Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Ms Buck
That is correct; I recognise that figure. We have seen from the Bill and the debate behind it a political debate and a set of wheezes that the Government think will pay off for them. The problem with wheezes is that they tend to fracture when they come into contact with reality. The Government cannot make serious money out of an assault on out-of-work benefits, whatever the Conservatives like to say. Just 3% of all welfare spending goes on jobseeker’s allowance. Indeed, all out-of-work benefits account for only 3% of GDP between them. The House of Commons Library advises me that if only out-of-work benefits were subject to the 1% cap, but in-work benefits were uprated as normal, 80% of the proposed savings would disappear. If one factors in the changes to the personal tax allowance, one finds that working people, as the Resolution Foundation demonstrated to us, take 60% of the hit.
If the Bill is passed, 2.5 million workless households will lose out by about £215 a year by 2016, and of the 14.1 million working-age households with someone in work, 7 million will be hit: 30% of all households will take a hit on their income because of this Government’s obsession with the tiny minority of long-term or multigenerational workless.
The distinction between those in and out of work is far less rigid than the Government would have us believe. That is an extraordinary piece of rhetoric, given that the universal credit, the centrepiece of the Government’s welfare agenda, is designed to blur the distinction still further, and it has that one significant advantage of seeking to do that. Millions of our constituents, in Conservative and Liberal Democrat constituencies as well as in Labour ones, churn between those states of being in and out of work. Last year there were between 244,000 and 357,000 new claims every month for jobseeker’s allowance, while between 242,000 and 370,000 left benefit every month.
It is a myth that the welfare reform agenda put forward by the Government is about tackling worklessness. It is an assault on low-income working families far more than on working households. It is an assault on both, and on very low-income families, but it is real and not mythical families who will be hurt as a consequence. It is real children who are at increasing risk of going to school hungry, as teachers unions are already reporting, and it is real children who will return to homes that cannot be heated by parents who cannot manage to balance all the bills.
We live in a country that apparently can afford tax cuts for millionaires but requires low-income, working families to go to food banks and pay their mortgages with payday loans. Every day in London 100 homes bust the £1 million value level, yet 70,000 children were homeless this Christmas. Today we should not be reducing the capacity of 9.5 million families and households across the country to pay their bills.
What the crash and its aftermath demonstrated beyond doubt was that the future cannot be like the past. We want everyone who can work to do so, we want that work to be secure and fairly paid and for the costs that consume an unsustainable element of people’s incomes to be reduced.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Did my hon. Friend notice that the Secretary of State accused Labour of having a new idea with our job guarantee? In fact, the pamphlet produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) on a job guarantee is dated January 2012. We have been discussing these ideas for more than a year.
Ms Buck
We have indeed been discussing these ideas. The future jobs fund demonstrated value for money in getting people back into work, but the Conservative party, which claims to like evidence, trashed it in favour of the Work programme, which, as we know, has been less effective than doing absolutely nothing would have been.
Without jobs, deficit reduction is doomed, however much the Government cheese-pare away at the income of the poorest. While housing and child care costs consume an ever-larger portion of the incomes of poorer families, work cannot pay and families cannot thrive. It is jobs, fair pay, affordable homes and good affordable child care that will get us out of the trap we are in, whether it is the trap we want to spring to get people into work or the trap of deficit reduction. The trap that the Government are setting today will catch 30% of households in a worsening squeeze on their incomes at the very worst time for them to be facing it.
Welfare Reform (Disabled People and Carers)
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) on securing this debate and on the way in which he opened it. In the little time I have, I want to focus on the carers of people with disabilities.
Carers’ organisations have told me that they fear that the welfare reform measures proposed by this Government will seriously undermine the ability of carers to care for people with disabilities and for older family members. On the reform of the disability living allowance, the Government’s original impact assessment said:
“We expect that the introduction of Personal Independence Payment will not affect the overall size of the Carer’s Allowance population”,
but analysis by Carers UK shows that there will undoubtedly be a knock-on effect on those who claim carer’s allowance. If the number of claimants of the allowance falls, as it moves to PIP, in line with the caseload for DLA, Carers UK estimate that 23,800 carers will be unable to claim carer’s allowance.
On the housing benefit cap, it seems clear that around 5,000 households that will be capped in 2013-14 are expected to contain a carer. Those carers will see an average reduction in income of £105 a week. That is quite clearly at odds with the Government’s stated policy for the cap.
