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Benefits Simplification

It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, and my fellow Committee colleague, the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), on this particularly important subject. I agree with both speakers' initial comments: we have one of the most overcomplicated benefit systems in the world. That point was also made by the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander). We have an unacceptably complicated system. One need only look at the extent to which the advisory guidelines for the benefit experts have multiplied to understand that we are well past the point of being helpful, and well into the territory of nightmares. I think that the Chairman mentioned that one book has gone from 250 pages to 1,600, and the other has gone from one volume to 32. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have given facts and figures from a technical point of view. It might help if I illustrated the problems that the complexity causes with a couple of real-life examples. The first example was first given to the House by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt) in debate on a ten-minute Bill that he presented in the Chamber on 20 June this year, which I had the honour to co-sponsor. He mentioned a gentlemen who had been hit by a runaway car while walking along the road. My hon. Friend said that"““he ended up in a coma and when he came round he had an acquired brain injury. As a result, he was unable to continue with his job. Someone in that situation is eligible for up to eight different benefits. If he were to apply for them all, he would have to answer a total of 1,275 questions over 352 pages.""Let me put that in context. An A-level student doing maths, physics and chemistry has to answer 510 questions. Someone applying to do a masters in law at Harvard has to answer 54 questions. So, our welfare state, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of a civilised society, makes a man with an acquired brain injury answer more questions than our brightest A-level students or our most ambitious lawyers. That cannot be right. I wondered whether, because disabilities are complicated, we needed to ask all those questions, but in fact 80 per cent. of the questions are repeated. A third of the questions are repeated twice and a quarter are repeated four times. Think not about the waste of employing Department for Work and Pensions officials to process the same information over and over again. Think not about how that money could be put to much better use. Think instead of the man with an acquired brain injury and the signal that this sends to him about our willingness as a society to help him piece his life together. Think also of those parents who discover that they have a child with severe disabilities and the signal it sends to them that we ask them to answer more questions than if they were applying for a mortgage, a credit card or a bank account.””—[Official Report, 20 June 2007; Vol. 461, c. 1379-1380.]" That is the human cost of what we are trying to deal with. It is small wonder that we all agree that the situation is unacceptably complex. The second example is in the written evidence given to the Select Committee inquiry by Hertfordshire county council, which is quoted on page 16 of the Committee's report. The council gave the example of two clients, a disabled pensioner and their partner. The written evidence states:"““They each have a full retirement pension. With the small occupational pensions that they have, they are just above the threshold for getting Pension Credit but they get partial help with rent and council tax. The disabled person claims Attendance Allowance which is successfully awarded.””" This is where it gets horrible:"““The carer is then told about Carer's Allowance and makes a claim. It then has to be explained to the carer that they will get a letter disallowing their claim, as their retirement pension is higher than the Carer's Allowance. Armed with that letter, they then have to reapply for Pension Credit and may now qualify because of the inclusion of a carer premium in the calculation.””" I hope the House is following this carefully. The written evidence continues:"““If Pension Credit is awarded, they will get additional Housing and Council Tax Benefit. If Pension Credit is not awarded, the carer should still get some additional Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit on application.””" Hertfordshire county council goes on to say:"““It is almost impossible to explain this sequence of events to a lay person. Advisers are telling them that, if their income goes up, by virtue of the attendance allowance, they have to claim an additional benefit that we know in advance they will not get, in order to get fresh or higher entitlement to other benefits that were previously refused or reduced because their income was too high!””"