Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I support these two amendments. In the family to which I referred earlier, Ms Lorna Sculley has three children; the oldest and youngest sons have a disability, and she is a working mother. She works 16 hours a week as a dinner lady at the First Love Foundation—the food bank—and she discussed the prospect of getting more work. She calculated that if she worked seven more hours a week, she might get only another six pounds. It just was not worth her while to progress along a work route. I welcome very much what the Government have said about introducing the new, much higher, minimum wage, but the actual effect on families’ incomes might not be as positive as we would all hope, so I hope the Minister will consider accepting this proposal.

I would like to raise another point about a further complication for Ms Sculley. She depends on housing benefit and lives in Tower Hamlets. Her benefit has not been sufficient to pay her rent, so she has to subsidise it from her other income. She says that she cannot move from where she is because of her eldest son’s disability: he is at a school that is good at meeting his needs. That is what I understood from what she said, so that is perhaps relevant to others in our discussion.

My final point in relation to Ms Sculley is that she was offered a parenting class because of her two sons’ disabilities, but it took place on a Thursday, which is when she has to work at the school. She is therefore, in a way, disadvantaged by being in work because she cannot take up the opportunity of attending the parenting class. There is a lot to be said for these two amendments, and I look forward to the Minister’s response. Before I finish, however, I would like to thank him for the time that he took last week—an hour—to speak on the needs of children as they relate to this Bill. I certainly appreciate that very much.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment of my noble friend Lady Lister, which was supported so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. I will be puzzled if the Government propose to resist the thrust of this amendment. The Government know perfectly well that, although the incidence or percentage of poverty among workless families is high, and higher than that among working families because the number of working families is so much greater than the number of workless families, as has been mentioned already, two-thirds of children who are in poverty live in a family where an adult is in work. Part of that might be that the parent, if a lone parent, has restricted hours, but we know that, with insecure contracts and the minimum wage and so on, the key lever to get that family out of poverty is not just to get the single adult into work but, where there are two adults, to get the second adult into work as well. We know that that is a function of the age of the youngest child and the size of the family. Child poverty might well be for a temporary period until the second earner—let us say, for this purpose, the mother—is able to go back into the labour market along with her husband or partner in order to amplify the family income. The need to support those children may be a temporary issue.

Given that the Minister today has put so much weight on the strain being carried by the new minimum wage and given that he will want to know, as we will all want to know, the interaction of that with the benefit bill, and the extent to which, therefore, that helps to address the levers of child poverty, above all of which is getting the second earner into part-time work, I do not understand why he would not want to track the information that my noble friend has called for. We all support the Government’s move to increase the national minimum wage. If he is right, this hopefully will have repercussions that we would all accept and support for the benefits system. But do we need to do more than that? We do not know. It may be about the size of sibling groups or the need for a second earner. We need to know what levers to pull. Unless the Government track that information, we will not know. I am sure that the Minister does want to know, so I hope that he will think very carefully about this amendment.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I wonder whether my noble friend is aware that of the children in poverty who we are discussing at the moment, two-thirds have parents who are in work. The majority of the children we are discussing have parents who are in work.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, very briefly, I support the amendment in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham.

I am puzzled. When we considered the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, the Minister rightly commanded the respect of the entire Committee and allowed the proceedings to be lengthened from the original 10 or 11 days to 17 days, in the process of which he negotiated, discussed and shared information because he was determined that the introduction of universal credit would be, as far as was possible, evidence-based. That was something that we all responded to: we were not being motivated by the latest piece of journalism or an ideological twist; it was evidence-based.

What puzzles me about the Government’s position is not that they are seeking to get analysis of the impacts of poverty in terms of well-being measures, adult worklessness, child educational attainment at 16, and so on—it is perfectly sensible to have information about that. But this is not an either/or situation. We all know that we need to know about the income going into a family as well as about the impact of that lowered income on the outcomes that affect the family and the children, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said. This is not an either/or situation. We need both because, above all, government need to know where they can most effectively intervene to ensure that, as far as possible, children and their families have good, strong, decent and well-funded lives. We cannot know that unless we collect the information on both income and on what the Government believe to be the impact. It is not a question of which comes first, which drives one or the other, or which is the gateway. That does not matter—we need both. On the basis of that evidence, we, as a House and as Parliament, can come in behind government to see what levers are most effective in addressing the issues that that evidence has identified.

