Grand Committee
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Housing and Planning Act 2016 (Permission in Principle etc) (Miscellaneous Amendments) (England) Regulations 2017
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
That the Grand Committee do consider the Housing and Planning Act 2016 (Permission in Principle etc) (Miscellaneous Amendments) (England) Regulations 2017.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
My Lords, these regulations are necessary to ensure the effective operation of permission in principle when it is introduced later this year. Permission in principle is a new route to planning permission that will give developers up-front certainty that sites are suitable for housing-led development in principle, before they need to work up detailed and costly development proposals.
Permission in principle will make the planning process less risky and more efficient and, in doing so, will help tackle the undersupply of housing by increasing the amount of land, particularly brownfield land, with permission to build. We secured the primary powers through the Housing and Planning Act 2016 to bring permission in principle into effect. We consulted on the detailed operation of the policy and, taking account of the responses received, are now developing secondary legislation that we intend to lay shortly before this House. These regulations make a small number of minor consequential and miscellaneous amendments to primary legislation.
Regulation 2 amends paragraph 9 of Schedule 12A to the Local Government Act 1972, which prevents local planning authorities excluding information at a planning committee about an application for planning permission in relation to development on its own land. This amendment will require the local planning authority to comply with this requirement where an application for permission in principle is made in relation to local authority land, thereby ensuring an equal level of transparency.
Regulation 3 amends the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Section 69 of that Act deals with entries on planning registers, which are public records of planning applications and permissions in the local area. Regulation 3 will ensure that records of permission in principle applications and consents are made publicly available on local planning registers, too. Section 75 of the 1990 Act ensures that a grant of planning permission enures for the benefit of the land. In other words, a grant of planning permission runs with the land and is not personal to the applicant. Regulation 3 applies this long-standing principle to grants of permission in principle, so that they also run with the land and not with the applicant.
Section 96A of the 1990 Act enables a non-material change, for example a correction to a spelling mistake, to be made to a grant of planning permission. This amendment will enable the applicant to follow an expedited process to make a non-material change to a grant of permission in principle. Without this amendment, the applicant would have to reapply for permission in principle to make such a change. The final change we propose to make through Regulation 3 is to amend Section 100 of the 1990 Act, which deals with revocation powers. This amendment will ensure that local planning authorities can revoke or modify a grant of permission in principle in the exceptional circumstances where such a course of action is necessary. This is consistent with the current arrangements for grants of full or outline planning permission.
Regulation 4 amends the Planning (Hazardous Substances) Act 1990 to ensure that in dealing with an application for hazardous substances consent, the hazardous substances authority shall have regard to any permission in principle that has been granted in relation to land in the vicinity. This change will ensure consistency with the arrangements for having due regard to grants of planning permission in relation to hazardous substances consent.
Finally, Regulation 5 will amend the Commons Act 2006 to ensure that when a local planning authority publicises its intention to grant permission in principle to a suitable site on a brownfield register, the right to apply to register that site as a town and village green is switched off. The right to apply is reinstated when a period of 10 weeks passes from when the local planning authority publicises its intention to grant permission in principle without the land being granted such permission. The right to apply is also reinstated when the grant of permission in principle expires. I commend these regulations to the Committee.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I have two brief questions for the Minister. The first relates to the definition of housing-led development that the Government are currently using. We debated this during the passing of the Bill and, as I understand it, permission in principle can be obtained only in relation to housing-led development. However, questions were posed at the time regarding what happens when the housing element of a development is much smaller than the development as a whole, which may have commercial development at its heart and the housing element is consequential. In other words, can permission in principle be granted for housing on a site where less than half of the total development planned is for housing? A clear definition would be helpful.
The second matter is not so much a question as a request for the Minister to consider producing for the general public a plain-English guide to planning law. There are complexities around the Neighbourhood Planning Bill, which goes to Report on Thursday, and the changes it makes to the Housing and Planning Act, under which these regulations are being made. If one looks at, for example, permitted development regulations, permission in principle regulations and, probably in future, pre-commencement conditions, the question arises of whether there are any plans to consolidate all of them. Perhaps more importantly, it should be made easy for the general public, particularly those who are producing neighbourhood plans, to understand the statutory position of many of these policies in relation to themselves. In other words, it should be written in language that people can understand.
Lord Jones (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his helpful, clear and brief exposition. I note that he is a compatriot with a truly Welsh title. I have a brief question on Regulation 4—“Consequential amendment to the Planning (Hazardous Substances) Act 1990”—in the knowledge that successive Governments have been encouraging the use of brownfield sites. There must be a relevance to that aspect of policy and this item. What is the consequence of this regulation for builders, local authority housing committees and housing associations? How have the Government reached conclusions affecting the use of brownfield sites? I note the helpful reference to Regulation 4 in the Explanatory Note and the mention of a “hazardous substances authority”. Can the Minister—during the debate, by letter or with help from officials—say what this authority is, who is chairing it and what sort of people sit on it? It is relevant in terms of a genuine debate.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)
My Lords, I start my remarks with my usual declarations and refer Members to my entry in the register of interests. I should specifically mention that I am a local councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
The Government are slowly—actually, very slowly—bringing forward regulations under the Housing and Planning Act. We are now coming up to the first anniversary of Royal Assent, and I recall all the fuss, hoo-hah and pressure we had to get the Bill on to the statute book. When Members argued that we should spend a bit more time getting the regulations sorted out, we were told, “No, no, we have to get this on the statute book now. It must happen”. Here we are, nearly a year later, and one or two regulations are coming forward. That is no way to legislate. It has caused worry and confusion and is not the way to do things. Having said that, I am very pleased that the Government have dropped some parts of the Act. That is good, and long may it continue—there are one or two things we want to see the end of fairly shortly and all power to the noble Lord’s elbow on that—but it is not a great way to make legislation.
The SI deals with permission in principle. It is designed to separate planning decision-making on “in principle” issues—for example, locations—from the more technical detail, to give up-front certainty to developers before they get into the more technical and, some might say, costly matters. Equally, one could suggest that residents are concerned that this is just a way to bypass local people in the planning process so they have less influence. Of course, that is not very localist.
Turning to the specifics of the statutory instrument, I have one or two questions for the Minister, but I shall not be detaining the Grand Committee for very long. Regulation 2 provides that a local authority application for permission in principle should not be exempt information. Perhaps the Minister can say a little more about that, and whether the Government have any plans to increase transparency there. That would be useful. Regulation 3 concerns non-material amendments; perhaps he can say a little more about that. Regulation 4, to which my noble friend Lord Jones referred, talks about hazardous substances with regard to any permission in principle granted to land in the vicinity. Can we have more information about what that means in practice? How will the Government decide what is in the vicinity? What does that mean? It is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string. What sort of testing regime will there be of harmful impacts of hazardous substances on land, water supply or animal life? We need to know a bit more about what will be carried out.
Finally, Regulation 5 is about triggering and terminating events of an application for registration of a village green. As the Minister will know, Section 87 of the Localism Act 2011 is still a very new piece of legislation which was put on the statute book by the coalition Government and deals with assets of community value. It allows village greens to be designated and therefore prevents them being sold off for development. Effectively, the regulation could put a stop to all that. What is the point of putting something on the statute book in 2011 to give communities this right and then, six years later, creating a mechanism whereby that right can be lost? That does not seem very localist either. I should like to hear more from the Minister about that. What was the point of putting it on the statute book in the first place if we are now to take that right away with no warning to local people?
Those are my questions. I have no further points to make on the effect of the regulations. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Beecham (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. I want to make just one point raised by my honourable friend Roberta Blackman-Woods when the matter was discussed in the Delegated Legislation Committee yesterday. She referred to the remark of the Minister in the Commons that the statutory instrument would amend primary legislation. As she pointed out, during the Bill’s passage there was a promise that a lot more detail on how the procedure would operate in practice would be brought forward in secondary legislation. This is not, by any means, the most substantive set of provisions in relation to what the 2016 Act brought into being—or, at least, forecast would be brought into being. Yesterday she asked whether and when the Minister would expect more information on how permission in principle will operate in practice.
We now have a housing White Paper. Does that mean that the secondary legislation under the previous Act will be held up until there is legislation following the housing White Paper? Are these two things connected, or will the Government proceed with the regulations implementing the provisions in last year’s Act? It all seems somewhat confused. This is a result of the very laborious process that many across the House warned last year was unsatisfactory: that we were being asked to pass legislation without seeing or being consulted on any draft regulations. I hope, therefore, that the Minister can indicate whether this specific issue—how permission in practice is going to work—will be the subject of regulations under the existing legislation, and when we might expect to see them.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have participated in the debate on these regulations and I will try to address the points they made in the order in which they were raised.
First, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, the definition of “housing-led development” is that the main purpose of the development is housing: that is central. I have much sympathy with the second issue raised by the noble Lord. As officials in my department know, I fight against acronyms and abbreviations every day, because they confuse me—and, I suspect, a lot of other people—so I will go away to reflect on that and look at our website to see how we make this more accessible for people than it is now or is generally the case. I have some sympathy with that point.