Around 1 million carers have either given up work or reduced their working hours in order to care. An average drop in income of £105 per week is a cruel way to treat carers who have given up their careers. It could also be counter-productive, in that it could make caring for a family member financially untenable and force more people into taking up the option of care homes or residential homes.
Many carers already face financial hardship. A survey of carers by Carers UK found that 45% of them were cutting back on essentials such as heating or food, and four in 10 were in debt as a result of caring. Carers are not choosing to give up work, but being forced into doing so by the crisis in social care. Carers UK found in a survey that 31% of working age carers gave up work or reduced their working hours to care because support services were not flexible enough, the person for whom they cared did not qualify for support, there were no suitable services in the area, or the services were too expensive or not reliable enough. There is not time now to go through how care charges have gone up.
In an earlier debate on social care, I talked about the impact of financial issues on the lives of carers. I have heard of one carer who had to take on a part-time cleaning job in the early evening because money was so tight. She puts her husband to bed at 4pm so that he is safe while she is at work. That is the reality.
Grahame M. Morris
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a case not just of money—pounds and pence—but of the dignity of disabled people?
Barbara Keeley
Indeed it is. The House of Commons has received reports that criticise care agencies for putting people to bed at 6 o’clock or 8 o’clock. This carer has to put her husband to bed at 4 o’clock. How must that feel to her? I have had further evidence that shows that that is not an isolated example. It is very common for carers who can no longer afford respite care to have to leave a person, perhaps wearing an incontinence pad, and hope that they will be safe in a chair while the carer has a hospital appointment or goes to work.
I question whether anyone here believes that it is right or fair to hit carers with further cuts to their income when changes already made by this Government are clearly hitting them. The manager of my local carers centre in Salford told me that, this Christmas, the centre’s staff are collecting and distributing food parcels to carers. That is something that they have not had to do since the 1980s. She said, “This does not bode well.” It does not, and it should not be happening to carers, who already give so much. I call on the Minister for a rethink on welfare reform for carers.
Barbara Keeley
The Minister is right to comment on carers, but does she see how deeply unfair it is to apply the benefit cap to them? They will lose £105 a week. This stuff about households and the way in which they are defined is just nonsense; 5,000 carers should not lose out.
Esther McVey
I will explain to the hon. Lady why the changes have to be brought about. At the moment, there are 1 million spare bedrooms, 250,000 households living in overcrowded conditions and 1.8 million households on the waiting list, so we have a size criterion in the private sector, and we must get this right. We have to support people. We have to work with what we have, and we will introduce the changes because we have to get this right—it has not been right, and the previous Government left it to get into this predicament.
Esther McVey
I will not give way.
Work must always pay more than benefits, and that is why we are introducing the cap on the amount of benefits that working-age people can receive. It is not reasonable or fair that people out of work can get an income from benefits that is greater than the average weekly wage for working households. We understand, however, that disabled people face extra costs, and that is why we are exempting from the cap households receiving DLA, PIP or the support component of the employment and support allowance.
It is fair that the benefits system should support people in public housing in the same way as it does those in private housing, but we have made changes to the housing benefit regulations, in recognition of the fact that some people need an additional room for an overnight carer who lives elsewhere. We have also listened to concerns about disabled people living in significantly adapted accommodation, and have announced additional discretionary housing payment funding of £30 million for 2013-14, to cover both that group and foster carers.
Instead of simply cutting money from everyone, we chose the more difficult but principled option of modernising the benefit and focusing support where it is needed most. PIP will be awarded on the basis of fair, consistent and objective assessments, and such assessments are not in place at the moment. The assessments have taken two years to develop. We consulted with disabled people and made key changes as we received their feedback.
Although they are different assessments that will work in different ways, we have learned from the experiences of the work capability assessment—something that the Opposition brought in—and we had to introduce Professor Harrington, who produced recommendations that we are still working through, to get this right. That will enable us more accurately and consistently to ensure that support is targeted at those who face the greatest barriers to leading independent lives. More than a fifth of PIP recipients will get both of the highest rates, worth £134.40 a week, compared with only 16% of those who are on DLA at the moment.
