A LABOUR minister has suggested that the people who will lose disability payments amid sweeping Labour cuts do not have “significant needs".
Work and Pensions Minister Alison McGovern was quizzed on BBC Radio Scotland when she struggled to answer some of the questions posed – and declined to answer others.
It came after the Labour Government announced plans to cut the main disability benefit – personal independence payments or PIP – by £5 billion per year by 2030. There were sweeping further reforms of the DWP, including cutting the health element of Universal Credit in half from 2026, and raising the age of PIP entitlement from 16 to 18.
Appearing on the BBC, McGovern was asked who “the losers” will be from the changes.
She said: “So, obviously the past 14 years for people under the Tories has been challenging.
“So I don't doubt that there will be a lot of people who are worried about this. We need to focus support on those who need it most.”
Asked instead how many people would be worse off as a result of Labour’s changes, McGovern said: “Well, we'll be tightening the eligibility criteria. We'll work with the Scottish Government to work that through as well.”
Asked again how many people will be worse off, she said: “Sorry, let me just answer your question on numbers.
“The details on the numbers of people who will be affected and so on will be given shortly.
“The Office of Budget Responsibility has an independent process of judging the government's budget and savings, and those numbers are contained in that information and – forgive me not answering your question, the reason is because we respect the OBR process and I want them to do it in the right way.”
McGovern then stumbled after suggesting that the people who Labour will remove from PIP eligibility do not have “significant” issues.
The BBC host said: “You're going to make it more difficult to qualify for personal independence payments, which are paid to people with a disability, regardless of their income or whether they're in work.
“Now, in future, claimants will need to score a minimum of four points in at least one activity to qualify for the daily living element. But that's a pretty high bar, isn't it?
“For example, needing prompting to prepare food, help with showering or washing and dressing the lower body, needing help to engage with others, they're all measures that score below a four. So how can you justify withdrawing support to these people?”
McGovern said: “The reason for doing this is to concentrate the support on those people with really significant help needs.”
“Are those people not significant?” the BBC host asked.
McGovern then pivoted to say: “That doesn't mean that those people who would have scored the lower range of points don't need help. That's why we are investing more than £20 billion into the National Health Service to improve and to get our NHS back on its feet and to give people the kind of services that they need.
“In Scotland, we need two governments working together to fulfil that objective.”
Told that that NHS investment is not “immediately going to help people depending on personal independence payments”, the Labour minister said: “Yes, I understand where you're coming from and I can't say that I don't understand why people worry and people have been through a lot over the past 14 years and I understand the challenges that people are living with.
“The thing that we want to do is to make sure that the money we have for the welfare state is there for generations to come.”
