Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2020-01-27
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: With take-up of entitlements such as pension credit and attendance allowance sitting at about 60% nationally, what material does my hon. Friend have to increase awareness of the benefits locally, and thus increase the number of claimants?; Benefit claimants are two and a half times more likely to need a food bank if they are on universal credit than if they are on one of the predecessor benefits, and the main reason is the five-week delay after applying for universal credit compared with seven working days in the past. Will the Minister look at significantly shortening that delay, which is doing such harm?; As my right hon. Friend knows, EU structural funds have been used extensively to support training programme in constituencies such as mine in west Wales. What progress is the team making in discussions with the Welsh Government about how to use the shared prosperity fund to continue to support high-quality training and skills programmes?; My constituent Anna Ward has been waiting five months for a PIP home assessment, but it has been cancelled twice at very short notice. Atos tells me that currently there are no appointments for home visits available in the Cambridge area. In any other walk of life, that would be totally unacceptable, so why do the Government think it is okay to treat disabled people so badly?; There are now more than 84,000 people on universal credit in Birmingham, including more than 9,000 in my constituency. They include large numbers of disabled, unemployed and single-parent claimants, which is exactly the profile of claimants that the Resolution Foundation found will be worse off on average once the benefit is fully rolled out. If the Government are serious about levelling up economic outcomes across the country, why are they so determinedly ignoring the true impact of universal credit in areas such as mine?; Coventry South is home to one of the largest food banks in the country, which provided more than 20,000 emergency food packages last year. I pay tribute to the food bank and its volunteers, but the need for food banks is a national scandal. There are more food banks in Britain than there are McDonald’s restaurants—a company that I know recently paid off its fired British boss with roughly £30 million. Does the Minister accept that it is a gross injustice that nurses are forced to use food banks while fat-cat bosses receive obscene pay-outs?; Many constituents have raised concerns with me about their PIP assessment, and the accuracy of the information contained in the assessor’s report. All too often they say that the report does not accurately reflect how their condition affects them or what happened at the assessment. Can the Minister tell me what mechanisms are in place to ensure that assessments are carried out appropriately, so that we can be sure that the correct decisions are made on people’s claims?
Justin Paul Tomlinson (Conservative, Centre-right): We rightly welcome the fact that we are now providing an additional £6 billion to some of the most vulnerable people in society through the PIP system, but we recognise that more needs to be done to gather evidence early. Through the forthcoming Green Paper, we will be looking at how we can work better with claimants to ensure that as much evidence is presented as early as possible in order to get the right decision first time.