Stephen Timms MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the sensitivity of this issue. I particularly regret the anxiety that has been caused by press speculation over the past several weeks—that has certainly been regrettable. From my postbag, the thing that particularly frightened people was the point I have already referred to, which was the previous Government’s proposal to switch PIP from a cash benefit to vouchers. That caused a great deal of concern, but my hon. Friend is right: we now need to be absolutely clear in our communication about these matters. I think the Green Paper is clear. The accessible versions of the Green Paper will all be published by the beginning of next month, and we will then have a 12-week consultation period. As a result of those versions, including the easy-read version, being available, I hope that everybody will be able to see clearly what is proposed and will be able to respond to the consultation with their views.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right to underline again the hugely important contribution, not least economic contribution, made by carers. The consultation is under way, and it will run for a full 12 weeks from the time when all the accessible versions of the Green Papers are published, which will be in early April. I would be very grateful if she encouraged the organisations that she is working with to respond to that consultation, and I would also be very interested to hear and see her response to it. We will take those contributions extremely seriously as we finalise the details of these proposals.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Member for raising that point, but the Green Paper is very clear about the protections provided for people who are terminally ill. There are special rules in place, and they will absolutely be maintained. She can be very much reassured about what the Green Paper says about that group. If there is a point that I have missed that she has spotted, I would be grateful to hear about it, but we have very robust protections for those people for exactly the reasons she sets out.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  An assessment will be carried out by a properly trained health professional. If the person to whom my hon. Friend refers scores more than four points on any one of the 10 daily living activities, they will be eligible for personal independence payment, as at present.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  The assessment published yesterday is that 90% of those receiving the daily living PIP component will continue to receive that benefit after the changes take effect, so I think the concern that the hon. Lady raises is not entirely appropriate.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right to highlight the needs of young carers. I have spoken to young people who started caring in their primary school years. It takes a while for them to be recognised as carers. We need to speed things up.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  Absolutely, it is. The people that my hon. Friend described will be the beneficiaries of the big commitment that we have made.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I very much agree that this all needs to be done in a managed and compassionate way, which is exactly what we are doing, so I do not agree that it is being rushed. As I have said, the changes will not happen for more than 18 months—they will not take effect until November 2026. They will not affect current recipients of personal independence payment until their first award review after November 2026, and review periods are typically three years, so this is definitely not being rushed. It will happen in a properly planned, staged and careful way. The hon. Gentleman referred to couples losing £12,000. I think he must be referring to instances of people who receive personal independence payment and also receive carer’s allowance for caring for their spouse—he is right that there are some instances of that. There are couples for whom that happens both ways. The transitional arrangements we are consulting on, which are referred to in the Green Paper, need to take account of that incidence, but it is absolutely the right thing to do, to ensure that personal independence payment continues in the long term as part of a sustainable benefit system. We do have to make some reductions, as I think the hon. Gentleman acknowledged. If he has another idea on how that can be done, I am interested to know what it is. By concentrating on those whose impairments are the most severe, which the proposed changes will do, we will be able to ensure that the benefit is there for the long term and that it is sustainable.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise those points. I can give him the assurance that he seeks. Indeed, I spoke to Scope yesterday, and to other disability charities. Yes, this will be a proper consultation, and we will listen very carefully to what people say to us in response.

• 27 Mar 2025 · PIP Changes: Impact on Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that we were left with a broken system. May I pay tribute to her for her work on the all-party parliamentary group on eye health and visual impairment, which focuses on supporting people into employment? That is the crucial element of this package. We will invest substantial sums, rising to £1 billion a year by the end of the Parliament, in supporting people who are out of work on health and disability grounds into work, and I very much look forward to working with her in that endeavour. When somebody who is out of work moves into a job, the likelihood of their being below the poverty line is halved, so there will be a very positive poverty impact from that commitment.