The Minister is an evidence-based Minister, which is why he has our respect. Therefore, in the light of that and all the work that he did on the 2012 Bill, I urge him not to sabotage it by ignoring crucial evidence of how best the Government should use the resources at their disposal. I hope that he will accept the right reverend Prelate’s amendment.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I wonder whether the Minister could rephrase her comment about social rents being out of kilter with the private rented sector. She has heard the evidence in previous discussions: first, that those social rents rose because government required them to rise; and secondly, that social rents are on average about 40% or less of private sector rents. Therefore, the pressure on the housing benefit bill has come very substantially from the increase in the number of properties in the private rented sector. That is completely at odds with the position that the Minister keeps painting: that the justification for increasing social rents is that they are somehow out of kilter.

[The Earl of Listowel]

That is certainly my understanding too: that more and more the poorest people are being pushed into using the private rented sector as the supply of affordable social housing has dwindled. This has led to more insecure housing and, unfortunately, more and more homelessness. Of course, many of these people are parents, and therefore their children become homeless too. Perhaps the Minister might think of writing to me before Report, because I have not given her notice of my question. However, I am listening to what she has to say.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am very happy to write to the noble Earl. I do not make a judgment about why social rents have, in percentage terms, increased out of kilter with those in the private rented sector. The quantum might be different but, in percentage terms, they are out of kilter with the private rented sector.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Monday 14th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I would like to ask the Minister a question. Concerns have been expressed to me by legal advice centres and the local equivalents of CABs and so on. Anybody who is threatened with a sanction can obviously appeal or ask for a second opinion, and that would then go to an independent decision-maker. How long will that independent decision-maker take to arrive at their judgment? The advice I have been getting is that that is where it is being held up and that there are sometimes waits of six, eight, 10 or 12 weeks before a decision is made. As a result, there is a long queue for the independent decision-maker.

However, you cannot go to appeal, where the original decision may quite possibly be overturned, until it has been reviewed by the independent decision-maker. I am in favour of the department reviewing its own internal decision-making before we go through to the tribunal appeal process, but only if that is done speedily and competently, as well as fairly. Can we be reminded of those statistics, because I am advised in case after case that it is being used as a narrow gateway? It puts a lot of delay in and doubles the difficulties of the sanction procedure.

Then there is an entirely different question, not connected with that at all, which goes back to the Minister’s words towards the end of the last Committee day on work conditionality and sanctions and on the preparation for work interviews for those with a toddler aged two years or more—although the requirement to work does not bite until the toddler is three. Are people required to attend such work interviews or work preparation without their toddler? Consider a situation in which a lone parent has recently had to move, perhaps six months before, from a privately rented, mouldy property on an insecure tenancy to another property, and there is no support system in place. The little two year-old boy still does not speak, although he perhaps has the beginnings of a bit a temper. That child still needs to be fed and to have his nappies changed, but there is no local support network in place and the little boy has never been looked after by anyone other than his mother. Given that we are not talking about a work placement or continuous employment, as would happen when that toddler is three years old, but about attending, often on quite short notice, a work interview or work preparation training, may I have the Minister’s assurance that the lone parent may bring her two year-old toddler with her? In that case, are the jobcentres appropriately staffed and do they have provision for nappy-changing facilities and the like for such small infants?

[The Earl of Listowel]

May I correct something I said earlier? On my visit to the food bank in Tower Hamlets on Friday, the principal reasons given for people coming to food banks were mistakes in benefits and their own lack of knowledge about their entitlements; it was not to do with sanctions brought against them. I have checked my notes and apologise for my mistake.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Monday 7th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

Briefly, my Lords, I welcome the introduction by the previous Government of the family test. It was good to see in a recent Bill—it might have been the Education and Adoption Bill—that, just as the European Convention on Human Rights is written down, it was stipulated on the Bill itself that the family test had been gone through as the Bill had passed. I am sorry to hear that the results of the family test have not been published, because that test is very welcome.

