Minister admits signing off on order that led to widespread cuts to Access to Work

The disability minister has admitted signing off on orders that have led to widespread cuts to disabled people’s Access to Work support packages since Labour came to power.

Disabled campaigners have been warning for more than a year of DWP cuts and inconsistent decisions on their Access to Work (AtW) claims, while there have also been mounting concerns about lengthening waiting-lists for decisions on claims.

But when social security and disability minister Sir Stephen Timms (pictured) was challenged by an MP on the apparent cuts earlier this summer, he insisted that no changes had been made to Access to Work policy, although work was “underway to improve Scheme decision-making by applying the guidance with greater consistency”.

He still insists that ministers have made no changes to AtW policy.

But Sir Stephen has admitted to Disability News Service (DNS) that he signed off on an order for Access to Work (AtW) staff to apply the guidance more “scrupulously”, after being presented with a “proposal” from civil servants which they submitted to him to approve.

The confusion over who was responsible for the move began when DNS asked him who in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had asked AtW civil servants to carry out the demand to be more “scrupulous” in applying the guidance.

He replied: “Well, the department, I guess.”

Asked if it was definitely not him, he said: “I’m not sure… I don’t want to give you a misleading answer.”

But when asked by DNS why he thought AtW staff were suddenly following guidance more scrupulously, he said he had no “no doubt seen a submission, which I have said ‘OK’ to, saying that it’ll be scrupulously applied, to achieve consistency apart from anything”.

He added: “The way things work is a proposal goes into a submission, which comes to me, and I say, ‘OK,’ and it’s very likely that I’ve been advised that we are going to apply the guidance more scrupulously.”

During the interview at Labour’s annual party conference in Liverpool, Sir Stephen said he could not remember when he signed off on the order, but that he would find out.

But when DNS suggested it would then be possible to secure this order through a freedom of information request, he suggested that DWP would resist this request because such an order would have been “advice to ministers” – which would not have to be released under the Freedom of Information Act – even though the instructions would then have been sent out to all relevant AtW staff.

Just minutes earlier, he had claimed that Labour DWP ministers were “very substantially changing the culture of the department in a pro-transparency direction” (see separate story).

Sir Stephen then claimed that the order to AtW staff might not have been written down, and that it might only have been passed on through “a conversation, a staff meeting; who knows how it’s promulgated”.

He later declined several opportunities to welcome the increase in AtW claims, which he called a “huge surge in the number of applications”.

He said the increase meant “people are having to wait longer” to have their claims dealt with, which was “a big part of why we need to reform Access to Work and why we’re consulting on it”.

Asked again if it was a good thing that more disabled people were applying to AtW, he said: “I think there’s a lot to be said for Access to Work and the opportunities it opens up to people.

“But we’ve got to have a system that works efficiently and does not keep people waiting for weeks and weeks and weeks.

“And that’s the aim of our reform that we consulted on in the [Pathways to Work] green paper.”

The government’s decisions on AtW reform are set to be announced later this year.

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