Carer’s Allowance
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(7 months ago)
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Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
I have to say that the gist of the argument that came from the noble Baroness’s question is, “What is going on?” I can tell her that around 1 million people are in receipt of carer’s allowance and that the vast majority of them—around 95%—were paid correctly. I do not entirely accept the statistics that the noble Baroness mentioned: the total overpayment rate for carer’s allowance was 5.2%, which represents about 60,000 people. About half of them ended up being given a penalty of £50—the basic civil penalty.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, on the statistics, can the noble Viscount tell us how many people owe more than £20,000? When he talks about responsibility, will he agree that the problem is that we have another instance where the information technology system has got away from human judgment? The IT system does not trigger action, so carers may wait months and months to be told that they owe significant amounts. The evidence now suggests that one of the effects of this is that some carers are not going to claim carer’s allowance because it is too risky. They are facing so much stress and this is one element of stress that they simply cannot handle.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
Although I do not have the figure to pass on to the noble Baroness, I can say that the other main category for overpayments comes under the title of “conditions of entitlement”. That represents 2.8% of the total. This is when claimants have stopped caring and neglected to tell us, or when the claim has been fraudulent from the outset. I am aware of some extreme cases highlighted in the press—which, by the way, have been building up over many years—where the amount of repayment is particularly high. That amount is not particularly high, but I will certainly get the figure to the noble Baroness.
People with Disabilities: Access to Services
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(7 months ago)
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Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure and privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester. She has fought her corner on disability issues for so many years, and it is no surprise to hear her focusing on PIP and the need for medical assessment. I am very grateful to my noble friend for introducing the debate in the way that she did, which was comprehensive, passionate and measured at the same time.
This has been an excellent debate, and I have learned a huge amount. I am not going to repeat some of the things I intended to say. The Government strike me as being very hyperactive suddenly about disability. The problem is that anything with the term “modernisation” in the title strikes the fear of God into me, because, basically, we know that modernisation means greater cuts, more difficult assessments and a narrower gate to go through. We have to be extremely careful in our response, because clearly there is so much that needs changing—goodness knows that we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, about the enormous scope of the things that need to be done.
One of the things that has struck me this morning, and in reading the White Paper and Green Paper, is the gap between what is being proposed and the reality of people’s lives on a day-to-day basis, when every encounter is a struggle. We are not even taking account of the impact of cost of living increases on the ability to live a decent life if you are disabled. The Trussell Trust has been measuring the increasing dependence of disabled people on food banks, for example. We know how difficult it is to find and keep a personal assistant; not only are they scarce but the effort that goes into having to employ them is enormous. These are things that can be simplified. It seems to me that the Government have taken a stiff broom to the wrong end of the problem. What we should be doing is just the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, talked about—that is, making employer contracts more robust and requiring much more changes by way of specialist support being available for people looking for work and so on.
I have a question for the Minister. Why did the Government not involve experts by experience in the design of the White Paper? They are the people who know what it takes to change things effectively, and cost-effectively as well. It is pretty outrageous that they have had to go to law to make their case about not being included. It did not improve the situation as the other White Papers came forward.
I want to raise two specific challenges which are having an effect on the ability of people to seek and keep work. They are about the people who look after disabled people. Obviously, one of the outstanding issues in recent years has been the collapse of mental health services for young people and children, but compounding that is another disaster, which is less visible but really bears down on educational opportunity.
I know that school transport for disabled children is not, strictly speaking, within the Minister’s brief, but he has a colleague who is responsible for it, and I would be very grateful if he could act as a messenger in this respect. It is no secret that transport for disabled children to go to school is reaching breaking point in many local authorities. There has been an increase in the number of children who are eligible, I believe, but there have also been huge cuts in local authority budgets. Appeals are mounting up, increasing numbers are frustrated, parents are scared and children are bewildered.
I want to give the Minister one example, and I declare an interest because the parents are known to me. Their child is 16, and she has been moved to an FE college appropriate for her age and condition. It takes her working parents three to four hours a day, driving back and forth twice a day. Previously they were able to access a taxi, which was free, with a carer. That has been withdrawn. Two appeals have failed. The child has, among other chronic conditions, epilepsy, and so she cannot travel alone.