Turning to the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Jones, I thank him, as always, for his courtesy. His point, I think, related to Regulation 5 and the hazardous substances authority. What we are doing here is tightening the restrictions. I know from how this operates in Wales, which I think is essentially the same as in England, that currently if planning permission is granted for a site, the hazardous substances authority, in designating how it can be used—for the storage of oil or whatever—has to consider whether there is planning permission in the vicinity. I am not sure of the precise definition of “in the vicinity”, but I will write to the noble Lord about that, as I suspect that there is a statutory definition of it. The authority has to take account of that and that restricts it, for very understandable reasons. This regulation extends that to permission in principle, in addition to the existing planning permission.
I therefore thank the noble Lord for his considerate and, if I may say so, balanced response—which brings me to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, who I thank for his qualified welcome and excellent impression of Eeyore during the first couple of minutes of his introduction. I know the noble Lord, and suspect that some of that was tongue in cheek. I will, however, address some of the points he raised about the regulations, starting with Regulation 2. This regulation is rooted in the community; a local decision is being made. This does not in any way run counter to the localism agenda. The choice about where to grant permission in principle is a local one. The local planning authority would make the decision in accordance with its own local plan and in line with the National Planning Policy Framework. That is a rigorous process, and I do not see anything unlocal, as it were, that runs against localism in that.
The noble Lord asked about Regulation 3, which amends the 1990 Act, and what it ensures. It ensures that in addition to current planning applications permissions, which are put on the register, permission in principle is put on the register as well. This extends transparency. Without this, it would not go on the register. I am sure the noble Lord welcomes that provision, possibly in a rather muted way.
Regulation 4 amends the Planning (Hazardous Substances) Act. I think it was the noble Lord who asked about “vicinity”, and I will ensure that that is covered in a letter to noble Lords who have participated in the debate, as I am not quite sure of the definition. I think there is a fairly tight statutory definition.
The noble Lord then raised an interesting point on Regulation 5, which amends the Commons Act 2006. This is not a new procedure. There are trigger events at the moment—I think they operated under the last Labour Government as well—that, for understandable reasons which I would certainly support, put a halt to registering something as a commons when planning permission has been given for it. I do not think that that is unreasonable, as you have given planning permission. If the planning permission lapses or is withdrawn, the land is available once again for commons registration. That seems to me to be entirely sensible. It is a pause, and the same applies here. This extends the process to permission in principle—dare I say, mutatis mutandis? That operates on both sides, that one. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, raised points on this issue and I will have to write to him on those. As he said, the issue was raised in the Commons, and he makes a very fair point about making clear what we are going to do in this area. I will write to him on that issue and copy noble Lords in. I thank noble Lords who have in general given a welcome to these regulations.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
I thank the Minister for his welcome of the points I made. We are clearly going to have a number of these regulations over the next few weeks and months, and that is fine. We will debate them. However, we will come back to this point, and I make no apology for raising it. If you want to look at how to put legislation through Parliament, the Housing and Planning Act—I know the Minister was not in the department at the time and had no input whatever—was not a good example. It was rushed through, and here we are, a year later. It was not a good way of doing things. I make no apology for raising that. I am sure there are many examples of where the Labour Government did something similar. I am not suggesting it is only one party, but we need to look at how we make legislation. This Act was not a good experience for Parliament or for the department.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
I thank the noble Lord for the constructive way he is offering to share the blame on legislation that fails to meet the objectives of being open, transparent and non-rushed. I hope that the process will be followed. I thank the noble Lord and the noble Lords, Lord Beecham and Lord Shipley, and other noble Lords for the way we have engaged on the Neighbourhood Planning Bill. It is a model for others to follow. These regulations are wholly sensible, as I think the noble Lord accepts, and are consequent on measures that we know make sense in ensuring that we build more houses in our country.
Motion agreed.
Bereavement Support Payment Regulations 2017
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Henley
That the Grand Committee do consider the Bereavement Support Payment Regulations 2017.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Henley) (Con)
My Lords, the regulations were laid before the House on 12 January. They provide the details of a new benefit, bereavement support payment, which was first introduced as part of the Pensions Act 2014. Bereavement support payment will replace bereavement allowance, widowed parent’s allowance and the bereavement payment for those who lose a spouse or civil partner on or after 6 April 2017. These regulations set out the amounts to be paid, the duration of payments, payments for those who are prisoners, and the territories in which a person must reside in order to receive the new benefit. I am satisfied that this instrument is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Losing a spouse or civil partner is a tragic occurrence, and bereavement benefits provide vital financial support during this deeply distressing time in a person’s life. Previous reforms have tended to be limited and in response to specific pressures. No one had really considered how this support fits in with wider changes to the benefit system and, indeed, to the social landscape as a whole. Consequently, the current benefits are out of date, difficult to administer and hard to understand. Reform is essential to simplify and modernise the current system. The history of bereavement benefits is rooted in the Widows, Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act 1925, at a time when most women were wholly dependent on their husband’s income. If a woman was widowed, her sole source of income would disappear completely, so it was considered necessary at that time to provide a replacement for that income in order for her to survive. Thankfully, that situation is no longer the case, women as well as men are active participants in today’s workforce, and many households are now made up of, and benefit from, dual careers and dual incomes. For those where the loss of a spouse equates to the loss of the sole breadwinner, income-related benefits are available to make sure that nobody is left without sufficient money to live on.
Compared to the current bereavement benefits, bereavement support payment is designed to be significantly simpler with a uniform payment structure and a single contribution condition. The aim is to provide targeted financial support at the time when it is needed most without affecting access to additional forms of support available through other parts of the welfare system. The reform of bereavement benefits has been welcomed by both the Social Security Advisory Committee and the Work and Pensions Select Committee, the latter of which heralded many of the changes as long overdue. In addition to scrutiny by those two bodies, bereavement support payment was also the subject of a public consultation exercise launched in 2011. Responses to this consultation played a major part in the design of bereavement support payment, including the decision to structure the payments as a series of instalments as opposed to a single lump sum and also the decision that bereavement support payment will not be subject to income tax.
The evidence from our public consultation exercise found that the financial impact of spousal bereavement is particularly acute in the early months. Bereavement support payment will therefore provide a significant cash boost for people at this time where they need it the most, with a lump sum followed by 18 monthly instalments. In recognition that those with children may need a greater level of support, a higher rate will be paid to those who are pregnant or who have dependent children at the time they are bereaved. The duration of payments is not intended to equate to the period of an individual’s grief, nor is it intended to provide ongoing income replacement; rather, the fundamental design principle of the new benefit is that, as a short-term payment, it is designed to address the additional costs of bereavement rather than contribute towards everyday living costs. Because they are clearly distinct from income replacement benefits, we will disregard payments of bereavement support payment from universal credit and legacy benefits, as well as discounting them from the calculations which count towards the benefit cap. This will clearly benefit the least well-off as they will, for the first time, be able to receive payments of bereavement benefit in full, alongside any other entitlements. For example, an unemployed widow with one child who is entitled to bereavement support payment could receive £7,350 in the first year. In addition, they could receive the standard allowance and the child element of universal credit, which is more than £7,130 a year. On top of this, they may also be able to access other support such as help with childcare and housing costs.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
I thank the Minister for his succinct and helpful introduction. I realise that we have already had extensive debates during the passage of the pensions Bill and I do not wish to impede the progress that we are making with these regulations. Therefore I hope the Minister will not mind if I briefly raise a number of concerns, which I know are shared by my colleagues on the Bench of Bishops, in the hope that Her Majesty’s Government might keep these under review.
I have three concerns. The first is around the length of time for which bereavement support payments will be made, particularly to widowed parents with dependent children. At Second Reading of the pensions Bill, my right reverend friend the Bishop of Derby suggested that three years of additional financial support should be a minimum standard when helping bereaved families to adjust to life without a father or a mother, and I endorse his comments. If the Government are serious about this payment being about bereavement support, they must recognise that the effects of bereavement go way beyond 18 months. I realise that it is difficult to decide on what is the right length of time but I want to push the issue a little. Universal credit, with its system of conditionality, is unlikely to be appropriate for a young family still coming to terms with its grief.
My second concern is about the Government’s refusal to uprate basic support payments in line with inflation, which will see the value of the payments eroded after time, particularly given the likely rises in inflation over the coming years. Benefit support payments must be added to the list of benefits subject to annual review and be uprated in line with inflation. I hope that the Minister will encourage Her Majesty’s Government to commit to that in the forthcoming Budget.
Thirdly and finally, I have a concern about the failure to extend eligibility for bereavement support payments to cohabiting couples, particularly those with children. One might be surprised that I am making this point. As a Bishop, I of course support marriage and want to encourage everyone to consider it good for society and individuals. One would know the line that I would come out with. However, a situation that leaves one in five parents ineligible for bereavement support if their partner dies is inadequate. I recognise that determining a qualifying partnership outside marriage or civil partnership is complex but these challenges are not insurmountable, particularly when one thinks about the welfare of children, who are almost always those who take the hit and suffer most.
Benefit systems already accommodate the claims of cohabiting couples, and the Armed Forces Pension Scheme successfully uses a definition of “eligible partner” to determine who can receive a pension. I hope that Her Majesty’s Government will give serious thought to this situation and see what can be done to extend support, at least to cohabiting partners with dependent children. That is my key point. Failure to do so could leave an estimated 2,000 families a year facing the future, having lost a parent, without the financial assistance of bereavement support.
