Employment Minister Chris Grayling responds to a Tribune report of a demo against moves to restrict disability benefit

Published: 29th April, 2011

"I WISH I’d done this years ago,” he said to me. “But I never believed I could do it.” A man  in his 50s, on a back-to-work programme, after years on incapacity benefit suffering from chronic depression. A man taking steps back to self-belief and the workplace.

The thing that strikes you when you meet people who have spent long periods on benefits is that they have so much to offer, but that all too often they no longer know how to make use of those skills. They convince themselves that they have little to contribute and that there is no other option but to be on benefits.

For 13 years, as the economy grew and jobs were created around the country, most were filled by migrant workers, while at the highest point some 2.6 million people sat at home on incapacity benefits.

Not all could have worked. Some were full-time carers. Others were bringing up very young children on their own. Still more suffered from long-term health problems that meant they could not work. But a substantial proportion of that huge total could and should have been helped back into work. It didn’t happen.

We cannot afford to make the same mistake again.

Of course, many of those claimants are too sick or disabled to have any realistic chance of making a return to work. They will continue, through new support arrangements, to receive our unconditional support – and rightly so.

But every group I have ever met that works with disabled people tells us that far more of them want to be in mainstream employment. We share that goal – and we want to make that a reality.

We have started the process of trying to help those who can work to find the right opportunity for them.

We will be re-examining the cases of about 1.6 million people across the country, around 10,020 on incapacity benefit here in Islington.

Over the next three years we will ask each of those claimants to provide us with written information about their case, with any supporting material that they want to provide from their own doctors, and we will also ask them to go through a reassessment exercise.

The work capability assessment, as that exercise is known, has become very controversial. It was set up by the last government for new claimants, and was part of a process that had become too inhuman.

We have taken independent advice from a leading professor, Malcolm Harrington, on how to improve things. As a result the assessment is no longer the only part of the decision-making process. We will now place much greater emphasis on other evidence that will shed a light on someone’s condition. And the process will be more human. Previously, the only contact a claimant had was through letters full of official jargon. Now they will get a sympathetic phone call explaining what is happening.

We won’t ask those who will qualify for state retirement pension in the next three years to go through the process.

Nor will we expect anyone who is too ill to attend a work capability assessment to do so.

I cannot stress strongly enough that this is not about forcing people back to work if they are genuinely unable to do so. Nor are we tied into specific financial targets about the number of people we need to get back to work.

This is about finding out who we can help. Perhaps to do something different to what they did previously, but still to do something more with their lives.

The Work Programme, which begins in June, will give current incapacity benefit claimants access to specialist back-to-work support if they have the potential to return to work. That’s vital. This cannot be simply about abandoning people to their fate.

We are at the start of a revolution. Many current incapacity benefit claimants will be worried about what lies ahead. My message to them is simple. We will provide unconditional support to those whose health means they cannot possibly work. But we will put real effort into trying to help the others find a better role in life. And we will continue to make determined efforts to ensure that we, and the system we have put in place, treat people fairly, properly and appropriately.