The parents, in this case, are self-employed. They are distinguished artists who work to commission, so they cannot make up the time lost during the day because they have to care for the child, who requires intensive care when she is at home. She has become increasingly frustrated and violent towards them because she cannot go to school, which she loves and where she thrives.
What is going to happen to those parents and the child? They have no other family to support them. They are both at risk of losing not only their income but their health. How will the child be able to remain in school at all? What will be her future? This is not an isolated case; I am sure many other noble Lords will know of such cases. I have one question here. There seems to be a tendency towards discriminating against self-employed parents because their work is seen as less predictable and less guaranteed. Will the Minister ask his colleague to look at that point?
My final topic is the problem of carers who are in receipt of carer’s allowance but are finding that, mostly inadvertently, they have worked too many hours and are therefore having to pay back some of that allowance. In our Select Committee report, A Gloriously Normal Life, we showed how interdependent carers were with the people they cared for—if you harm one then you harm the other. We catalogued the many different ways in which unpaid carers were suffering from invisibility. We asked the Government to look again at the carer’s allowance—at a princely £21 a week, it is the lowest benefit available—and at the hours and conditions of employment.
The Government rejected those recommendations, and things have got worse. All the evidence suggests that the health of unpaid carers is getting worse, and they have little access to information. That bears down on the point I want to make. Carers who have managed to hang on to a part-time job are desperate to maintain their links with work and with normality. They are allowed to earn up to £151 a week—13 hours at the minimum wage. To add insult to injury, thousands of carers are now being pursued by the DWP for breaching the income threshold and are being criminalised. Let me explain why that is so unfair.
The DWP has an IT system that flags up when a carer’s income breaches a threshold but fails to trigger action, so that they know and can pay back their debt as soon as possible. Debts pile up. In 2022-23, 26,000 carers were asked to repay sums relating to earning breaches. Some of the sums were tiny, at £1.50, while 800 people owed between £5,000 and £20,000 and 36 people owed over £20,000. Carers have told me they cannot understand why the DWP has not been notifying carers of overpayments in a timely manner. It is very difficult to get hold of the DWP about the carer’s allowance, so they have to sort out these mistakes themselves. The impact is devastating. Many carers are now thinking of giving up their carer’s allowance because it is too risky. It is a very serious situation.
One carer says:
“This is an additional stress you choose to go without on an already stressful life. We are neither heroes or scroungers but people who care and who are doing a complex job we have no training or experience of and very little support for”.
I ask the Minister to consider with his colleagues whether the whole system should be paused so it can be reviewed at this point.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Viscount Younger of Leckie) (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their very valuable contributions to this important and wide-ranging debate. As it has highlighted, disabled people share the same hopes, aspirations and ambitions as non-disabled people to fulfil their potential and play a full part in society. However, I acknowledge that they often experience barriers that can prevent them realising this.
I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, who provided a good overview of the many issues that are challenges for disabled people. Although she would not expect me to agree with many of her conclusions, she raised a number of questions which I will attempt to cover. As the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, acknowledged, it may not be possible to cover all the many themes encompassing disability that were raised today. Having said all that, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, in her usual style, won the verbal marathon to canter through most of the issues.
Over the last 25 years, this country has made important progress in tackling the barriers, through the work of campaigners and across different Governments, from the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which was alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Addington—he was here in the House for that, which is interesting—to the Equality Act 2010 and, more recently, the British Sign Language Act and Down Syndrome Act. Today, in Mental Health Awareness Week and on Global Accessibility Awareness Day—I have a badge to match—I reflect that these are reminders of how far we have come in talking about, and having awareness of, disability and accessibility issues. They also highlight what still needs to be done.
I have listened carefully to all the issues raised. Let me say clearly that there is more to be done. My noble friend Lord Holmes is right that I should be aware— I reassure him and others that I am—of the lived experience of those who are disabled. I will take back to the relevant channels his points about floating bus stops, black taxi cabs and the bank issue; I very much noted that.
Having said all that, I am proud that this Government have continued to tackle the barriers faced by disabled people. As a bit of a pushback, let me say that there are now 2 million more disabled people in work when compared to 2010. We have 20 Ministers across government committed to championing accessibility and opportunity for disabled people within their departments. Our Disability Action Plan, which we published in February, sets out the actions that we are taking this year across these and other areas, and lays the foundations for longer-term change. I will talk more about this later.