Lord Jones (Lab)
My Lords, I am glad to follow the right reverend Prelate’s caring remarks, and my intervention will be brief. I thank the Minister for his thoughtful outline of the impact of these complicated regulations about serious matters. I note that Article 19 of the order to follow—the Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2017—refers to bereavement benefits. Can the Minister give us an estimate of the numbers of those claiming such payments in the past year? On the basis of that insight, can he estimate the number of future claimants under the new regulations?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his explanation of these draft regulations and all noble Lords who have spoken today.
As we have heard, these regulations enact the provisions of the Pensions Act 2014—which, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, we debated at some length. They introduce a new single payment to replace bereavement payment, bereavement allowance and widowed parent’s allowance for those whose spouse or civil partner dies on or after 6 April 2017. The Government’s case is that this will modernise the current provision and increase simplicity for those who are bereaved and seeking support. I am grateful to the Minister for confirming that the Government’s main aim is not to save money. However, I am pleased to reassure him that they are, accidentally, about to save quite a bit of it. I confess that my antennae always start twitching whenever I hear Ministers promise that a social security reform is mainly just about making things simpler. The first question is always to look at who stands to gain as a result of the new simplicity—the claimant or the Treasury. On this occasion, after two years of an introductory period the answer is, I am sorry to say, the Treasury. The Explanatory Memorandum tells us that after two years of reform, steady-state savings are expected to be about £100 million a year. In other words, these reforms take £100 million a year from bereaved families and give it to the Exchequer.
The Explanatory Memorandum offers two other objectives for the reforms: for the system to be fair and to promote self-dependency. I suspect that if the Government had tested public opinion on the matter of fairness, being kind to widows might come high up the list. Has the Minister reflected again on the issue of promoting self-dependency? People who get married or civilly partnered and have children were not intending to be self-dependent. They formed a family which had been ruptured, presumably by the death of their spouse or partner. That was precisely the sort of situation for which the welfare state was designed to step in. We on these Benches registered our concerns about the impact of these reforms during the passage of the Bill. Indeed, concern was expressed across the House. I still remember the powerful speech given by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby when we discussed these matters; his interventions were very much taken to heart by many in the House. We sought to amend the Bill to mitigate some of the effects but, sadly, we were unsuccessful —so here we are.
On matters of detail, concern was expressed by the Social Security Advisory Committee and the Work and Pensions Select Committee about a number of areas, and I am pleased to see that the Government have responded to one criticism raised by both committees by extending the period that the bereavement support payment can be accessed from 12 to 19 months. Unfortunately, that is less generous than it sounds because the Government have simply redistributed the amount of money that they originally proposed over a longer period, so people get the same amount but for a longer time.
There are notional gainers, such as younger widows, although figures in the original impact assessment seemed to me to suggest that, perhaps unsurprisingly, and fortunately, there are very few of those, with the vast bulk of the current caseload in the over-55 bracket. Despite the time extension, the Childhood Bereavement Network, which I thank for the very comprehensive briefing that it sent to all interested noble Lords, suggests that 91% of parents will still be supported for a shorter time than under the current system and that the DWP’s own figures admit that 75% of claimants with children will get less money. Can the Minister confirm that those figures are correct and, if not, give the Committee the department’s own estimates instead?
Those with young children will be disproportionately affected, as the parents can currently claim for longer. The current widowed parent’s allowance is paid until the youngest child leaves full-time education. As the briefing from the Childhood Bereavement Network briefing pointed out, a six year-old child losing her father in 2016 would be supported until she leaves school. A six year-old losing her father in 2018 will be supported for just a year and a half. I suspect that her mother might be willing to deal with a bit of complexity for the sake of another decade of additional support to feed and clothe her daughter. The Childhood Bereavement Network says that those with younger children could be up to £31,000 worse off in total than they would have been without these reforms. Can the Minister confirm that this is correct?
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans raised the question of cohabiting couples, and I am sure that the House was glad to hear concern for those cohabiting couples and their children, notwithstanding his support for the institution of marriage. In their consultation response, the Government said:
“The Government position on this issue is unchanged: there are still no plans to extend eligibility for bereavement benefits to those who are not married or in a civil partnership”.
No reason was offered as to why the Government had rejected this proposal. Given that the right reverend Prelate had given his blessing and feels that the institution of marriage will be safe should the Government venture into this territory, can the Minister take the opportunity to tell the Committee why the Government chose not to extend provision in this way?
Lastly, I would like to ask a couple of questions about universal credit—first, on the interaction of universal credit with bereavement support. I think that I heard the Minister say—and I apologise as I did not quite follow the argument, which is entirely my fault—that BSP will be disregarded in full when calculating entitlement to universal credit. Can he confirm that in his reply? I apologise for making him revisit the matter.
Secondly, paragraph 7.13 of the Explanatory Memorandum says:
“Payments will be subject to a disregard within the calculation of income-based benefits; Payments will also not be counted as benefit income when calculating the maximum amount of other benefits a person can be paid”.
I think that that means that BSP will not count towards the benefit cap, but could he just confirm that? I apologise if he did so and I missed it.
There is then the question raised by the right reverend Prelate about those who need to claim universal credit as well as BSP and will be subject to conditionality. I understand that those conditionality requirements, as the Minister said, will be suspended for six months following the death of a partner or child, but during the passage of the Bill we had a lot of discussion about this point—the position of parents with children who are dealing with the consequences, not just for themselves but for their children, of losing a partner or parent. The consequences were emotional for the children and for the parent having to deal with their own and the child’s emotions, but also practical in a range of ways. During the passage of the Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, agreed to conduct a review of the position of parents whose children had suffered distress in bereavement, in response to points made in the Chamber by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. Parents whose children’s distress and bereavement disrupts their normal childcare responsibilities are, I understand, able to request a one-month suspension of work-related requirements. If I have read this correctly, you can request another one month every six months for up two years. So that would be potentially four one-month periods but only one every six months. I believe from my reading of the regulations that that was enacted in Regulation 8 of the Universal Credit and Miscellaneous Amendments (No. 2) Regulations 2014. Can the Minister confirm that that is the only specific provision available for parents in this circumstance? If it is, can he tell the Committee—or agree to write if not—how many claimants have used, or are expected to use, this facility?
On backdating, paragraph 7.17 of the Explanatory Memorandum states:
“Given the vulnerability of this claimant group there will be a period from the date of death in which the claimant can make a claim without losing any money. If a claim is received more than 3 months after the date of death payments can be backdated for three months before the date of claim. This time limit is extended to 12 months for the initial higher payment to help ensure that people do not miss out on this payment”.
I am glad that the Government are acknowledging that people are vulnerable after a death and that they may not always quickly manage to turn their attention to making a claim for bereavement support payment. However, given that the Government have accepted that, what is the rationale for limiting that flexibility only to the lump sum? Why not allow people the same flexibility in relation to the monthly payments?
I endorse the point made by the right reverend Prelate about whether or not it is the Government’s intention to update the value of this payment in line with other benefits. It would seem that it is not. I hope that we have misread that and that the Government can tell us now whether it is their intention or that we can expect a change of policy on that matter very soon.
I thank my noble friend and the right reverend Prelate for their contributions and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the noble Lord, Lord Jones, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for their contributions. I hope to deal with their concerns in the course of my speech.
On the first point raised by the right reverend Prelate about the length of time—this was also alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock—as noble Lords will remember, the original idea was that it should be for 12 months. This was extended as a result of the consultation, the comments from SSAC and the Select Committee to 18 months. One of the reasons for this is that it was considered that 12 months was not the optimum period, particularly in the light of its ending more or less on the anniversary of the death. Eighteen months fits in slightly better with that. The same could be said about three years because it also would fall on an anniversary. However, I do not use that to argue against a period that might be longer or shorter. We came to the view that 18 months rather than three years was about right and that thereafter, if necessary, income-related benefits would be more appropriate. The idea is to provide support at the time of bereavement and in the months afterwards, but there has to be a cut off at some point.
The noble Baroness accused us of bad faith when we extended the period from 12 to 18 months and said that the global amount would be a slightly smaller figure. If we extended to three years the same would apply—it would be a smaller figure—and it is better to get it in 18 monthly instalments than over a period of three years. Others may disagree, but judgments have to be made on this issue and we feel that 18 months is about right.
The right reverend Prelate also objected to the fact that there was no automatic top-up in line with inflation. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, also wished to address the point. She will know that bereavement benefits of all sorts have been uprated in the annual Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2017, which we will get to later on. She will also know that the basic component of bereavement allowance and widowed parent’s allowance have to be uprated annually, at least in line with price inflation. There has been no requirement to uprate the bereavement payment, which has been frozen since 2001.
Bereavement support payment is a grant paid in instalments, rather than as an income replacement benefit, so it is treated in a similar way to the current bereavement payment. That is what is behind our views on that matter. It will be reviewed annually on a discretionary basis but without expectation that the payment should automatically be increased annually. Again, I imagine that we will want to come on to that later on, when we debate the general uprating order.
