Welfare Reform Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden), who is eloquent and well informed, as well as the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley), who continues to display the consensual mindset that characterised his deliberations in Committee. This is an important group of amendments. I support new clause 7, which makes explicit the importance of the support group having equal access to the support offered by pathways to work—a matter to which I shall return. Amendments Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4, which I tabled with my hon. Friends, as well as amendments Nos. 57, 58 and 116 to some extent, reflect on the appropriateness of the conditionality regime and the way in which it should apply to work-focused health-related assessments. Amendment No. 3, which would delete clause 10, is a probing amendment, designed to elicit a wider debate about those assessments and the regime in which they operate. Amendments Nos. 1, 2 and 4 relate to specific aspects of the clause and deal with concerns about timing, the conditionality regime and sanctions. As the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds said, and as the Minister made clear in Committee, there is a justification for some form of work-focused health-related assessment, which tries to do something different. However, there are tricky issues, as the hon. Member for Blackpool, South suggested, such as the appropriate timing and format of those assessments. There are arguments on both sides. The hon. Member for Blackpool, South advanced an argument for a delay, which might be appropriate for some people, but I am more sympathetic to amendment No. 87, which gives discretion to claimants and imposes a requirement on the Department or the company operating on its behalf to consult claimants on the timing of the assessment. It is important to stress that that assessment tries to do something quite different from the assessment of limited capability for work and the assessment of limited capability for work-related activity. Both those assessments are about determining entitlement to benefit. Again, as hon. Members remarked, having two assessments might seem confusing, although the Minister reassured the Committee that the process would be seamless. None the less, a work-focused health-related assessment which is designed to be more positive and tries to understand what health interventions might be appropriate to help someone get back into work, and which immediately follows the two assessments dealing with entitlement to benefit may well cause the problems that have been described. Equally, for claimants in constituencies such as mine, where the nearest assessment centre might be 70 or 80 miles away from their home, requiring two journeys to that centre within a period of two weeks raises the problem identified by the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds. In that context, I return to an idea that I suggested in Committee—that in the longer term the Department should consider enabling more of a core assessment. At least part of the medical assessment process for incapacity benefit or employment support or allowance, as it will be, is similar to that which might be used for disability living allowance and for industrial injuries disablement benefit, for example. If it were possible to develop form sort of core assessment, that might offer claimants greater convenience, as opposed to what I have experienced in my constituency, when individuals are required to go to the same assessment centre three times in three weeks for similar but slightly different assessments for different benefits. That seems an unnecessarily burdensome system as it applies to some of the most vulnerable people in society, particularly those who may, in the end, qualify for the support group. I do not think a hard and fast two-week period is right. Empowering claimants to make a judgment for themselves about what would be most appropriate in the circumstances is a more sensible way forward. There is one outstanding issue that arose in Committee and has not been adequately addressed by Ministers in relation to work-focused health-related assessments—the technical but important matter of the timing of those assessments, and how that relates to the application of sanctions. If, for example, someone takes part in their assessment for limited capability for work-related activity and believes that they should be in the support group, but the assessment finds otherwise and on that basis they refuse to take part in the work-focused health-related assessment, my understanding of what the Minister told the Committee is that although the decision would not be made until it had gone to the decision maker to check that the process had been followed properly, in practice the sanction could be backdated. In principle, that person could be subject to sanctions for not taking part in the work-focused health-related assessment, which followed immediately from the assessment for limited capability for work-related activity, which followed immediately from the assessment for benefit entitlement, even though the decision about their entitlement to benefit had not at that time been taken. That is a technical but serious issue, which I hope the Minister will clarify.