Food: Food Banks

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I can assure my noble friend that the DWP is retaining advances of benefit within the core benefit system. The crisis elements of the Social Fund—the community grants—are going towards local welfare provision by local authorities. This happened in April. My information is that that transfer has landed well.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, does the Minister really think that people want to go to food banks or that those who are providing them really want to do so? I visited the food bank in Consett recently, and the person running it said to me, “Please, please, tell the Government that this is because the benefits system is now inadequate and people are desperate. That’s why they’re coming”.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, as noble Lords know, we are very concerned about the existing benefits system, which is very complex. We are introducing the universal credit, which is designed to make work pay but also to direct more funds to the poorest people. That is exactly why we have introduced that initiative.

Homeless People: Night Shelters

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the actual finding was that a particular night shelter in Anglesey could not be treated as a dwelling because it was, basically, a converted hall. There was no reserving and the people there came on a first come, first-served basis every night. It was a particular finding which might apply to a few other places. However, that is about how local areas find the best possible funding for their support for homeless people.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I declare my interests stated in the register. I know that the Minister understands that many homeless organisations are trying to move as many people as possible from hostel accommodation in to independent living. However, does he realise that that is now being put at threat because of the changes to the benefits system and, of course, the bedroom tax? In Newcastle, the local housing company has had to warn the Cyrenians, which is the biggest supplier, if you like, of work with the homeless, that it is coming to the stage where it will not be able to allocate any properties to the homeless because it will have to use them for people being transferred within their own estate.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, that is clearly a very wide question and I find it hard to answer the specific point. On the point about hostels for the homeless, our best estimate is that there are about 9,000 bedrooms for people who are rough sleepers. A proportion of those may be affected by this particular provision. Authorities need to look at the other sources of funding, including the Supporting People programme, which received £6.5 billion in this spending review.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the maiden speeches. I always welcome people from the north-east, even if they are on the opposite side, and I know the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, quite well from being a Member of Parliament in the north-east. I was also very interested to hear that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester was born in and has such a close attachment to east Africa. I have a very close attachment to east Africa, so maybe we can have the odd conversation in Kiswahili.

I have a different approach to my speech because I always view the Queen’s Speech as the signal from the Government of their vision for the future and their aspiration for the country. Perhaps it is a bit ambitious to look at this Queen’s Speech from that perspective, but I will have a go and deal with detail when we come to the individual Bills.

The debate yesterday showed that whatever the analysis of how and why the economy is in the state it is, there is a consensus that more needs to be done to get growth. There is also the realisation that for the foreseeable future the country will continue to face economic hardship. I want us to think about what that means for the areas of social policy that we are looking at today.

The post-war settlement on public services and welfare, born out of the Beveridge report, was not just based on economic arguments but sought to look after those who had fought in the Second World War. It was based on the values of decency and on conquering what were then seen, and today would still be seen, as five great evils. Those values essentially spelt out the Britain that people had sacrificed for during the war. Those values are enduring. While the circumstances and context that we are living in have changed, the values are still there.

It is clear that we really need to reform the way in which public services—health, education and welfare—are delivered so that they are relevant to the vast changes in our society. Britain has never been a place where there has been a belief that the market on its own can deliver the values that our society is based on. That is as true now as it was in the 1940s. Our circumstances are very different: women expect to work and are expected to work, and the nature of work is vastly different, with many fewer unskilled workers and many more changes in any working life.

In his speech last week, the Prime Minister said that we are now in a “global race”. Globalisation has brought incredible changes to our society, many of which my parents’ generation—let alone my grandparents’ generation—would not recognise and certainly would not have envisaged. Of course, one is the level of migration around the world, but there is also the recognition in this country that migration—not all of it, but some of it—is critical to our economy and our future, even if some aspects of it give us problems. It is our job to tackle those problems.

To handle this global race, we need not only some immigration but a well educated and trained workforce. We need a healthy workforce. We still need a system that protects people when they are most vulnerable so that they will be able to retrain and re-equip themselves quickly to get back into the workforce. They will inevitably need to do that several times over their working lives, which means that they need to have real confidence in the public services that they rely on: education, training, healthcare and income support in hard times. They need confidence that their children, and increasingly their parents—that is you and I—will have responsive and high-quality services when they need them so that as working people they can continue to play their part in the workforce, the economy and their community.

