Health: Local Healthwatch Funding
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Earl Howe
We do need to know if people are being sold short. I would say to my noble friend that that is one of the reasons why local Healthwatch has a seat at the table of the health and well-being board, where it is eminently able to make its voice heard if it feels that it does not have sufficient resources to do the job which local authorities are legally obliged to commission.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
My Lords, can we therefore have an assurance from the Minister that if local authorities do not spend all the money allocated on Healthwatch, they will not find their funding for Healthwatch proportionately reduced next year?
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)
My Lords, briefly, I agree with everything that has been said. There is often criticism in my native city of Glasgow that the housing estates are too big, but those of us who know those housing estates know that there are excellent communities within them. In fact, those of us who have lived in big cities think of them not as a big city but as a collection of villages and communities. Many of the housing estates that I know of and are excellent were built just after the war, when the soldiers came home from the forces. The families were regarded as big. I came from a family of five living in a tenement, and in those days that was a small family—there were families of eight or nine.
Noble Lords are right to say that there can be a big impact on children if they have to move away from the communities that they enjoy. Most of us have happy memories of the childhood communities we lived in and the support of the extended families who were there. We could end up taking young children out of their school, as has already been stated, and away from their community facilities into a strange area.
I go back to where I was raised in the city of Glasgow. If a family is in an underoccupied house, that can mean that the house has a garden and a back and front door, which is regarded as significant for a family. To go to the proper size of house that the Government suggest could mean that they are forced to take a tenement flat. It has a big impact on a young person to go from a house with a garden to a tenement flat.
When I have spoken to the Minister, he has been very courteous to me and told me that he will give me a reply on this matter, but he has always mentioned the waiting lists and how long they are. The implication is that, if you have a long waiting list, you will fill the vacant accommodation. That is not necessarily the case. Anyone who has been a constituency MP or a councillor will know that people will come to you to say, “I’ve been on the waiting list for 10 or 12 years”, but when you say, “I can get you a house tomorrow”, they say, “Oh, but I’m not taking a house in this area or that area; I want this particular area”. Those who are on the waiting list exercise a great element of choice.
I personally have no housing problem either in London or in Glasgow, but I dare say that, legally, there would be nothing to stop me going to the local housing association in Westminster and saying, “I want to put my name on the waiting list”. By the same token, I could do that in Glasgow. Being on a waiting list does not mean that the person on the list is in need. I do not think that the waiting list is necessarily the best measure to use when saying that we can solve the problems caused by people being forced out of their so-called underoccupied houses.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
My Lords, briefly, I think that the Minister has a choice when he responds to the amendment, which was so effectively moved by my noble friend. He can say either that children of a certain group—disabled children, children in poverty or whatever—are exempt from the application of the bedroom tax to the tenancy, or he can say, on the contrary, we will leave it to local authorities to exercise their discretion, so that the response you get is a lottery based on where you live, and you have all the problems associated with what is effectively means testing.
The advantage of the first path is that you can perfectly easily have ways of ensuring that certain families with children do not come into the category of the bedroom tax as such. You could say that children on disability living allowance, for example, would simply be exempt, but discretionary housing payments apply to other people, which may include disabled people and so on. If that is the way which the Minister wishes to go, that would be the clean and clear way to do it.
Carers: In Sickness and in Health
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, the Minister will be aware that in Grand Committee we are currently discussing the Local Government Finance Bill, which will reduce council tax benefit for a wide range of people, including carers. Given that he is concerned about financial support for carers, will the Minister talk to his colleagues in the DCLG to ensure that the same support which we hope will be extended to disabled people will also be extended to their carers?
Social Care: Legislation
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, my noble friend raises an important issue, and I am sure that there will be an opportunity during the Bill’s passage to debate the subjects to which she referred. The draft Bill will be published after the Government publish their White Paper and the progress report on funding, and the Bill will set out the legislative framework for adult social care in the future. I have no doubt that noble Lords will wish to raise issues pertinent to that.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, the Minister has referred to drumming up finance for long-term care for older people. He will be aware that higher rate tax relief on pensions—as part of the total of £30 billion of tax relief—amounts to £7 billion a year. Were that money ring-fenced and redistributed within the same age group it could pay for Dilnot three times over. Will he consider looking at that as a source of funding for Dilnot?
Queen's Speech
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I, too, join in warmly welcoming the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the noble Lord, Lord Hill, to their new posts. I remember the noble Earl when he was a Minister the first time around. People have mentioned that he has seen off a number of Ministers while he was in opposition; I firmly recall the battles that he had with the noble Countess, Lady Mar, and will merely mention sheep-dip to him. Such issues will no doubt reoccur.
