve their skills, get into work if they can and get the benefits and assistance to which they are entitled. That is an important change of culture.
In our welfare reforms across the board, we are tackling poverty and the causes of poverty in every way possible through the help that we give and the benefits that we provide.
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling:
The hon. Gentleman has not been here for most of the afternoon. I should like to make a little more progress, because I anticipate that there will be interventions on other matters that I want to deal with.
I shall set out what the Government are doing to help people get into work. We introduced the new deal. It was opposed by the Conservatives and the funding was opposed by the Liberal Democrats. In 15 areas we are piloting--
Mr. Duncan Smith:
Get on to the amendments.
Mr. Darling:
The Conservatives do not want to hear this. We are helping disabled people get into work. We are making work pay. The minimum wage will bring 700,000 women into the national insurance system. The disabled persons tax credit--[Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. There should be silence, with the exception of the Secretary of State.
Mr. Darling:
The disabled persons tax credit is worth £155 a week. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Dr. Jones) said, we have extended the linking rules that allow people to try out work before they lose their entitlement to benefit. Under the Tories, they had only eight weeks. Under the arrangements that we have introduced, disabled people can try out work for up to two years without losing their original benefit. This week we have extended the disabled
Our second objective is to provide security, because we recognise that there are some who cannot work. The system clearly does not do enough for the most severely disabled people. We are increasing child benefit for everyone. We have invested £2 billion in the new state second pension for carers and for disabled people with broken work records. Costs have been referred to a lot this afternoon. That measure alone represents a £2 billion investment that has not been made before. It is not true that our reforms for disabled people are driven by a desire to save money. We shall save unnecessary expenditure and concentrate help where it is needed. We have a new £22 child credit for children of disabled parents. The disability income guarantee will benefit 175,000 people. The extension of disability living allowance to three and four-year-olds is worth another £35 a week. Our reforms to the severe disablement allowance give more help to severely disabled young people by up to £26 a week. Our approach to SDA--
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough):
What about the amendments?
Mr. Darling:
The subject is covered by amendments Nos. 7 and 86. Just sit back and listen.
Severe disablement allowance is paid at the rate of £54.40 a week. It is so low that 70 per cent. of people on it have to claim income support. Their SDA does not help them, because every penny of it is taken into account in calculating their income support. The original purpose of the benefit was to help people who never had a chance to work because they were disabled at birth or early in life. That is why we are increasing the benefit for young people from £54 to more than £80 a week. That is an example of looking at benefits, asking whether they serve the purpose for which they were intended and increasing them. Some 175,000 people will gain from that. They also have access to the universal, non-means-tested DLA, which is worth up to £89.95 for the most severely disabled people. We wanted to provide more security for people who, by any view, need our help, and we are doing that.
I wish to refer to the amendments that we are making in relation to incapacity benefit and, in so doing, deal with amendment No. 12 and the others that have been mentioned. While we are providing more help for severely disabled people and more help to get people into work, we want to ensure that the system is brought up to date to reflect changing conditions. As in all of our reforms, none of the changes that we are making will affect people currently getting incapacity benefit. Unfortunately, the newspapers sometimes forget to mention that, but I hope that people will bear it in mind.
We intend to restore the benefit to its original intention, which was to replace income that people lost as a result of sickness and disability. I want to set out how, under the new rules, people will qualify, because there seems to be some misunderstanding--certainly among the Opposition. Under our proposals, people will still be
eligible for incapacity benefit after two years--or, in some circumstances, for as much as three and a half years after becoming unemployed. I believe that the conditions are fair. Someone on average earnings can work for as little as four weeks in all during a two-year period prior to a claim, or 12 weeks for someone earning the national minimum wage.
It is right to link eligibility for incapacity benefit to recent work. There are thousands of people now who satisfy the medical tests for incapacity benefit, but not the contribution conditions--I will return to them shortly--who are on income support, which can, in some circumstances, provide £73 a week, more than the £66 a week for incapacity benefit. The most severely disabled people on income support would also get help from the new disability income guarantee and disability living allowance, which can provide help of up to £90 a week, as my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Mr. Levitt) said.
The hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) referred to the medical test, as have one or two of my hon. Friends. Throughout this afternoon, there has been much talk of a perceived lack of consultation. One of the things that I considered was whether we ought to amend the medical test. We are doing so in one way, to which I shall refer in a moment. If anyone thinks that there is some unrest about what we are doing, I can assure them--this was made clear to me by the disability organisations to whom I talked--that if those organisations had thought for one minute that we would try to solve a perceived problem by ratcheting up the medical test to make it more difficult to qualify medically, there would have been just as much trouble. That is not the right thing to do.
We know that there are problems with the all-work test, which is patently subjective. I do not think that the option of ratcheting it up would be right. As part of our reforms in the Bill, we are introducing a new personal capability assessment. What was wrong with the all-work test--a bit of a misnomer--was that it concentrated on what one could not do, rather than on what one could do. Surely our proposal is the sensible way to go.
The hon. Member for Maidenhead referred to someone suffering from multiple sclerosis or a similar degenerative condition. Because of the way in which the contribution conditions are structured, anyone knowing that they were slowly going to come out of the labour market--given what I have said about the number of contributions that would have to be made in the preceding two years--could easily manage their departure from the labour market.
The disabled persons tax credit and the national minimum wage mean that somebody coming out of the labour market that way has more purchasing power and more national insurance contributions than otherwise. Of course, the Conservatives are against the national minimum wage and the disabled persons tax credit--both of which are helping people.
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