Sir Stephen Timms
MP for East Ham · Labour · United Kingdom
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman. If he would like to send me details of that particular case, I will happily look into it. On the subject of people with hearing impairments, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equalities and I will be meeting the British Sign Language Advisory Board this afternoon.”
“Better outcomes require early identification and support for girls and young women with special educational needs, including dyslexia. That is the aim of the SEND reforms and the development of national inclusion standards.”
“Autistic people and people with ADHD have been struggling to get the right support at the right time. Recommendations from Professor Karen Guldberg’s neurodivergence task and finish group directly informed the SEND reforms that were published earlier this year.”
“The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on public bodies to make reasonable adjustments, so that disabled people are not put at a disadvantage by accessibility challenges.”
“The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. This benefit is there to contribute to the additional costs of disability. Too often, what has happened—my hon.”
“I think we can take the hon. Member’s question as a tacit recognition that in 14 years the previous Government should have done something to fix these problems. The steering group is clear that the provision of cash to meet the additional costs of disability is vital.”
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“Under the Government’s plans, the cut will happen just as unemployment is forecast to peak. The last time anything like this happened in such circumstances was 90 years ago under the national Government of Ramsay MacDonald. It will devastate the finances of a large number of struggling families. Ministers will find it extremely hard to justify, so I particularly welcome today’s reported call by more than 100 Conservative MPs to make the £20 a week uplift permanent. The Resolution Foundation’s “Living Standards Outlook 2021” in January said that rising unemployment and removing the £20 uplift would push 800,000 adults and 400,000 children into relative poverty—the biggest annual poverty rise since the 1980s.”
“A Work and Pensions Committee report in February drew attention to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s finding that withdrawing the temporary increase “will risk sweeping 700,000 more people, including 300,000 more children, into poverty”, and that “500,000 more people could end up in deep poverty (more than 50% below the poverty line).” It goes on to explain that “people who were already more likely to be in poverty were most affected by the economic storm caused by COVID-19: workers in low-wage sectors or part-time jobs, people living in areas with higher rates of deprivation, families with children, disabled people, or those from BAME backgrounds…around 60% of the families who lose out being in the bottom 30% of the income distribution.” It goes on to say that “60% of all single parent families in the UK will experience this overnight cut to their incomes” when the £20 a week is removed.”
“Clause 31 relates to the decision to cut the £20 a week uplift in universal credit and working tax credit in six months. I want to focus my brief remarks on that decision, highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray), because it will be key in the impact analyses in new clause 23 and amendment 15.”
“We need the change in the law that amendment 41 would provide.”
“The Government have responded with the support for migrant victims fund pilot, which we have heard about, both to support survivors of domestic abuse with no recourse to public funds and to help gather data to formulate policies eventually to support all migrant victims of domestic abuse. It is due to report next March, and I welcome the announcement that Southall Black Sisters will manage it, but it has been pointing out that there is already ample evidence. We do not need more evidence on this. The pilot and the Bishop of Gloucester pointed out what a small amount of funding it entails, compared with the scale of the problem, and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) highlighted that in his earlier intervention. The pilot must not be used to avoid addressing the problem and to carry on maintaining perpetrator impunity.”
“There is a 2019 study by the professor of development geography at King’s College London, which reported a survey of migrant victims of domestic violence, in which two thirds had been threatened by the perpetrator of the abuse that they would be deported if they reported it. The ability to make that threat credibly, which the current arrangements allow, maintains the awful climate of impunity that we have at the moment. The Government are right to recognise that abused migrant women with insecure status need immediate support and protection, but restricting it only to women with spouse visas perpetuates impunity for perpetrators, and that is in nobody’s interests except the perpetrators.”
“In 2012, a concession was introduced giving those applicants three months’ leave and access to limited benefits and temporary housing while their applications for indefinite leave are considered, but the concession does not apply to women with other kinds of visas, including those with student visas, work permit holders and domestic workers. Southall Black Sisters reports more and more women on those other kinds of visas with no recourse to public funds being turned away, including by refuges and domestic abuse services. Women’s Aid found in its report “Nowhere to turn” that, over a year, two thirds of its users were ineligible for support because they had visas other than spouse visas.”
