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Benefit Cap

• From 2013 the government will cap household benefit payments at around £500 a week for couple and lone parent households and around £350 per week for single adult households, so that no family can receive more in welfare than median net earnings for working households.
• In recognition of their additional needs, all households with someone claiming Disability Living Allowance will be exempt from this measure.
• Government will introduce legislation in the Welfare Reform Bill and work with Local Authorities to implement the cap from April 2013.

Housing: Reform of Support for Housing Costs

• Expenditure on working age Housing Benefit has increased by £5 billion in just five years to £15 billion in real terms, and unreformed is set to increase by a further billion by 2015. The current system is unfair and unsustainable, and in need of urgent reform.

Reform of Housing Benefit

• From April 2011 we will start making a number of changes to Local Housing Allowance. These reforms will not affect social housing tenants, who account for 69 per cent of the housing benefit caseload. The reforms include restricting the maximum Local Housing Allowance level to the four bedroom rate and applying overall weekly caps to the rates as follows:
  • £250 for a one bedroom property
  • £290 for two bedrooms
  • £340 for three bedrooms and
  • £400 for a four bedroom property.
• To help those in the most vulnerable circumstances who could be affected by the reform of housing benefit, we are tripling expenditure on Discretionary Housing Payments. This budget will be increased by an additional £10 million in 2011/12 and then £40 million per year from 2012/13 giving a total of £60m.
• We will keep the current exemptions for those in shared accommodation, so that people aged between 25 and 34 who need care will not be affected by the extension of the shared room rate.
• From April 2013, people who have received 12 months or more Jobseeker’s Allowance will have a 10 per cent reduction in their Housing Benefit.
• People will see reductions in their Housing Benefit from April 2011 onwards, but the purpose of reform is to influence rent levels and housing choices so that Housing Benefit tenants have to make the same choices about their housing that people who manage without make. We want people to continue to have access to decent housing but the support we provide needs to be founded on principles of fairness, affordability and making work pay.
• We recognise the important work done by carers up and down the country and so we will put in an extra £60 million by 2015 to help fund an additional room for disabled people who have live-in but non-resident carers.

Universal Credit

• The Coalition Government is committed to reforming Britain’s broken benefits system. The Spending Review set aside over £2 billion to invest in building a welfare system that is fit for the 21st century. Over the next two parliaments the current complex system of means-tested working-age benefits and tax credits will gradually be replaced with the Universal Credit.
• Universal Credit will improve incentives to work (especially for low earners) by a combination of earnings disregards and a single withdrawal rate to reduce the Credit when earnings exceed the disregard. This will make the benefits of work clearer and simpler, encouraging people to move into work and see the financial benefits of increasing the number of hours they work.  We are committed to simplifying the benefit system to ensure it is fair and supports disabled people in their day to day activities.

Mobility Component of Disability Living Allowance – Care Homes

• The proposed measure will end payment of the mobility component of Disability Living Allowance for all state funded residents in care homes after 28 days.  While these residents will not be paid Disability Living Allowance, they will retain an underlying entitlement to the benefit and payment will be reinstated if they leave the care home providing they continue to satisfy eligibility conditions. The planned implementation date for this measure is October 2012.
• Local Authority contracts with care homes should cover services to meet all a resident's assessed needs, including any assessed mobility needs. So an individual’s care, support and mobility needs should be met by residential care providers from social care funding. Our commitment to increasing the take up of personal budgets in Adult Social Care will give disabled people more choice and control over their services – including accessing transport that suits them.
• Local Authorities and residential care homes have a duty to meet the needs of their local population and those they provide services to. This includes children and adults.
• It will end the anomaly whereby two state funded residents placed in the same care home, with similar needs, can be treated differently according to whether they are funded through the NHS or Local Authority.
• The measure will not apply to residents who meet the full costs of the care home themselves and they will continue to be paid both the care and mobility components of Disability Living Allowance they may be entitled to. 

Time limiting the contributory ESA to one year for those in the Work Related Activity Group

• The Coalition Government is committed to supporting people back to work. Over the course of this parliament we are investing billions in back to work support, including through Work Choice and the Work Programme. The Work Programme will provide personalised support to a wide range of customers – from Jobseeker’s Allowance recipients who have been out of work for some time, to customers who may previously have been receiving incapacity benefits for many years. It is important that people who are capable of moving towards employment are not left to spend years written-off by the benefit system.
• From April 2012 time limiting will affect all those who receive contributory ESA and who are placed in the Work Related Activity Group. People in the ESA Support Group will be unaffected by the change, as will anyone receiving income-related ESA regardless of which group they are assigned to.
• After a year, those people who have no other means of supporting themselves may qualify for income-related benefits – there will always be a safety net for those who need it. Of those affected by time limiting contributory ESA, we estimate that 60 per cent will be able to claim some income related ESA.

Cold Weather Payments

• The previous administration temporarily increased cold weather payments to £25 per payment. We recognise the importance of this additional money to vulnerable groups and will therefore put this increase on a permanent footing.
• Around 4.2 million people are currently eligible for Cold Weather Payments to help meet heating costs every time the average temperature in the local area falls or is forecast to fall below zero degrees centigrade for seven consecutive days between 1 November and 31 March. Jobcentre Plus makes payments automatically to older people who receive Pension Credit and disabled people and families with children (who are under five years) who receive an income-related benefit.