To ensure that this country is the most accessible place in the world for them to live, work and thrive, we are going further through the support delivered through the benefits system, helping disabled people to start, stay and succeed in a more flexible and accessible labour market. We are also ensuring that disabled children—also mentioned today—get the best start in life, creating more accessible homes, which I will allude to later, and improving health and care outcomes.
This Government are delivering for disabled people. The noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Sherlock, asked when disabled people can expect an update on the national disability strategy and the disability action plan. The actions set out in the disability action plan are planned to be delivered over 12 months, to lay the foundations for longer-term change. To track our progress, we will publish updates on the progress of actions from the disability action plan after six months and 12 months. The six-month update will also include an update on the delivery of the national disability strategy.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Sherlock and Lady Hughes, raised the differences between the documents. The disability action plan will be taken forward in parallel with the national disability strategy and is designed to complement the long-term vision set out in the strategy. In a Written Ministerial Statement of 18 September 2023, we announced how work on the strategy would be taken forward. Other significant work being taken forward by individual government departments in areas that disabled people have told us are a priority include reforms to employment and welfare via the DWP’s Transforming Support: The Health and Disability White Paper and strategies to address health and social care via the DHSC’s People at the Heart of Care White Paper, which the House will be aware of.
I turn to the support provided through our benefits system. I am proud that we have a strong and generous safety net for those who need it. We expect to provide £88 billion worth of support for disabled people through the benefits system this year. Last month, we increased the extra cost disability benefits by a further 6.7%. I have listened carefully to comments today on access to the benefits system. We know that, in some cases, people may not be able to engage effectively with the claim process due to various vulnerabilities. That is why the DWP has a range of different support measures at every stage of the benefit claim. This includes a “move to universal credit” helpline, a “help to claim” service delivered independently by Citizens Advice and face-to-face support in local jobcentres, where the staff will have been specifically trained and prepared for this work. Where a claimant cannot manage their claim due to a lack of capacity, they can appoint a third party to manage the claim on their behalf.
Our wider reforms look more fundamentally at different options to reshape the current welfare system. As the House will know, we have published a Green Paper, which was much spoken about today. It considers options to provide better-targeted support to those who need it most, ensuring that it is fit for the future. This subject was raised by my noble friend Lady Browning and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. I was particularly pleased to hear the remarks from the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas—it is good to hear from her again.
My noble friend Lady Browning asked how PIP provides support to claimants with mental illness. PIP was designed to help disabled people and people with long-term health conditions by making a cash contribution towards their extra costs. As part of this consultation, we want to understand whether there are other forms of support that may be more suitable for people with mental health conditions. We know that being in suitable work is good for people’s physical and mental health, well-being and financial security. As we set out in 2023 in Transforming Support: The Health and Disability White Paper, the Government aim to support more people to start, stay and succeed in work.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, asked about the reason for the rise in PIP, suggesting that it was not due to the increased prevalence of disability and health conditions but was perhaps linked to NHS waiting times. I reassure her and the House that cutting waiting lists is one of the Prime Minister’s top priorities. We are making good progress in tackling the longest waiting lists, to ensure that patients get the care that they need when they need it. This is incredibly important. Thanks to the incredible work of NHS staff, we have virtually eliminated waits of 18 months. NHSE management information from March 2024 suggests that these waits have been reduced by over 95% since September 2021, but there is clearly more to do.
Alongside the support available through the welfare system, the Government also recognise the valuable work and the needs of those who care for disabled people while holding down a job. My noble friend Lady Browning and the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, asked whether the PIP consultation was simply a money-saving exercise. It is not a money-saving exercise; this is about the Government’s long-standing approach to supporting disabled people and people with long-term health conditions. We want the system to provide the right support to those who really need it. It is right that we should look at this after 10 years or so—as I said, we introduced it in 2013.
As the House will know, the Carer’s Leave Act came into force in April, giving a new unpaid leave entitlement that is available from day one of employment for employed unpaid carers. I will briefly touch on the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. I am very aware of the issues surrounding overpayments for carers; the Government are taking this extremely seriously. It is the responsibility of individuals who receive the carer’s allowance to let us know if their earnings exceed £151 per week. We are looking very seriously at it, particularly to see how we can improve the communications exercise. Everyone will receive a letter every year to remind them, but I believe there is more that we can do. As was said the other day in the media, we are already ringing as many people as we can, from the information that we have received, to remind them of what happens if their earnings go over the threshold, so that they understand what to do.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, I am extremely grateful for what the Minister has said. Do I understand correctly that this is the response to the issue of the IT system not automatically triggering any action that would lead to information being sent immediately to the carer? Does the Minister think that this will address that issue?