The right honourable Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State, did good work with Graham Allen MP in looking at early years interventions to begin thinking in this country about how important it is to support families so that their children do well from the very start of their lives, because more and more evidence shows that supportive families, good relationships and bonding early in life have huge and beneficial impacts on society, and that is hugely important. That was really wonderful work but I am afraid that it may be getting lost somehow. I would like to be reassured that that focus has not been lost and that the Secretary of State is still worried about “broken Britain” and broken families, and is still putting that right at the top of his priorities. I wonder if the Minister can say whether it is intended in future, as I gather has been the case in the past, for the Bill to say that it has passed the family test.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

Can the Minister help me? I was just checking, and as far as I can see from handbooks, we continue to support various partners in polygamous marriages and we do not say, “After two partners you won’t get any more support for your third, fourth or fifth member of a polygamous marriage”. Why is it okay to have several spouses who are financed by benefit, but if you have more than two children they are not?

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Monday 7th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

I was not going to add to the very powerful opening speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, but I will just say to the Minister that, when he faced a similar problem with housing and the cut in benefit to those with a so-called spare bedroom—I refer to the bedroom tax—the Minister understood the degree of disquiet around the House and invested in discretionary housing payments, which he increased and increased. In other words, there was a recognition that there needed to be some head space in the system for dealing with difficult issues, many of which we have discussed today. I suggest to him that we have had so many of those in the previous amendments and most powerfully again on the issue of disabled children that he should seek a similar discretion which then the Government can come back with in proposed draft regulations which the House can discuss before they then become part of the legislative process by the time we get to Report.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Meacher in her amendment, which she so eloquently moved. A couple of years ago a woman called Stacie visited Parliament to talk to your Lordships in preparation for a childcare Bill. She talked about her difficulty, as a mother of a disabled child, in finding appropriate childcare. I think she went through more than 20 childcare providers who just said, “Look, we cannot deal with the needs of your child”. Eventually she found a very good provider that was prepared to go the extra mile. I know that this is an issue we have to take seriously and are looking to improve in terms of making childcare more easily accessible. It continues to be a problem. So there is that additional issue that I would highlight to your Lordships.

My noble friend also highlighted the fact that so many of these women are bringing up disabled children on their own. I invite your Lordships, women and men, to think about trying to bring up a child on your own when that child has a disability. The risks of isolation, of being overwhelmed—all those things must be exacerbated.

The Minister, in the early discussion about popular feeling with regard to taxation, made his response. It made me reflect a little that perhaps part of the way the public sees these issues is mediated by how the Government present them. I encourage the Government to be very careful, and I hope that this will not be taken the wrong way. On Saturday morning I was speaking to a mother with a two week-old baby, and she was speaking with another mother. The other mother, perhaps a little unkindly, because this two week-old baby had an elder sister, who was three, said, “Has the older sister started trying to kill her yet?”. What this highlighted for me is that it is such a basic element of human nature to be envious, to resent something that somebody else has, that one has to think through very carefully how one presents sharing resources with somebody else, or giving resources to somebody else and not giving it to another person. I am afraid that that may not come across very well. I say to the Government that I hope they are being very careful about how they present these things.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Thursday 10th November 2011 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, before the Minister replies, can I say that I am very disappointed to hear that lone parents with a child of six or seven who cannot find a job except one that occupies them during the school holidays as well, will be obliged to take a job under the new arrangement. That was not my understanding from my reading on this and it seems very disappointing that that is the situation. I would appreciate if the Minister would double check to be very clear on this particular matter. If he has done so, and he is clear on it, then in that case I suppose I will have to read Hansard again.

