I am pleased to open the debate on behalf of the Welfare Reform Committee.
I am sure that members remember from their school days the end-of-year school report, in which their teachers assessed their achievements, failures and areas for development for the next year. As the motion notes, it is almost a year since many of the provisions of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 came into force on 1 April 2013. The debate presents us with an opportunity to report on the performance of those United Kingdom Government welfare reforms, and I am afraid that the end-of-year report is riddled with “fail”, “could do better” and “needs to pay more attention to those whom welfare reform is affecting”. We also have a great deal of concern about welfare reform’s future performance.
I hasten to add that that view is shared by the majority, but not all, of the committee. I am sure that Alex Johnstone will not agree with that assessment of UK Government welfare reforms, and I hope that those differences of opinion will be aired during the debate. I can see Mr Johnstone licking his lips already.
If we assessed welfare reform on its contribution in class, it would be awarded an F. In economic terms, it is taking money out of the Scottish economy. In April last year, the committee was presented with research commissioned from Sheffield Hallam University on the impact of the Welfare Reform Act 2012. The headline figure had the UK Government’s package of welfare reforms losing the Scottish economy a staggering £1.6 billion per year. The committee recently commissioned Sheffield Hallam University to conduct further work, this time examining the impact of welfare reform at ward level.
The impact of welfare reform on the individual has been a key focus for the committee’s work to date. We have delved below those alarming figures to assess the impact on the people of Scotland. Through the your say initiative, we have tried to give a voice to ordinary people to tell us what welfare reform means for them. We have invited anyone who wishes to write to us with their personal stories, and they have certainly done that.
To date, well over 100 individuals have taken the time and effort to contact us with their experiences about the impact of welfare reform on their everyday lives. We have held four formal committee meetings at which individuals have delivered their personal testimonies to the committee. In 15 years as an MSP, I have never heard such extraordinary, moving, shocking and painful evidence.
I refer to the evidence from Scott Wilson, a 46-year-old with young-onset Parkinson’s who recently separated from his partner of 20 years. Having lived in his home for 25 years, he is now subject to the bedroom tax. When he asked the council where his pregnant daughter and disabled son would sleep when they came to stay if he moved into a one-bedroom flat, he was asked, “Have you ever heard of inflatable beds?”
I refer to the evidence from Henry Sherlock, who is blind and was asked to raise an empty cardboard box in his work capability assessment but not to take it anywhere. He could not, as he needed to hold his white stick in one hand.
I refer to the evidence from Audrey Barnett, who has multiple sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus. She worked until 2008, when she was awarded retirement on medical grounds—that is an important point. Her application for employment and support allowance contained details of her medical conditions and a letter from her general practitioner stating that they were progressive, unpredictable and incurable. The Department for Work and Pensions assessed her as being in the work-related activity group and judged her able to prepare to return to work. Her former employer was the DWP.
The courage of the men and women who have come before us has been humbling, and the committee has certainly sought to address the concerns that have been raised in those powerful evidence-taking sessions.
The main focus of our recent work has been the bedroom tax, on which we have taken extensive evidence and commissioned research. The committee’s interim report, which was published at the end of January, concluded that the UK Government should abolish the bedroom tax or give the Scottish Parliament the power to do so. That view was held by the majority of the committee, along with a belief that the cost of the bedroom tax to tenants is
“iniquitous and inhumane and may well breach their human rights”.
I do not believe that treating people’s homes as merely bricks and mortar—the homes of approximately 65,000 disabled people and 15,000 homes with children—is acceptable in this day and age. The reality for many is that they cannot pay and they cannot move. To make the situation even more frustrating, it is entirely possible that the bedroom tax is costing the public purse more to implement than it is saving. Armed with our evidence and our awareness of the bedroom tax monster in our midst, we have looked in detail at the on-going attempts by local authorities and the Scottish Government to mitigate the impact of the bedroom tax.
As the Scottish Government has detailed in its response to our report, it is committed, if the cap on discretionary housing payments is not removed, to put in place a scheme during 2014-15 that will make funding available to social landlords to mitigate the effects of the bedroom tax. We welcome the steps that the Scottish Government is taking in that regard, but I ask the Minister for Housing and Welfare to provide some further insight into how the scheme would work.
As the scheme is for the next financial year, how would it work for a tenant who has not received or applied for a DHP this year and has not paid some or all of their bedroom tax liability? Would the funding write off those debts? Would the scheme encourage tenants to apply first for a DHP, and then, if they did not receive it, to let the landlord know they would not be paying the bedroom tax? Would the landlord then make a claim on the fund and write off the debt? I am sure that the committee will scrutinise closely the detail of the Scottish Government’s scheme, if it is required, in the coming months.