My concern with the Government’s programme is that it seems more concerned with rhetoric—whether to appease the right wing of the Tory party or UKIP, I am never too sure—than with properly addressing the challenge of reform. Far too often, rhetoric replaces real, necessary reform. We need to reform the way in which public services work in order to see that real change in the relationship between the population and the services that will enable this country to properly play its part in that global race.

I want the Government to do this in a way that upholds the values that make this country what it is, and what in my view makes it great, and to move away from the rhetoric that makes it virtually impossible to achieve that objective: that everyone on benefits is a scrounger, that every immigrant is leeching from our National Health Service or other aspects of our society, that education is not able to deliver. The Secretary of State for Education keeps saying that he is committed to reform, but we have had no plan to tackle the shortage of school places, which is so acute in some areas, and proposals for the curriculum will take us back generations rather than offer a curriculum suited to the 21st century. Reforms in welfare have been overshadowed and in many senses threatened by the rhetoric around “scroungers” and the lack of candour on the part of the Secretary of State about the impact of the changes.

I wish that the Queen’s Speech had tackled the skills and training deficit, but it did not. We have a Bill on social care, which is hugely welcome. I suspect, however, that it is insufficiently radical and does not take us far enough into the real challenges that face us, but we will deal with that when we get the Bill.

The Government have become frightened of talking about reform in health. We had two years where we were supposed to be getting into real reform and real change, but they became worried about that and did not introduce the sort of reforms that would have transformed our health service for the future. The new Secretary of State has now been told, “Do whatever you can to get to the election without mentioning reform”.

Without real and radical reform, the Government will simply end up with cut after cut, so that people will lose confidence in the contribution that public services can make to securing and empowering them for the future. That will bring huge change to this country, change that I believe nobody wants. This is all very difficult, which I suspect is why the Government have simply avoided tackling it in the Queen’s Speech. We will all suffer from that.

Credit Unions

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Kennedy, not just for today’s debate, but for continually reminding us of the importance of supporting credit unions and changing the environment in which they operate. I have had long-term experience of credit unions in the north-east. I used to teach at what was Sunderland Polytechnic. I taught only mature students, who had come into higher education without the traditional qualifications, on a course where they would eventually become qualified community or youth workers. There was one incredibly strong woman who came from south Tyneside and who had had a difficult life, but was an incredibly good community organiser. We put her on a placement in an estate in Jarrow where there were real problems. These led to significant intimidation and threats because of the number of lenders and so on who operated on the estate without any controls or proper attention. We discussed this and talked about whether she should set up a credit union, which she did. It is now a strong and powerful credit union.

Subsequently, I joined my local credit union as an investor, along with the then Prime Minister. Even so, it did not succeed and I was part of winding it up. However, in the process of doing it, we encouraged other credit unions in Durham to look at merging. They did not quite get that far, but we were able to get housing providers in Derwentside and Wear Valley to support their local credit union. They made this a major issue in their tenants’ away days and in other ways when they put on events for tenants. They really got them to look at how they manage their money and brought in the credit union to help that thinking and spread good practice. Actually, in the housing association in Derwentside, some senior staff got very involved in running the credit union, so it is absolutely strong and has a very good base now. Again, I recommend that to others.

I also managed to get Barclays Bank to come and give advice, support and some publicity to the credit union. The banks could do more, and I very much support the ideas that both my noble friend Lord Kennedy and the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, had about them. Banks have a great a responsibility but also they would learn an enormous amount about customer relationships and how to work with people who may not have much money but want to be careful with it and use it effectively. As my noble friend Lady McDonagh said, this debate is very timely. At the beginning of this week, I was talking about food banks. A young MP said to me, “I can’t remember: did we have poverty at this level with this effect during the period of Mrs Thatcher?”. Actually, we did not because the safety net was stronger.

