Welfare Reform Bill

I am so sorry, but I was mindful of the time. As has already been noted, the Welfare Reform Bill envisages that claimants will be invited to attend assessments and, if assessed as having limited capability for work but not limited capability for work-related activity, was subsequently be required to attend a series of work-focused interviews. As someone who has had personal contact over many years with people with severe mental health problems, I confess to being very pessimistic about the likely consequences of that conditionality being attached to benefits for that group, despite the assurances given by the Minister in response to Amendment No. 32. I have no doubt that others, such as blind people, will also be extremely vulnerable in the new environment. However, I shall direct my remarks to people with mental health problems simply because that is where my experience lies. That group has particular communication needs which present real challenges to benefit offices. I often think that I am glad that I am not one of those officers trying to tackle those very difficult problems. The reality at present is that Jobcentre Plus may be doing an excellent job with many of its clients but, sadly, it simply does not have the skills to deal effectively with people with mental health problems. Social workers tell me that they and others working in community mental health teams spend a great deal of their time troubleshooting—for example, preventing people being evicted from their homes because of the failures of the benefits system, principally arising from the communication failures between Jobcentre Plus staff and the claimant. Service users’ symptoms or side-effects may leave them unable to focus on practical issues like the need for money or making sure that their rent has been paid. They may well fail to take the initiative to ask for a form to complete, to read the instructions or to fill in the form when it arrives. In short, people with mental health problems are unlikely to communicate consistently and effectively or to pursue the necessary set of procedures to attain what they need. Furthermore, people with severe mental illness may have an unexpected crisis on the day of an assessment or interview, and hence not turn up. If they are too ill to attend the interview, they almost certainly will not let anyone know why they have not arrived. One of the most challenging problems for the benefits authorities is the fluctuation of symptoms. Perhaps people feel reasonably well on one day and will phone Jobcentre Plus to be told that they will be invited in for a medical assessment for benefits, but the next day they may become depressed again and for the succeeding week or weeks they may be in a bout of depressive illness and unable to function. But the jobcentre staff member has a note that the person phoned up and is due to come in for an assessment. All would seem to be well. When the claimant then fails to appear for the assessment and the jobcentre worker checks their notes, they are probably going to misconstrue the situation and the risk to the individual’s benefit is perfectly obvious. It is no one’s fault, but the system even as it stands does not cater for that kind of problem. Even under the existing relatively benign system, problems arise when a service user changes their circumstances. That is a very particular point of difficulty. Perhaps, for example, they take up a job but fail to keep it and need to restore their benefits urgently. According to the linking rules, this should happen without a problem, and I am grateful to the Minister for his letter about those rules. However, I have to say that it does not actually address the issues I have raised about them, so perhaps we could have a discussion outside this Committee. The fact is that problems arise because the symptoms of the individual’s illness or the severe side-effects of the medication in the early stages of a relapse—when they have suddenly lost a job because they have become ill—mean that they do not answer letters or respond to phone calls, and the benefits are simply not paid. Too often, what actually happens is that the landlord threatens eviction, and on we go from there. Social services are contacted, or indeed members of my staff. However, my big worry is that communication failures under the new system will create this kind of life crisis without there being any change in an individual’s circumstances. If they get to the point of receiving benefits, there will then be yet another interview, another challenge and another set of hurdles. So one of my concerns is the sheer number of actions and contacts that will be necessary in order to achieve and then retain an adequate income from the new ESA. Every claimant will have to negotiate one or more work-focused and health-related assessment, work-focused interviews once a month, and in time to arrange and attend work-focused activities. In our world, you have to break all that down and think of how many activities each of those things involves: responding to a phone call, opening a letter, reading the instructions, filling in a form, finding an envelope and a stamp to go on it, remembering to post the letter when all that has been done—if the individual ever reaches the point of doing it. These are actions which most of us hopefully can manage without too much difficulty, but you have to consider all of them as risk points every time there is a requirement for an interview or other action. In a bureaucratic world, we can simply forget the enormity of all this. The methods of notification and communication will need to be sensitive, repeated where necessary, and involve checks to ensure that the claimant has really understood the position and is well enough to take the requested actions. To do this properly will require even more resources than the Pathways to Work pilots which, although as all noble Lords know, have been successful for a lot of people with physical challenges, have not been successful for those with mental health problems. It seems that there will be one of two outcomes: either people’s benefit will be set at or reduced to the jobseeker’s allowance, simply because they will fail this whole gamut of measures; or they may be granted employment and support allowance and then simply be neglected by the contractors who take on this work. In the latter case they will presumably remain on benefit indefinitely without any kind of help. But let us assume for a moment that the contractors will attempt to engage with this client group, in which case a failure to undertake any one of the actions that I have referred to will potentially put the claimant’s benefit in jeopardy. I return to my conversation with the Jobcentre Plus manager responsible for operating this system. I hope that noble Lords will forgive my returning to this—I mentioned it on Second Reading—but it is so relevant to what we are talking about now. When I asked her what happens to people with mental health problems when they come to her needing to restore their benefit, she said: ““Quite honestly, what usually happens is that the police pick them up and they are taken back to hospital. We cannot really help. We don’t understand mental problems. There is no doubt that mentally ill people really suffer in the system””. She was referring to the current system without the conditionality envisaged in the Bill and without these repeated requirements to attend at various junctures for various assessments and interviews. We should be aware that even those who are ultimately judged as entitled to membership of the support group, and thus not subject to any conditionality, may nevertheless, as I understand it, be required to undertake a work-focused interview after eight weeks—I think that that is correct. These will be severely disabled claimants, yet they too must show good cause—within five days, as I understand it—why they failed to comply with those requirements. Perhaps the Minister can assure us that a failure to comply with that requirement will not affect the support group benefit to which they have been assessed as entitled. I certainly acknowledge that the answers to these problems are not straightforward. Only sustained personal contact and home visits will protect this group; and yet we know that that means resources, and we know that the DWP is facing a 5 per cent budget cut. So if conditionality is applied to vulnerable groups including people with mental health problems, I hope that the Minister can assure the Committee that the system will take account of the disabilities of the claimant and that he will give serious consideration to these amendments. I beg to move.