“The Children Act 1989 requires local authorities to provide accommodation and financial support for some families with no recourse to public funds, but they often do not provide it, due to lack of resources or confusion about what exactly people with no recourse to public funds are entitled to. There is, in practice, a postcode lottery of support, so Southall Black Sisters often has to take legal action against councils that are not fulfilling their obligations to vulnerable women. That is no way to run a system of proper support. The DV rule introduced in 2002, which has been mentioned in this debate, allows migrant women on spouse visas to apply for indefinite leave when their relationship breaks down due to violence.”
“I commend the important work of Southall Black Sisters in this area, which has been frequently referenced in the debate. It says: “Many women are too scared to report their experiences to statutory agencies because they are wholly financially and otherwise dependent on their abusive spouses or partners, many of whom use women’s immigration status as a weapon of control and coercion.” The denial of safety in these arrangements to migrant women is obviously bad for them, but it has other immensely damaging impacts as well. Above all, it creates impunity for perpetrators, who get free rein to go on and harm other women and children.”
“People are often surprised that a large number of law-abiding, hard-working families in the UK—often with children born here, and sometimes with children who are UK nationals—have an immigration status subject to no recourse to public funds. For a victim of domestic abuse, having no recourse to public funds is catastrophic. Basic victim protections are not available. Only 5% of refuge vacancies are accessible because costs in a refuge are generally met through housing benefit, and people with no recourse to public funds cannot claim housing benefit. Women’s Aid points out that a woman with no recourse to public funds who, as a result, cannot stay in a refuge has to choose between homelessness or going back to their abuser.”
“I add my tribute to our late colleague Dame Cheryl Gillan. I agree very much with what the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) said about the importance of the role of local councils in dealing with problems of abuse. Like a number of other Members, I want to support Lords amendments 41, 40 and 43 and to argue that a serious problem of perpetrator immunity needs to be grasped and tackled. I welcome what the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) had to say on this. Lords amendment 41 was moved in the other place by the Bishop of Gloucester. It provides migrant victims of abuse with temporary leave to remain and access to public funds for no less than six months, having left the abuse and while applying to regularise their status.”
“Other key cases have collapsed; witnesses and victims are intimidated; senior police officers are taken off investigations; and the former head of the Criminal Investigation Department has been arrested. The president has promoted war criminals; all Government Departments are led by former military commanders; military intelligence officers run covid contact tracing, threatening activists and victims; and, as we have been reminded, Muslims are targeted. The Human Rights Council must pass an ambitious resolution next week.”
“Last month, the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, which has Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese support, said that “respect for the rule of law and human rights has demonstrably diminished” and that the current Government have “significantly reversed progress on 15 out of the 25 commitments” under resolution 30/1 “and halted progress on 7 others.” The president now controls all senior judicial appointments. In a climate of fear, human rights defenders and victims survivors are watched and harassed, and human rights lawyers are held without charge. We have been reminded of the presidential pardon for one of the only soldiers ever convicted of a wartime atrocity.”
“Before the 2019 Sri Lanka election, the Government there paid lip service to the Human Rights Council resolution that they co-sponsored with the UK after David Cameron visited as Prime Minister. The calculation seemed to be that if they paid lip service to engaging, the international community would leave them alone. They were right: there was no serious effort to hold Sri Lanka to account. The new Sri Lankan Government, elected in 2019, includes guilty men, as we have heard. They are no longer pretending; they have simply withdrawn.”
“The US has rightly designated army commander Shavendra Silva, who has been mentioned already and led the ground assault on the beaches of Mullivaikkal at the end of the civil war, attacking civilians, hospitals, medical staff and no-fire zones; will we now do so too? Kamal Gunaratne, who is now Defence Secretary, led a February 2009 assault, attacking civilian hospitals and food distribution points. He commanded the Joseph army camp, which was notorious for torture after the war. The UN has named him; will we sanction him? Why on earth do we have a resident defence adviser in Colombo, providing training and legitimacy? He has met at least five people who have been credibly accused of mass atrocities. Surely that adviser must now be withdrawn.”
“I warmly welcome this debate. The resolution to be voted on next week comes at a crucial time. It should make a reference to the International Criminal Court, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) argued so powerfully in opening the debate. The evidence-gathering element is crucial to maintain material for the international accountability which Sri Lanka has resisted for so long but which must come in due course. I welcome the proposed commitment to regular report-backs on the conditions in Sri Lanka. As others have reminded the House, we now have a UK mechanism for sanctions against those guilty of human rights atrocities; will we sanction those who are guilty in Sri Lanka?”