I do not know whether the Minister ever gets the opportunity to wander around towns in poor areas but when I go into Consett, in the constituency that I used to represent, I am horrified at the number of shop fronts that are now easy credit shops. They advertise to folk who I know do not just have nothing but already have massive debts to go in and get another instant loan. Too many of those folk do not have pay days for it to be anything but ridiculous that they are offered that sort of opportunity. They then go into a shop where they get white goods and furniture, and they are charged the most incredible rates of interest on a weekly basis. Of course, in the past social fund loans funded that. The experience that the right reverend Prelate talked about in Stanley—“Big Stanley” as we call it in County Durham—links to that directly. Your cooker has broken down and you need a cooker to cook the kids’ tea so what do you do? What you do now is go to one of those shops where they give you extortionate prices for goods, even sometimes for second-hand goods.

I do not think the Government will be comfortable with that or with that being the end result of stopping social fund loans. We have to rethink this. I am not saying, “Go back to the old system”, but there needs to be something that gives people an opportunity to be able to feed their children without getting into that level of debt. Credit unions are one way—not the only way—but they are simply not there on the high street, certainly not in the north-east. I know that one or two of the very big ones have shop fronts but that is not there for most. The Government have to really think through some of the excellent recommendations that there have been and act quickly. The problem out there is getting more and more serious.

I had a Christmas greeting this week from someone that the Minister may have heard of: Bob Holman. Bob works and lives in Easterhouse, and was many years ago my tutor when I trained to be a social worker in Birmingham. He has more integrity than anyone I have ever met in my life. He left university teaching because he wanted to work on a normal wage among the people who he had been training us to work with. He berates me regularly for not taking a low wage—and for not taking a low wage when I was in Parliament. He lives by his beliefs. He described to me in his Christmas note the number of people in Easterhouse now using the food bank as the only way they can feed their children. He talked about the café they had opened at the local church, where they give free tea and coffee and subsidised meals. Bob, of course, is the person who persuaded Iain Duncan Smith to take poverty seriously when he visited that estate.

I do not think any of us can be proud of what is happening today on estates like that. The Government have a responsibility in this. I could have gone on about all the other ideas that everybody has had but I do not want to take up the House’s time. I hope that the Government will take up these good ideas but will also implement them quickly so that more people have access to decent credit and savings in a way that the credit union movement enables them to do.

Universal Credit

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, there is naturally a programme to get employers on board. HMRC has launched a major campaign—for instance, writing to 1.4 million employers so that they are ready in time. Even in the KPMG report, 75% of employers were aware of the change over and that was before this campaign got going.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

Is the Minister content that people currently being moved from one benefit to another frequently have to wait three, four or more weeks because the system cannot cope? How is that meant to give us confidence in what the Minister and the department are proposing for next year?

[Lord Freud]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right on this particular problem. It is one of the reasons we are sweeping away the existing system—it is simply too complicated for people to operate. The real difference in the new welfare system is that we do not have a distinction between out-of-work benefits and in-work tax credits. You do not have to jump from one system to the other when you move category. You stay on the same system and do not have to suffer awful delays.

Unemployment: Young People

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, youth unemployment, specifically, falls within the context of overall unemployment or employment. In practice, it is more important to have integrated support for people to get back into the employment market than across government for youth. In that area, we have the Social Justice Cabinet Committee, which looks at supporting society right across the piece, including youth.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, is the Minister aware how much the Government are failing many young people in the north-east? We have the highest rate of unemployment and of youth unemployment in the country. That part of the country is struggling to keep going. Given that the Government scrapped the Future Jobs Fund and the regional development agency, which was much engaged in these things, will the Minister give his personal commitment to look at what is going wrong in the north-east and to come up with specific answer for that region and those young people?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, without just saying yes, I will give that commitment, I want to point out that despite a growing economy some real structural problems have existed in different regions over decades, and certainly over the past decade. There are no easy solutions, but I will follow up the request personally and look at some of these regional issues. We are spending a great deal of time worrying about this.

Unemployment: Young People

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jones]

My Lords—

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords—

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, clearly our intention is to put support where it is most required. Therefore, the schemes will be widespread but naturally there will be an emphasis on the areas that need most support.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

Next Question.