Tag: Eilidh Whiteford

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2015-12-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if his Department will automatically exempt people (a) who are homeless, (b) with mental ill health and (c) in other at-risk groups from benefit sanctions.

Priti Patel

The sanctions process encourages benefit claimants to do everything they can to find work. Evidence shows that they have a positive impact on behaviour – over 70% JSA & over 60% ESA claimants say that sanctions make it more likely they will follow the rules.

Jobseekers are only asked to meet reasonable requirements, taking into account their circumstances and capability, including mental health conditions, disability housing status and caring responsibilities. These requirements are clearly explained and agreed by jobseekers with their Work Coach and set out in their Claimant Commitment.

As we already have a number of flexibilities in place, we will not be automatically exempting people who are homeless, who have mental health issues, or other vulnerable groups from benefit sanctions.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2016-09-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, when his Department plans to publish data on the number of (a) low, (b) medium and (c) high level sanctions applied to universal credit claimants (i) before and (ii) after challenges.

Damian Hinds

The Department updated its strategy for releasing official statistics on Universal Credit (UC) in February 2016. As outlined in the strategy, officials are currently assessing the data for UC and will only release information once the necessary quality assurance work has taken place. These statistics will be published in accordance with the relevant protocols in the Code of Practice for official statistics.

Universal Credit official statistics and the Departments release strategy can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/universal-credit-statistics

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The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2016-09-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the number of people who were affected by the recent server issue affecting the universal credit portal; and if he will make a statement.

Damian Hinds

Whenever a service problem is identified the Department always prioritises claimants first ensuring their payments are not interrupted. In this instance the outage impacted only 24 of the 712 Jobcentres across Great Britain and none of the claimants impacted experienced a delay in their payments.

The performance of all systems is continuously monitored on many resilient servers and in the event of an outage an immediate impact assessment is made and appropriate action taken to ensure normal service is resumed at the earliest possible opportunity and the impact on claimants is minimised.

We continually assess the performance of our suppliers, and underlying engineering, to ensure systems are available to meet the needs of claimants and the Department. With the exception of this isolated supplier outage the performance of the UC portal has been higher than expected, however, further improvements to resilience were already under active consideration as part of preparing for UC Full Service national expansion.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2015-12-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what proportion of people sanctioned since 2012 have not gained employment and are no longer in receipt of the relevant benefit following the sanction period.

Priti Patel

The information requested is not readily available and could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

The information that is available, on the number of sanction referrals and adverse sanction decisions, in respect of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), is published and available at:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/:

Guidance on how to extract the information required can be found at:

https://sw.stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/Getting-Started—SuperWEB2.html

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The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2016-09-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment his Department has made of the effect on claimants of no longer being eligible to receive employment and support allowance payments at the assessment rate when undergoing a mandatory reconsideration of a work capability assessment.

Penny Mordaunt

ESA claimants who are found fit for work and are waiting for their mandatory reconsideration application to be decided, are eligible to claim JSA. This is the right benefit for those who are capable of work, with Jobcentre work coaches fully supporting these claimants during this period – and the statistics released on 8 September show that this period is now a relatively short one – the median average being around 9 days.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2016-09-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether he plans to include proposals relating to personal independence payments in his Department’s Green Paper on the disability employment gap.

Penny Mordaunt

Later this year, we will produce a Green Paper and conduct a consultation on a wide range of issues.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2015-12-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people in receipt of (a) employment and support allowance and (b) job seeker’s allowance have been sanctioned since 2012; and how many such claimants (i) remained on the relevant benefit, (ii) gained employment and (iii) dropped off the system following the sanction period.

Priti Patel

The information requested is not readily available and could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

The information that is available, on the number of sanction referrals and adverse sanction decisions, in respect of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), is published and available at:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/:

Guidance on how to extract the information required can be found at:

https://sw.stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/Getting-Started—SuperWEB2.html

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The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2016-09-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many disability employment advisers are employed by Jobcentre Plus.

Damian Hinds

The number of Disability Employment Advisers employed by the Department for Work and Pensions is 263 at July 2016.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2016-09-05.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans his Department has to increase awareness of the Disability Confident campaign; and how his Department plans to measure the effectiveness of that campaign.

Penny Mordaunt

We have developed a new Disability Confident employer accreditation scheme. This went live in July.

This will be core to our engagement with employers to raise awareness, improve performance and drive up engagement on the disability employment agenda.

We are developing plans to formally launch the scheme in the Autumn and more information on take up and effectiveness measures will be available from then.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Eilidh Whiteford on 2015-12-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment his Department has made of the effect on women with a mental function problem of the different assessment recommended for them in its Work Capability Assessment handbook on risk of self-harm, suicide or other risk.

Priti Patel

The Department took its obligations under the Equality Act 2010 into account when making changes to the WCA handbook and recognises it has an on-going equality duty under the Act and is committed to complying with this duty.