“Having seen the impact of household overcrowding during the pandemic, I want to ask the Minister what prospect there is of a new wave of investment in social house building on the scale that we need—or are we going to have to wait again for a Labour Government, for the overcrowding crisis to be addressed? Will he prioritise building affordable family homes with three bedrooms and more? Why have we started down the road of freezing local housing allowance again, after that policy has done so much damage over the past decade, and what response, if any, do the Government plan to make to the report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s housing commission?”
“Many households have had no benefit at all from higher housing support over the past year, because it has been immediately capped. The Work and Pensions Committee has recommended maintaining the increases in support provided in the pandemic, including keeping local housing allowance at the 30th percentile, and conducting an annual review of rates to keep them appropriate for each area. The Archbishops’ Commission on Housing, Church and Community recommended that it be tied to 50% rather than 30%, and that the Government should urgently review the operation of the local housing allowance.”
“The Government need to step up, and after the pandemic we need a new programme to build affordable and secure social homes. Social security needs to tackle overcrowding. Welfare cuts over the past decade have mostly hit tenants. Freezing local housing allowance means that support is not tied to real rents and families cannot afford homes suitable to their needs. This year, thankfully, local housing allowance has been relinked to the 30th percentile of rents. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions told the Work and Pensions Committee, which I chair, that that change was permanent. She was unfortunately mistaken. The Chancellor has frozen rates again from next month, and the gap will start to widen all over again. The benefit cap also makes it impossible for families in London to afford the housing they need.”
“That furore led to the foundation of Shelter and a wave of council house building. We are there again now. Families are being destroyed and lives blighted. The impact during the pandemic in the part of London that I represent was well documented in Anjli Raval’s powerful article, “Inside the ‘Covid Triangle’” in the Financial Times magazine last weekend. We need that moral outrage again and a new wave of investment in council house building. We need an alternative to private renting—a decent home where people can live and plan for their future. We have done it before; we can do it again. Councils are finding creative ways to build, such as the Red Door Ventures initiative in Newham, but we need them on a much bigger scale.”
“It states: “A good home is a place…where we feel safe, it enables us to put down roots and belong to a community, it is a place we enjoy living in and which is a delight to come home to.” That should be what we aim for. The report calls for Government action on a “coherent, long-term housing strategy, focused on those in greatest need.” It calls for a long-term housing affordability policy with new housing, greater public subsidy, reinstating capital grants, reducing land prices, a new housing affordability definition in terms of household incomes rather than market rents, and a review of social security to strengthen housing support. I am old enough—just—to remember the furore in the 1960s over the housing crisis around the television play, “Cathy Come Home”, which was about a family destroyed by inadequate housing.”
“The Government have taken various steps to try to address it by subsidising first-time buyers with starter homes, Help to Buy ISAs and the 95% mortgage announced in the Budget last week, but there was nothing at all to tackle the real housing crisis—people trapped at the bottom end of the rental market with unaffordable rents in overcrowded, poor quality homes. The heart of the problem has been the failure to replenish the social housing stock, so families in social housing are twice as likely to be overcrowded now than they would have been decades ago. I welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s housing commission report last month, with its ambition and vision.”
“On a video call last month with a family in my constituency —mum, dad and another family with five daughters, this time in a two-bedroom flat—the girls pointed out to me how infeasible it was for them all to study at the same time. That family was clearly teetering on the edge. More people in overcrowded households have reported psychological distress in the lockdown. Sometimes in Parliament when we talk about the housing crisis, we are referring to young people not being able to buy homes until they are a bit older, and that is a problem.”
“Last May, Inside Housing magazine published a graph plotting local authorities’ rates of overcrowding against their covid death rates. The correlation is remarkable. Overcrowding might well partly explain the disproportionate mortality rate among ethnic minority groups. Public Health England’s review into why black and ethnic minority groups have been so badly hit by the pandemic identified poor housing and household composition as key factors. Severe damp and mould, much more common in overcrowded homes, cause chronic respiratory problems, making people more vulnerable if they contract coronavirus. For children, the onset and worsening of asthma in overcrowded conditions is well documented. For those who have to live, learn and work in one room, the psychological impact of lockdown has been extraordinary.”
