 House of Commons |
Session 2008 - 09 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates Welfare Reform Bill |
Welfare Reform Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Liam Laurence Smyth,
Committee Clerk † attended
the
Committee WitnessesMr.
Tony McNulty, Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, Department
for Work and
Pensions Jonathan Shaw,
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Minister for Disabled People),
Department for Work and
Pensions Kitty Ussher,
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and
Pensions Sharon White,
Director, Welfare to Work, Department for Work and
Pensions Mary Helson,
Deputy Director in the Office for Disability Issues, Department for
Work and Pensions Public Bill CommitteeThursday 12 February 2009[Mr. Jim Hood in the Chair]Welfare Reform BillWritten evidence to be reported to the HouseWR
03 Families Need Fathers, Resolution, The Centre for Separated
Families, Jewish Unity for Multiple Parenting, Mothers Apart from their
Children 9
am The
Committee deliberated in
private. 9.2
am On
resuming—
The
Chairman: Good morning. It is a pleasure to have everybody
here. I do not know whether this is a first for the House but it is
certainly unusual to have three Ministers giving evidence and a
Minister on the Committee available to ask questions. Because we need
to finish at 10.25 am, we need to get on with the business. I will ask
the Minister whether he needs to introduce his two
colleagues. Mr.
McNulty: No, I think they
can introduce
themselves. Sharon
White: I am Sharon White, director of welfare to work
at the Department for Work and
Pensions. Mary
Helson: I am Mary Helson, deputy director at the
office for disability issues, working on right to
control.
Q
116Mr.
Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con): I would like to start
with the right to control area of the Bill. This question is probably
best directed at Mr. Shaw and then perhaps Ms
Helson.
Clause 29(2)
starts well by being drawn widely across a range of areas affecting
somebody’s whole life. Unfortunately, it gets rather narrower in
subsection (5) where it excludes social care services and a number of
other things. I have read the reasons for that—that those areas
are already controlled under other legislation—but it seems to
me that we run the danger, with a number of Government Departments
moving in this direction, of ending up with individuals having a number
of individual budgets and a number of different funding streams and not
being able to draw all those things together. Why not be braver and
encompass a range of funding streams across Government Departments to
give individuals a genuine right to control, so that they do not have
to fit their lives round departmental boundaries but Departments try to
fit their service delivery around individual
lives? Jonathan
Shaw: Good morning. One could say that
if we were very prescriptive we would be in danger of constraining the
possibilities under right to control. That is why we have said that we
want to have the trailblazers, which I know you asked the chief
executive of RADAR about. We want to have them so that we
can look at all the possibilities. If we are too prescriptive at this
stage, we might need to come back and have further legislation. In
addition social care is there, so there will be a danger of duplicating
that legislation. I believe there is sufficient legislation; we should
not create confusion by being prescriptive in the Bill.
We have
provided the Committee with a helpful paper which includes all the
various parts of the legislation. It is right to have as wide a scope
as possible. We have set out our stall to ensure that local authorities
can act in partnership with ourselves and other public bodies. Most
importantly, that has to be underpinned by working with disabled people
and their organisations to find out what
works.
Mary
Helson: The intention is that it should be as
seamless as possible for an individual disabled person. There is an
absolute desire to avoid confusion and duplication of the primary
powers. The alignment at local authority level will ensure that it is
possible to join all those different pots of money together. We are
starting that through the project steering group. It will involve the
Department of Health and the Department for Communities and Local
Government. That will ensure that we join up at all the different
levels where necessary. In the pilots we will need to ensure that the
transformation of adult social care, which is already very advanced, is
integrated sensibly with the personalisation on the disability
employment programmes, where we need to make further
progress.
Q
118Mr.
Harper: I am still not entirely convinced, and we will
have more debate on this when we get to the detailed consideration of
the Bill. First, the legislative framework for adult social care is in
place, but it is not very advanced in the sense of the number of people
in the country who have an individual budget. One of the witnesses on
Tuesday was Paul Davies, the director of adult social care at Oldham.
His authority has a fifth of the national total of people on adult
social care who have an individual budget. The number of people with an
individual budget in adult social care is very disappointing. Picking
up the point that you both made about pilots or trailblazers, he said
in his evidence that he understood why people wanted a pilot but,
having rolled this out to everybody in his authority, he was convinced
that there was sufficient evidence about what works and how to proceed,
and he said unequivocally that he would like the Government to press
forward with this. That is broadly my view.
Have you
considered the alternative to a piloting system, which is putting the
legislation in place and being very clear with authorities about the
direction that you want to go? Obviously some local authorities, and
possibly even some parts of the DWP and its delivery organisations such
as Jobcentre Plus, would move faster. You could then use those leading
organisations to learn the lessons—to see what worked—and
then roll out to those that were slower. That would set a clearer
direction and would be more likely to lead to this concept taking hold
than running pilots for three years, during which a lot of authorities
will be tempted to sit back and wait and not engage with the process
because they are not sure that it is inevitable.