The other matter is about transitions in school. A point that is always emphasised to me is that the transitions into primary school and from primary into secondary school are key to the success of a child’s education. We need to ensure that we do not do anything to make those transitions more difficult. If there is research there that we can identify, maybe the Minister might be able to help with that, or perhaps he could undertake to look very carefully at this particular area. It would be helpful if he could see whether there is any adverse impact caused by the changes in terms of the transitions of children into primary school.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, could I also ask a question, which is to turn the comments and questions made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, around the other way? If a lone parent has found a job as a dinner lady, precisely because her hours fit those of her young children, and she is therefore not being paid and not working over the holiday periods, is she at all exposed to the issue of work conditionality?

The second issue is on transition. Again, speaking from personal experience—and we all brought our children through school—many children sail through and love that first year of school. However, many children who suddenly go into what they regard as “big school” can find it very stressful. They revert to bed-wetting, have disturbed nights, are fearful, actually hide under the table when the school bus comes, and so on. In those situations, the lone parent needs to be on hand and available to go into the school if necessary, to collect the child from the school, during that first year of settling down. Most of us can talk from personal experience in that respect. The noble Lord would be very wise to listen to the point about transition—whether it is for one year, or ideally for two years, before the full conditionality comes in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, there has always been a tension within social security, as David Donnison spelled out many years ago when we had what was then called supplementary benefit, between standard, national, no-postcode-lottery funding and payments, and the need for discretion. The Social Fund as it has become has that element of discretion and flexibility, which is why it would be madness to go to a call centre and think that you can do the thing that most requires discretion by telephone. I entirely sympathise with the Government’s wish to move away from that procedure.

My noble friend Lady Lister and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, have eloquently explained the need for the Social Fund. I do not want to rehearse that, although if I had my way I would treble the money going into it because of its value to people. Indeed, the people who need it are not there because of financial mismanagement, let alone scrounging. They are there for the most part because of absolute, desperate, grinding poverty, having come out of care, prison or a refuge. They are the ones we seek to help.

Instead, I want to talk about something more mundane: the process proposed for the handling of Social Fund moneys, particularly community care grants, in future. Where that money is going to a local authority that is a single-tier unitary authority, I have no reason to think that it will not be able to get its act together because housing, social services and advice services are integrated on one level. However, it will be catastrophic for the shire counties where there are two-tier structures. I shall explain.

I come from Norfolk, a county which is about 60 miles by about 40 miles. When I was a county councillor representing Norwich I was closing schools that I had never visited and putting yellow lines on roads I did not drive on, and we called it “local government”. I have to say that the Jobcentre in my district had more local knowledge than most county councillors had outside their immediate patch. Under this proposal the money will go to a county council that has no local experience or knowledge. I do not in any way mean to criticise social workers who are doing a heroic job, but the council has none of the local knowledge at councillor or policy-shaping level that is required.

A second problem is that in a county council like Norfolk, there are a number of rural districts within which there may be small pockets of acute rural deprivation—even though they may contain thatched cottages covered with roses—but there is also the deprivation of Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, Thetford and some of the poorest estates in the eastern region, in Norwich. If the county council decides to go on a format allocation, it may send money to rural districts that do not need it as their pockets of rural deprivation have been resolved because those people have voted with their feet—I know this to be the case—and have come into the nearest urban city area. I have known good social workers give them the bus fare to do so, and quite right too; I would do the same in their situation. So the first problem with sending the money over to the county council is that they do not have local knowledge, but the second problem is that there is a huge variety of circumstance in an area as large as Norfolk, and I have no confidence that that will be recognised in the use of that money by the county council.

The third issue is what we call ring-fencing. If I were a county councillor with this money and I was seriously worried, as most county councillors are in good faith and decency, about child abuse protection, I would regard this as a fund to plunder. I would regard other priorities as being of more urgent need. I am therefore not in any sense confident that that money will be spent where it should be.

For several reasons, I want to see instead, and I hope that this will happen, the money in two-tier authorities going to the local district council. First, the local district council should have much more intimate knowledge of its locality and local needs. If localism means anything, it does not mean distributing down to a county council, half of whose councillors have never visited the village or the area where the deprivation is concentrated. You might just as well have the money coming from London or indeed from Scotland. It has to go down to the local district council.