“Poor quality of sleep is one of the reasons for that. Lack of space to play or study holds back children’s development and education. Overcrowding is associated with interrupted schooling and behavioural problems at school. It can harm family relationships and lead to fighting and arguments between children. All of that was true before the pandemic, but covid has shone a bright light on all of these problems, and overcrowding has made coping with covid much harder. Transmission within households has spread the virus. In overcrowded households, infection has spread faster. Social distancing and self-isolation can be impossible. The stress of overcrowding—long-term and familiar—has been transformed by the pandemic into a catastrophe.”
“If the Government are serious about addressing racial inequalities in public health, they must tackle overcrowding. I should be grateful if the Minister would tell us whether the strategy that the Committee has called for will be produced by the end of this summer. We know from studies such as the Marmot review that housing is a social determinant of health. Poor housing can lead to lifelong poor physical and mental health. There is a higher risk of accidents in overcrowded homes, and there is more condensation and mould. Research has established a link between overcrowding and poor child health due to infections and respiratory and gastrointestinal problems. There is consistent evidence of poorer mental health for people in crowded homes—depression, anxiety and stress as a result of living in cramped conditions.”
“Some 34% of all Bangladeshi households are overcrowded. The figure for Pakistani households is 18%, black African 16%, Arab 15% and mixed white and black African 14%. All face high levels of overcrowding, compared with 2% for white British households. Dr Haque, who was the then interim director of the Runnymede Trust, told the Women and Equalities Committee last summer that “there will always be multigenerational homes where people decide to live with multiple generations—maybe their mothers as well as their grandparents—but they do not ever choose to live in overcrowded housing.” Recognising those different impacts, the Women and Equalities Committee recommended that, by the end of this summer, the Government produce a strategy to reduce overcrowding.”
“With 27,000 people on Newham Council’s housing waiting list, it is not unusual for families to wait 15 years to be housed, as that one has. Until the 1990s, the average number of people per household in London had fallen steadily since the end of the 19th century. Now, the number is going up. Nationally, the English housing survey showed overcrowding at the highest rate ever in the social rented sector—it was 9% in 2019-20, just before the pandemic. In both the social and private sectors, the rate has roughly doubled in 20 years. I am sorry to report that in my constituency, the overall rate of overcrowding is the highest in the country, at 27%, according to the 2011 census. It will be a good deal higher than that when the data comes in from the census that is under way at the moment.”
“Every night when my dad gets up to go to work, he always has to turn on the light so he doesn’t step on us. Due to this, I don’t get enough sleep. I can’t concentrate. I’m so scared, because I want to pass my SATs, but I’ve got no place to revise. I’m falling behind in class, and it is because nobody cares about me. Nobody wants to see me happy. I feel like you don’t care, because if you did, you’d help me. All of my friends invite me to birthday parties. However, I am unable to come, because I feel that if I come, they should be invited to my birthday, but I can’t, because I have no place in my house. I have never got to celebrate anything. Every day, I see my mum cry and it makes me cry.” The family is still in that flat today.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered household overcrowding and the covid-19 outbreak. Eleven years ago, I was contacted by a family who were very overcrowded. The father, mother, and four daughters aged from one to 10 were living in a one-bedroom council flat. In the four years that they had been applying to move, Newham Council had been unable to provide anything larger. Nine years after that, in 2019, I received a letter from the youngest of the four children, who was by then aged 11 and had a younger sister. There were now five daughters, all still living in the same one-bedroom flat. The letter from the 11-year-old said: “Since I was born, I have not even had a good day, because all this flat does is bring back bad memories. I sleep on the floor with my two older sisters.”
“I thank the Minister for the points that he is making. Can he tell us whether the Government will accept the recommendation of the Women and Equalities Committee and bring forward a strategy to tackle overcrowding by the end of the summer?”
