Welfare Reform Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments, and with his usual foresight he makes some of the points that I was going to make. He is correct that getting the gateway right is most important in dealing with people with mental health challenges—a subject that he takes great interest in and on which he has campaigned a great deal—and with those with learning disabilities. A second reason why it is so important to get the gateway right is that there can be no confidence in a new benefit if there is no confidence in the assessment process through which the benefit is awarded. That confidence is sorely lacking in respect of incapacity benefit at the moment. Why? First, it is because ““limited capability for work”” is defined as an essentially medical process. Many people would like to broaden it to include not just the responsibilities of disabled people to seek work when they are capable, but the responsibilities of society as a whole, so that it can play its part in including those people in the labour market. The elimination of prejudice—seen, for example, in the fact that 38 per cent. of employers are unwilling to employ a disabled person, which rises to 63 per cent. in respect of people with a history of mental illness—is a critical factor, as such prejudice limits people’s capability to work. It has to be said that it is difficult to work out how it could be measured in an assessment process, but the new clause would at least allow that debate and might allow the assessment process to adapt to meet the challenges posed not by a person’s impairment, but by the obstacles thrown in his or her path by a society still coming to terms with what it means to include disabled people in the mainstream. Another reason for concern about the way in which the personal capability assessment has operated historically is its ability to deal with fluctuating conditions such as bipolar disorder, which my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) mentioned. In a seminar on benefit reform that I organised last year, one of the participants who had bipolar disorder explained what happened when she went for her assessment. It is a fluctuating condition and she felt fine on the day that she had her PCA, but because she was worried that her assessor would not understand what a fluctuating condition was, she felt obliged, in her words, to ““ham up”” her condition to ensure that she secured the assessment result that she needed. A widespread concern about the current PCA process is that it does not adequately recognise not only fluctuating conditions but hidden disabilities such as autism and other learning disabilities. The National Autistic Society says that 40 per cent. of GPs do not have enough information to make informed decisions relating to autism. The result is that people with autism can often be mistaken for being belligerent and unco-operative. That is a real concern. Clause 8(4) states:"““Regulations under subsection (1) may include provision… for a person to be treated as not having limited capability for work if he fails without good cause… to provide information or evidence in the manner in which he is required under such regulations to provide it””." Someone wrongly considered to be unco-operative could lose benefit as a result of a lack of understanding of their condition.