Secondly, over and beyond local knowledge, if we cannot have ring-fencing—I hope we do, but I will come back to that—then at least it should be integrated with the fact that it is those same lower-tier authorities, the housing authorities, that are going to be responsible for the discretionary housing allowance and for the development of this absurd structure of individualised council tax benefits. Okay, it is an absurd and foolish system but it looks as though we may be stuck with it for a while until better sense prevails and we can reintegrate council tax benefit into universal credit. This means, though, that district councils on the ground have to have the staff, the resources, the local knowledge and the detailed experience of those same client groups for discretionary housing awards and for council tax benefit. They should ally to that the grants and some of the loans of the Social Fund because often they are dealing with the same client group, and often for the same purpose.

We have heard that a high proportion of community grants are spent in securing rent access to the private rented sector. It means that discretionary housing allowance—two funds, in future on two tiers—will be doing the same thing for a local community. This is absurd. If we cannot have a ring-fenced fund, then at least the money should go to a district council which can see the best way of meeting the needs of young people coming out of care or of ex-offenders. It may be that more money should go into discretionary housing and less should go elsewhere, but you can meet the service in different ways. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that you then need to make sure that there is an effective reporting and monitoring regime so that local authorities at the district level are accountable for how they have spent the money. There is more than one way to meet a need, and that is why I am not always supportive of ring-fencing. Local authorities can often meet a need in a better and more effective way—you only have to see the difference between residential care and domiciliary services to realise that there is not just one way—but they have to have retrospective, so to speak, supervision and control by virtue of inspection and monitoring.

I am hoping that the Minister will respond positively to this and say that when dealing with two-tier authorities, the shire counties, where the document says that the money is going to the upper tier, he will give a commitment, as far as he can, that there will be a letter of guidance requiring county councils to distribute and allocate funds based on previous expenditure levels in the district council. Otherwise some rural districts may pocket the money to keep their council tax down while the urban areas that receive people from the rural districts who have voted with their feet will have an even heavier burden to bear on reduced funding. In addition, meeting need should be recognised as a part of a district council’s repertoire. If there is to be an assumption that a local connection should be required, I accept the need for special care, particularly for battered women. Actually, in practice that is the least of our problems because in my experience nearly all local authorities have a very decent arrangement of trading homes so that women coming out of a violent relationship can move on from a hostel to a half-way house and then into a permanent home in a different authority. That works pretty well on the ground, but there are many other groups that, if they can, rural authorities will encourage into urban areas so that their responsibilities are negated. I hope that in that case the money will follow the client. If it does, I have no problem with that at all.

When the Minister deals with the big policy issues raised by my noble friend and by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, I ask him also to comment on the process point and at least give some of us some comfort that this will simply not be exploited, manipulated and abused in good faith by upper-tier authorities to do things that, because of their lack of local knowledge, they regard as more important than this and, as a result, strengthen the capacity of lower-tier authorities which are going to be dealing with discretionary housing allowance and council tax benefit. They will have an additional resource in order to meet the local need that they are best placed to address.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the call by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, to introduce ring-fencing or at least to allow ring-fencing for some time while we go through this huge transition with the introduction of this Bill. I do so for a number of reasons. Listening to the debate I am again reminded of the speech made by the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith at the Conservative Party Conference this year. He highlighted the great amount of debt that this country carries and, in particular, the debt of unsecured loans that people have taken upon themselves. Will the Minister say whether he is concerned that individuals who currently benefit from the Social Fund might turn to loan sharks or take out unsecured loans and expose themselves and their families to risk and threat because there is nowhere else where they can get the support they need?

I have been meeting chief executives, and indeed I recently met a deputy chief executive of a metropolitan authority. After spending the evening with him, what really struck me was the immense burden that he carried. He had to make choices with limited resources. I asked him whether he found himself having to cut back in the areas of child protection and child and family social workers. He said that he and his colleagues were definitely not taking money out of those pots. Then, on meeting a group of chief executives and directors of children’s services in the Palace of Westminster to discuss children’s centres, again we heard that the money was definitely not being taken out of children’s centres and they were really trying to support those as far as possible.