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
I think that it will go a very long way. We are looking seriously at getting the information out quickly—the link with HMRC is incredibly important here. We already get real-time information from HMRC anyway. We are asking the same question: what more can we do to be sure that those who do not let us know, for whatever reason, will do so? We also must not forget that the vast majority do let us know. This is a very important point. I believe that there will be a Question in the House next week on this issue, which I will be willing and ready to answer.
The subject of work was raised in particular by my noble friend Lord Shinkwin. This Government will always protect the most vulnerable, but we must also do everything possible to support those who can to move into work. I echo the Prime Minister’s speech at the Centre for Social Justice on 19 April, which I attended:
“The role of the welfare state should never be merely to provide financial support … but to help people overcome whatever barriers they might face to living an independent, fulfilling life”.
That is why we are supporting thousands more disabled people to start, stay and succeed in work through our £2.5 billion back to work plan. That includes exploring reforms to the fit-note process through the call for evidence—another theme raised today—and rolling out WorkWell, to bring together local health and employment support. Questions were raised today about who is best placed to make health assessments for work. I do not intend to go further on that, but we may well receive some information through the conversation and the PIP consultation on that subject.
From 2025, we will reform the work capability assessment to reflect new flexibilities in the labour market while maintaining protections for those with the most serious conditions. My noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond and others raised the disability employment gap. The Government have an ambitious programme of initiatives to support disabled people and people with health conditions. The disability employment rate was 52.9% in the first quarter of 2024, compared to 81.7% for non-disabled people. For disabled people, that is an increase of 0.1 percentage points. The disability employment gap was 28.8 percentage points in the first quarter of 2024, a decrease of 0.6 percentage points on the year before.
We are also expanding access to mental health treatment, with nearly 400,000 additional places through NHS talking therapies, which I think the House will be well aware of. All this builds on existing support, such as Access to Work grants, our Disability Confident scheme and disability employment advisers in jobcentres.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Donaghy and Lady Hughes, asked what the Government are doing to help those in poverty. There is a long answer I could give, but the short answer, which I think I have given in the House before, is that we are committed to supporting people on lower incomes and expect to spend around £303 billion through the welfare system in Great Britain in 2024-25, including around £138 billion on people of working age and their children. These statistics cover 2022-23, a year when inflation averaged 10% and benefits were uprated by 3.1%, in line with the CPI.
On the disabled, the latest statistics show that the number of people in families where someone is disabled and in absolute poverty—which is our preferred measure—fell by 100,000 between 2021-22 and 2022-23. The proportion of people in families where someone is disabled and in absolute poverty after housing costs has decreased by two percentage points since 2019-20, and the number of people in such families has increased slightly due to an increase in the number of people in families where someone is disabled.
Briefly, on education, which I think was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and others, in the special educational needs and disability sector our improvement plan will establish a single national system so that children can achieve good outcomes. We have increased high-needs revenue funding for children and young people with complex needs to cover £10.5 billion this year, up 60% over the last five years. The Law Commission is also undertaking a review of disabled children’s social care legislation to help clarify the law and to ensure that families of disabled children receive the support that they need. I hope that this may help address the remarks from the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
I will go further on the question of what the Government are doing to achieve greater national equality in the support offered to children. Our improvement plan outlines our commitment to establish a single national SEND system with a proposal to deliver national standards. National standards will improve mainstream education by setting standards for early and accurate identification of SEND need, and they will include clarifying the types of support that should be available in mainstream settings and who is responsible for securing the support. Finally, national standards will create a more consistent SEND system. That may not provide the whole answer, but I hope that helps.
Carers: Financial Support
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My noble friend makes a very good point. As I said earlier, we are committed to supporting unpaid carers to balance the care they may give alongside work, if they are able to do so. Some caring responsibilities are extremely demanding. My noble friend may know that the Carer’s Leave Bill is currently going through Parliament. This will introduce a new leave entitlement as a right from day one to those being employed, available to all employees who are providing care to a dependant with a long-term care or support need.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, we have received the Government’s response to the report from the Adult Social Care Committee and we are grateful for it. Is the Minister aware that in that report we recommended that carer’s allowance be reviewed in the next year? We recommended that the threshold for the hours of caring be reduced so that people could access carer’s allowance more easily, and that the allowance be uprated in line with the national living wage. All those recommendations have been rejected. Can the noble Viscount tell me why?