I shall talk about pensions. Post-Turner and amid both the financial and longevity crises, as the number of pensioners will have doubled by 2050, we need a new, all-party pensions settlement—led, I hope, by the much respected Steve Webb. My assumptions, which I hope the House will share, are that we wish to continue reducing pensioner poverty, that we wish to reduce means-testing and to encourage people to save for their retirement, and that we can put together a settlement which is relatively simple, fair, easy to understand, affordable and—because it is based on consensus—has staying power. Yes, I believe it is possible. If your Lordships will allow me, I shall sketch the outlines of such a settlement.
The first essential is a new state pension similar to the NAPS foundation pension. I very much welcome the new Government’s commitment to the earnings link of the basic state pension next year. That is much to be welcomed—well done. However, almost 50 per cent of pensioners may face means-testing to close the gap between that state pension of £97 a week and the pension credit figure of £132 a week. That means that any modest savings cost you 40p in the pound in lost pension credit, so unless you have a pot of some £50,000 floating you off pension credit altogether—the average pot is half that, at £26,000—it is simply not worth saving, so people do not. Sixty per cent of all pensioners have savings of less than £10,000.
What to do? People on low incomes or on credits simply cannot save their way off future means-testing. Pension credit has rescued hundreds of thousands of pensioners from retirement poverty, which is wonderful, but at the price of too high a hurdle for working people to save. But there is an alternative, and I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I urge a proposal outlined in my recent pamphlet, A New State Pension, to which the Minister, Steve Webb, was a contributor in his previous incarnation.
Put into one pot the state pension, the state second pension capped at 2020—this is key—and the £8 billion or so that we are now going to be spending on pension credit. Then, within the same broad cost envelope, you can pay all pensioners with a 30-year record of national insurance—some 90 per cent of them, in due course—a new state pension of £132 a week, at or fractionally above the means-tested pension credit level. That would mean a state pension that, as of right through the NI system, would lift most pensioners out of poverty and out of means-testing.
Few would need pension credit unless they had special needs. NEST, the new auto-enrolment scheme, would be safe from mis-selling because, unless you were on housing benefit, you would get every penny of value from it. Removing annuitisation at 75, which I greatly welcome, would also be safe because even if a few individuals did blow their pots on cruises or whatever, the new state pension would still lift them clear of means-tested benefits, so it would be up to them and not us. Incidentally, I would be happy to see their children inherit any residual pot, provided, of course, that it was ring-fenced for their own pension solely and was subject to IHT so it did not become a tax loophole. Above all, with a new state pension at or above pension credit level, we would make it pay to save. As they stand, private pensions are high-risk for small savers because of the benefits trap. A new state pension would remove that risk at a stroke.
The first step, therefore, is a new state pension, a foundation underpinning all else that we need to do. The second step is to make pension saving attractive. Over half the workforce are not contributing to any pension scheme. One way would be to ensure early access to at least the pension tax-free lump sum. At a stroke, that would turn the pension into a lifetime savings account, proposals long and rightly espoused by the government party. Why is it OK to use the lump sum at 55 to build a conservatory, but not at 45 to save your home from repossession? If modest savers knew that 75 per cent of their savings was ring-fenced for retirement but the other 25 per cent was available as an accessible savings slice, then women, the low-paid, young people and the self-employed might save for the first time.
Over and beyond a new state pension and early access to a pension slice, we also need to connect ISAs and pensions more intelligently, as a forthcoming pamphlet from Michael Johnson of the Centre for Policy Studies, familiar to Members opposite, argues most effectively; it will be called Simplification is the Key. Pensions, as your Lordships are well aware, attract tax relief on the way in, while ISAs attract it on the way out. However, five out of six higher-rate taxpayers become standard-rate taxpayers in retirement. You could reduce tax relief on pensions to the standard rate and save, even after the 2009 and 2010 Budget changes, some £3.5 billion. However, if pensions, like ISAs, were tax-exempt only on the way out—that is, on payment—you could probably save closer to £8.5 billion a year and build a simplified, attractive retirement package.
Please do not say that this would destroy pension savings. ISAs, which are tax-exempt only on the way out, already attract more money than pensions every year, even though there is no employer’s contribution to them and, therefore, they represent less obvious value. Such integration would work. There would be a new state pension, early access to pension savings, greater integration of ISAs and pensions, and no compulsory annuitisation at 75. What is there not to like? It is fair, flexible, simple, supportive of women and the low-paid, and it could even save rather a lot of money.