The third point touched on by both the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness was about extending the payment to cohabitees, as opposed to just those who are married and in civil partnerships. I do not actually know the result of the civil partnerships case that was in the Court of Appeal today.
Lord Henley
I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for saying that it has been rejected. By that, I take him to mean that it is still not possible for those of the opposite sex to have a civil partnership. Civil partnerships will therefore apply to those of the same sex, and marriages to those of the same sex and those of the opposite sex. We took the view that it was better and simpler to confine it to those groups, rather than to extend it to cohabitees. Cohabitees, as we have always known, have the ability to take steps to rectify their position and become married or, in certain cases, to become civil partners. To add the complexities, which I accept already face cohabitees regarding, for example, income-related benefits, such as UC, to a payment of this sort would not be appropriate. It can be dealt with by people themselves if they wish to regularise their position, which is always important to know.
I can remember some of the debates on various Private Members’ Bills, particularly one which I think was promoted by the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill. He said that there was gross ignorance about this matter and that people thought being a common-law wife or husband gave them the same rights. I think that by now, most people should know that it does not give them the same rights; their rights are distinctly different if they are cohabitees. As I said, it would add excessive complications to a benefit of this sort, and I do not see the reason for extending it.
The noble Lord, Lord Jones, asked about the numbers of those who are likely to be affected. In the past, it has been something of the order of 40,000 a year and we have no reason to believe that it will be any different. I can add to that one other figure, which will be of interest to him and the Committee: of those 40,000, some 8,000 also have dependent children. That figure might or might not surprise the noble Lord. I was slightly surprised, since we are talking about claimants of working age, that it should be as low as that. But that is the figure, and I have no reason to believe that it will change.
Finally, I can confirm to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, that bereavement support payment will be disregarded for universal credit and for income-related benefits. I think I made that clear in my speech. If even Homer nods, perhaps even the noble Baroness occasionally nods.
Lord Henley
She was nodding in a different way but anyway, I can confirm that it will be disregarded, as it will be for the benefit cap.
Finally, the noble Baroness talked about the time for claiming the benefit and the fact that the monthly payments must be claimed within three months but that in terms of the basic amount, they had a full year. The simple answer is that for monthly payments it is appropriate to have a cut off that is shorter than for the lump sum. I do not believe—this is the important thing—that there is much ignorance, once people are bereaved, about benefits of this sort. Certainly the evidence we have and the evidence we have had in the past, which implies a very high take up of this benefit, seems to suggest that most people get to know about it very quickly. It is one of those things that, for example, I am sure undertakers know about and will advise on, as will others.
I hope that, with the assurance that I may find that there are one or two points I have not answered, the Committee will accept the regulations.
Motion agreed.
Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2017
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Henley
That the Grand Committee do consider the Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2017.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Henley) (Con)
I beg to move that the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the draft Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2017. In my view, the provisions in this order are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Today we are debating the Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2017. This statutory instrument reflects the Government’s continuing commitment to: increase the basic and new state pension with the triple lock at 2.5%; increase the pension credit standard minimum guarantee in line with earnings at 2.4%; and increase benefits to meet additional disability needs and carer benefits in line with prices at 1%.
The Chancellor reaffirmed this Government’s commitment to the triple lock for the length of this Parliament in his Autumn Statement on 23 November 2016. This ensures that the basic state pension will continue to be uprated by the highest of earnings, prices or 2.5%. This year, the increase in average earnings and the increase in prices were less than the baseline of 2.5%. As such, the basic state pension will increase by 2.5%. This means that from April 2017 the rate of the basic state pension for a single person will increase by £3.00 to £122.30 a week. As a result, from April 2017 the basic state pension will be more than £1,200 a year higher compared to April 2010. We estimate that the basic state pension will be around 18.5% of average earnings, one of its highest levels relative to earnings for more than two decades.
Last year, the Government introduced the new state pension for people reaching their state pension age from 6 April 2016 onwards. This made the system clearer, providing a sustainable foundation for private saving. The Government have previously announced that the triple lock will apply to the full rate of the new state pension for the length of this Parliament. This is the first year that the new state pension will be uprated. As such, this year the full rate of the new state pension will increase by 2.5%. This means that from April 2017 the full rate of the new state pension will increase by £3.90 to £159.55 a week. This will be around 24.2% of average earnings.
We are continuing to take steps to protect the poorest pensioners. This includes through the pension credit standard minimum guarantee, the means-tested threshold below which pensioner income need not fall. The pension credit standard minimum guarantee will rise in line with average earnings at 2.4%. This means that from April 2017 the single person threshold for safety-net benefit will rise by £3.75 to £159.35. Pensioner poverty continues to stand at one of the lowest rates since comparable records began.
I turn to the additional state pension. This year state earnings-related pension—SERPS—and the other state second pensions, together with protected payments in the new state pension, will rise, in line with prices, by 1%. On disability benefits, this year the Government will continue to ensure that carers and people who face additional costs because of their disability will see their benefits uprated in the usual way. Disability living allowance, attendance allowance, carer’s allowance, incapacity benefit and personal independence payment will all rise in line with prices—by 1%—from April 2017. In addition, disability-related and carer premiums paid with pension credit, and working-age benefits, will increase by 1%, as will the employment and support allowance support group component, and the limited capability for work and work-related activity element of universal credit.
The Government will be spending an extra £2.5 billion per year in 2017-18 on uprating benefit and pension rates. In this order we continue to maintain our commitment to the triple lock for both the basic and the new state pension for the length of this Parliament. We also commit to increase the pension credit standard minimum guarantee by earnings and to increase benefits that reflect the additional costs that disabled people face as a result of their disability, and carer benefits, in line with prices. This includes increases to the disability living allowance, attendance allowance, carer’s allowance, incapacity benefit, personal independence payment, and disability and carer premiums.
On that basis, I beg to move.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that helpful opening statement. I will make one or two comments on what he has said.
However, I will also spend a moment—if I do not impose too much on the Committee—talking about the process available to us as parliamentarians more generally to observe, be confident of, and have assurances about, how the annual social security spend is surviving some of the impositions arising from the Government’s more general fiscal rule—to save £12 billion during this Parliament. That is a significant sum. I absolutely acknowledge—and the Minister was right to explain this, under the terms of the order—that sensible provision has been made for our retired population. The pension rates, the triple lock—everything that he has explained—make perfect sense and sit well with the requirements of that part of our population that is past retirement age.
However, we must have some concerns whether proper provision that, arguably, is being made for those over retirement age, is also being made for those of working age. I want to focus on paragraph 4.3 of the Explanatory Memorandum. In the final sentence—this will come as no surprise to any of us—it is accepted that the main rates of benefit are frozen at their 2015-16 rates, under the 2016 Act. They were not part of the Secretary of State’s review. My opening question derives from the fact that I have been doing uprating statements for as long as anybody—since I first entered Parliament in 1983. They used to be very big occasions, because they were responsible for disbursing huge amounts of public money, and that is still the case. We are, however, getting to the position where I am no longer confident that the protection provided by Section 150 of the Social Security Administration Act is the assurance that it used to be.
As a policymaker, legislator and parliamentarian, I always had confidence that Secretaries of State for Social Security or Work and Pensions sat down once a year and thought carefully, on advice from the detailed research that Secretaries of State have available to them, about whether what was being proposed to Parliament was adequate for the purpose. I do not think we can say that any more, and if that is even halfway true, we as policymakers and the Opposition need to be looking at other ways, if we cannot get assurance from Section 150 of the 1992 Act, to discover what the Government are doing in the department and in their discussions with the Treasury to make proper provision for the rest of this Parliament. This is the only occasion that I can think of when we can do that, although I understand that under the strict terms of the order, I might be on the cusp of what is technically in order.
The plea I make to the Minister—he may not have an answer for this more general question—is that in his new role and as part of a new and very capable ministerial team within what is effectively a new Government taking a fresh look at responsibilities for social protection, he should reflect carefully on how he and his colleagues will be able for the rest of this Parliament to give me the assurance that is absent now that we have restricted consideration for annual review.
My second question relates to the change that we made some years ago, moving to the CPI from the RPI measure. It is significant, historical and very easy to miss. I notice that in its April 2015 data review, the Office for Budget Responsibility calculated that as a result of that single change there was reduction in spend of £5.2 billion a year by 2019-20. I do not expect the Minister to have this figure at his fingertips, but it is very important that for the rest of this Parliament we track the estimates made by the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Department for Work and Pensions of the cumulative results of that single change, which is so significant for all benefits. Monitoring that is part of the work we should be doing.
In the uprating statements for the rest of this Parliament, will the Minister be good enough to monitor exactly how the £12,000 million social security spending reduction is being effected in practice? Where is that money being saved? I know that it is an estimate. That has been made clear by the OBR, the IFS and others. We need to know the relative savings achieved from the freeze, the new two-child limit, the cuts to universal credit, the cuts to ESA and the reduced household benefit cap. If we do not have that information in debates of this kind for the rest of this Parliament, we will be at a significant disadvantage in trying to work out what lower-income households are facing.
