Alarm among veteran activists as Burnham appoints ‘scrounger rhetoric’ Purnell as No 10 chief of staff

Disabled activists have expressed alarm at the decision by prime-minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham to appoint former work and pensions secretary James Purnell as his new chief of staff.

Purnell, who was Labour’s work and pensions secretary for 16 months, from January 2008 until he resigned in June 2009, has reportedly been appointed by Burham to the hugely influential post.

But Purnell (pictured) leaves grim memories among disabled activists who were engaged in campaigning on work and pensions issues in the late 2000s, including his enthusiasm for so-called “scrounger rhetoric”.

Among the most prominent of these memories is an interview he gave to the Liverpool Echo in April 2008 as part of his department’s attempts to soften up the public for the introduction of employment and support allowance and the work capability assessment (WCA) and particularly Labour’s plans to reassess claimants of the old incapacity benefit through the new WCA.

Purnell told the paper: “People who scrounge from the system take money away from legitimate claimants. Clearly we want to stop that.”

Academics at Liverpool and Oxford universities later showed that the process of reassessing incapacity benefit claimants through the WCA were linked to about 600 suicides between 2010 and 2013.

Purnell – a former flatmate and football team-mate of Andy Burnham – was also an enthusiastic supporter of benefit sanctions (PDF), which have been closely linked to DWP’s increasingly hostile environment over the last two decades.

In July 2008, in evidence to the Commons work and pensions committee, he repeatedly spoke of claimants “playing the system”.

And in December 2008, he was accused of introducing “workfare” to Britain, as part of plans in a white paper that he told MPs would see “virtually everyone claiming benefits to be preparing for, or looking for, work”.

Linda Burnip, co-founder of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), who met Purnell when he was work and pensions secretary and she was campaigning on local housing allowance, said she was “very concerned” by the appointment.

She said: “From my previous negative encounters with James Purnell prior to my involvement with DPAC, I’m very concerned to find that he may be back in any capacity in which he can influence government disability policies.”

She said the appointment suggested that a Burnham-led government would be no different on support for disabled people than the current and past Labour and Conservative governments and would see disabled people “continue to be demonised as scroungers and a drain on taxpayers”.

Another disabled activist, a Labour party member, said they were frustrated and concerned at Purnell’s return.

They pointed to his use of “unevidenced catchphrases” such as “playing the system” when work and pensions secretary, and his incorrect claims of widespread fraud among incapacity benefit and disability living allowance claimants.

They said his return was a “real concern” because of his “previous record of misinformation” but they said they hoped he was “older and wiser” 18 years after his short spell as work and pensions secretary.

Another disabled activist, a former member of the Spartacus network of disability rights campaigners in the late 2000s and early 2010s, said Purnell was “the one that I remember radicalising my era of disabled campaigners into an awareness of what’s coming”.

They said they would be “very wary” of Purnell’s appointment, as he has “always viewed welfare reform as unfinished business” and was one of the politicians who “believed there was a massive group of people who could work if they were forced to do so”.

But Purnell does not appear to understand, they said, that there is a much smaller group of disabled people who could work with the right support, if there was a society that did not discriminate, and there were employers willing to employ them, circumstances which rarely exist in the real world.

They said they believed Purnell’s appointment “was a signal that Burnham is not going to deviate that far from the way the government has been up until now.

“It was a warning to anyone capable of reading the signals that the direction of travel that Burnham will go in is not necessarily one that will benefit disabled people or anyone who is in a position of requiring social security to live.”

Meanwhile, Burnham himself delivered the vaguest of hints about his future direction on work and pensions policy when he delivered a major policy speech this week.

He appeared to support the work of former New Labour health secretary Alan Milburn, who is producing a report for the government on young people – particularly young disabled people – who are not in education, employment or training.

Milburn’s interim report stressed that there should be a “participation-first welfare system” and it suggested that he would recommend in his final report that more young disabled people must engage with employment support and face sanctions if they fail to do so.

Burnham said in his speech that he took Milburn’s interim findings “very seriously”.

Later in the speech, he said: “Where young people need mental health support, it should be provided as part of in-work support.”

He did not clarify what he meant by this.

He also called for devolution of employment support programmes away from central DWP control, which he said meant “working with organisations people trust to help them – rather than going to places they fear.

“This is the difference that the mayors can make, and in doing that, we will reduce the welfare bill in a way that is fair and lasting and helps people move forward.”