My point is that there are so many calls on the limited resources of chief executives and directors of children’s services in local authorities. The risk is that this money, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, has said, will be diverted into other very important provision, but that those families who need this ultimate safety net will lose out under the new arrangements. I look for an assurance from the Minister that this will not be the case. I should say that Barnardo’s, which has so much experience in this area has raised these concerns with me. One should also pay tribute to the Conservative Administration that set this up in the first place and the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, because from what I have heard, it has made a very positive impact on the lives of some of our most vulnerable citizens and families.

The issue of accountability, of how this money is spent, has been aired and needs to be addressed. Should there be minimum standards that local authorities have to meet before they are allowed to use this money as they see fit? I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I wanted to say only that I support the very moving amendments of my noble friend Lady Lister and the noble Lord, Lord Patel. When we introduced the 1999 Act, which I remember vividly, and replaced invalidity benefit with incapacity benefit, we considered and decided against the proposals that are now being introduced. This was primarily on the grounds of decency, but behind that lay another argument. The group that we were most concerned about at that time was not so much the cancer patients to whom the noble Lord, Lord Patel, referred, but those people with severe learning difficulties who would never find their way fully into the labour market and, as a result, could never build up contributions or savings. They might at some point receive a modest legacy or something that would help them but we did not want contributory IB to be dependent on that lottery. Therefore, we did not go down that road. Given the very small sums of money involved, in the interests of decency and given that such young people cannot build up the financial resources—and often the practical resilience, with the help of partners and so on—to allow them to cope, I very much hope that the Minister will think strongly about reconsidering the approach taken in Clause 52.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, briefly, I join in the request for the Minister to think very carefully about these matters. I have been moved by the speeches on this amendment. Reference was made to children leaving care, which certainly resonated with me. We know that disabled children are greatly overrepresented among children in care. We know that the transition from care is very difficult for many children without disabilities, so those with disabilities may be doubly disadvantaged as they make that transition into adulthood. Furthermore, we also know that for children with disabilities, in the general run, the turnover of social workers and many disturbances mean that the transition to adulthood and adult services is often very problematic. There are many good reasons why this amendment should be given careful consideration. I look forward to what I hope will be a sympathetic response from the Minister.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Earl of Listowel

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I add a couple of lines to my noble friend’s eloquent introduction to this issue. What we know from all our research about getting lone parents into work is that those lone parents stay in work if they have childcare they trust. Trust is key. As one lone parent told me when I visted, “I would never leave my child with strangers”. Childcare they trust tends to be associated with schools and extended hours. That is highly trusted. If they live in an urban area, it may be the availability of a nursery which is acceptable to them and which is trusted because of scrutiny. They may have neighbours or friends, and so on, who are childminders.

The biggest resource in my experience has always been grandmothers, particularly the maternal grandmother. The reason the maternal grandmother could do the childcare and often would do so once or twice a week, particularly over holiday periods, allowing a lone parent to hold down a job, was because she was herself not caught by conditionality. Can the Minister assure us that he has taken into account that, as we see the retirement age rising to 66 from 60 and that she as well as he in the 60s bracket are expected themselves to be available for work if otherwise they would be claimants on UC, that that unpaid resource will be taken out of the caring economy which has made it possible for that grandmother to permit her daughter to work? In other words, there is interaction going on here with other fields of government policy.

I am sure that the Minister has taken this into account, but one thing that I was most pleased that the right honourable James Purnell was able to introduce was the substitution: where a lone mother did not need her HRP because she was in the labour market and getting her own NI, a grandparent did not lose her entitlement to a state pension by virtue of not being in the labour market for wages, but was in the unwaged labour market, allowing her daughter to remain in full-time paid work.