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
First, I wish the noble Baroness a very happy birthday. Moving on swiftly to her question, I very much note the points the report has produced; I read it over the weekend and it makes some important points. I said earlier how much we value the role of unpaid carers. Yes, the rate of carer’s allowance is £76.75 a week. The total caseload is 1.4 million and I think it very important indeed that we continue to review the role of carers and the carer’s allowance, but, as I mentioned earlier, there is a means-tested element here and top-ups are available for those in need.
Disabled People: Impact from Policies and Spending Cuts
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
The noble Baroness is right to raise PIP. We are targeting support at those with the greatest needs, as she raised. PIP exempts a household from the benefits cap and is uprated by CPI, and it is payable regardless of a person’s employment status. On her particular points, I am pleased to say that we continue to see an improvement in the way that we look at and pay PIP, and particularly in the clearance times—the noble Baroness will know that there have been some delays. I will write to her on her specific question about the content. As I say, the delays are very much a priority for my department at the moment.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, I take the Minister back to his answer on personal assistants. When we were taking evidence in the Adult Social Care Committee on the provision of personal assistants, it became perfectly obvious that there is a real crisis for those people who do not want to ask their families to care for them and who would really benefit from personal assistants. One lady we spoke to had employed 27 personal assistants in the course of a year, none of whom could stay with her because they could not afford to. What is the Minister going to do, if he is not going to do an impact assessment, to find out what is actually going on in the lives of these people, particularly in an area where the data is extremely short and where we also know that people are having to take on personal assistants and then act as small businesses to try to organise their national insurance? For many, that is a huge burden.
Universal Credit
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I am sorry, it should be the debt repayment rate. I am grateful to the noble Lord. I am so eager to get this right, and noble Lords may understand that there are quite a lot of numbers and it is quite technical. I am quite emotional about the fact that we are the party of social mobility and we have introduced a system that we genuinely believe will be better for everyone. It is, however, a very hard system to get right for everyone, because everyone is different—we are dealing with different situations and circumstances and we do not want people to fall through the cracks.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
I appreciate what the noble Baroness has just said, because it is an extraordinarily complex system, and this is the biggest—and riskiest—change in social security for decades. She has said that people’s lives are different. When she refers to working conditions and benefits, surely she should remember what we have been saying about the need to take great care—universal credit is great in principle but very difficult to get right. A redesign should not be beyond the Government’s confidence.
I will repeat one question that was raised by both my noble friend on our Front Bench and by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. If the Government want, as they must, to simplify whatever they can, surely they should have a better answer than the one they have given about why they do not segment certain categories of people that cannot be treated universally. It would be relatively simple to do. Apparently the department has said that it cannot be done. That is not a good enough reason when the noble Baroness is struggling to explain what will happen. There is a risk of mistakes that will bear down on the very poorest with disastrous results. This is not scaremongering, and I resent it being described so: these are very serious challenges for the very poorest in our society.
Baroness Buscombe
I agree with some of what the noble Baroness said but not that I am struggling—I am just saying as much as possible in the time allowed. There is a lot to say—a lot that is positive. I repeat, however, that she is correct in saying that it is hard and that we have to get it right. That is why we are going to spend so much time on the design, which is not there yet—we have not yet designed the managed migration process. That is the point: we will have rolled out universal credit itself in all the jobcentres—634 of them, I think—by the end of this year, but we will take the actual managed migration process much more slowly, because it will lift people already on benefits from legacy benefits on to universal credit.
I wish that we could automatically transfer certain categories of people seamlessly, but we did that in 2011 when we were moving people from incapacity benefit to ESA, and the problem was that we missed some people’s change of circumstances and underpaid them. We do not want to take that risk again—we would be facing another judicial review. We know, however, that about 700,000 people are not receiving the legacy benefits—worth about £2.4 billion—that they are entitled to, and we want them to. That is one of the main reasons why we want face-to-face contact—work coaches and claimants working together to make sure that they get the right support.