I have one further point before I finish, but I shall be brief because I think I am pushing my luck slightly. The order does not contain any reference to working-age benefits. There is a real risk in using cash limits to set benefit upratings in future, but we are getting into a habit of doing that. We froze benefits on a cash basis in 2013-14, and we are doing so now. Two things happen with that. First, the Government are transferring the risk of inflation to benefit recipients, and I do not think that is fair because no one can truly judge what is going to happen to inflation. Colleagues may have more to say about that. Secondly, there is no way of knowing exactly where the saving will be if you rely on inflation. The Government are in a much safer position if they take decisions that can lead to calculations and assessments of what is expected in future.
I am no economist, but I do not think you need to be one to understand that inflation is increasing. The impact of that will bear down on working-age families, particularly those with children. The IFS and the Resolution Foundation have done some excellent work trying to point out the risks that we as a country will be running for the next three or four years. The Child Poverty Action Group reminded us in a recent leaflet that child benefit has risen since the 2010s to where we are now by something like 2%, whereas costs will have risen for the client group that CPAG seeks to represent by about 35% between 2010 and 2020. These are forecasts, and of course forecasts can be wrong, but they are frightening in what we may be facing, particularly for families with children in the lower income brackets.
My plea is that we look at this more carefully and that, if these uprating statements are less useful technically in looking at the totality of the benefit spend, the Minister in his new position goes back and discusses this with his departmental colleagues. He has vast resources, he has some very experienced, talented and clever research people in the department, and I am sure he can help them to ensure that we avoid some of the really regressive scenarios painted by some pressure groups, which know what they are talking about. If we do not, Parliament will find it more difficult in future to be confident that we know exactly what is happening and the disposition of what is an essential policy area for the safety-net provision for low-income families in the UK.
Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)
My Lords, I hesitate to intervene after the powerful speech from my noble friend Lord Kirkwood, but the DWP bus does not come along very often, so I fear I must take this very small chance to jump on it. The Explanatory Memorandum was actually very helpful, which has not always been the case with DWP statutory instruments. Often the DWP has not had many accolades for its Explanatory Memorandums being helpful, so I would like to say that this one was. At the very end of the memorandum, paragraph 11.2 says:
“Small businesses, like all employers, meet the costs of Statutory Sick Pay without reimbursement but are able to access the services of the Fit for Work Service, a free occupational health service funded by Government for employees absent from work through ill health for four weeks or more”.
Can the Minister tell the Committee whether that service is being taken up? Small businesses are not always good at knowing what the law is, and I know that many of them have never heard of the access to work service for the employment of disabled people. That is very important if the Government want to halve the disability unemployment rate. I would like an update on the fit for work service, which I know was designed by Dame Carol Black, and I would be happy for the Minister to write to me.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction of this order and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, for their contributions. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and I gather around this time every year—sometimes to decreasing effect, it feels—and we miss my noble friend Lady Lister, who is usually with us on these occasions. In the absence of her enormous knowledge, I will do my best to fight the good fight for these Benches.
I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that he is not out of order because the order increases the disability premium and some elements of working-age benefits. Therefore his area of comment is wholly in order for addressing these questions today. It was a comment in which I have an interest because I am about to do the same thing.
While obviously not objecting to the 1% uprating of the benefits that are covered, the triple lock or in-line-with-earnings increases as described by the Minister, we have serious concern about the increasing impact of the Government’s approach to benefit uprating on the millions of people who rely on benefits to look after themselves and their families. The real action here, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, pointed out, is happening offstage. It applies to the many benefits that should be on this list and are not.
The summer Budget 2015 listed a series of working-age benefits that would be frozen for four years from 2016-17 to 2019-20. We should remember that they had had only 1% uprating from 2013 and that there was the massive effect, described by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, of the shift from RPI to CPI as the measure for increasing benefits. That list includes child benefit, JSA, ESA, income support, housing benefit under women’s state pension age, LHA rates, child tax credit, working tax credit, universal credit and bereavement support payment. Many of these benefits affect working people and working families, but they all affect people who are dependent on benefits to survive. It is good that the disability and other premiums paid with these benefits are being increased by 1%, and I am glad to see that.
The freeze to the other levels of social security payments are having a detrimental impact on those who depend upon them. Between 2008 and 2014, the prices of essentials rose three times faster than wages. Combined with the period of 1% uprating and then the freeze, low-income households have seen a significant deterioration in their income. Now that inflation is starting to pick up, we need to be reassured by the Government about how they are going to ensure that Parliament can understand the degree to which households are protected from the consequences of those changes in ways that we could reasonably expect them to do.
The 1% uprating is based on the rate of CPI prevailing in the year to September 2016, which was reported at 1%. However, since then, inflation is clearly on the rise. Last week, we saw the release of the latest figures which showed that the consumer prices index rose by 1.8% in the year to January 2017. Last week we also saw the Bank of England inflation report which said:
“In the central projection, conditioned on market yields that are somewhat higher than in November, inflation is expected to increase to 2.8% in the first half of 2018, before falling back gradually to 2.4% in three years’ time”.
As the Resolution Foundation pointed out in a report entitled Under New Management in November 2016, the effect of rising inflation is that this policy is saving the Treasury rather more money than it expected. The report estimates that rather than the £3.6 billion the policy was due to save the Exchequer by 2020-21, the savings would rise to £4.6 billion. Can the Minister tell the Committee whether that £4.6 billion figure is accurate and, if not, what is the value of the savings now estimated to be according to his department or the Treasury?
On the other hand, the effect of these changes on households in receipt of benefits is also far greater than Parliament expected at the time when the decision was made to freeze benefits, and people on the lowest incomes are least able to withstand the effects of inflation because they have the least disposable income and in most cases they have little or no savings to depend on as a cushion. That is why Parliament has traditionally protected them from these risks by inflation-proofing benefits. As the IFS puts it:
“This policy represented a significant takeaway from a large number of working age households. But it also represented a shifting of risk from the Government to benefit recipients. Previously, higher inflation was a risk to the public finances, increasing cash spending on benefits. Now the risk is borne by low-income households: unless policy changes higher inflation will reduce their real incomes”.
That point was also made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. The IFS also points out that, as of last March,
“the freeze represented a 4% cut in the value of those benefits … relative to previous plans”.
Last October, the IFS, based on its inflation forecasts at that point, produced some other observations on the impact on claimants, saying:
“As a result, 11.5 million families were expected to lose an average of £260 a year, saving the government £3.0 billion in 2019-20. Given the latest inflation forecasts from the IMF, the policy now represents a 6% cut to affected benefits. The same 11.5 million families are now expected to lose an average of £360 a year (£100 a year more than expected in March), saving the government £4.2 billion in 2019-20 (i.e. an additional £1.2 billion on top of what was expected back in March). Greater losses are found among families—typically those on lower incomes—who receive more in benefits”,
so,
“8.3 million families affected now expected to lose an average of £470 a year”.
The Minister might claim, truthfully, that his party had a manifesto commitment that the working-age benefit system should be made less generous over this Parliament, but as the IFS pointed out,
“it is hard to see why the appropriate size of cut should be arbitrarily determined by the impact of movements in sterling on prices”.
Quite, but if the Minister does not want to listen to the Resolution Foundation or the IFS, or the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, or the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, or, unaccountably, even me, perhaps he might be persuaded by the following comments, reported in the Independent from another parliamentarian:
“When the original benefit freeze was set it was set against an estimate of a much lower rise in inflation … Therefore I’m sure the Treasury will want to look at to keep that under review because the purpose was not to have such a dramatic effect on incomes against a forecast of rising inflation … I’m sure the Treasury will want to look at that and keep that under review so that doesn’t actually happen and make it adverse in a way that it was not completely intended”.
That was Iain Duncan Smith, speaking to an event in Westminster, reported in the Independent on 8 November last, and that was before inflation hit the heights that we saw last week.
My questions for the Minister are simple. First, can he tell the Committee the latest estimate of the savings to the Exchequer of this four-year benefit freeze, as against CPI uprating, over and above the amount originally scored? Secondly, how big would the gap have to be between projected and actual impact on claimants of this freeze before the Government would revisit it? Finally, to echo the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, whom I commend for his determination to come back to this matter on behalf of all parliamentarians every time we discuss it, what is the mechanism for Parliament to revisit the issue and be assured of the adequacy of social security benefits in the absence of any appropriate annual mechanism?
Lord Henley
My Lords, again, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, spoke about his experience of uprating statements going back to, I think he said, 1983. I feel a mere child in these matters going back only to the 1989 uprating statement. I did a few after that, but I do not think that I have quite the assiduous record that the noble Lord has in these matters.
The noble Lord also talked about the process by which we go through these matters, and asked whether it is still the case that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State sits down and considers what uprating is necessary. I assure him that, within the confines of current legislation, he does and that he takes note of comments received in both Houses. I assure the noble Lord that I shall report back to my right honourable friend and others about the course of this debate.
Obviously, we have to make very difficult decisions on welfare spending. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, is aware of that, as is the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. We also know very well that work, not welfare, is the best route out of poverty and that anything that can encourage people into work will be good for them in all possible ways. That is why our welfare reforms are designed to incentivise work for those who can and go wider than just the benefit system. They include such things as the national living wage, which will be up to £9 an hour by 2020, cutting income tax for more than 30 million people and the rollout of universal credit. At the same time, we remain committed to protecting all those who need support. That is why we made the reforms we did. As someone coming back to this world after some years out of it and having had some experience of seeing benefit offices, it is gratifying to see the rollout as it begins and to hear the comments of those making use of it. I am sure it is going to be a success. Anyway, I can give an assurance that my right honourable friend sits down and considers these matters.