• 25 Mar 2025 · Seriously Ill Children: Financial Support for Parents · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) on securing this important debate, commend his consistent advocacy on this topic, and welcome the thoughtful and passionate speech he has made this afternoon. I have now met my hon. Friend twice, and his constituents Ceri and Frances Menai-Davis, who founded It’s Never You—which I think is also what they said when they received their son’s diagnosis. I thank them for telling me what had happened and telling me frankly about the journey they went through with their son Hugh, who was in hospital with a very serious illness. Their heartfelt reflections and the Hugh’s law campaign help people like me to understand and appreciate much better the emotional and financial impacts that parents experience at an extremely difficult time. I commend the outstanding work that that charity and others do to support the parents and families of children with cancer and other very serious health conditions. Many parents caring for children and young people with serious illnesses are likely to need additional support through social security. Caring naturally has an impact on work and therefore, very likely, on household income. Financial support is available through universal credit, and if needed support can be available on day one through a universal credit advance. Alongside the universal credit standard allowance, additional amounts—the child element, the disabled child addition, the carer element and housing costs—are added as appropriate. Of course, universal credit is means-tested, and I recognise that it will not help households with greater financial resources, but it is there as a safety net if those financial circumstances change. In the tragic circumstances of a child dying, the universal credit bereavement run-on is in place. It is designed to ensure financial stability for the initial period following the bereavement, and it can last for up to three months. Universal credit elements—the child element, the disabled child addition, the carer element and housing costs—will all remain in payment for the assessment period in which the child died and two further assessment periods beyond that. To support parents at this very difficult time, benefit conditionality is switched off for six months, which ensures that bereaved parents do not have to work or search for work during that period. After three months, a work coach will be in touch to offer additional voluntary support, which may or may not be taken up. There is also disability living allowance for children aged under 16 and personal independence payments for those over 16. They are available if a child or young person’s condition or illness is of a long-term nature and gives rise to care, daily living or mobility needs. They are not means-tested. We are currently consulting, following last week’s Green Paper on pathways to work, on raising the age at which young people move from DLA on to PIP, the adult disability benefit, from 16 to 18. That proposal has been quite widely welcomed since we published the Green Paper. Comparing January to February 2020, just before the pandemic, with September to October 2024, the number applying for DLA for children has increased by 193%—it has nearly tripled in that period. As a result, I am afraid the average journey time for DLA claims has risen; it is up now to about 20 weeks. I very much regret those delays and the Department is working to reduce them. We have increased the number of staff dealing with applications; they are clearing cases in date order, to be fair to everybody. These benefits are a contribution to the extra costs that may arise as a result of a disability or health impairment. They are assessed on the needs arising, not on the condition itself, so they are available irrespective of the diagnosis. The highest level of benefit is over £9,500 per year. The benefit is generally paid to the child’s parent or guardian, so it can help with overall family finances and be used as the family choose to meet their needs. Many children and young people with serious illnesses may spend a lot of time in hospital. For those under 18, DLA and PIP continue to be paid in full, which is a difference from the adult benefit. I will now address the three-month qualifying period—which my hon. Friend rightly referred to in his remarks—that applies to disability benefits such as DLA and PIP. Payment begins once the three-month period has been completed, which helps to establish that the disability and resulting care and support needs are of a long-standing nature and provides a division between short and long-term disability. Claims can be submitted during the three-month qualifying period. Consideration will always be given to whether the qualifying period has already been served, at least in part, before the date of claim. I want to highlight this point: the three-month qualifying period begins when the care needs began, and we depend on the parents to tell us when that was. It could well be a week or a significant period before the diagnosis or the hospital admission, and before the benefit application was submitted. It is important to look at when the care needs began, because that could have been well before the application was made. If the child sadly has an end-of-life diagnosis, as my hon. Friend knows, special rules apply: claims are fast-tracked and the three-month qualifying period does not apply. The highest rate of the DLA care component or the enhanced rate of the PIP daily living component will be paid from the date of the claim. My officials are currently exploring the legal implications of another measure that has been proposed, which would introduce a run-on for child DLA and extend disability living allowance for a period after the death of a child. They will report on their conclusions once they have reached them. Receiving DLA and PIP can passport to a range of additional support, such as premiums in income-related benefits, carer’s allowance, the Motability scheme and exemption from the benefit cap, providing further help for families. Help from social security is part of a wider commitment on the part of the Government. For children and young people who have cancer, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has relaunched the children and young people cancer taskforce, which is focused on identifying tangible improvements for that particular patient group. I commend the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), who co-chairs that taskforce and will spearhead its work on patient experience alongside her co-chair, Professor Darren Hargrave of University College London and Great Ormond Street hospital. The taskforce will examine a wide range of issues across both clinical and non-clinical care, early diagnosis, genomic testing and treatment, research, innovation and, importantly, patient experience, looking at issues such as travel, food and psychological support. Ceri and Frances will be in a position to say a good deal about that, drawing on their own experiences in hospital with their son. The cost of travel can be a real problem for families of children with serious illnesses. The healthcare travel costs scheme provides financial assistance to patients in England who do not themselves have a medical need for transport, but need help with the costs of travelling to NHS services. The Government recognise that some patients and their families who one might think should benefit from that scheme are in fact unable to do so as it is currently configured. The Department of Health and Social Care is looking at that issue and whether more should be done, alongside its wider work on cancer.