“I thank everybody who has contributed to the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) made a characteristically powerful contribution, as did the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). I am grateful to them both, and to the Front Benchers. The real housing crisis is about people trapped at the bottom end of the rental market, paying unaffordable rents in overcrowded, inadequate homes. As we have been reminded, there was absolutely nothing in the Budget to help. It may well be, as it was in the 1960s, that we have to wait for a Labour Government, and for my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) to become the housing Secretary, for us to get the programme of investment that we need. I would just say to the Minister, as he takes up his role—I know that he is very enthusiastic—”
“How are the crucial EU negotiations on the memorandum of understanding on financial services progressing? Given its importance to the UK economy—by comparison, for example, with fishing—why was it not included in the overall deal?”
“Kickstart is only for young people claiming universal credit. Many disabled young people claim employment and support allowance instead. Will the Secretary of State consider extending kickstart to include disabled young people who are not eligible for it at the moment?”
“The Secretary of State will have seen the evidence that disabled people have seen a big increase in their grocery costs during the pandemic, and yet people claiming employment and support allowance have had no extra help at all. Why have they not been supported?”
“The Secretary of State said that the universal credit uplift would be extended on a monthly basis. Does that mean that if circumstances warrant it, the uplift will be continued beyond September of this year?”
“We also called for the cap on deductions to be reduced further, to 10%. The minimum income floor for self-employed people claiming universal credit will be suspended for a further three months until the end of July. Where is the evaluation of the minimum income floor first announced in 2018? The Red Book announced investment to tackle “welfare fraud and error.” Fraud and error is at the highest level ever recorded for a DWP benefit with universal credit. It will be very interesting for the Committee to see exactly how that new investment will be spent.”
“Many have been left high and dry in the pandemic by the “no recourse to public funds” condition, as research published today by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants points out. As the hon. Lady correctly said, large numbers have been refused visa renewal on spurious grounds of historical tax discrepancies, long since corrected and sorted out. A new scheme will require a welcoming, not a hostile, environment, and that will require a major change at the Home Office. I welcome bringing forward to April the increase in the period over which universal credit advances will be recovered to 24 months, and the reduction, as the Secretary of State mentioned, of the maximum rate of deductions to 25% of the standard allowance. The Committee had recommended that that should be done “no later than April”, so I particularly welcome that.”
“The DWP is investigating historic underpayments of the state pension to some married women, to widows and to people over 80, which were first highlighted by the former Pensions Minister Steve Webb. The OBR’s “Economic and fiscal outlook” report says that “it will cost around £3 billion over the six years to 2025-26 to address these underpayments, with costs peaking at £0.7 billion” in the coming financial year. Those are eye-watering numbers, which we look forward to hearing more about. The Chancellor announced yesterday, as the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) rightly reminded us, a new highly skilled migrants scheme. For that to work, problems faced by existing highly skilled migrants need to be addressed.”
“The previous Work and Pensions Committee welcomed the commitment in 2019 to new statistics for measuring poverty based on work by the Social Metrics Commission. That has ground to a halt. The Secretary of State said last month that she has no plans to restart it. Baroness Stroud, the Social Metrics Commission chair, told the Committee that “we are going into Budgets and Spending Reviews and we are spending £200 billion, but we have no sense at all as to the impact on poverty.” The Committee has commissioned me to write to the Prime Minister to ask for an assurance that the Government remain committed to this work, and, if they are, for a timetable to restart it.”
“The House of Commons Library tells me that the only precedent for that is the 10% cut in unemployment benefit introduced by the National Government in 1931. There is no additional support in the Budget for people claiming legacy benefits. The Government should not simply ignore the needs of all those who, because of Government policy, claim benefits relying on outdated computer systems. Disabled people, above all, have lost out. They have seen big cost rises in the pandemic—I hope the Secretary of State, having told the Committee that she had not seen evidence of that, has now seen the clear evidence—through not being able to shop around as normal, but they have had no extra help. That is unforgivable.”
“I want to focus on points of particular interest to the Select Committee on Work and Pensions. I am relieved that the £20 uplift to universal credit will not be scrapped this month. That should have been announced weeks ago; I have no doubt that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions was doing her level best to achieve that, but it should not have been left until yesterday. However, the uplift is going to be scrapped in September. Tax rises are being delayed until next year, because, as the Chancellor recognised, we will not have a proper recovery until then. Why then is the universal credit cut not also being deferred for 12 months, as the Select Committee recommended? A total of £20 a week is to be cut from unemployment benefit in September, just as furlough ends and unemployment reaches its peak.”