The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, talked about the change from using CPI as opposed to RPI, an issue also touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. I appreciate that there is no ideal measure of inflation, and there never will be, but we certainly think that CPI is a better measure than the old RPI. I understand that the ONS is making changes to RPI, and it may be that some improvements can come forward in due course. However, at the moment, we are committed to CPI, which we think is a better measure and is the target rate used by the Bank of England. It also takes better account of how behaviour changes in response to price changes, using a methodology in line with international standards, and better reflects benefit recipients’ and pensioners’ experience of inflation by excluding mortgage payments. Again, we have to recognise that all the measures of inflation affect different people in different ways. I think all would agree that there is no ideal measure that we can use. CPI is the best and using the September-to-September measure is the only practical way in which to introduce the change in April the following year. I am sure that the noble Baroness would accept the difficulties of having to use a figure some months ahead, but any subsequent inflation will be taken into account in following years, so there is a catch-up designed into the system for future years.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, is not happy about the whole subject of freezing benefits, which goes wider than the uprating statement we are debating today. As she is aware, we have by statute frozen working-age benefits for a number of years—until the end of this Parliament, if I remember the dates correctly. It is not a matter for discussion today, but I repeat what I have said: we are dealing not merely with benefits but with work, which is the best route to get people out of poverty. As I said in response to the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, we want to incentivise work for those who can work, while supporting those who cannot. The noble Baroness then asked a number of detailed questions about our estimate of the savings and cited estimates made by this or that group and ending up with the comments made by my right honourable friend Mr Duncan Smith. I shall not comment on any of those estimates at the moment; this is not necessarily the right and proper place to have that debate. If we have some appropriate figures that I think the noble Baroness will find useful, I am more than happy to make them available to her.
Lord Henley
I will have to write to the noble Baroness to assure her on that point.
I appreciate that the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, would prefer a greater and longer debate on freezing benefits. As I said, I do not think that this is either the time or the place.
Baroness Sherlock
I confess to being disappointed by both the content and the tone of the Minister’s response to the questions put not just by me but by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. I wonder whether he could tell me two things. First, does he accept that a number of the benefits being frozen are in-work benefits? Secondly, if this is not the occasion on which Parliament can expect to hold the Government to account to find out what in fact will be the impact of a measure which now looks to be much more expensive to benefit- claiming families than they were assured in the first place, what is?
Lord Henley
My Lords, this is the occasion to deal with the uprating of those benefits which are being uprated. Parliament debated on another occasion, during the passage of the 2014 Bill, the freezing of benefits. The noble Baroness will not find it hard to find other occasions to raise the subject. When we are debating those benefits which we are uprating, it is not the time to pursue the question of the freezing of benefits.
Guaranteed Minimum Pensions Increase Order 2017
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Henley
That the Grand Committee do consider the Guaranteed Minimum Pensions Increase Order 2017.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Henley) (Con)
My Lords, I will be brief. The Guaranteed Minimum Pensions Increase Order is entirely a technical matter that we attend to each year. This order was laid before the House on 16 January 2017 and, in my view, its provisions are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The order provides for formerly contracted-out defined benefit occupational pension schemes to increase their members’ guaranteed minimum pension which accrued between 1988 and 1997 by 1%, in line with the increase in the general level of prices as at September 2016. On that basis, I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his brief introduction to this technical order. It addresses, as we have heard, the required uprating of GMPs by CPI. The period in question is the year ending 30 September 2016, which we have just discussed. That period largely precedes the spurt in inflation—imported inflation—driven by the post-referendum depreciation of sterling. At 1%, it is well within the 3% cap on the GMP uprating. We will obviously support this order but, although it is superficially straightforward, uprating GMPs is a complicated area, as a recent NAO report identifies. It illustrates that, although GMPs were applicable for a relatively short period of time—1978 to 1997—there are ramifications well into the future. Some people with rights to GMPs would not reach state pension age until around 2050.
April 2016 saw the introduction of the new state pension, of course, which involved the end of contracting-out and of the additional state pension. Because the contracting- out position is incorporated in somebody’s starting amount, the Government no longer take account of inflation increases to GMP accruals between 1978 and 1988, nor for increases beyond 3%. I think that is correct, but perhaps the Minister might just confirm it. Can he also remind us what is happening to GMPs which are in payment?
The NAO also points out that, with changes to the state pension age, there is a growing time period between GMP age, which is 65 or 60, and the actual state pension age when payment begins. Other things being equal, this means a longer period during which the GMP is not fully uprated.
The scheme provider is now solely responsible for uprating, but only from 1988 and in excess of 3%, and for maintaining the records necessary to calculate each member’s GMP. The NAO advises that up to October 2018, scheme providers have to reconcile their records with HMRC. Individuals will be notified of the value of their GMPs as at April 2016 and will have to keep a record thereafter themselves, including when they transfer to another pension scheme. Can the Minister tell us how this is all going? What communications support these requirements, and what assessment have the Government made of compliance with these arrangements? How many individuals are involved in this process?
Finally, the Minister may be aware of the article on the front page of the money section of the Sunday Times last week, which seemingly involved contracted-out pensions and the provision of inaccurate data. Can the Minister please explain what is happening? What is the problem and its scale? Who is affected and how is it going to be fixed?
Lord Henley
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, is quite right to refer to the complicated nature of this field and to point out how long it is likely to go on. He talked about 2050. I did a few sums and thought that someone—I hope not me—could still be moving this order some years after 2050. Certainly, it has some years ahead of it as an annual order—when the GMP has to be increased by either CPI or 3%, whichever is the lower. That is why we have increased it, on this occasion, by 1%, which is the CPI figure for September.
The noble Lord also asked some rather detailed questions about what communications we were making to individuals and what compliance we sought from the benefit providers. I would prefer, on this occasion, to write to him in greater detail on that matter, because it might be dangerous to answer. Similarly—this goes beyond today’s debate—the problems reported in the business section of the Sunday Times, which I think it got slightly wrong, are a matter probably better dealt with by a letter from me rather than in a debate on the uprating of the guaranteed minimum pension, formerly SERPS. I apologise to the noble Lord for not answering his questions on this occasion but promise to write to him. I also accept his acceptance of the 1% increase—as it will be—and look forward to having this debate again for many years to come, though not necessarily with him or me involved if it continues as late as 2050.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I am grateful for the offer of correspondence on those two issues: dealing with information flows under existing arrangements and the Sunday Times article. It may be “fake news”—I think that is the term—and I do not know how accurate it is, but it seemed to tie in with important issues regarding data and the capacity of the system to cope with it.
I am particularly concerned about the arrangements for reconciling records with HMRC. My noble friend Lady Drake has been heavily involved in many pension matters over the years, particularly the Pension Protection Fund. She could wax lyrically about the dirty data that somehow came from defined benefit schemes, and how difficult it was to straighten those data out. I am not sure whether there is any of that in this, or how many GMPs are currently in payment. Having said all that, I accept the generous offer of correspondence on this. It would be helpful to have it as soon as possible, because I have to go back to basics every year to remind myself what it is all about.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, as my noble friends Lord Freud and Lord Young took the pensions Bill through, and admired her expertise on this subject. One day, no doubt, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and I will reach such a level, but in the meantime we will have to rely on correspondence between us. I am grateful to the noble Lord for accepting my assurance, and I will write to him in due course on those matters. I beg to move.
Scottish Fiscal Commission Act 2016 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2017
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Dunlop
That the Grand Committee do consider the Scottish Fiscal Commission Act 2016 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2017.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office and Scotland Office (Lord Dunlop) (Con)
My Lords, I beg to move that the draft order laid before the House on 19 December 2016 now be considered. The background to this order is the Smith commission agreement and the Scotland Act 2016, which gave the Scottish Parliament significant new tax and welfare powers with responsibility for nearly £21 billion devolved and assigned tax revenues and more than £2 billion in demand-led welfare spending. Indeed, in future more than 50% of the Scottish Government’s budget will come from revenues raised in Scotland.
It is perhaps appropriate that we are debating this order today—the day on which the Scottish Parliament is, for the first time, setting income tax rates and bands for Scotland. It is therefore important that, also for the first time, there will be independent forecasts and analysis of the spending revenues within the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament, something to which your Lordships’ House attached great importance during the passage of the Scotland Act. It was also a key objective for the UK Government in the fiscal framework negotiations with the Scottish Government.
Prior to this point, the Scottish Fiscal Commission has merely scrutinised and commented upon forecasts produced by the Scottish Government. This order is therefore made in consequence of the Scottish Fiscal Commission Act 2016, which I shall refer to as the 2016 Act. It was passed by the Scottish Parliament on 10 March 2016 and received Royal Assent on 14 April 2016. The purpose of the 2016 Act was to establish the Scottish Fiscal Commission as a body corporate and to provide for its functions. These include preparing forecasts and assessments to inform the Scottish budget and a duty to co-operate with the Office for Budget Responsibility, so far as is necessary for it to perform its functions. The commission has a board of three commissioners, chaired by Susan Rice—Lady Rice—formerly CEO of Lloyds TSB Scotland, and it currently has a staff of 15. The impetus for the 2016 Act came from the fiscal framework agreement in February 2016 that set out the financial arrangements between the UK and Scottish Governments to underpin the new tax and spending powers in the Scotland Act 2016.