• 25 Mar 2025 · Seriously Ill Children: Financial Support for Parents · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the pressures on the family in those circumstances. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire referred to the fact that from April this year, the Department for Business and Trade is introducing a new entitlement of up to 12 weeks of neonatal care leave and pay for those with babies in neonatal care, to make sure that parents have appropriate support during that time—for exactly the reason the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has just set out. That new entitlement was introduced under the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023, which started as a private Member’s Bill in the previous Parliament and received cross-party support. When opening this debate, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire said that he will speak to Ministers in that Department about some ideas along those lines. It is important that all parents of children with serious illnesses are supported to return to or remain in work, if that is what they choose to do. Carers for seriously ill children are already protected from employment discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 and parents are entitled to up to 18 weeks’ unpaid parental leave to look after their children for any reason. The Government’s new Employment Rights Bill will make it easier to access that entitlement, and will make the leave available from day one of starting a new job. It will also make it more likely that flexible working requests will be accepted by employers. To support existing, new and potential unpaid carers to make informed decisions about combining work and care, the Job Help website provides advice and information all in one place, and our new deal for working people will provide further support and help. This debate has reminded us all that having a child who is seriously ill is surely one of the most worrying and stressful situations a parent can experience. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire for the initiative, which has given us the opportunity to talk about that today. There are no current plans to introduce a day one, non-means-tested grant for parents in this situation, like that proposed in the Hugh’s law campaign and supported in this debate, but I underline that there is already significant support offered by my Department. That is just part of the very important work across Government to improve support for parents in these circumstances, including, in particular, the relaunched children and young people cancer taskforce. Once again, I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. It is an important and sensitive subject, and I commend him for pursuing it so energetically, the cause having been raised with him so effectively by his constituents. I thank everyone who has contributed to the debate, and I have no doubt at all that we will return to this subject. Question put and agreed to.

