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Former DWP disabilities minister set to be suspended from Parliament for leaking payday loan report to Wonga

Justin Tomlinson has already apologised and admitted he broke the rules

Thursday 15 September 2016 11:50 BST

Justin Tomlinson, the former disabilities minister (Reuters)

A former DWP minister with responsibility for disabled people is set to be suspended from the House of Commons for leaking a parliamentary report to a payday lender.

Justin Tomlinson shared the findings of a draft report into regulating payday loans with an employee of Wonga.

An inquiry by the House of Commons sleaze watchdog found the former minister, who sat on the Public Accounts Committee at the time of the leak, had “committed a contempt” with the leak

It said his actions “constituted substantial interference” with the process of the influential Committee, which was seeking to protect vulnerable consumers from payday lenders.

The report, which will be debated and voted on, recommended that Mr Tomlinson be suspended from the Commons for two days and be compelled to make a statement to the House.

At the time of the report the then PAC chair Margaret Hodge at the time accused part of the payday loans industry of “disgraceful practices” and said existing rules had been ineffective.

Research by the charity Scope has found that people with disabilities are significantly more likely to turn to payday loans than people without them.

18 per cent of people with disabilities have used so-called 'high cost' lending compared with 5 per cent of non-disabled people, according to that study.

Mr Tomlinson has previously apologised and accepted that he had broken the rules.

Justin Tomlinson comments on the findings to the House of Commons (House of Commons)

The MP was sacked as disability minister in July's reshuffle by Theresa May and has not been given another job in the Government.

In a statement to the House of Commons on Thursday morning he said that he sent the report to the payday loan company because he believed action needed to be taken on payday loan companies.

"I wanted to take this opportunity to make a full and unreserved apology to you and to the House," he told the Speaker.

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

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1/77 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Closing Remploy factories

The Work and Pensions Secretary called time on Britain’s system of Remploy factories, which provided subsidised and sheltered employment to disabled people. People employed at the factories protested against their closure and said they provided gainful work. “Is it a kindness to stick people in some factory where they are not doing any work at all? Just making cups of coffee?” Mr Duncan Smith said at the time, defending the decision. “I promise you this is better.” The Remploy organisation was privatised and sold to American workfare provider Maximus, with the majority of the organisation’s factories closed. The future of the remaining sites is unclear

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Scrapping the Independent Living Fund

The £320m Independent Living Fund was established in 1988 to give financial support to people with disabilities. It was scrapped on July 1 2015, with 18,000 often severely disabled people losing out by an average of £300 a week. The money was generally used to help pay for carers so people could live in communities rather than institutions. Councils will get a boost in funding to compensate but it will not cover the whole cost of the fund. This new cash also doesn’t have to be spent on the disabled

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Cut payments for the disabled Access To Work scheme

Iain Duncan Smith is bringing forward a policy that will reduce payments to some disabled people from a scheme designed to help them into work. The £108m scheme, which helps 35,540 people, will be capped on a per-used basis, potentially hitting those with the more serious disabilities who currently receive the most help. The single biggest users of the fund are people who have difficulty seeing and hearing. The cut will come in from October 2015. The charity Disability UK says the scheme actually makes the Government money because the people who gain access to work tend pay tax that more than covers its cost. The DWP does not describe the reduction as a “cut” and says it will be able to spread the money more thinly and cover more people

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Cut Employment and Support Allowance

The latest Budget included a £30 a week cut in disability benefits for some new claimants of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). The Government says it is equalising the rate of disability benefits with Jobseekers Allowance because giving disabled people more help is a “perverse incentive”. The people affected by this cut are those assessed as having a limited capability for work but as being capable of some “work-related activity”. A group of prominent Catholics wrote to Mr Duncan Smith to say there was “no justification” for this cut. Mental health charity Mind, said the cut was “insulting and misguided”

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Risk homelessness with a sharp increase disability benefit sanctions

Official figures in the first quarter of 2014 found a huge increase in sanctions against people reliant on ESA sickness benefit. The 15,955 sanctions were handed out in that period compared to 3,574 in the same period the year before, 2013 – a 4.5 times increase. The homelessness charity Crisis warned at the time that the sharp rise in temporary benefit cuts was “cruel and can leave people utterly destitute – without money even for food and at severe risk of homelessness”. “It is difficult to see how they are meant to help people prepare for work,” Matt Downie, director of policy at the charity added

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Sending sick people to work because of broken fitness to work tests

In 2012 a government advisor appointed to review the Government’s Work Capability Assessment said the tests causing suffering by sending sick people back to work inappropriately. “There are certainly areas where it's still not working and I am sorry there are people going through a system which I think still needs improvement,” Professor Malcolm Harrington concluded. The tests are said to have improved since then, but as recently as this summer they are still coming in for criticism. In June the British Psychological Society said there was “now significant body of evidence that the WCA is failing to assess people’s fitness for work accurately and appropriately”. It called for a full overhaul of the way the tests are carried out. The WCA appeals system has also been fraught with controversy with a very high rate of overturns and delays lasting months and blamed for hardship

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

The bedroom tax

The Government’s benefit cut for people who it says are “under-occupying” their homes disproportionately affects disabled people. Statistics released last year show that around two-thirds of those affected by the under-occupancy penalty, widely known as the ‘bedroom tax’, are disabled. There have been a number of high profile cases of disabled people being moved out of specially adapted homes by the policy. In one case publicised by the Sunday People last week, a 48 year old man with cerebral palsy was forced to bathe in a paddling pool after the tax moved him out of his home with a walk-in shower. The Government says it has provided councils with a discretionary fund to help reduce the policy’s impact on disabled people, but cases continue to arise

"I completely accept the findings of the report published today by the privileges committee and the report submitted by the committee for standard.

"I accept that my actions in sharing the report constitute and interference in the work of the committee for public accounts and for this I am sorry.

"This was never my intention. These actions came as a result of my own naivity driven as a desire to strengthen regulations on payday lenders and protect vulnerable consumers.

"The Commissioner for standards confirm this as my motivation based on evidence that I have worked on cross party campaigns to protect consuemrs and that I have long argued for tighter regulation of the payday lending industry.

"I welcome the report’s conclusion that my actions were not motivated by financial gain and the report states that I did not act in the way I did either for financial gain nor with the intention of reflecting the views of the company concerned.

"I also appreciate the acknowledgement that the national newspaper story following the start of the campaign was substantiated."

The Speaker replied: “I thank the honourable gentleman for what he said and the way he said it. The matter rests there, that’s the end of it.”

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