Benefits: Reductions
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, like every other noble Lord who has spoken, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Bassam for initiating this debate. It is a poignant debate as well as a timely one because we are remembering our dear friend Patricia. One of Patricia’s favourite words was “decency”, and we know exactly what she meant by that. I was her Whip for some time when I was a social security specialist in this House. I do not think that a Whip has ever learned more or done less. Sitting beside Patricia for the pension and social security debates, I was enormously impressed. I used to pray that she would stay in good health so that I would never have to take over from her. We will miss her hugely all around the House.
Patricia and I both grew up in a society that had the benefit of the post-war social contract defined by national insurance, the National Health Service and free secondary education—the elements of a decent life. It laid the foundation for a family life that was free from fear. The tragedy is that we could have predicted in the past 10 years that fear would return, and indeed it has. I very much regret the way that the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, finished his contribution; I was very appreciative of it until that point. The point is that we have seen the return of fear: not just being unable to envisage owning your own home, but the immediate day-to-day fear that comes from not being able to pay your rent or bills, or to buy food.
How did we ever come to this point? Patricia was an accomplished historian, and it is worth reflecting on the years between 1997 and 2010 when we are now certain, by irrefutable measures, that child poverty fell by one-third due to a combination of more affordable childcare, the minimum wage, access to jobs, better benefits and better services—years in which family incomes grew. The years between 1997 and 2010 proved that when Governments are serious about reducing child and family poverty, they can do it, and Patricia was part of that Labour Government.
The past eight years have shown how very easy those measures are to undo, even things that you think are certain and deep in the system. Year-on-year cuts in public spending have removed vital services, such as children’s services, that have an immediate impact on how people live and work. There was a real cut of £12 billion in welfare benefits in 2015, £3 billion of which were cuts to work allowances in universal credit, a scheme predicated on “making work pay”—one of the many paradoxes to be exposed; the rest was an accumulation of cuts in working benefits, tax credits, housing benefits, council tax benefits and of course child benefits. Of course I welcome the £1.7 billion that the Chancellor announced yesterday to increase working allowances, but there is a limit to how grateful we can be to a Government who are simply trying to repair the damage that they themselves have deliberately inflicted with calculated policies. And, as we have been told by many people around the House, there is indeed more to come.
We have heard a lot about jobs in this debate so far. The changing picture of family and child poverty is not about unemployment; it is more about the deregulated, insecure and unstable workplace that so many families are now in thrall to. In the middle of that massive economic change has come universal credit, the biggest and riskiest change in social security for decades and the biggest IT project, with all that that implies.
UC may well be defensible in principle, but it simply fails to acknowledge the realities of working life. It is a system based on an assumption of what is average, on monthly assessment, on erratic payments determined by arbitrary dates and calculated delays in payment, with a total reliance on IT. Families are flummoxed by how much or how little they receive. Many of them are for the first time in their lives in debt, in housing arrears, dependent on food banks.
The PAC said that universal credit is taking too long to pay people the money they need to live on. The Select Committee on Work and Pensions said that the universal support system needs to be completely overhauled if it is not to threaten not only the well-being of claimants, but the scheme itself. Every expert— and I include two ex-Prime Ministers—has said the same. The time for patching up is long gone. Another delay will solve nothing. It is imperative to embark on fundamental redesign to remove the structural disincentives, absurdities and perversities in the system. Does the Minister—who is not in her place—agree with that analysis and that there should be no mass migration until that is sorted? Does she also agree with the Resolution Foundation, which states:
“Reforming while cutting is reckless, and doing so on the back of a catastrophic decade for low-to-middle income families’ living standards is plain wrong”?
The effects are nationwide and in every community. I live in what looks like a very affluent community in Lewes, but there are pockets of poverty. We have three food banks. The wonderful volunteers who run the Fitzjohn’s Food Bank tell me that food bank usage has doubled over the past year. It has provided 43,000 meals. A mother came in the other day in total distress, having lost half her universal credit without warning. It is extremely anxious about the move to universal credit. That is just one food bank.
The rise of food banks is ascribable not just to universal credit. That is the problem: the causes go much deeper. That is why the damage relief Budget this week, which prioritised an increase in tax relief for top earners, is a disgrace. It simply puts the country on a faster track to even greater inequality.