• 20 Mar 2025 · British Sign Language Week · Hansard source

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  I am very glad to do so; I completely agree with my hon. Friend. This week gives us a chance to celebrate British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language. As we have heard, 151,000 people use BSL; 87,000 have it as their first language, and it is the UK’s fourth most widely used indigenous language. That is a very large group of people, with a great deal to contribute to our economy and our society. It is right to take this week as an opportunity to highlight, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock said, the rich culture around BSL, of which many people are unaware. I was intrigued that American Sign Language is completely different from BSL; I think that arises from its origins not long after American independence when—I suppose understandably—Americans wanted more to do with the French than the British. That has shaped American Sign Language today. We have heard about the 2022 Act, and I echo the tributes to our former colleague Rosie Cooper and to Chloe Smith, the then Minister. The Act is driving improved accessibility of Government communications and in this Government we are going to implement it in full. My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock very reasonably asked why the BSL version of Tuesday’s Green Paper has not yet appeared. I can only apologise for that. The 12-week consultation clock will not start until all the accessible versions are published in early April, with a BSL version among them, so that BSL users will have a full 12 weeks to respond. The BSL Act requires the Government to publish a British Sign Language report setting out each Department’s steps to promote and facilitate the use of BSL in public communications. The first, as the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies) reminded us, was published in July 2023. The second was a bit delayed by the general election and appeared in December. I echo the commitment that she set out to annual publication in those first five years. As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock said, BSL activity has more than doubled across Government since that first report, but there is still a long way to go, and I have noticed impatience in some quarters about the speed of progress. The new Lead Ministers for Disability will have an important role here. We discussed the BSL Act and its reporting framework at our first meeting in December, and we did so again in our second meeting last week. We will keep progress under review, and of course I will have the opportunity to discuss there a number of the issues raised in this debate. We will also publish a BSL plan for each Government Department with the third BSL report, which we will be publishing in the summer. In line with the commitment in our election manifesto, I work closely with disabled people and representative organisations to put their views and voices at the heart of all we do. Since July, I have met a wide range of deaf people’s organisations, along with other disability organisations. We have heard about the independent BSL Advisory Board, set up in the wake of the Act; it is co-chaired by Craig Crowley, chief executive of Action Deafness, who has done a fantastic job. The board has 15 members, mainly BSL users and all with lived and/or professional experience of the barriers facing deaf people. I have been very impressed with the board’s work, drawing on the experience of its members and their knowledge of those barriers to develop priorities and a focus for its work, including setting up sub-groups on specific issues. For example, the health and social care sub-group is compiling recommendations based on deaf people’s experiences in the health service—we have heard about a number of those in this debate. I have also spoke to SignHealth, which has made the point to me that BSL users often struggle even to make a GP appointment and to communicate basic health information with the NHS. The report of that sub-group, with its recommendations, will appear later on this year. Over the last year, the board has also discussed deaf access to sport with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It presented at the British Deaf Association conference in Manchester, the theme of which was BSL in the early years, and I am grateful to the board co-chairs and other members for their commitment to improving the lives of deaf people and collaborating in order to do so. I attended the education summit that the BSL Advisory Board organised at the Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children at King’s Cross last year. There were powerful contributions from senior leaders on the barriers that deaf children and their families face in education. That school is really interesting; it has a bilingual model of education and shares a playground with a hearing school, encouraging interaction between deaf and hearing children, contributing to the inclusion of everybody. We want to enhance the status of BSL, and I agree with the points made in this debate that the GCSE will benefit BSL users generally, as well as those individual students who take it.

• 20 Mar 2025 · British Sign Language Week · Hansard source

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  Yes, I would be very glad to meet representatives of the devolved Governments, and to co-operate with them on this, as we do in many other areas.

• 20 Mar 2025 · British Sign Language Week · Hansard source

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  The situation in Cornwall has also been raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon). My understanding is that the adult skills fund will be devolved in Cornwall under the recent devolution agreement that has been reached. The fund will be devolved from the coming academic year 2025-26, so there is an opportunity for local decision making in the future. My hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth rightly made points about the way in which that funding has typically been used in the past, and the fact that the decision has certainly not always been made to provide courses along those lines. Following that devolution deal, there is at least the opportunity to do that. I assure the House of our continuing commitment to the GCSE. Ofqual is now finalising the assessment arrangements for it, working closely with exam boards and BSL organisations to ensure that there is a fair and reliable assessment process. Ofqual met the BSL Advisory Board on 5 February to discuss that, and I think the board was generally reassured about the progress being made and the commitment to deliver. I am advised that the technical consultation that the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) asked about will be launched in the next few weeks.

• 20 Mar 2025 · British Sign Language Week · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. We have had a wide-ranging and thoughtful debate. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) on securing it during British Sign Language Week and on the initiative of establishing the all-party parliamentary group. It is not very well known that the Deputy Prime Minister is BSL qualified to level 2. She has this morning posted on social media a signing message in support of British Sign Language Week. She sets out in the message the Government’s commitment and her own commitment to championing BSL and to tackling the barriers that face people in Britain with hearing impairments.