That resource will come out of the system, if I understand the double interaction, of the raising of the retirement state pension age for women and the conditionality that the Minister will expose her to while she waits in that twilight decade to draw her pension, while she is perhaps not an attractive option for many employers. Can he reassure us that this has been taken into account and that there is lateral thinking here because 40 per cent of lone parents have relied on grandparents to provide informal care? We have never recognised this, except in so far as we have been assured that she does not lose out in terms of a pension. Can the Minister advise us on how this will be handled in future?

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, before I speak to my amendment in this group, Amendment 51FZA, I thank the Minister for asking his officials to provide me with information in this area. I also apologise for being absent from the discussion of the first grouping today which was relevant to this debate now. I apologise if I repeat information raised then. I also remind your Lordships of Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:

“In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”.

I should be grateful if the Minister could make his best endeavours to demonstrate how the Bill is considering the best interests of the child in relation to this debate.

My Amendment 51CED states:

“It is not a failure sanctionable under this section if a claimant falling within section 22 does not have guaranteed and predictable access to high quality, flexible and affordable child care acceptable to the parent and child or children”.

The lack of widely available, affordable and acceptable childcare has been referred to. The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that claimants with a dependent child will not face sanctions if they are unable to work or participate in work-related activity due to a lack of suitable high-quality, flexible and affordable childcare appropriate to the parents’ and children’s needs. As we have heard, most lone parents want to have the opportunity to combine paid work with the vital job of being a parent. However, so far the Bill seems to fail to recognise that the required childcare infrastructure is lacking in many parts of the UK, including Scotland. There also continues to be a serious lack of childcare settings that are properly equipped and which have staff who are properly trained to deal effectively and positively with children with disabilities, learning, communication or behavioural challenges or who have a wide range of additional support needs.

To make a slight aside, I know how important it is to the Minister and to all your Lordships that we encourage a culture of independence and attack a culture of dependency. The kinswoman of the noble Lord, Anna Freud, whom I believe was a child psychotherapist and an early-years teacher, established in her work dating from the 1940s the absolute importance of the relationship between the child and parent in making the move from infant dependency—absolute dependence—on the parent to adult independent emotional maturity. The danger is that if we do not do all we can in this Bill to strengthen the relationship between parents and children we might inadvertently build in the problem of dependency in the next generation. For adults to be independent they need to have had strong relationships in their early childhood. That is what gives them the strength to be independent in their adulthood. The nature of the relationship between parents and children also colours the relationships that those children will have as adults with other adults. Therefore, the strength of parental bonds between partners is coloured very much by their early experiences in childhood.

I wish to cite a couple of case histories of lone parents in Scotland. I should say that this amendment is supported by 20 charities working in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Judy says:

“All very well and good expecting lone parents to work once their children are in fulltime education, personally I don’t have an issue with it. For me personally, voluntary work & eventually paid work turned my life around albeit not financially. However, where is the childcare to go along with this? Where is the flexible working? Where is the long term thinking? It’s all very well providing ‘some’ funding for childcare, what use is it if there is none? We now face a new generation of children who are ‘forced’ by the Government to be latchkey kids … These same children are often (not always) the ones who require the most emotional support and stability, in particular during difficult times (separation/divorce) … who is going to be around to support them at the times where parents have to be working?”.

I took part in the proceedings on the Childcare Act 2006. What was noteworthy about that was the recognition of how far behind our continental neighbours we were in developing an effective childcare strategy. We were 30 years behind Sweden in having our first childcare strategy. We start from a very low base in terms of thinking and providing for early-years and other childcare.

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[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, can the Minister give us an assurance that one possibility he could explore again is that great source of unpaid childcare: grandparents. I tried to get payment, but the deadweight costs would have been too huge. I hope that he will take the issue of her—and it is usually a her—responsibility into account in assessing her conditionality. We have already moved down this path, as my noble friend mentioned, in terms of credits for her pension and so on. It would not be difficult to do and it would ease the pressure on two or even three generations if her contribution to childcare was set against the conditionality on her in her late 50s—certainly in her 60s—and thus make it possible to keep all three generations afloat.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, sorry—