Benefits: Sanctions

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords—

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

Lib Dems!

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

The reality is that the number of ESA claimants being sanctioned is very small—it is running at around 1%—and we look at those cases very carefully. We do not have any plans to look at that specifically at this stage, given that it has steadied out.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My noble friend Lady Sherlock’s figures on the number of appeals are absolutely right: they are based on the annual figures. The DWP is sheltering behind monthly figures, which will not do. We know—as I am sure the Minister will agree—that over 50% of those who appeal after being sanctioned have their sanctions overturned, having lived for many weeks, sometimes months, without their benefit. Can the Minister tell the House how many of those sanctioned have mental health problems?

[Lord Freud]

Where people’s sanctions have been found to be wrong, they recoup that money. Meanwhile, we have an established process of hardship payments, by which people can now get paid within three days where that is appropriate, to deal with that problem.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

Will the Minister answer the second question?

Child Poverty

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, one has to look at all the elements that are going in. They are the new national living wage, the changes to welfare in both universal credit and the tax credits system and, clearly, the changes to personal allowances, which are moving up under our manifesto commitment to £12,500. Under universal credit there are gainers, but the real impacts that we will see from these changes will be on a dynamic basis because they will encourage people to go into work, and into better-paid work.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, these Budget changes will actually make working families £40 a week poorer, with larger families even more so. It is a Budget for security but not for working families with children; a Budget for the family but not for working families with children; a route out of poverty but not for the working poor and their children. Will the Government accept that they have ensured that the face of poverty in this country will continue to be the face of a child?

[Lord Freud]

No.

Housing: Under-occupancy Charge

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the number of those affected by the social rented sector size criteria who have downsized into smaller properties.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

Across the seven months between May and December 2013, around 22,000 households affected by the removal of the spare room subsidy either moved to the private sector or downsized within the social rented sector. The final independent evaluation report will be published later this year. This will provide more up-to-date information on how people are responding to the policy.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, 22,000 out of 600,000 people is very few. Most tenants cannot move, as there are not the small properties; nor can they afford to stay without going without meals or going into debt. Some are desperately downsizing from two-bed social houses at £82 a week to one-bed private flats at £140 a week. These are of poorer quality and half the size, but cost almost double the rent and therefore almost double the benefit bill, which we all pay for. We are smashing lives. Why are the Government pursuing such ugly, faulty economics, and why are they pursuing such pointless cruelty?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, looking at the position in the round, people move from low-cost social housing to higher-cost private housing, but that allows another family who may have come out of private housing to go into social housing. You have to look at the bill as a whole, and the saving on this particular part of the bill is running at £0.5 billion a year.

Personal Independence Payments

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

This is an area into which we have looked very closely, helped by the noble Countess. We have an audit system for all of these tests whereby we test that they are being conducted to the quality that we require.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, of those people who are going from DLA to PIP, how many does the Minister expect will lose their Motability car? Will it be 50,000 or 100,000?

Universal Credit

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of a housing association. More than half of tenants affected by the bedroom tax are in arrears. We now learn that the Government propose to claw back those arrears by deducting a further 20% from those tenants’ benefits. For couples, this means a full £20 to £40 deduction a week from their benefit for living in homes that we allocated to them and from which they cannot move. The Government have created the debt and now seek to solve it by sending those tenants even deeper into debt. It is shocking, and many will never recover. Do the Government not understand that we are wrecking people’s lives?

[Lord Freud]

We conducted a painstaking process of testing how people respond to paying their housing rent directly. We found that there was a three-month adjustment process until people got familiar with it. We are now ensuring that we have the right systems to help people make that adjustment into the monthly payment situation.

Underoccupancy Charge: Carers

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

This is precisely the kind of circumstance for which the discretionary housing payment is designed. It has not been found possible to have a general rule, and that is why this system, which has gone through the courts in quite some detail, has been found to supply support where necessary.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, if, as the Minister suggests, disabled families with family carers are effectively covered by DHPs, why not simply exempt them? If he is wrong—which I suspect he is—why are we, quite knowingly, making lives that are already hard even harder, perhaps thus ensuring that the family carers will themselves become disabled?

[Lord Freud]

The courts have gone through this in some detail now and found that it is reasonable for the Secretary of State to take the view that it is not practicable to provide a further exemption for an imprecise class of persons, and that the flexibility of the DHP scheme can be relied upon to provide the additional help.