The commission was originally set up in 2014 as a non-statutory body with a main function of scrutinising the Scottish Government’s forecasts for tax revenues devolved to Scotland. From April 2017, the commission will become responsible for the production of forecasts on all revenue from fully devolved taxes and of income tax receipts arising from the rate-setting powers devolved to the Scottish Parliament. It will also produce forecasts of onshore Scottish GDP. This is important as under the fiscal framework agreement the Scottish Government are being given additional resource-borrowing powers, in part to assist in the management of any additional risks and volatility associated with extra devolution. The borrowing powers come into play if onshore Scottish GDP falls below certain trigger points.
This order is made under Section 104 of the Scotland Act 1998, which allows for necessary or expedient legislative provision in consequence of an Act of the Scottish Parliament. It will have UK extent and will enable the 2016 Act to be implemented in full. It contains provisions about the status of the commission and amends UK legislation which is not within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.
Article 2, for example, makes the commission part of the Scottish Administration, allowing for its designation as a non-ministerial department. The effect of this is that the commission will be accountable to the Scottish Parliament. Also, civil servants who work in the commission, which is currently a non-statutory body, will transfer to the new statutory commission and continue to be civil servants. The Civil Service is a reserved matter under Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998, so it is not within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament to enact such a transfer.
Article 3 reflects the fact that under the Crown Suits (Scotland) Act 1857 every action to be instituted in Scotland on behalf of, or against, an organisation in the Scottish Administration may be lawfully raised in the name of, or directed against, the Lord Advocate. In order to safeguard the perceived independence of the commission from the Scottish Government, Article 3 disapplies the 1857 Act so that the Lord Advocate, a member of the Scottish Government, should not represent the Commission.
Article 4 places an obligation on the Office for Budget Responsibility to co-operate with the commission. It is required to enable information sharing so far as it is necessary for the commission to fulfil its functions, and is a reciprocal duty to the one I mentioned earlier in the 2016 Act.
Finally, Article 5 amends the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975 to disqualify members of the Scottish Fiscal Commission from being Members of the House of Commons. This is to protect the independence and impartiality of the commission and mirrors similar provisions in the Scottish Parliament legislation regarding elected representatives.
The UK and Scottish Governments’ Ministers and officials have worked closely together to ensure that this order makes the necessary amendments to UK legislation in consequence of the 2016 Act and the fiscal framework agreement. I hope that noble Lords will agree that it represents a sensible and appropriate use of the powers in the Scotland Act. I commend the order to the Committee.
Lord McAvoy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his clear and lucid presentation of the order. It is a step in the right direction that we on the Labour Benches welcome. It is commendable that both Governments have been able to come together to provide for independent scrutiny of Scottish Government finances. Noble Lords may be aware that some members of the Scottish Government were initially uncertain about the wisdom of setting up an independent body to scrutinise their work, and kept changing their minds. We are glad that they have been brought around to the idea.
As the Minister said, this measure emanates from the Smith commission. I am lucky enough at the moment to have the services of a Hansard intern, a young man from Latvia—one of the countries that escaped the Soviet yoke over the past few years—and he is interested in constitutional matters. The basis for this order is commendable in terms of the agreement reached, and the measure agreed must serve as a model for some constitutional change in different parts of the world. For the first time, there will be independent forecasts and analysis of the spending and revenues of the Scottish Parliament. This is incredibly significant because the Scotland Act 2016 turned the Scottish Parliament into one of the most powerful devolved Parliaments in the world. With that responsibility must come transparency, independent scrutiny and accountability.
This order is made as a consequence of the Scottish Fiscal Commission Act 2016, and enables the Act to be implemented in full. We welcome the reciprocal duty that this order places on the Office for Budget Responsibility to co-operate with the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Can the Minister say whether work is already under way to build structures for this co-operation between the two bodies, and whether the OBR is offering advice and guidance on recruitment and impartiality ahead of the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s expanded role?
This order embeds the newly empowered fiscal commission as part of the Scottish Administration and removes any uncertainty about its future. It builds a welcome infrastructure to ensure both current and future Governments are held to account. We look forward to the work the commission will do to shed light on Scottish Government finances now and for many years. This totally justifies the initial implementation of the Scotland Act 1998, which started us on the road to devolution. We welcome this measure.
Lord Dunlop
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his support for this order. He is right to point out that initially the Scottish Government were not persuaded of the need for the Scottish Fiscal Commission to undertake independent forecasting. This was one of the positive outcomes from the discussions in which he and I exchanged many views on the fiscal framework negotiations.
As to the provision of information and advice, the order enables and facilitates the provision of reciprocal information between the Scottish Fiscal Commission and the OBR, and I am sure that that will take place. The noble Lord is right to point out the importance of constituting a Scottish Fiscal Commission that is properly resourced with the right expertise. It is fair to say that there is a relatively small pool of people who have the expertise to carry out this technical forecasting and modelling. I am sure that discussions are going on to ensure that the Scottish Fiscal Commission has the right people to do what will be its important job of making these forecasts and ensuring that the information on which the Scottish Government take their decisions is well founded.
Lord McAvoy
I would like to clear my conscience. I mentioned the Latvian intern but did not mention his name. He is Mr Ralfs Beitans—I feel a bit guilty about using his work and not mentioning him. The Minister’s response indicates the level of co-operation and agreement that has existed between the two Front Benches to deliver a powerful Scottish Parliament, and I am grateful to the Minister for that.
Lord Dunlop
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his excellent co-operation during this process. As I said during the passage of the Scotland Act, we will continue to return to this House and the other place to report on the progress of the fiscal framework.
National Health Service Commissioning Board (Additional Functions) Regulations 2017
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord O’Shaughnessy
That the Grand Committee do consider the National Health Service Commissioning Board (Additional Functions) Regulations 2017.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord O'Shaughnessy) (Con)
My Lords, these regulations will confer on the NHS Commissioning Board, more commonly known as NHS England, new functions covering the work currently undertaken by the Department of Health’s Commercial Medicines Unit.
The principal function of the Commercial Medicines Unit is to procure, conclude and manage procurement framework agreements with suppliers of services, drugs, medicines or other substances or products. These framework agreements are for the use, in the main, of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts. In securing competitive prices for these products and services, these framework agreements enable considerable savings to be made by the NHS.
The final report of the Carter review, on hospital productivity, suggested that the Commercial Medicines Unit might be best located within the NHS. After due consideration, the Department of Health and NHS England came to the view that the potential benefits could be realised if the majority of the unit’s work transferred to NHS England. The NHS Act 2006 does not provide NHS England with the necessary powers to undertake this work, so regulations are required to enable this transfer.
The regulations before us confer three additional functions on NHS England. First, they confer a power to conclude and manage framework agreements, which will enable NHS England to take on the functions from the Commercial Medicines Unit. Secondly, they impose a duty to provide assistance to the Secretary of State in relation to the exercise of the first function. This will ensure that the important contribution made by the Commercial Medicines Unit to other health priorities continues. Thirdly, they impose a duty to consult and collaborate with the registered pharmacists of every NHS trust and NHS foundation trust in relation to the exercise of the first function. These stakeholders play a vital role in the work of the Commercial Medicines Unit, and this duty will ensure that this role continues under NHS England. The Government consider that these regulations will bring together related procurement and commissioning functions within NHS England, which will enable the sharing of expertise and support the realisation of various benefits, including better use of NHS resources. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for his comprehensive introduction to the regulations before us this afternoon. I was interested when in his opening remarks he referred to the NHS Commissioning Board, more commonly known as NHS England. What struck me is that, when challenged on NHS funding, the Minister and his predecessor have been fond of saying that the NHS got the extra money that it had asked for. But what he really meant to say is that the NHS Commissioning Board put forward a five-year forward plan which talked about a £30 billion gap between the resource needed and the resource that was likely to be got, on the projections then published. We know that it was then told by the Treasury how much it could actually ask for. When we come to debate the NHS and its funding, it would give a much better reflection of the actual position if the Minister were to say that the figure which the Government have produced is what the NHS Commissioning Board was told to put into the five-year forward view.
I was puzzled by the way in which NHS England changed the name of its organisation to be that. Much of the two years we spent debating the 2012 Act was around the work of the NHS Commissioning Board. I was a little surprised that a quango took it upon itself simply to change its name and give itself the kind of title to which, statutorily, it clearly had no right—nor is it in its remit. It is interesting that when it comes to regulations such as these, which we have frequently, they have to relate to the NHS Commissioning Board. I suspect that very few people know what it is. At the end of the day, either the Government should regularise this by legislating to call NHS England by that name or it should revert to being the NHS Commissioning Board. As a matter of principle and practice, it is not a good idea to use a name that has not been given in legislation.
