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I shall deal specifically with the amounts that will be involved. The hardship payment is paid not at the full rate of income-based JSA but at a reduced rate of the applicant’s personal allowance, which is currently £64.30 for an individual aged over 25. The reduction is either by 20 per cent or 40 per cent, depending on certain characteristics. Where the claimant, a member of the family or a member of a joint-claim couple is pregnant or seriously ill, the reduction is 20 per cent, and a 40 per cent reduction is applied if the claimant belongs to a vulnerable group. For a weekly JSA personal allowance for someone aged 25 or over, the hardship payment at the 80 per cent rate would amount to £48.40. Income-based JSA would be paid at the same rate. If it were a payment rate of 60 per cent, it would be £36.30 per week. For lone parents aged 18 or over, a similar 80 per cent rate would be £48.40 and £36.30 for the 60 per cent rate. My understanding is that only the basic rate applies and would not impact
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Lord Skelmersdale: I asked if the ultimate sanction had ever been used, to which I do not think I had a reply.
Lord McKenzie of Luton: I am looking for some help on that question. I am told that it has been used, but perhaps I can gather some data on this and write to the noble Lord.
Lord Skelmersdale: I would be extremely grateful for that. It certainly is not the point of this probing amendment to make these sanctions weaker than the New Deal and I am grateful to the Minister for his comment that the system will lift sanctions for re-engagement. Whether that is an absolute guarantee or whether it depends on the individual circumstances of the case, I am not entirely sure. None the less, whichever way it is, it is helpful as far as it goes.
Of course it is wrong to penalise children for the actions of their parents, but we are not necessarily talking about parents with children in this clause. Indeed, if there are children, the income will be more than the £64.30 quoted by the Minister because of the family premium payment of £17.30 and £56.11 for each dependent child. Moreover, there may well be housing benefit, council tax benefit, family credit and so on. I am sorry, family credit would not apply in this case. However, other benefits are involved. Unless the Minister wants to come back to me, I am happy to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton: Perhaps I may respond briefly on the specific point about lifting sanctions. We are looking at ways of lifting them part-way through. This is something we want to do in the flexible New Deal and carry forward into the “work for your benefit” provisions. It is something which is on the radar and we are trying to see how we might best achieve it.
Lord Skelmersdale: So it is work in progress, but it has not actually happened yet. That is useful and helpful additional information. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
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15: Clause 1, page 2, line 40, at end insert—
“( ) Regulations under this section must make provision to ensure providers of the schemes—
(a) submit to the Secretary of State data showing the number of participants with a disability at every stage of the scheme by impairment category;
(b) are required to show how they will meet the needs of participants with particular disabilities.”
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Lord Rix: I shall speak also to Amendment 21. I thank noble Lords who have added their names—unbidden by me, I hasten to add—to these amendments. To their support I can add that of 27 other organisations from outside this Committee, including Leonard Cheshire Disability, Age Concern, the National AIDS Trust, RNID, Macmillan Cancer Support, Mind and, of course, the charity of which I am president, Mencap. I hope that at the end of this short debate, the Minister will add his name to that list as well.
In a nutshell, the effect of theseamendments would be to monitor the impact of these reforms by category of disability. “Category of disability” is a rather clumsy phrase, but it is what I have been told to say. The provision of these data will allow the Government to track and evaluate how well the reforms will assist the different categories of people with disability into work. The amendments will ensure that this new benefits system works for everyone, no matter what their type of disability. It will guard against any group being left behind on the equality agenda.
Support for the aim of these amendments is not limited to the charitysector. A report from the Work and Pensions Committee, published in April this year, recommended that,
- “the Government monitors progress [in employment] by physical impairment, mental illness and learning disability ... to ascertain whether more progress is being made in some groups of disabled people than in others”.
This monitoring and evaluating is essential in order to assess whether the reforms are working accurately and appropriately for all different types of disability, including those furthest from the labour market, such as those with a learning disability.