Work Capability Assessment

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Clearly, I am not able to respond on specific people going into specific places. The whole point of the assessments is to focus on functional capability or needs at the point of assessment.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, 40% of people appeal against their assessment, some of them terminally ill. The DWP has added an extra stage to the appeals process, mandatory reconsideration by the department, but—and this is key—there is no time limit for staff to meet. Tiny numbers of appeals are being processed; the rest are being seriously delayed by six months or more. What is the Minister doing to speed up those appeals?

[Lord Freud]

The noble Baroness is quite right that the rate of appeals has fallen very steeply, by 92% in the latest quarter compared with a year earlier. It is too early to tell the definitive reasons for that. It may well be due to many of the changes that have gone through—75 recommendations have gone through—or to mandatory reconsideration so that we look at it early. However, when you look at the backlog of mandatory reconsiderations, you see that the pure numbers do not seem to be a huge influencing factor in this fall in appeals.

Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to change their policy following the publication of their report Evaluation of the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy: Interim Report.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

We inherited a housing benefit system with costs spiralling and took steps to bring expenditure under control. This remains our policy. The interim report establishes an early baseline. Since the field work was completed, the numbers affected by the policy have continued to fall month on month, reported levels of arrears experienced by English housing associations have fallen, and there is emerging evidence that many landlords are adapting their building plans in response to this policy.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, everything we feared about the bedroom tax has been confirmed by this research—everything. Two-thirds of affected families are disabled. As there are no small homes, only 4% have been able to downsize. They cannot move but as most cannot get discretionary housing payments, they cannot pay and stay either. So 60% are in arrears; one-third face eviction; meals are forgone; debts are mounting; grandparents are cutting back on grandchildren’s visits because they cannot afford to feed them; people cannot stay; people cannot move. Does the Minister agree and accept that the bedroom tax—the coalition bedroom tax—is profoundly wrong?

[Lord Freud]

This report was based on evidence from last autumn and we have had data since then that show that people are adapting. The numbers affected are falling and are now down 70,000 people; arrears have fallen in the past two quarters and rent collection remains for the Homes and Communities Agency for the social sector at 99%; homelessness numbers are reducing and are down 7% on the year. As for DHPs, we had a quarter of a million payments last year to people affected by this policy and we had £20 million returned to us unallocated. Finally, the Court of Appeal has upheld the Government’s position that DHPs are the proportionate remedy for looking after people with problems from this policy.

Poverty and Social Exclusion

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

The noble Earl is absolutely right to concentrate on this issue because this group has traditionally done disproportionately badly. We have taken steps to ensure that these young people are better off in terms of housing than youngsters who are not coming out of care. As regards the mental health issues, it is absolutely correct to concentrate on the fact that a large proportion of people develop long-term disabilities due to mental health issues. We are devoting a lot of energy to consideration of that area.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, we have a bedroom tax because the Liberal Democrats voted for it—

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that employment alleviates poverty, and does he welcome yesterday’s unemployment figures?

Universal Credit

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

One thing I want to ensure is that I can get as much information to noble Lords as I possibly can. I am pleased to say that I have extended an invitation, which has been accepted, to arrange for a group of opposition Peers—as many as the noble Baroness would like to bring; well, not quite as many as that; we could not fit them all into Hammersmith; but enough to fill the room with a little standing room—to go through what is happening on the ground and the process.

One thing that I am keen to show the noble Baroness, which we saw this morning with a small group, is access to the work coaches to see how they work with clients in an entirely different way—in particular, to try to help the most vulnerable, whether it is looking at how they budget or various other things that they will need to do under universal credit.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, Mr Duncan Smith insists that UC is on time, on track and on budget. I fear that it is not. None of the monitoring bodies—the Treasury, the Major Projects Authority, the NAO, the DWP Select Committee, the Public Accounts Committee, Sir Bob Kerslake—believes that. To paraphrase Sir Jeremy Heywood, the project remains well off-track. We want this to work. Will the Minister, whose integrity we entirely respect, give us the facts and the future plans rather than recycle the empty bluster of the Secretary of State?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, this is a very large programme and the way we are doing it is quite responsive. What we have is a test and learn process. That is not just an empty phrase. It is a very large process, based on a live run-out of many tens of thousands of people, which feeds into how we build a fully digital interactive service that we are building at the same time. We will make changes to the process. That is what it is about. It would be silly to do all that work without being responsive. We learn lots of things. One of my jobs is to try to understand what we are finding out and then make those changes. There will be changes. Having said that, we announced a rollout process in December and we are, to my pleasure, managing to get it out to time with those plans. The next stages, which are towards the end of the year, are really important—moving on to families, bringing in childcare and going to that digital place. By the end of the year we will have a working test bed of how a fully interactive process will work. I am not saying it will not change after that, but I am saying that we are doing what we were planning to do.