Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, I speak very briefly in support of Amendment 35, to which I have my name, to endorse entirely the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, in introducing this bank of amendments, and to support the other amendments that deal with disability particularly. In doing so I should declare my interest as vice-president of Mencap Wales. In fact, at the Mencap annual conference in Warwick on Saturday, there were people who asked specifically about these matters. They said, “They have taken away from us home ownership for people with long-term disabilities, and now they are going to start clobbering us on housing benefit, where people with disabilities may be in a particularly vulnerable position”. I should therefore like to ask the Minister, so that I can respond to people who raise these questions with me: do the Government still believe in home ownership for everybody, and if so, does that include people with long-term disabilities? If the Government, having taken away the previous scheme, are not going to put something in its place, surely that is a straight contradiction of what the party opposite has always put itself forward as believing in?

Secondly, with regard to people with disabilities and housing benefit—the amendments before us would make exceptions for them—I hope that the Minister will be able to spell out how he will ensure that they do not suffer. If the amendments are not acceptable, I hope that amendments will come forward from the Government on Report. If not, I hope that there will be an opportunity to vote on these matters to show exactly where each of us in each of our parties, including the coalition partners, stand on such a basic issue.

[Baroness Hollins]

I, too, support Amendment 35, as introduced by my noble friend Lord Rix. As we have already heard today, tidy laws are not always fair laws. I am concerned about some exceptional people whose needs cannot neatly be described and I hope that common sense will prevail.

I shall give the example of a young man with autism and learning disability, Theo. Since early childhood, Theo has loved and become very knowledgeable about cathedrals, churches and architecture. He is also a man with complex impairments and a history of behaviour which has challenged every shared setting he has lived in. With specialist advice from Housing Options, and support and endorsement from social services, his parents set up a safe and individualised housing and care package for him.

The Government’s view may now be that it has never been the intention that SMI would cover all a person’s housing liabilities, but Theo’s shared-ownership mortgage was offered precisely on the basis that it would cover the mortgaged part of his housing cost, as was DWP policy at the time. The past nine years of Theo’s life have been built on that. His home has provided the all-important stability that someone with autism needs; and his disabilities combine to make change much more disturbing than we would find it.

Theo has an interest-only mortgage, so the possibility of the acquisition of a valuable capital asset does not apply in his case. With careful management by his parents, he has been able to lead a happy life at a much lower cost to the public purse than the alternative arrangement of a secure hospital. However, the new FSA rules require mortgage-lenders to set aside more capital and to treat mortgages on shared-ownership properties as 100 per cent mortgages. The result is a sudden gap between the rate at which lenders have to lend—for example, 6 or 8 per cent —and what the new SMI rate, which I think is 3.63 per cent, will cover. In Theo’s case, this leads to a shortfall of £200 per month. You can imagine that the arrears are already quite high. A new mortgage would be at an even higher rate, but he would then have to find a 25 per cent deposit for his property. He does not have the money to negotiate another mortgage.

There has been quite a bit of publicity about the adverse effect of this reform on HOLD. Experienced housing experts say that fewer lenders are likely to want to deal with disabled applicants seeking this solution to support a non-institutional life.

Ageing parents of disabled adults have followed similar paths with the help of enlightened housing associations. Those parents have been making responsible arrangements in their own lifetime, hoping for some assurance of long-term stability and security for their child. Instead, Theo's parents now face the prospect of seeing Theo’s distress at being uprooted from his home and moved, probably, to an inappropriate and less sensitive institution, which will be much more costly.

As the noble Lord, Lord Rix, pointed out, there are probably about 1,000 customers with learning disabilities—0.4 per cent, I understand, of the total caseload looked at by the impact assessment. Some of those administering HOLD have suggested ways in which the cost of continuing higher-rate payments for this group of disabled people could be contained, but it would require acceptance that there are indeed exceptions to the rule.

Since the Poor Law 1601, society has tried to tidy away people whose needs do not fit present-day norms, but in today’s more enlightened society we have made huge strides towards creating an inclusive society in which every person's humanity and dignity are respected and in which they have a place regardless of the extent of the difference that the person presents. However, these gains are quite fragile and we need look no further than Winterbourne View to be reminded of the previous scandals in mental handicap hospitals such as Ely and Normansfield in the late 1970s. Surely, we must now realise that without adequate advocacy and diligence we could again allow such inhumane provision to be re-created—people shunned by society and placed out of sight and out of mind at considerable expense but in the interests of tidiness. The test of a humane society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.

I had little awareness of the lives lived by some people with learning disabilities until I had a disabled child. My eyes were opened. I should like the Minister to consider using the Bill to reinstate SMI at the higher level for people such as Theo, which would allow them the opportunity to live with dignity in their own homes.

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

My Lords, I rise briefly and somewhat diffidently because I did not have the privilege of hearing some of the earlier exchanges, as I had other obligations at that time. However, I have been listening to the later stages of the debate and before I add one comment to it I want to make it clear that in no sense am I derogatory of the very real problems that disabled people face—and those faced by other people of particular categories, including foster carers and others. Indeed, a good deal of my trade, time, interest and passion in my previous vocation as a Member of the other place was directed towards these issues. Of course they matter, and the people who are experiencing them matter. They have complex and difficult needs.

At the same time, it is worth putting down a marker. My remarks are prompted by those of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, about the cumulative effect. Of course, in a sense, I entirely agree with her point about the cumulative effect of changes, but I am afraid that the argument runs both ways. If the effect is cumulative and poses difficulties for the individual, a cumulative set of concessions or changes to the package that the Minister is presenting to us also has implications for public expenditure. In our debates last week on disabled children, I made the point that I regarded their overall position as being one of particular pressure that required the Minister’s attention and the maximum degree of flexibility. While I do not for a moment resile from the arguments that have been put with great passion by noble Lords on the range of difficulties, we will not be able to meet all those requirements within the equal requirement that the Minister and the Government have for economies in public expenditure—and with the commitments that have been undertaken to secure the prize of universal credit.

What we must do—and I will certainly want to listen to the Minister’s answer on this—is ensure that we understand the implications, and that is why debate is so important. We should be prepared to make changes where the shoe pinch is particularly hard or where the interaction that the noble Baroness referred to may have taken place. However, we will not be able to solve all the problems of all the client groups, however good our intentions are, without making it impossible for the Bill to survive and be sustainable. The Minister has to answer in that vein, and I hope that he does so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

I will repeat the two points. The first point is exactly the issue that we want to deal with and the one that the foster community is worried about—the voids area. That is something that we are aiming to address. My response to the second point was, and remains, that this is where we would expect discretionary housing payments to come into play. It is exactly the complex set of judgments that need to be made, and local authorities are best placed to make them.

[Baroness Hollins]

I apologise for this, but I think that the Minister said that the same mortgage rates would be applicable as for everybody else. From my understanding, in the example that I gave of Theo, the mortgage rates had changed from the previous preferential rates, leading to a gap in the costs of his housing that he cannot meet.