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Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers’ Compensation) (Payment of Claims) (Amendment) Regulations 2008

I shall make a short contribution to this important debate. I welcome these regulations. The Government are to be congratulated on what they have done in the recent past. It has taken a long time to get here, and there has been a lot of suffering, but we are beginning to get on top of it now. That is extremely welcome. I shall make three points. The first is about indexation, which is the most readily available means of making sure that these payments do not fall behind earnings and retail price increases. That is a sensible way of making progress on benefits that are merely about money, but payments of this kind depend so much on the medical conditions, the background and the context in which the awards are given and in which the amounts are paid. I know that under the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992 there is a duty on the Government to look at indexation in respect of certain benefits. I wonder whether just looking at the numbers is enough. I would like an assurance that there is a medical dimension to the investigation that goes on before a final decision about the level of the annual uprating is made by Ministers. Medical science may make progress, or we may discover more and more that these terrible illnesses are more severe than we originally thought. Can we have an assurance that the uprating calculation is more than merely financial and that thought is given to some of the medical dimensions to the problem? Secondly, I know the department inherited the scheme in 2003, and I have no evidence to think that it has any problems with it. However, like other Members of the Committee, I am all too well aware that the constraints of the Comprehensive Spending Review on the departmental spending envelope for 2008-11 mean that the administrative pressure under which the department will be administering some of these schemes will increase. Can we have an assurance that there will be no delays in assessments, payments or the processing of the applications? There are Members of the Committee who spent a lot longer than me campaigning honourably and gallantly for this system to be set up. I would not like to think that delays might happen just because we are not watching urgently and clearly enough to see that the falling Civil Service headcount, administrative back-up and resources available to the department mean that there is slippage in the consideration of claims. That would be unfortunate, particularly with regard to the severity of the conditions of some of the claimants and the long road they have had to get to the scheme as it currently is. Finally, I do not know the answer to this question, so it is a dangerous kind of question to ask. Is there co-ordination with the devolved Administrations in Scotland and Wales? There are some differences in the way that NICE in England and its equivalent north of the border deal with some of the treatments and with the more medical dimensions of the background to this problem. I guess that in Wales and in some of the former shipyard areas of Scotland there is potentially a much higher incidence of some of these diseases, and I would like to think that this scheme is being run in close co-ordination so that best practice and maximum assistance can be given through a co-ordinated drive to try to make this scheme as successful as it should be. It is an important scheme. The Government deserve credit for setting it up and for the state it is in. I am sure we are all on the same side in striving to make it even better in future.