congratulations on your appointment as the new Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).
In the spirit of your opening statement to the House of Commons where you stated that you wanted to lead a new conversation with disabled people, charities and the wider community, I would like to offer some initial thoughts as you take on this complex department.
Take time to appreciate the Social Model of Disability
Although the Social Model has been around for a few decades, none of the major political parties has truly appreciated its radicalism and opportunities for policy design. The first articulation of the Social Model came from the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation who stated in 1975:
In our view it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society.
In the forty years since then, the Social Model has broadened its scope as other disabled cohorts have identified with its basic principle that society creates barriers through how it is organised to turn people's impairments into disabilities and makes them vulnerable.
The UK's response was largely to compensate disabled people for the additional costs incurred. This included the John Major administration in 1992 introduced Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for working age adults (something that you and your fellow Conservatives should feel proud of).
Yet the nature of a compensatory system meant that disability benefits were exposed when the collapse in government income occurred in 2008. While I disagree with the reasoning employed by your predecessor in cutting certain disability benefits such as abolishing the Independent Living Fund or the arbitrary 20% reduction in the DLA replacement Personal Independence Payments (PIP), what it demonstrated was that the gains that disabled people achieved re the Social Model in the 80s and 90s were shallow rather than deep-rooted.
The opportunity available to you Stephen is to have that debate of what does good Social Model policy design and practice look like. Conservatives should be happy to embrace the principles of participation and controlling one's life that the Social Model demands that people with impairments should have. What objections can a Conservative have to helping people to help themselves?
The good thing about framing the discussion through the Social Model is that the conversation isn't dominated by amounts of spending but rather about outcomes. That will prove challenging to some of your current policies that act in opposition to the Social Model. Yet some disability campaigners and charities will also find that framing challenging.
What I found encouraging about your statement on Monday Stephen was that you stated that you were willing "to think beyond the artificial boundaries of organisations, sectors and Government Departments to an approach that is truly collaborative". Adopting a Social Model framework would enhance such thinking.
Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) has structural problems
I have no doubt that ESA was developed with good intentions. The problem is that good intentions doesn't always lead to good policy and ESA falls into that category. The decisions made in 2010 by your predecessor to roll out the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) exacerbated the flaws within the benefit.
The first issue with ESA was that it attempted to simplify by processing those with short-term health difficulties with those with long-term illnesses and/or impairments/disabilities. While it superficially made sense to have one process, the needs of these two cohorts are very different yet the system asks them to access the system as if they were to be long-term recipients of the benefit and all requiring to be assess for work capability. This doesn't just confuse the purpose of ESA, it generates unnecessary bureaucracy and backlogs.
For claimants with short-term health conditions preventing them working, they are signed off by their GP and those Doctor's Notes generates the ESA benefit for the period proscribed at assessment rate which is the same rate as Jobseekers Allowance (JSA). When the Doctor's Notes end, so does their access to ESA. This happens before any WCA is able to be scheduled. It would make sense to split ESA into a short-term benefit and a longer-term benefit. The short-term benefit (say a maximum of 6 months with mechanisms for extension/transfer into longer-term benefit) can be regulated by Doctor's Notes alone.
The longer-term benefit would allow you to address the second issue with ESA. Namely the artificial split between those in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) and the Support Group who have longer-term health issues and/or impairments/disabilities.
On a practical level, the comparable off-flows into work from both the WRAG and the Support Group indicate that the current system isn't that good at identifying who is nearer the workplace. It also demonstrates that its not about the levels of impairments someone has but whether those impairments can be minimise by reasonable adaptation to allow access to the workplace. Individuals are better at judging the balance and support required than a tick-box exercise like the WCA.
I also have considerable sympathy with Matthew Oakley's argument in his recent paper Closing the Gap that the ESA Support Group provides fiscal support for more than just being out-of-work with a premium for the income penalty of longer-term health issues and/or impairments/disabilities which the WRAG currently provides. Instead of this additional payment being access through other parts of the benefit system or social care, it has been confusingly attached to ESA Support Group. I agree with Oakley that the distinction between WRAG and Support should be abolished with the payment rate set at WRAG level. This is partly why I hope that you will reconsider the £30 reduction in WRAG payments for new claimants from 2017.
