Speeches by Timms.

“I want to make some further headway. In her speech, my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) drew attention to the fact that she and I had known each other for a long time, and that is correct. She urged us to listen to the voices of our constituents. In February, someone I had not met before came t…”

“My answer to my hon. Friend is the one I gave earlier: we need to await the outcome of the review and the assessment that it develops to determine whether it will be implemented in primary or secondary legislation.”

“I can assure my hon. Friend that the review is not intended to save money—that is not its purpose. The review is to get the assessment right and make sure we have an assessment that will be fit for the future.”

“During this debate, my hon. Friend and others across the House have raised concerns that the changes to PIP are coming ahead of the conclusions of the review of the assessment that I will be leading. We have heard those concerns, and that is why I can announce that we are going to remove clause 5 from the Bill in Commi…”

“Yes, I can confirm to my hon. Friend that that is the case. We will table the amendment to do that. Let me say in answer to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann), who raised this point perfectly properly in the debate, that we will also remove the parallel provisions for Northern Ireland. He suggested that tha…”

“I will not be giving way again. The Tories were never really interested in the disability employment gap. They had a brief flirtation in the 2015 general election campaign, when David Cameron suddenly announced a target to halve the gap. Unfortunately, as soon as that general election had been safely won, that target w…”

“We are looking at the moment at the terms of reference for the PIP review. The background to it is that it is a long time now since PIP was introduced. It was introduced in 2013, 12 years ago—the Chair and I will certainly remember that happening—and it is being looked at. Paul Gray carried out a couple of reviews in 2…”

“People above state pension age by and large will not be affected by these changes. The reason for that is that they are on what are known as ongoing awards with a light touch review that happens once every 10 years or so. The light touch review does not involve a reassessment for those who are over state pension age. T…”

“It does take time, and it will take time before these changes come in as well. That is the point I was making earlier about the need to make progress on all of these tracks in parallel, including fixing the NHS. It will be November next year, getting on for 16 months, before the changes to PIP start to take effect, so …”

“I am pleased to say we are fixing the NHS, as you know.”

“I think there are several points here. I talked about the employment support that we will guarantee to people during the 13 week run-on period, about a decision on benefit is made. I am confident we will be able to deliver that by the time all of this starts in November next year. I think there is more than that we nee…”

“I have had one or two of those conversations. I think sometimes that is around the cost of travel to work, and of course we have the Access to Work programme that delivers help for that kind of cost. There are some long delays at the moment in Access to Work because of the very big increase in demand for it over the la…”

“Can I just come in? That is not how I see it. As I say, the key programme will be in place this year. The changes we are talking about in the benefit system start from next year but the number of people affected by them will grow over time. I think the support that we are providing will be in place in line with the nee…”

“On the first point, I think the evidence is clear that a voluntary approach here is the most effective and that people are best supported when they have chosen for themselves to take up employment support. The motivation is there, they have been involved in deciding what to do and that works more effectively. Let us se…”

“No. As you say, PIP is a contribution to the costs imposed on people by their disability or health impairment. It is a contribution towards those costs and the person receiving it can be in work or out of work. The benefit does not have anything to do with work. About one in six, 17%, of those who claim PIP are in work…”

“I am going to duck the question, and I will be glad to come back in the autumn once we have thought this through properly and talk more about how we see it all panning out.”

“We want to have in place a network of work coaches who have specifically been trained up to do this work among people out of work on health and disability grounds, the dedicated Pathways to Work advisers. I think we have 1,000 of those now in place, equivalent to two in every jobcentre. We have the academy for work coa…”

“On the whole, I think the right approach here is a voluntary approach, to offer people the support that is available and it is for them to decide whether to take it up. This is an early part of the conversation here and, as I say, we will have much more when we come forward with our White Paper. I think the principle t…”

“I think the biggest changes would be for those who are currently in the LCWRA group who get absolutely nothing at all now. Our view is that it is reasonable to expect the great majority of people at least to talk to us about what their work ambitions are and about the support that we can provide to enable them to fulfi…”

“I think it will certainly help. Obviously we have been listening to what everybody has been saying about these proposals over the last few months. The 13-week run-on will allow us to deliver the support that we refer to in the Green Paper—the employment support, personalised employment support and also the support to m…”