“I expected the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) to complain about the fact that this was a massively tax-raising Budget. I am not sure whether, perhaps in a coded way, he was doing so, but it did reverse policies on income tax thresholds and corporation tax rates that have been central to Tory policy for 10 years. We all understand the reason why the Chancellor made these announcements, but I must say it was unedifying to watch him yesterday hand out funding on such a brazenly party political basis. However, the real criticism of yesterday, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) spelled out in her opening speech today, is the absence of vision. The Financial Times says this morning that “the needed long-term vision for a country facing an uncertain future is absent.” We need much better than that.”
“Has the Department found any solutions that would enable telephone-based assessments to take place instead? He mentioned those in his opening remarks. How long does he estimate that it will take to deal with the backlog that has arisen?”
“In those cases, and others like them, what steps will be taken to put things right? How will the Department ensure that all claimants receive the correct amount of compensation, based on their age when they made their claim, rather than when their claim was determined? When giving evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, the permanent secretary promised to write to us on those points, but we have not yet had such a letter. The asbestos victims support groups forum confirmed this morning that it has had “no information about what can be done for those victims who have lost out on compensation under the Pneumoconiosis etc (Workers Compensation Scheme) Act due to the delays.” With publication of the Prime Minister’s road map out of lockdown, will the Minister confirm when he expects face-to-face IIDB assessments to resume?”
“The support group makes a perfectly reasonable point: “We believe it is unjust that victims of asbestosis and pleural thickening are further disadvantaged, having had to wait a considerable length of time for a procedure to be even put in place.” In another example, a claimant whose date of birth is 2 July 1950 was visited by officials on 31 January 2020, so his application was made when he was 69. However, his workers compensation award letter was not issued until last December. It states his age at determination as 70—correctly, as that is how old he was by then—which entitled him to £5,378. If he had been paid before his birthday on 2 July, six months after he was visited and made his claim, he would have received £5,557. He has missed out on £179. The Minister has made it clear that he does not intend claimants to suffer that penalty.”
“Let me give one concrete example that was brought to our attention by the asbestos victims support group forum. The Greater Manchester support group helped a 71-year-old man with diffuse pleural thickening to apply for industrial injuries disablement benefit plus a 1979 Act payment. It helped him to make his claim on 21 January last year, but he was not awarded IIDB until 11 November, following a paper-based assessment. In the meantime he had turned 72, so his 1979 Act payment was £5,010, rather than £5,190. He lost £180 because no consideration was made for delays due to the pandemic.”
“There is a sliding scale up to the age of 77, and along that scale payments are reduced as a person gets older. The Minister has given an assurance that awards will be backdated to the date of the claim rather than the date of the determination to ensure that people whose claims were delayed do not have their award reduced. We asked the Secretary of State about that when she gave evidence last month, and the Committee heard from people whose compensation is still reflecting their age at the date of award, rather than at the date of the claim. The permanent secretary acknowledged at a meeting alongside the Secretary of State that at the moment “the link to age applies to the point where the condition is assessed as opposed to the date of the claim.” That is a problem.”
“Following the Department’s decision to suspend face-to-face assessments during the pandemic, many claims have been delayed. The Minister told the Select Committee that the backlog of IIDB claims had increased from a little over 2,000 in March last year to 5,300 in November, and that the average age of each claim was 116 days. I wonder whether the Minister can update us on those figures. What is the current size of that backlog and the average age of claims? The Minister also told the Committee that the Department has started conducting paper-based assessments for some IIDB claims, and he mentioned that again this afternoon. I wonder whether he can tell us a bit more about how many have been completed, and what the impact has been on the size of the backlog. The value of a claim for IIDB is reduced with the age of a claimant.”
“I too welcome the fact that the Government are increasing the value of compensation in line with inflation, even though they are not required to do so. I want to press the Minister on the problems that sufferers of asbestos-related diseases have had while waiting for an assessment for industrial injuries disablement benefit, and I am grateful to him for touching on that point in his opening remarks. Lots of people suffering from asbestos-related diseases receive IIDB, but eligibility under the provisions we are debating is dependent on whether the applicant has had an IIDB assessment. The Department for Work and Pensions has made the point—the Minister reiterated it today—that the nature of the assessments means that they cannot be carried out remotely.”