Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I support the non-existent amendment of my noble friend Lord Bach as it is key to the changes that we are having. We should not be discussing this Bill in isolation from the Welfare Reform Act that preceded it. They represent a package of cuts and changes that will bear very heavily on 5 million to 7 million people in this country—no light measure.

To follow my noble friend, it is worth reminding the House of what we discussed at Second Reading about the number of changes that will affect people who are receiving benefits, even though many of them are in work. Those changes will happen to them all at once. We will see a new structure of benefits, brought together in universal credit—that is a structure that I welcome—but it will be accompanied, as in this Bill, and in reducing benefit inflation to CPI, by serious cuts, which many benefit claimants will think is simply an error by the department. They will go frantic with concern in trying to rectify them. That is the second change.

The third change that we are going to see is to the new patterns of payment. For example, tenants of social housing who currently have their housing benefit paid directly to the landlord will now have it paid to themselves, looped through a bank account. Very often, given other pressures of finance, debts and so on, they may be in real difficulties in making that money over to the landlord at the end of the month. So there is a new pattern of payment, with which tenants must become familiar. They will also have monthly payment of benefit, when many of them have been used to weekly or fortnightly payments, and the payment will go to a single earner or person in the household and not split. Again, that is a major change.

All those changes—the new structure, the cuts, the new method of payment direct to tenants, and the monthly payments—will be handled by an IT system, when we know that 20% to 30% of the tenants wishing to claim benefit have no familiarity with IT at all. So what will they do? What they have always done is to seek legal advice from Citizens Advice, which in the past has been funded very substantially by the Lord Chancellor’s Department. CABs have received some 40% of their funding from the Lord Chancellor’s Department, but that has been cut, and they are now 40% short. As a result, those same people facing this sequence of changes, some of which I support, like universal credit, and some of which I deplore, will make their bids for benefit on the basis of an IT system, with which they are not familiar, instead of a paper trail. Where do they go? They cannot go to the traditional advice centres because the legal aid money that sustained them has been withdrawn in the worst, most foolish and most indecent economy of which I can conceive. I declare my interest as a chair of a housing association. I am having to appoint paid professionals to do the welfare advice, to be paid for out of increased tenants’ rents, which hitherto was provided by the skilled but unpaid volunteers of the CABs, which represented a real commitment to the big society to which we all give lip service and which, I fear, is too seldom observed in this House.

My noble friend is absolutely right that this is a foolish way to proceed and I regret very much that we were not allowed to debate this properly. I speak with some concern because, as a departmental Minister for eight years, I was responsible for tribunals before they went over, via Leggatt, to a generalised tribunal system. I sat in on those tribunals for DLA and other benefits. My noble friend is exactly right—I could see within five minutes whether the person coming before the tribunal had or had not received prior legal advice. If they had not, the appeal or discussion at tribunal took five times as long, with the chairman, as they were then called—now judge—trying to tease out the issues and establish whether it was a bona fide case, whether they could take it further and even whether the person was claiming against the right benefit. In some cases, they were complaining about an incapacity benefit when it should have been DLA, and I felt like jumping up and saying, “You’ve got the wrong benefit here—let’s start again”.

That is the situation here. We are transferring the pressure of the problem away from the point that is most approachable, accessible and value for money—local services in the community funded by legal aid—to the tribunal process itself and merely distributing the pressure over a longer time, at greater cost, with greater inaccessibility and greater difficulty for everyone to understand. That is a huge folly and, like my noble friend, I beg the Government, even at this late stage, to reconsider.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, at the risk of repeating arguments made in earlier debates, I remind the Committee of the context of the Bill. This country is still recovering from the most damaging financial crisis for generations. When this Government came to power, the state was borrowing £1 in every £4 that it spent. Even before the recession, the UK had the highest structural deficit in the G7 and between 1997 and 2010 welfare spending increased by some 60% in real terms. Welfare spending now accounts for more than a quarter of government spending: that is, more than £200 billion. The £1.9 billion of savings enabled by this Bill in 2015-16 is a necessary part of helping to reduce public spending, tackle the deficit and secure the economic recovery.

Amendments 1 and 9, spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, would remove the 1% uprating figure in the Bill in Clause 1 and Clause 2. The effect of these amendments would be to give the Government discretion over benefit levels on an annual basis in much the same way as under existing legislation. As I have already explained, we believe it is vital that we set out credible plans for the longer term. The Bill is needed to enable us to set out our uprating policy over several years so that we can be sure we will deliver those £1.9 billion worth of savings.

My speaking notes at this point said that this amendment would completely undermine that core purpose of the Bill. I was relieved, but not surprised, that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, used that very word to define the effect of these amendments. He said that the amendments would undermine and, indeed, negate the core purpose of the Bill. They would, and so a vote for these amendments would be equivalent to a vote against the Bill at Second Reading. I note that the amendments, while removing the 1% figure, do not suggest an alternative uprating metric. If we assume that the noble Lord’s intention is that we operate in line with the CPI, this would obviously not deliver the savings we are talking about. I remind the Committee that the £1.9 billion worth of savings that this Bill will generate in 2015-16 are equivalent to the salaries of about 45,000 nurses and about 40,000 teachers, so these are not negligible amounts, as some noble Lords have suggested, and the savings would have to be found somewhere else.

As I say, the amendments undermine the purpose of the Bill and, frankly, demonstrate a fundamental difference of opinion between the two sides of the House on how we deal with the current economic situation. The Government believe that the main priority is to get spending under control, reduce the deficit and restore growth. The Bill helps us to achieve that. At the same time, we are implementing policies that make a real difference to people’s lives—people of the most modest means. Let me name just a few of them: universal credit; the pupil premium; reform of early years education; tackling problem debt; and lifting people out of paying income tax through raising the personal allowance. We believe that these policies are vital if we are to have a real and sustainable impact on poverty over the medium to longer term. We cannot simply focus on increasing incomes through welfare payments, lifting people just above the poverty line.

The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, asked me a number of questions about the impact assessment. I remind the Committee that we published a detailed impact assessment for the Bill, which includes details of the impact by family type, and have made public details of the impacts on relative child poverty. She asked whether we could delay the changes until we had a broader impact assessment that covered the impact on mental health, crime and, I think she said, social unrest. As regards the impact on crime, it seems to me that the noble Baroness is being completely unrealistic to believe that such an impact can be measured with any degree of precision. At the start of the downturn, most commentators believed that crime rates would rise substantially. If one had taken the average view of people in the know, that is what one would have put in an impact assessment. The truth is that crime rates have not risen substantially. They have fallen. I obviously welcome that. I make that point only to make the more general point that, while one can make an impact assessment that covers some things with a reasonable degree of precision, on other things—on crime, for example—it is impossible to do what the noble Baroness wants. That is why the impact assessment is couched in the terms that it is.

The noble Baroness asked about exceptions or exemptions from direct payment. We are not setting out the exemptions in the regulations because they will be based on individual needs and assessments. Individuals will work with an adviser via Jobcentre Plus. There will be personal budgeting support, which will contain two elements: money advice, to help people who cannot manage monthly payments, and alternative payment arrangements, which include rent paid direct to landlords, more frequent payments and payments split between partners. These will be undertaken on an individual basis.

I do not really want to get involved in a long macroeconomic discussion. I would like to get involved in one, but perhaps I might simply refer the noble Baroness to the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Desai, in the Financial Times last week. It seemed to explain extremely carefully and clearly why this downturn is not like the typical Keynesian downturn that we have seen in the past. I would commend that letter to all noble Lords who are looking for a primer on why the Government are following the line that they are.