• 20 Mar 2025 · British Sign Language Week · Hansard source

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  I welcome that innovative arrangement; if the hon. Member drops me a line about it, I would be interested to look at it further. That is a similar example to what we heard about some energy companies operating for their customers, and I welcome it. Another main focus for the advisory board this year is the use of artificial intelligence to reduce barriers. How long will it be before we have a handheld device that will be able to interpret BSL both ways? What might be the pitfalls of that happening? Yesterday I chaired an interesting roundtable at Tata in Bishopsgate, attended by the co-chairs and members of the BSL Advisory Board, representatives of the British Deaf Association, the RNID, Professor Richard Bowden from the University of Surrey, and Professor Kearsy Cormier, professor of sign linguistics at University College London. At the roundtable Dr Charudatta Jadhav, the principal scientist and head of the accessibility centre of excellence at Tata in India, told us that, while Tata is focusing initially on Indian and American Sign Language, it expects to have a BSL interpretation product within five years. We discussed the ethical and cultural issues around that: how can software interpret the nuances in facial expressions, which I believe are much more important in BSL than in Indian Sign Language? How do developers decide which version of BSL to implement? How will regional accents, which can provide a BSL user with valuable information about the signer, be handled? Those are interesting topics, and as Members have said, deaf people need to be in driving seat in resolving them. Tech can certainly help deaf people to overcome barriers that too often and needlessly block opportunities that others take for granted. We want more of that potential to be realised. The Government have taken important steps around equal pay and flexible working. On Tuesday, we launched our 12-week consultation on mandatory disability pay gap reporting—including, I am pleased to say, a BSL version of the consultation document. We want deaf people to get the support they need to thrive in the workplace, and we recognise that too many do not at the moment. Implementing the BSL Act is only just beginning. Let us all keep working together to deliver the access and inclusion for deaf people that all of us want to see. Again, I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock and to everyone who has contributed to this important and welcome debate. I am grateful to those in the Public Gallery for their interest. I express particular thanks to the interpreters who have supported us today, and I thank Mr Speaker for enabling them to be with us.

• 19 Mar 2025 · Health and Disability Green Paper · Hansard source

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  I refer the hon. Gentleman to the previous Government’s proposal to convert PIP from cash into vouchers, which caused huge anxiety. We made it clear in the announcement yesterday that we are not going to do that, but we will make changes to ensure that the personal independence payment is financially sustainable in the long term. That will reassure a large number of people for whom PIP is vital.

• 19 Mar 2025 · Health and Disability Green Paper · Hansard source

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  I am sure the hon. Lady will welcome the additional £26 billion being invested in the national health service in the coming financial year, for exactly the reasons she set out, and the most severely impaired people will be protected under the changes that we announced yesterday to the personal independence payment. Yes, we will be consulting—there will be a full 12-week consultation period on the Green Paper proposals, and we will be listening carefully to what everybody says in response.

• 19 Mar 2025 · Health and Disability Green Paper · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend raises an important subject, and as she knows, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has set up the valproate pregnancy prevention programme. I, or a Minister from DHSC, will be glad to meet my hon. Friend to discuss those points.

• 19 Mar 2025 · Health and Disability Green Paper · Hansard source

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  Yesterday afternoon, we set out the Government’s plan to fix the broken system, which gives proper employment support to help hundreds of thousands who are out of work on health and disability grounds, but who want to be in a job; deals with the work disincentive that has been inserted into the benefits system over the past 15 years; and makes the personal independence payment financially sustainable.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Benefit Reforms: Disabled People · Hansard source

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  I am concerned about the level of anxiety and speculation that has been around over recent weeks. I am sad that that has happened and that people have been concerned, but the current welfare system is failing the very people it is supposed to help—the people it is there for. Our aim is to make the system sustainable so that it will be there for people now and in the future. When the hon. Lady sees the proposals, I think she will see how we will deliver on that commitment.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Benefit Reforms: Disabled People · Hansard source

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  I can confirm to my hon. Friend that we will produce a full impact assessment in due course.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Benefit Reforms: Disabled People · Hansard source

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  We will be reforming the current broken system of health and disability benefits. We will bring forward a Green Paper with proper plans very soon, setting out how we will help disabled people who can work to do so, while fully supporting the most severely disabled as well.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Benefit Reforms: Disabled People · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That balance will be at the heart of the Green Paper that we are bringing forward. We will deliver proper employment support for disabled people, which has been taken away since 2010. We will deal with the incentives to inactivity that the current system presents. Of course, there will always be people who are unable to work through disability or ill health, and we are committed to fully supporting them too.