Begg honoured for services to disabled people

In the Queen’s New Year Honours List, the disabled MP Anne Begg was made a Dame. As Ian Macrae discovers, she sees this as very much a part of her continuing parliamentary journey

In the past, when disabled MPs – David Blunkett for one – were asked why they didn’t do more for disabled people, the stock response was along the lines of “I didn’t come into politics to represent just a part of the community…” etc.

Anne Begg, Dame Anne Begg as we must now call her, admits that this was very much how she used to think.

“I started off with that attitude as well, because you have to establish your own identity and I was keen not to be known as ‘the disabled MP’. But things changed.

“I started to get more interested in social security and it was that that made me take more interest in disability.

“When I got elected I knew no more about disability benefits than anyone else. Then there were some changes to Incapacity Benefit and journalists phoned me and asked me what I thought about it and I said it wasn’t something I was interested in. They said, ‘but it’s a disability benefit’. And I said, ‘but IB is an unemployment benefit for disabled people and I’ve never been unemployed.’

“But once you start looking at a subject, you get more interested in it and that’s why, since 2001, I’ve been on the Work and Pensions Select Committee.”

Such was the blossoming of her interest that, since May 2010, she’s been Chair of that Committee.

It’s a role that requires her to be rather more restrained, more reticent even, than perhaps she might otherwise be.

For example, this former teacher didn’t feel it appropriate to give marks out of ten for the performances of individual government ministers.

She’s willing, though, to address the Coalition’s welfare reform and its impact in wider terms.

“In some cases there are things we can welcome in principle, but of course the devil is always in the detail. So obviously, Universal Credit is the holy grail of welfare reform but until we know what the levels are, and how it will affect individuals, it’s impossible to say whether it’s a good or a bad thing in and of itself.”

Putting it another way, she recognises that a simplified benefits system might well be a good thing, but not if it pays people less money.

She also sees a deeper and fundamental problem with the Government’s current agenda.

“The rhetoric is that we want to help people back into work, and that’s absolutely correct. But then some decisions come right out of the blue.

“So, for instance, Maria Miller says that the benefits system should be much more personalised so that people have and manage their own budgets.

“And then she cuts Disability Living Allowance Mobility Component to residential care home residents when that’s the epitome of personalised budgets.”

Similarly, Dame Anne regards the closure of the Independent Living Fund as, “another example of the actions and the rhetoric not marrying”.

Much of what she says is on familiar territory for readers of Disability Now. The “medicalisation” of DLA, for instance, flies in the face of much that she’s championed.

“I’ve fought very hard over the years to get disability away from health, saying that it’s not a health issue, it’s a human rights issue.

“I saw something on Twitter recently, saying that disability benefits should be a matter for the health departments. That to me would be completely retrograde.”

Her immediate priority as Select Committee Chair is the chance to question Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith at a session in the near future.

So the Committee has been asking people for submissions giving their views on Universal Credit. “That, of course, is very much his baby.”