In conclusion, we are witnessing fundamental changes in the welfare state that are dismantling the idea of the social contract and the notion of an unconditional social citizenship which included all families in the prospect of a decent life. Universal credit overrides the real choices that people face and attaches conditions to accessing and keeping work. Risk is no longer pooled; resources are no longer fairly shared. The burden is being borne by poorer families with fewer means to change their circumstances.
Patricia Hollis would never have been silent on that. She would never have stopped until she had persuaded the Government that they had to change. That is her legacy, and that is our duty.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, even if he has made most of my speech for me—although I can hardly complain about that. I shall try to add a few points that he did not mention.
This is a very regressive Bill that plays fast and loose with language and is based on a series of false premises. The basic tenets of the Bill have already been demolished by my noble friend Lady Hollis and the cumulative impact exposed by my noble friends Lady Sherlock and Lady Lister, the latter of whom also offered the House an alternative and rather more accurate title for the Bill.
I will confine myself to two broad points. The whole tone of the Bill is based on the assumption that if we call poverty by other names or measure it in other ways it will go away. In fact, as has been systematically demonstrated this evening, the Bill cuts the incomes of the poorest, and the working poor in particular. It puts children inevitably at the greatest risk. It prejudices family life and threatens the most vulnerable. It is a prospectus for greater poverty and greater inequality. It is a deliberate policy choice by this Government.
Clauses 1 to 7, which eradicate the poverty targets, are a very simple solution to the problem—they aim not to abolish poverty itself but simply the targets in the framework that has enabled successive Governments to examine, understand, chart and attack poverty. As we have heard many times already, the targets would be replaced by a set of life chances. It is a solution worthy of Kafka. The Government, as we have heard, are virtually alone in defending this. My own figures—perhaps the Minister can confirm this—say that 97% of respondents to the consultation on the new measures believe that the targets under the Child Poverty Act should be retained; a mere 3% disagreed. Can the Minister in winding up tell us who constituted the 3%? It would be quite interesting to know who agreed with him.
The reasons for the abolition are pretty unsubtle. Those income measures tell a graphic story of failure: half a million more children will be in absolute poverty after 2016 and a likely 4.7 million will be in absolute poverty by 2020. Clearly, income is no longer an indication, let alone a determinant, of poverty, because the Government decree it so. I find it astonishing that this can be defended with any integrity or logic, yet we know that the Minister is a man of great intelligence and integrity. Instead of robust, independent targets that will impose on the Government reporting requirements and accountability for troubled families, worklessness and educational achievement—these are the substitutes for the hard measures of income poverty. They are not, as they have been described by the Minister in another place, measures of poverty. They are not the root causes of poverty. Research shows that they are more likely to be the outcomes of poverty. There is a mass of evidence showing the proven link between poverty and educational failure, and much of the other indicators. If the Government were serious about the root causes of poverty, they can do something very simple: keep the income measures in place, add them to the new measures of life chances, explore the relationship between them and devise policies to attack them.
When I think about what the Government are trying to do by redefining poverty, I think of a young man I heard about last week. He is a student who was unable to go to school because he had only one shirt. When it was washed he had to wait for it to dry, but there was no money for the meter, so he missed school. That is what poverty means: it means having no money for the meter, not having a spare shirt or a spare pair of shoes. That young man possibly came from a troubled family, and it would be good to measure his educational achievement and his social mobility, although it would take years and involve sophisticated methodologies. The point is, by dismantling the full picture of the impact of policies on incomes of families in and out of work, we cannot equip ourselves to understand or frame the policies that have the greatest effect, let alone eradicate material poverty.
One of the most disingenuous aspects of this part of the Bill is that the new measures proposed are at most half measures. The most egregious gap is that there is no measure for the poverty of families in work—those families attacked by the attempted tax credit changes. Another is that there is no reference or target for measuring the cost of housing on families, at a time when working families are being priced out of the private rented sector. Will the Minister explain why these measures do not take into account those two most fundamental aspects of family costs?
That brings me to the second area: housing. As we have heard, Clause 21 introduces a 1% reduction to social housing rents for each of four years, beginning in April 2016. It looks like a sensible step and has been cautiously welcomed. What are not welcome are the perverse consequences. The predicted loss of income to housing associations is £3.85 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated a loss of 14,000 homes; the National Housing Federation, 27,000. Which of these figures does the Minister agree with, or does he have an alternative figure? There is only one way to compensate for this: maintain funding for the affordable homes programme. Will he give us that assurance?