The Minister’s department’s report on the disability equality duty, published in December last year, acknowledges that,
“Although there has been an overall improvement in the employment rate of disabled people, there remains a wide variation in employment rates for different impairment types. In particular, theemployment rate of people with learning difficulties remains low”.
As I said at Second Reading, Mencap estimates that this employment rate for people with a learning disability is as low as 17 per cent. That compares to 49 per cent for all disabled people and 74 per cent for the population as a whole. The last decade has seen no improvement in these figures. This is despite the fact that 65 per cent of people with a learning disability want to work. With the inclusion of these amendments I have put forward today, the Bill gives the Government power truly to tackle thisinjustice.
Those opposed tothese amendments—I cannot believe that that relates to anyone present—say that we are asking the Government to micromanage providers. They are mistaken; we are simply asking that their payment and contracts model recognises the fact that people with differentimpairments experience particular types of barriers to equal participation. There has been very effective progress in other fields of equality, such as race, on identifying priorities for action by focusing on sub-group categorisations. The same approach must be taken for disability.
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I have every reason to think that the Minister and his colleagues in the DWP are supportive of theseamendments. Indeed, at the launch of the White Paper that preceded the Bill, the then Secretary of State confirmed that this new system would monitor the impact of these reforms by category of disability. Of course, the Minister kindly organised a meeting for me with the Bill team to discuss these amendments only a few weeks ago. I was delighted to be told that they were considering putting forward an amendment on this very issue on Report. When the Minister responds, perhaps he will be able to elaborate further on his intentions. We need a commitment to this monitoring in the Bill. As we heard at Second Reading, the number of references to regulations in the Bill is already at an alarming 387, and addingyet another when this amendment can be neatly fitted into the Bill should not be considered.
The weight of demand for these amendments to stand as part of the Bill is immense. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively. I beg to move.
Lord Northbourne: I am very much in sympathy with the research project that is envisaged, but will the noble Lord, Lord Rix, explain the concept of “equality” in this context? It seems to me that certain types of disability might mean that there are not enough jobs available for that category of person. How then can you have equality?
Lord Rix: Of course there will always, regrettably, be a shortage of jobs for people with a learning disability; it is sine qua non that they have far greater trouble obtaining employment than perhaps those in any other category of impairment. However, if the Government do not monitor the response to the Bill for disabled people, and it turns out that everyone who is an amputee is being given work but people with mental health problems or learning disabilities are right at the back of the queue, it will be clear that the advisers are not doing their work properly. It is therefore essential that these numbers are judged.
Lord Northbourne: The noble Lord said that they are not doing their work properly. They may work like anything, but if they cannot find jobs that they can fill, what are they to do?
Lord Rix: I tried to explain this at Second Reading. Mencap started the pathway employment service in 1976 in Cardiff and it spread around the country. The pathway employment officer, who was the equivalent of the adviser, made sure that the person with the learning disability would fit into the job that the employer wished to offer, that they were trained specifically for that job and that when they entered that job they had a foster worker who was with them for at least six weeks to ensure that they went through all the processes correctly, including clocking on and off. I am afraid that it will probably have to work like that with this larger enterprise. It is a matter of support for individuals.
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Lord Skelmersdale: I put my name to the amendment because I agree with it in principle. I am delighted to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Rix, that the Minister is at least in sympathy. However, I hope that he does not go quite as far as the amendment has gone. None the less, I congratulate the noble Lord on his ability to bring the problems of people with mental illnesses to our attention so early in the Bill.
Lord Rix: Not “mental illnesses”, please, but “learning disability”.
Lord Skelmersdale: I apologise. The problems are in identification. If they are self-confessed, all well and good, but if not, it depends again on someone in the jobcentre having the right sort of training. I clearly misread this amendment; I had anticipated that it referred particularly to mental illness, as opposed—
Baroness Thomas of Winchester: The noble Lord, Lord Rix, will be moving an amendment later about learning disabilities. This one is not about that.