Oral Answers to Questions
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Hoban
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is important. As we heard earlier, for some people the cost of travel is a barrier to employment, and I am delighted that the major bus companies have worked together to provide free travel in January. That is on top of the additional support that Jobcentre Plus and Work programme providers offer to ensure that we get as many people as possible into work.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Yesterday on the Directgov website, DWP job ID 438253 advertised for female presenters for Loaded TV working at home on internet babe chat. The advert has now been removed from the website, but does the Secretary of State think that DWP should be accepting and promoting jobs for internet babe chat? What does it say about this Government’s values on work?
Mr Duncan Smith
I remind the hon. Lady that it was this Government who changed the rules: under her Government, it would have been wholly acceptable, I suspect. The new system is in its national pathfinder and will, I hope, be rolled out before Christmas. We already have checks in place: more than 6,000 jobs, 60 attempted employer accounts and 27 bogus employers have been blocked so far, and we act swiftly if complaints are raised. I remind her that, on average, more than 5 million daily job searchers are working on this system. It will be a massive improvement and will benefit jobseekers, so the hon. Lady should not carp about the odd difficulty that arises. We get rid of the bogus jobs.
Oral Answers to Questions
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
7. What plans her Department has for a gender audit of public spending on sport.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Maria Miller)
The Department measures sport participation by gender via the Taking Part survey. In addition, Sport England’s Active People survey provides more detailed data on sport participation. Together, those provide a good understanding of the gender implications of public spending on sport. The Department has no plans to undertake a specific gender audit.
Barbara Keeley
I thank the Secretary of State for that answer. The Active People survey shows that more than 2 million fewer girls and women than men take part in sport, at both weekly and monthly intervals, but 12 million say that they want to take part in sport. Is not it time we had a full audit of public spending on sport to find out what it is spent on and why so many fewer women than men take part?
Maria Miller
The hon. Lady puts her finger on it. We know that there are participation issues, so rather than simply continuing to audit it, we are taking action. We already have our £1 billion youth and community sports strategy, which is looking at ways of ensuring that girls take part in sport, and the Active Women programme, a £10 million lottery programme aimed at getting women into sport. Of course, the most important audit of all was the Olympic games this summer, in which the very first gold medal was won by a woman, as indeed was the last. That is evidence that things are moving in the right direction, but clearly there is still more to do.
Oral Answers to Questions
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(14 years, 6 months ago)
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Maria Miller
I thank my hon. Friend for her question and say to her that we absolutely share the objective of ensuring that the people with the severest challenges in living independently in our society do not receive undue assessments. At the moment there is no in-built reassessment under disability living allowance. She put her question in the present tense—I am not sure whether she was referring to other things for which people are assessed. I reassure her that under PIP, we do not intend to have fixed annual reassessments. They will be made based on individuals’ personal circumstances.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
In their report “Responsible Reform”, disabled people and carers analysed the responses to the Government’s consultation and raised many issues about the replacement of disability living allowance. Carers UK has also expressed deep concern about the impact on carers of cuts to disability benefits, yet today we learn that 5,000 carer households will be hit by the mean reduction of £87 a week as a result of the benefits cap. Will the Minister now publish an assessment of the impact on carers of all the Government’s cuts?
Maria Miller
To give the House total clarity I should say that the report that the hon. Lady references was highly selective. It examined only about 10% of the responses that we received on the DLA and PIP consultation.
I will answer the hon. Lady’s question about carers directly as she, like me, wants to ensure that carers get the support that they need. We have already made it clear that carers will be eligible for carer’s allowance as a result of the person for whom they are caring being in receipt of either level of PIP.
Oral Answers to Questions
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(15 years ago)
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Chris Grayling
I absolutely agree. One of the most important steps the Government have taken has been significantly to increase the number of apprenticeships available, particularly for young people. It is absolutely clear under the Work programme agreement that a successful placement in an apprenticeship counts as a job outcome under the Work programme. I hope that will mean there is a clear link between the two.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Steve Kerr of the London Voluntary Service Council has questioned whether the Work programme
“will succeed…or simply make matters worse through sidelining the voluntary sector.”
What action is the Minister taking so that the voluntary sector does not continue to feel sidelined through the Work programme?
Chris Grayling
The hon. Lady is absolutely wrong. The voluntary sector is not being sidelined. On Friday in Stafford I visited the Shaw Trust—a major voluntary sector organisation that is already delivering support to people under the Work programme. There are many other organisations such as Groundwork delivering support right across the spectrum and there is specialist help available from some of the specialist groups. The Work programme has been designed to attract best practice, of which there is much in the voluntary sector. That is why it is such an important part of the Work programme.