As we have heard, some of the most vulnerable people in society will be badly hurt by these reductions in rent. These are people in supported housing, people who need shelter from domestic abuse, people who would otherwise be on the streets. It is the most expensive form of housing support. It carries high rents. As the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, said, housing associations are already cutting back on their plans. It is such a false economy. Supported housing is estimated to save the country about £640 million a year. In 10 years’ time the shortfall, if these plans go ahead, will be 46,000 homes. The only certain prognosis is a massive increase in homelessness and greater cost to the NHS. This is yet another example of the dysfunctional disconnect between housing and health policy. The Bill has already been amended in the House of Commons to allow for some limited exemptions. I urge the Minister to do what many of the agencies that really know what they are talking about are asking him to do and introduce an amendment for the whole of the supported housing sector. That is the only thing that we can do to guarantee viability.
Finally, I come back to a very significant point about young people. The Government announced in the Budget that 18 to 21 year-olds making a new claim for universal credit will not be automatically entitled to support with their housing costs. As yet, the details are unclear, as is the process of implementation, but there is widespread concern that many young people may not fall into a protected category. Already, 8% of 16 to 24 year-olds report homelessness. The last thing we want is more young people recruited on to the streets. Will the Minister give us an assurance this evening that he will provide the list of exemptions that takes into account all the reasons that young people may need support with their housing costs, and that this will be the subject of wide consultation before any regulations are brought forward?
In conclusion, in his foreword to the Cabinet Office briefing on the Bill, the Prime Minister said that the Bill was designed to champion social justice. We on this side of the House have a better idea of what social justice means. It does not mean cutting benefits. It does not mean removing a guaranteed framework so that you know how many people are in poverty and whether those figures are going up or down. It means being fair and introducing policies that really support families and the most vulnerable in our society.
Architecture and the Built Environment
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, it is a very important report, and I am very grateful to my noble friend for securing the debate and for introducing it so comprehensively.
The unifying and really big idea in the report, which has not been provided with such clarity or meaning before, is about what constitutes the elements of good places and good place-making. What makes the argument in the report compelling is not least that it presents a view of planning which is potentially creative, humane, connective and dynamic—somewhat the opposite to the constrained and rather mean-spirited version that we have had in recent years, which is focused on development control, is seen to be burdensome and has been unfairly blamed for failure, notably to deal with housing supply. I suggest that those failures have their roots in the economic and social challenges which show up the clear failure of policy on place-making and regeneration as a whole.
I am inclined not just to welcome the report but to say, “Amen: at last a different vision. A prospect for the sort of change that so many people who care about this country and what it feels and looks like have wanted for a long time”. In particular, the report makes clear a positive and integrated version of place-making, in which you indeed need planning, landscape, architecture, conservation and engineering working together across disciplines. We have never needed such a powerful vision more urgently than we do now. As a country, we need to plan on a scale which has simply eluded us so far. We need to build new power stations, green energy sites, gas storage facilities, reservoirs, airports, railways and towns. That all requires of us an approach to spatial planning, integrated labour markets, environmental sensitivity and climate change. We need to plan for food, energy and climate security. At the same time, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, made so clear, we need to conserve and work with the character of what makes this country so beautiful and different: the spectacular heritage of the everyday and everywhere.
To do all that means accepting the second definition in the Farrell report: that place is character. It involves politics, life, advocacy, community and the environment—elements which bring together not just the professionals but the whole community. Fundamental to that is expanding and sharing knowledge and the need to learn the constituent elements of place-making from the primary school to, yes, the planning committee. I do not agree with the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, made. I think that there is a lot we can do to assist planning committees of elected officials to understand some of the basic criteria that go into making good decisions.
We also need to inspire a new and energetic generation of place-makers drawn widely from different disciplines who can be taught in different ways by different people—not least, to develop a national habit of design. I have reservations about detail and implementation. For example, although I applaud the observation that conservation and development are not either/or, I do not think that the answer lies in bringing English Heritage and the CABE-Design Council into a single organisation. They deal with different criteria, which are often contestable, of development.
I am concerned about a few missing realities, particularly the serious impact of the loss of specialist planners and architects and the continuing uncertainties in the planning system. I hope that we will have the opportunity to debate the report at greater length. I hope that the Minister will say tonight that it is irresistible and implementable.