Lord Rix: To clarify, this amendment is about all disabled people and all categories of disability. That includes learning disability and mental illness, but they are not exclusive to this amendment. The amendment covers all forms of disability: loss of sight, loss of hearing, loss of limbs and so on.
Lord Skelmersdale: In that case, I will continue in the way that I started and intended.
As I was saying, the first problem is identification. It is easy enough when the illness is confessed—being on drugs to ameliorate that illness, and so on—but when the illness is not self-confessed, problems can occur. An example of this might be a physical illness such as some types of ME or, following surgery, depression, which might spiral down to deep depression. We have been told that personal advisers are already trained to detect mental illness, but I understand that this training amounts to a three-day course. Here I invite the Minister to correct me if I am wrong.
I thought not. My point is that only psychiatrists and psychiatric triage nurses, whose training is long and arduous, have a hope of detecting difficult cases. Therefore, it is unlikely that personal advisors will arrive at the right conclusion and that will happen, if it happens at all, even before the scheme in Clause 1 comes into operation.
If—it is a big if—the participant is correctly diagnosed for the Secretary of State’s purposes for moving him closer to, or ideally into, the job market, the next thing is to choose the scheme that is right for him. This may involve him going to a doctor for the appropriate drugs, a confidence-building course, part-time voluntary work, or possibly, if a suitable employer can be found, part-time work—all the things that we have heard about as we have progressed through the early stages of the Bill. It is hoped that all that will progress him into paid work. As the Government have acknowledged, the right support and assistance is vital in helping participants to get back into work. I agree with Rethink
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For now, however, I support the idea behind this grouping introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Rix. The Minister will, I suspect, say that the amendments go too far, but I hope that the Secretary of State will monitor what is going on. That monitoring should start in the jobcentre and continue through the scheme’s progress. The problem with the amendments as they stand—unless I have misread them—is that there must be a report on every impairment category. Is that wise? How does the noble Lord, Lord Rix, intend to break down these categories? I doubt from what he has said that he means there to be only two categories: namely, physical and mental. How would he categorise those with a physical disability, but with a mild or serious mental consequence, which I mentioned earlier? Is being in a wheelchair a category or would he break down the categories of wheelchair users into the reasons why people are in a wheelchair? I could go on but I hope I have made my point.
On the second part of the first amendment, I have a small problem regarding the issue of where monitoring is required on the contractors, who presumably will report on their subcontractors. Surely there is no point in monitoring what is going to happen. The Government need to know what has happened, so that when the piloting stage ends and the schemes are evaluated before being rolled out nationwide, the Government will have the data needed to evaluate the pilots, based on what has happened, rather than on what will, might or even could happen.
In summary, while I support the principle of these amendments, I am afraid that I cannot support them as they stand. I suspect that the Minister is in the same position.
Lord Rix: Before the Minister responds, perhaps I may say that internationally recognised means of measurement already exist, such as those used by the World Health Organisation, including the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, and the ICD-10—the International Classification of Diseases. Furthermore, my later amendments refer to the training of personal advisers. If they are properly trained, it is their duty to recognise the various forms of disability. You do not have to carry an enormous sign saying, “I have a learning disability”. Most people with a learning disability—of whom about 600,000 of the 1.5 million in this country would like to work—probably carry identification of one form or another which shows that they are in receipt of disability allowances. That would make it clear that they have a learning disability.
Baroness Turner of Camden: I, too, support the amendments, particularly Amendment 15, because it covers the needs of participants with particular disabilities—in other words, all disabilities. I speak with the benefit, if I can call it that, of some experience, because recently I have become partially disabled due to a mobility problem. When you have a mobility problem, you sometimes feel that the whole world has
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Baroness Thomas of Winchester: The outsourcing of government services to companies, charities and voluntary organisations is now commonplace, but many of us are concerned, as the noble Lord, Lord Rix, said, about how these non-government bodies will be monitored in the particularly sensitive area of “work for your benefit” schemes. We are still talking about Clause 1. We are not talking about people on ESA at the moment, because that is not this part of the Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Rix, said, there are a huge number of people with different disabilities—I am one—and we need to know how these outside bodies are performing in providing the right support for the different groups under this part of the Bill. One of the problems is that many people fall into more than one impairment category, and this would make the whole monitoring exercise difficult, not to say expensive. But without this evidence, how will we know whether these outside bodies are fulfilling their remit and not cherry-picking those easiest to place in employment? We do not know how the contracts are being drawn up, but by putting this requirement on the face of the Bill we will be reassured that progress on the employment of all jobseekers with disabilities is being monitored. It will also be very helpful to know whether the doubling of the budget of Access to Work, for example, is working. This would provide some evidence. So we strongly support the amendment. We believe that it is not beyond the wit of man to devise a good scheme for monitoring people with disabilities by impairment category.