The other reason to reconsider the £30 WRAG reduction is that the JSA rate is set as a temporary level assuming that people will move off that benefit quickly. With WRAG, the expectation is that it will take longer to support people into work hence the premium to reflect that length of time as well as their health and/or impairments. Even if the WRAG and Support split remains, lowering the WRAG payment by £30 risks exacerbating claimants health issues.
Further to this, the idea floated by Iain Duncan Smith on Sunday morning that more people would be moved into the Support Group as a result of this change to the WRAG in 2017 would imply parking more people on benefits. Given the criticisms of Incapacity Benefit for exactly those reasons, this policy feels rather confused. It certainly isn't compatible with the Social Model discussed earlier.
The third issue for ESA is the nature of the WCA itself. The design of the WCA means that in order for your impairments to be recognised, the claimant has to disabled themselves. It promotes anti-Social Model behaviour and discourages participation in society. The act of disabling is very painful and damaging especially for those with mental health problems and/or cognitive issues (autism/learning difficulties etc). It pushes people away from the workplace and towards greater health and social care needs.
There is an inherent contradiction between politicians wanting a system that supports what people can contribute whilst designing a policy that only recognises what they cannot contribute.
There is also an understandable rational response in not wanting to be constantly reassessed by the WCA given it is a painful process. Therefore taking risks and entering the workplace is undermined by the barrier that is the WCA if that risk is unsuccessful as you go back to the beginning of the assessment process.
A quick win for you Stephen in generating goodwill could be in offering, say, an 18 month period where if an ESA claimant in the WRAG or Support Group enters employment and then leaves it within that timescale, they would return to the WRAG or Support Group without another WCA. It would be an interesting trial as to whether that would make a difference to off-flows into work and encouraging risk and opportunity.
Ultimately ESA needs fundamental reform as its not fit for purpose.
Small concessions on the Bedroom Tax would go a long way
One of the qualities of your predecessor was that the DWP would fight every legal challenge beyond what many observers would call reasonable. A good example of this is this Court of Appeal judgment in January this year which your department is appealing to the Supreme Court.
What seems particularly bizarre is the DWP argument that discretionary payments covered the panic room costs. If the costs are to come from Whitehall whether in Housing Benefit payments or Discretionary Housing payments then for what is a small cohort, the reputational damage to your administration alone should outweigh any argument as to how the money travels from Whitehall to the local authority.
Equally the discrimination of the policy that disabled adults can have an extra bedroom for overnight carers but disabled children cannot have overnight carers just makes the DWP look petty and vindictive. It is inequitable as a policy and dropping the appeal to the Supreme Court would send a signal that your words in the Commons about recognising that "behind every statistic there is a human being" matches your deeds.
Another concession that would make a difference is exempting homes that have been specially adapted for someone's impairments. This is currently particularly cruel when an area doesn't have a wide mix of housing stock to choose from. It is also economically inefficient to have to adapt another property for the same needs when the provision already exists.
These three small concessions would make a significant difference to how you are perceived without incurring significant costs.
Closing the Gap is an honourable aim
If anything defines your predecessor, its the continued state of Universal Credit (UC) for which substantial time and resources have been devoted. Given the latest estimated costs of the programme are £15.8bn, the incentives to return to work have been downgraded by the Treasury to below the current Tax Credits system, and even if the complexity of the IT system can be resolved, the business case for UC looks extremely shaky.
Instead a worthy challenge for you and your department to focus on would be the gap that disabled people have with the workplace. Using the framing of the Social Model discussed above and looking critically at the barriers created by current policies and benefits such as ESA, such a determined approach would enable bridges to be built with disabled people and charities that have been damaged by recent policy decisions. Who knows, you might find that supporting people with their impairments to be contributing members of society actually does a lot for the welfare cap as well as fitting with the best traditions of One Nation Conservatism.
As you stated on Monday Stephen, this is a complex piece of work. Improving this area has benefits for health, social care, social cohesion and welfare. I would suggest it has more tangible benefits to the country than the speculative financial benefits of a reorganisation of how benefits are paid.