Jonathan
Shaw: It is not just social care that we are talking
about in terms of the possibilities. We have also referred to disabled
facilities grants. One can envisage a number of education grants. There
is also Supporting People. We can also see this in the context of care
and support. We will be producing a Green Paper on what, one could
argue, will be one of the most important pieces of social policy and
change that we need, in terms of delivery and affordability. It would
be wrong to constrain ourselves at this stage and cut off
possibilities. Of
course, local authorities are at different stages. I think there is
generally a consensus belief in the devolution of power and in local
authorities making those decisions for themselves. Your prescription
would fly in the face of that. We need to strike that balance. We have
set out our stall and have been clear that that is the direction of
travel that we want, but we cannot see this in the context of social
care alone. We need to pull together other aspects and other funding
streams. We know where we want to be and we need to provide the
flexibility to bring people with us, and, importantly, involve disabled
people.
Disabled
people say to me—and I am sure that they say it to you,
Mark—“Nothing about us without us.” That is
absolutely right, hence the need for the trailblazing and piloting. In
the previous evidence session rural matters were discussed, so we need
to pilot in different areas to find out what works. We cannot limit
this to social care. If we did, we could find ourselves having to come
back for further legislation. The flexibility is built in and we need
to establish what works in conjunction with disabled people and bring
people with
us.
Mr.
Harper: I have a final two-part question on this clause.
First, I am saying the opposite about constraining. When I read through
the Bill I was encouraged that clause 29(2) was all-encompassing,
covering a range of areas. It is later narrowed by excluding some other
funding areas. If you left those bits out, you would enable individuals
to start from looking at how their life works, pulling in the funding
streams from across Government. You would be able to give yourselves
the powers to do
that. My
second concern about the piloting is the opportunity cost of not doing
this fast enough. You will know from your visits that when you talk to
people who have managed to get an individual budget for social care,
they say that their lives have been transformed and enhanced and that a
huge difference has been made. There may be snags along the way that
need to be sorted out, but I would like to be able to bring help faster
to all those people who will not get the opportunity to get control of
their lives in the next three years or more. In the legislation, you
have powers to run a further set of pilots after that; it seems that we
are in danger of not making this happen fast enough for all those
people for whom it would be a life-enhancing
experience. Jonathan
Shaw: The legislation exists for local authorities to
provide individual budgets to social care. If you say that we should
put that in legislation and make them do it, I would say that that
flies in the face of working in partnership and the devolution agenda.
That legislation already exists. To repeat my previous point, this is
not only about social care. At the moment the legislation allows social
care as the gateway to individualised budgets. I have referred to
disabled facilities grants and education
grants, and we are also looking at making supported employment
available. We need to understand how that will work. Of course, there
are implications for services of devolving to the individual the
allowance of money for their supported employment and there may be
implications for the ability of wider parts of the service to
continue. We
are clear that the need to pilot is not born out of a desire to hold up
people’s ability to have individual budgets to live their life;
rather, having read the transcript endorsed by RADAR and other leading
organisations that I have spoken to, it is more about finding out what
works and involving disabled people
themselves.
Mary
Helson: I wish to raise one point of clarification
about the low number of people who have individual budgets. Part of the
Bill is setting out a framework for people who do not want to control
the cash themselves. So although it may not appear like an individual
budget, people will have choice and control over the services that they
are
using. Two
strong messages came through in our discussions on the Green Paper. One
was from the local authorities involved in the individual budgets
pilots, which provided a contrast with that of Paul Davies, who was
very enthusiastic and clearly at the cutting edge of what can be
achieved. Local authorities that had had experience of the individual
budgets pilots advised us to test this process
further. The
other message came through in our discussions with disabled people and
with the advisory groups, which are as keen as anybody to see this
transformation applied more widely; they emphasised how important it
was to get this right. Those people are conscious that the structure of
user-led organisations and the availability of advocacy throughout the
country—Liz Sayce touched on this in her evidence on
Tuesday—is simply not embedded enough to deliver a sustained
programme of personalisation. Although the Government are completely
committed, disabled people want us to move as swiftly as possible and
public authorities are lined up to move in this direction, we want to
make this a sustainable change that really makes an improvement to
people’s
lives.
Q
120Mr.
James Plaskitt (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab): Could the
Minister explain the thinking behind the proposal in the clauses
dealing with the social fund to bring in external providers to assist
with the
process? Kitty
Ussher: Certainly. We want to move
towards a type of social fund—this is really only the beginning
of the journey—that does not simply ask people precisely what
they want to spend the money on, but instead puts the resources into
supporting people to manage all their budgets more effectively.
However, by saying that I am not implying in any way that when people
get themselves into real difficulty that is always their own fault: all
sorts of things happen that might cause them to need a loan. However,
let us face it: some organisations have as their core function the type
of budgeting and debt advice that the DWP does not routinely
provide. We
wanted to be able to have the legal ability to work with outside
organisations if—it is a big “if”—we
thought that might help us, in the future, achieve our vision of a
reformed social fund that provides financial advice as well as finance.
We wanted to take the opportunity in this Bill to take that power to
give us a broader spectrum of policy options in
future.
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