Baroness Murphy: I support the amendment. I think we have to get real about what happens in practice. What normally happens in all departments of state is that they implement a law; they do not know how it works in practice; and then they go and engage a social research unit from an important university to set about a huge research project to find out whether it worked. I have been involved in several of those projects myself. The researchers then go back to the department to get the data but the data do not exist. With the Mental Health Act legislation, for example, no information at all about its implementation in certain groups was collected for about 15 years after 1980. They had no idea about the categories of people subject to it. We know from research literature from the United States that there are certain categories of people who have not done very well with these schemes. They will probably be in the minority and will be hidden in the generality of the results produced about how many people are moving into work and work-related activity. You will not see them because they will be totally lost in the data and the statistics will not show them.
We should therefore ensure that we are collecting sufficient data which can at least be translated into information. As the noble Lord, Lord Rix, said, that is
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Lord McKenzie of Luton: Like everyone who has spoken in this debate I fully support the sentiment behind it. I acknowledge the long experience of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, in campaigning, in dealing with these issues, and particularly in focusing on learning disabilities, although I acknowledge that this amendment is focused more widely. However, I do not necessarily agree that primary legislation is the way to achieve this aim. The amendments would require providers to monitor and report—we should focus on the fact that we are talking about “work for your benefit”, which concerns providers and not Jobcentre Plus provision—by impairment category, the number of participants with a disability at every stage of the “work for your benefit” scheme, and the amendments would require the Secretary of State to evaluate those data.
Placing a statutory duty on providers by asking for such detailed information, particularly in a programme designed for jobseekers, is, I suggest, a step too far. It would place a considerable reporting burden on providers and could divert resources away from support and into administration. A balance must be struck between seeking information that helps to inform policy-making, ensuring that the information gathered is appropriate and that it represents a responsible use of resources.
However, I reassure noble Lords that we will put in place a comprehensive evaluation of the “work for your benefit” scheme and will publish the findings. I very much take on board the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, has just made. We must seek to avoid such an evaluation 15 years after the event, when there are no data. Our approach will include looking at the experiences of jobseekers with health conditions or disabilities without placing undue burdens on organisations which are trying to deliver employment support. I certainly undertake to engage further with the noble Lord, Lord Rix, and with other noble Lords who wish to participate, when we focus on how this evaluation might proceed. We would certainly benefit from the experience of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy.
The amendment also requires providers to specify what support they will put in place for those with specific impairments. This change is more problematic. The entire direction of welfare reform is, quite rightly, to treat jobseekers as individuals and to determine, in partnership with them, what support they need, and not to make broad assumptions about their capabilities or barriers to work based only on what disability they have. The best people to determine exactly what support is needed are the advisers and suppliers who work with
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I assure noble Lords that “work for your benefit” contracts will require suppliers to support the Secretary of State in her duty to promote equality of opportunity for disabled people, as well as being exemplars in meeting their duties under the Disability Discrimination Act. Not only will the DWP’s contract-management arrangements monitor delivery in this regard, but customers will have the opportunity to discuss any problems or concerns with Jobcentre Plus. Indeed, we intend that Jobcentre Plus personal advisers will review with customers their needs before they are referred to “work for your benefit”. This will ensure that providers have a clear idea of the barriers and circumstances in individual cases.
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