These are interesting regulations because, in a way, they take us back to our debates in relation to the Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill. Much of those debates have been on the cost of medicines, and the operation of the PPRS scheme and the statutory scheme alongside it. I guess that the question I would put to the Minister is: since negotiations with the pharmaceutical industry currently lie principally with the Department of Health, what implications does the transfer of this unit to NHS England have for the department’s own capacity to negotiate agreements in future? Does it essentially mean that NHS England will take over those negotiations?
I have obviously seen the Explanatory Memorandum and the reference back to the Carter report. I understand the reasons why my noble friend Lord Carter, thought that the CMU would be best placed within NHS England. But does this transfer equate at all to the recommendation in the Accelerated Access Review, which called for the creation of a strategic commercial unit to be established within NHS England? Would I be right in thinking that the transfer of the CMU is, in essence, the strategic commercial unit that the accelerated access review called for? What it actually said is that it wanted an SCU to,
“have the capacity and capability to consider a range of flexible pricing models as part of a commercial dialogue with innovators”,
and envisaged:
“Win-win scenarios, where innovators benefit from earlier, and, in some cases, guaranteed market access and the NHS and patients benefit from better value through a reduced price”.
In a sense, that takes us back to our debates during the passage of the Bill about whether we can develop more of a win-win relationship with innovators so that patients get access to innovation at a much earlier stage—but also, because the NHS is moving from a culture that is very often opposed to the introduction of innovation to one that embraces innovation, it therefore gets the advantage of better value for money in the end. If that is not to be the case, does the Minister think that the CMU has the capacity, capability and expertise to agree new and innovative commercial arrangements with companies? Will those processes support improved patient access to medicines and will NHS England consult on any new methodology or guides that will support the commercial unit role? How will the reconstituted CMU within the NHS interact with NICE and the adoption of NICE-approved medicines? If it has an active role, will that affect a patient’s right to NICE-approved medicines as covered by the NHS constitution?
Clearly, the experience of companies dealing with NHS England at the moment is that it is inflexible and is interested not in quality and outcome but simply in price. I have had many representations to that effect. My understanding is that NHS England simply has not got the capacity to negotiate these rather more innovative approaches to innovation, adoption and value for money. At heart, the question is this: will the transfer of the CMU to NHS England enhance the capacity of that organisation to move from a crude bottom-line approach to purchasing to one which looks at best value, innovation and adoption?
Apart from that, I will be interested in the Minister’s responses. As this is about procurement, I should remind the Committee of my presidency of the Health Care Supply Association and of GS1, the bar-coding association.
Lord O'Shaughnessy
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his questioning which was, as usual, precise. I will attempt to respond to his questions as best I can. I shall start where he started. I do not think I can take any blame for any confusion that may be caused around rebranding the NHS Commissioning Board Authority as NHS England. It clearly has a commissioning role, and in that commissioning role there is clearly a good fit with procurement. That is what the noble Lord, Lord Carter, concluded. Bringing together specialised commissioning, general procurement capacity and the role of the CMU was a good fit and it might deliver better value for money for the NHS, which I know the noble Lord wants as much as I do, so we can clear that out of the way.
The noble Lord’s big question was about enhancing the capacity of NHS England to become more sophisticated. In one sense, he is getting slightly ahead of things because the regulations do not transfer the entirety of the functionality. Some of the functionality will continue to be in the department as it pertains to public health responsibilities—vaccination, for example, or the procurement of emergency treatments. However, those that are to do with the ordinary activities of the health service are moving over. From that point of view, therefore, there is no change: the framework agreements transfer and people transfer. It is simply transferring a unit from one place to another, but clearly with the idea that there will be an enhancement in everyday activities as a result.
The noble Lord is quite right to refer to the issue of access—we talked about that a lot during the Bill’s passage—and it may well be that in future, when we are thinking about what comes after the PPRS, the kind of things that he is talking about would be within the remit. It would be wrong for me to comment on that now, not least because the PPRS commits us to certain activities and behaviours on simplicity of pricing discounts and so on, and clearly the kinds of things he is talking about—the more sophisticated value-based pricing models—do not currently fall within that scope. I am clear, however, that the Government and the department will continue to take a lead in any future discussions about replacements that leverage capacity across the system.
In answer to a couple of the noble Lord’s other questions, there is no particular impact on NICE from these regulations. We know that within the PPRS there is a commitment to fund after three months: that is part of the agreement. I hope, therefore, that he is reassured about that. To repeat, this is, in essence, quite a simple measure that takes a set of responsibilities from one place to another with the aim of providing greater efficiency—by procuring framework agreements, and so on. That is separate, in a way, to what we have been discussing in the Bill, but it may be that in future the transfer and enhancement of that capacity could set the tone for the kind of negotiations that he would like. However, I hope that he will understand that it would not be right for me to make any commitment on that at the moment, bearing in mind the relationships that we have. If he is satisfied with those responses, I commend the order.
Pension Schemes Act 2015 (Judicial Pensions) (Consequential Provision) Regulations 2017
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Baroness Buscombe
Moved by
That the Grand Committee do consider the Pension Schemes Act 2015 (Judicial Pensions) (Consequential Provision) Regulations 2017.
Baroness Buscombe (Con)
My Lords, the instrument is relatively concise and I can also be brief.
The purpose of the draft regulations is to make provision to pave the way for the creation of a suitable pension scheme for eligible fee-paid judges, to mirror the pension scheme for salaried judges established by the Judicial Pensions and Retirement Act 1993. This is required following the court’s decision in the case of O’Brien v Ministry of Justice.
The background is as follows. Following the case of O’Brien v MoJ, and subsequent decisions, it is now established law that a lack of pension and other specified benefits amounted to unlawful, less favourable treatment of some fee-paid judicial office holders in comparison to salaried judges doing the same or broadly similar work.
The Ministry of Justice made a commitment to implement a pension scheme for these fee-paid judges. This commitment was honoured for future service, subject to transitional protection, by the Judicial Pensions Regulations 2015. However, a new scheme is required as the remedy in respect of service from 7 April 2000, the date when the part-time work directive ought to have been transposed into UK law. The Ministry of Justice intends to create a new scheme, using the power created by Section 78 of the Pension Schemes Act 2015, which inserted a new Section 18A into the Judicial Pensions and Retirement Act 1993. However, that provision alone is not enough to enable a suitable fee-paid scheme to be created, as I will now explain.
The Public Service Pensions Act 2013 enacted the Government’s policy on public service pensions. As part of that reform, Section 30 of the 2013 Act placed certain restrictions on the content and operation of public service pensions, subject to an exception for pre-existing pension schemes. At the time of the 2013 Act, a need to permit the making of a new but historic scheme of this nature was not anticipated. These regulations seek to make provision by amending Section 30 of the Public Service Pensions Act so that it will not apply to the new fee-paid judicial pension scheme, so removing a barrier to the creation of the scheme, which will be established through separate regulations, subject to the outcome of the consultation process and parliamentary approval.
In conclusion, I hope that noble Lords will welcome these regulations to make the necessary amendment to make provision for the creation of the fee-paid judicial pension scheme. I therefore commend them to the House.
Lord Beecham (Lab)
My Lords—or perhaps I should say, “My Ladies”—I ought to declare an interest, a paternal interest, because my daughter sits as a part-time deputy district judge and I suspect that she will be one of those affected by these regulations. There is good reason to commend the Government’s decision to bring this order, but I want to touch on the wider issue of the judiciary and its position.
As understand it, there is a significant degree of unhappiness among the judiciary at all levels about their conditions. Some 36% of judges are apparently considering leaving the judicial bench over the next five years. That reflects something like 47% of High Court judges, 41% of members of the Court of Appeal and 40% of those on circuit, which represents a significant number. While the Government are here redressing something of an injustice to those affected by what had been the position in relation to pensions, there seems to be a wider concern. I am not expecting the Minister to respond in detail to this, but I should be grateful if she would take back to the department to inquire what, if anything, the Government are doing to ensure that able people are attracted from the Bar to serve in a judicial capacity and to remain connected to the judiciary. There seems to be concern in the legal world that we may run short of competent, high-flying lawyers who are willing and able to take on judicial office. Given the great record and traditions of the judiciary in this country, it would be most unfortunate if that proved to be the case.
As I say, I am not expecting the noble Baroness to answer the somewhat tangential question tonight, but this is an opportunity to raise it, and I hope that something is already going on in the MoJ, in conjunction with senior judges, to look into this. Perhaps in due course she can write to me to explain what, if anything, is happening and when there might be a resolution of what seems to be a growing issue. However, I am, of course, happy to commend the Government for bringing forward this order and we, as an Opposition, support it.
Baroness Buscombe
First, I thank the noble Lord opposite for the points that he made. His interest in this matter—through his daughter—is, in a sense, welcome. She is close to the situation that he referred to with regard to the wider issue of how we encourage—as the noble Lord said—“competent, willing and able” lawyers to take on the role and remain in judicial office. I assure the noble Lord that we take that issue seriously and will write to the noble Lord with a response.
On the draft regulation, this is a reasonable amendment that serves to honour the Government’s commitment to implement a pension scheme for the fee-paid judges service from 7 April 2000 that will mirror the pension scheme open to salaried judges at that time. These regulations are an essential legislative step to allow us to honour that commitment. I beg to move.