The Civil Society Transition Fund

• The Civil Society Transition Fund will provide grant funding to voluntary and community organisations, charities and social enterprises to give them breathing space to enable them to manage the transition to a tighter funding environment and to take advantage of future opportunities presented by increased public service delivery:
  • new fund of £100m
  • available over 2 years – £10m in 2010-11 and £90m in 2011-12
  • delivered by the Office for Civil Society and a national delivery partner to be appointed soon
  • applications will open as soon as possible.

Social Care

• There is an additional investment to support social care reaching around £2 billion per year by 2014-15. £1 billion of this will go through local government and £1 billion will be made available within the NHS to break down the barriers between health and social care.
• There will be continued support for elderly, disabled and vulnerable people through Supporting People Programme, which is £6.5 billion over the next 4 years.

Psychological Talking Therapies

• By 2014, nearly a million people a year with depression or anxiety disorders will have access to psychological therapies, delivering the commitment made in the Coalition Agreement.
• The programme’s services offer effective evidence-based intervention and treatment choice to people with depression and anxiety disorders. The programme is training a new workforce of 3,600 extra therapists over three years to 2010/11 and treating up to 900,000 people in that time.

Disabled Facilities Grant

• The Disabled Facilities Grant (DFG) has been protected within the Spending Review and increased in line with inflation. The allocation to Local Authorities for the DFG will increase from £169 million in 2010-11 to £185 million in 2014-15.

Disability Living Allowance – previous announcements

• We will be reforming Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to create a more focussed, sustainable and credible benefit which will help the most severely disabled people lead independent lives. These reforms will ensure support is targeted on those with greatest need and distributed on a consistent and transparent basis.
• At the heart of the benefit will be an objective assessment, which we are developing with the help of health care professionals and disabled people. This will allow us to assess more accurately and consistently who would benefit most from additional support.
• DLA is designed to help with the extra costs associated with disability so we have no plans to means test it. It will continue to be available to disabled people who have never been able to work as well as to those who move in and out of work.

Employment Programmes – previous announcements

• We know that disabled people want the chance to compete in the labour market.  It is up to us to ensure that the support and training they get enables them to get those jobs. The new Work Choice programme is expected to support more disabled people into employment each year than any of its predecessor government programmes. 

The key employment programmes are:

Work Choice

• Work Choice will ensure disabled people facing the biggest barriers to work get the intensive support they need to help them find and stay in work (including those wishing to move into self-employment). It is expected to support more disabled people into employment each year than any of its predecessor government programmes.
• We are working to ensure that Work Choice and the Work Programme “fit” together, in the eyes of disabled people and of those whose role it is to support them.
• Disabled people who could be more effectively helped through a reasonable adjustment provided by Access to Work will receive that help rather than being referred to Work Choice.
• Work Choice has been developed in close consultation with disability groups and disabled people. It is less prescriptive and more flexible and the support it provides is based on the needs of the individual, rather than the “one size fits all” approach we have had in the past.
• The support could include:
  • help with CV writing and applying for jobs
  • close working with employers to help them see beyond pre-conceptions or perceptions of a person’s disability and help them focus on abilities and strengths, and
  • brokerage between employers and participants – analysing the support needed with the participant prior to the support being put into place.

Access to Work

• Access to Work has an important role to play in supporting disabled people to get and keep jobs. The programme has been through a reshaping exercise, to improve its focus and value. This included:
• asking larger employers to make a more substantial contribution towards aids or equipment This will free up resources to go to those working for smaller employers, and
• enabling customers to have an even more personalised package of support, with an individual development plan, more frequent reviews, and more intensive discussion about building independence and self-reliance.
• The change to employer contributions was effected from April 2010 and the other changes will be progressively brought in over the course of 2010/11.
• The Coalition Agreement states that: “We will reform Access to Work, so disabled people can apply for jobs with funding already secured for any adaptations and equipment they will need.”   We are currently developing a “Pre Employment Eligibility Letter” to meet this commitment and an announcement will be made shortly.
• We are continuing to look at ways of making the programme more efficient and effective, so the maximum number of disabled people can be helped to get and keep jobs. This will include ensuring that employers are meeting their duty to make reasonable adjustments to support their employees.  Access to Work is available to support costs faced by a disabled person, or their employer, beyond what is reasonable for an employer to meet.

Work Programme

• The Coalition Agreement: Our Programme for Government, which was published in May, committed the Department to the delivery of the Work Programme, to replace the confusing array of welfare-to-work schemes currently in place, and provide personalised and individual support to people based on their needs, rather than dictated from Whitehall.
• Pre-Work Programme: From April 2011, Jobcentre Plus managers and advisers will have the flexibility to focus on helping people rather than on completing activity and processes, and will have more discretion to tailor support for customers according to their individual needs.
• The Work Programme will provide more tailored employment support to disabled people. The Work Programme will support a wide range of customers – from Jobseeker’s Allowance recipients who have been out of work for some time, to customers who may previously have been receiving incapacity benefits for many years.
• Post-Work Programme Support:  From 2013, we will ensure support is provided for the small number of customers who have not found work by the end of the Work Programme and require further support to move into sustained employment.
• Remploy are in the third year of their five year modernisation plan.  Following the government’s review of Non Departmental Public Bodies and the spending review settlement, the budget for Remploy Limited during the five year modernisation period remains unchanged at £555 million, with an additional £111 million of modernisation expenditure.
• Remploy are on track to help 20,000 disabled people into work by 2012/13. We will continue to look at how we ensure continued improvements in the service provided by Remploy and to maximise the number disabled people supported into sustainable employment.