Another key area of the UK Government’s welfare reforms that the committee has considered is the employment and support allowance, specifically the impact of the work capability assessment. Welfare rights and disability organisations have raised with the committee concerns about how the assessments take account of mental health problems and fluctuating conditions. Some have termed the assessment centres the equivalent of Lourdes. Many people arrive with debilitating health conditions, but miracles occur in the assessment centres, where decisions are taken that the people who entered with those conditions are now fit for work as their health has miraculously been restored.
A cross-party delegation from the committee visited an Atos healthcare assessment centre in Edinburgh, and we have also seen what happens with the DWP decision makers in Bathgate. We are concerned that, of the nearly 60 per cent of people who have undergone an initial assessment for employment and support allowance who have been declared fit for work, 40 per cent have appealed against the decision and a staggering 38 per cent of those have been successful.
Last year, the committee had to resort to making a freedom of information request to the DWP to gain access to statistics on return rates for further medical evidence that was requested from GPs as part of the work capability assessment. The statistics suggest that GPs are failing to provide further medical evidence to Atos, which is one of the reasons why a large number of people are being told that they are fit for work only to have that decision overturned on appeal. People are being deemed fit for work when that is clearly not the case.
As Anne Begg, chair of the Work and Pensions Committee at the House of Commons recently stated, Atos has been the
“lightning rod for hatred and upset”.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the assessments have been devised by the DWP and are not Atos assessments. Atos desires to leave its contract before August 2015, which gives the DWP an opportunity to adopt a new approach before a new contractor is put in place.
In addition to the bedroom tax and employment and support allowance, we have scrutinised devolved aspects of welfare reform, on which we have more leverage. That includes the council tax reduction scheme and the Scottish welfare fund, both of which have been welcomed by the committee. There has been initial concern that uptake of the welfare fund has not been as high as expected. The committee was pleased to note during its budget scrutiny that the criteria for qualification for community care grants and crisis grants has been amended to take down some initial barriers to access. However, it appears from the first official statistics on the Scottish welfare fund, which cover April to September 2013, that performance is mixed across local authorities. Some are not meeting their spending expectations and there are variations between local authorities on the percentage of applications that they are accepting and the speed with which applications are being processed. The committee will explore all those issues with local authorities and the Minister for Housing and Welfare at its next meeting, on 18 March.
The committee has also turned its attention to other areas of investigation. In its first evidence session on food banks, it received alarming evidence from Ewan Gurr of the Trussell Trust that the number of people who are using food banks in Scotland increased from 17,000 last year to 56,000 this year. Dr Sosenko of Heriot-Watt University told the committee that Lord Freud’s statement that the increase in food bank use predates welfare reforms is “factually incorrect”. He said that welfare reform
“has become a major factor fuelling demand for food aid.”—[Official Report, Welfare Reform Committee, 4 March 2014; c 1308.]
The committee will also look to explore the related issue of benefit sanctions and consider the level and appropriateness of their use by Jobcentre Plus. We will start by taking evidence directly from people in Glasgow who have been subject to sanctions, and before the summer we will visit the DWP to consider the implementation of the universal credit pathfinder area in Scotland. We will consider the concerns that have been raised about how people will cope with universal credit, especially with the direct monthly payments for rent, and the difficulties that are involved in equipping people with sufficient digital ability to complete forms for benefit applications.
The final issue that I will raise in relation to welfare reform’s report card is attendance. Attendance is a vital component of performance, but to date we have seen no attendance from the UK Government ministers at public meetings of the Welfare Reform Committee. We have issued a number of invitations to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Welfare Reform and, most recently, the Minister of State for Employment to come and give evidence to the committee, but to date all have been declined. We have an outstanding invitation to the Secretary of State for Scotland, and I only hope that this debate highlights why his attendance and that of his colleagues is vital to our work.
The reforms are failing to achieve their aims. They are failing to pay attention to the people who are directly affected and failing to offer a safety net to the most vulnerable people in society when they require it. This end-of-year report card concludes “must do better”.
I move,
That the Parliament notes that many provisions of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 came into force almost one year ago, on 1 April 2013, and that the Welfare Reform Committee has, over the past year, examined the impact of these, including the under-occupancy charge (commonly referred to as the bedroom tax), passported benefits and the Scottish Welfare Fund, and is committed to examining the role of foodbanks and increased sanctions, as well as the introduction of personal independence payments and universal credit.
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