Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Wigley

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I support my noble friend on this. Some of the difficulty may have been caused by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, kindly agreeing not to move her opening amendments, Amendments A1 and A2, so that we could have enough time to debate this matter fully. This has arisen because of the time required for the European Council Statement, which has thrown out all the expected timings. As a result, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, was not in her place, as noble Lords would expect, because she had assumed that the other amendments were being debated. So I hope that the House will be sympathetic to my noble friend’s request, which makes good sense. The House is self-regulating. If the House thinks that this is a reasonable thing to do, we can do it. I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, will respond to my noble friend in the manner indicated.

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, I was under the impression that when the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, got to her feet to speak, she said that she would move the first amendment and speak to the second. As she has her name on the first amendment, I would not have thought that there was an issue.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Wigley

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, I was truncated once again shortly before we finished on Monday. I wanted to add just a few words to the powerful speeches that were made on this amendment—none more powerful than that of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, who apologises for being unable to be here because he is chairing another committee. The points that he made on entitlement to benefit were central. If one is going to get into a situation where capping prevents people getting what Parliament has passed as being their entitlement, there is something that is fundamentally wrong. I suspect that the Minister will have heard the points that have been made. A colleague whom I shall not name suggested that I give the Government hell; I am not going to do that because I am sure that the Government are in listening mode and will take on board the points that have been made. They are central to arguments about social security and I hope that the Minister will respond in those terms.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, we are talking still about benefit caps. We left the debate on Monday, I think, accepting that families hit the cap, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, explained so straightforwardly for us, through the interplay of both high rents and large families, a problem particularly in London and the south-east, with 70 per cent of those affected in social housing. Amendments tabled during our previous day’s debate sought, first, a more appropriate comparator by excluding child benefit in particular from benefit cap calculations—this was an argument by my noble friend Lady Lister—so that we could compare like with like and not apples with oranges. A second group of amendments suggested, wisely, a transitional period of grace before the cap was imposed. This is a theme to which I think we will all want to return, because we need a period of grace for quite a lot of the measures being introduced in order for them to settle down before the whole weight of penalties comes into play. We ran a similar amendment on housing benefit earlier. A third group of amendments sought to exclude subgroups from the caps—for example, those in supported housing, carers and kinship carers.

I want to focus on two aspects of all the debates that we have had so far, plus on the issue of carers, which was raised so effectively by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and issues of housing benefit raised by the noble Lord, Lord Best. I support the thrust of all the amendments. There was one golden rule of public finance that I learnt from my time in the department: amendments abating or removing cuts always cost more than the cuts originally saved, even if the situation is not restored to the pre-existing status quo. That may be the case here again.

I wish to raise some wider questions on Amendment 99A tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. She argued powerfully that just as PIP will remain outside of UC and the cap, so, equally, should carer’s benefit not be included in the cap, because they mirror each other, as they do in real life. The financial pressures, the fatigue and exhaustion, the using-up of savings and the social isolation apply just as much to many carers as they do to so many disabled people. We know that the Minister is sympathetic to carers, as is the whole House. So far, however, we do not yet know how many carers face a reduced earnings disregard. We do not know how many carers will lose carers allowance, because of the possible uneven mapping of the existing DLA passported benefit to the new PIP. We also do not know whether CA will come within the cap.

Given that the Bill is going through Committee stage here I feel that we are entitled to require the Minister to give us this information before we start Report stage and that we should not have to wait until we get to the clauses specifically about carers. If a single carer—it could be no carers, or it could be 100,000 carers—loses their entitlement to a passported benefit they will come into the framework of in-work conditionality which we have to deal with before we get to the carers clauses, at which point the Minister tells us he will be able to give us the information we want. We cannot do it that way round. It is not fair to the carers and it is not fair to Committee Members, who have been trying to do our best to get from the Minister—I am sure that he wants to be helpful on this—this information on the situation in which carers will find themselves. We must know everything about this situation before Report; otherwise some of us will be demanding that we go back into Committee, in the middle of Report stage, in order to take on board information that should have been available to inform earlier debates. It is not a proposal I would wish to argue. It is annoying for everybody concerned, but I feel quite strongly that it is not reasonable to ask us to proceed in this way.

The second area is housing benefit. Again, I strongly support the amendments moved so powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Best. However, perhaps I may widen the point to remind the Minister of where we are so far and what we so far know, and then to ask him what advice he would give to a housing association such as mine—I declare an interest as chair of Broadland Housing Association. First, there is under-occupying. So far we have learnt that many of our poorest tenants would be required to move to smaller accommodation—except that we do not have it; it does not exist and it will not be built in the next few years. So the tenants will stay put and be fined on average about £20 a week. They have no savings, so they will run up arrears. However, we will be asked to avoid evicting them on grounds of decency as well as cost savings. Although such tenants would not be intentionally homeless through arrears generated by benefit cuts—as the Minister has helpfully agreed on the record—we would in any event have to rehouse them, probably in the house next door, if we evicted them. We will get substantial arrears from—although not pensioners—perhaps one-fifth of our tenants. I do not know.

We will perhaps also be faced, as we found from the discussion last week, with some tenants who are up against the housing benefit or UC cap. They too will face arrears, and again we will be expected as social landlords to avoid evicting them for what is not their fault. Again, arrears for us will mount.

We may also face cuts in housing benefit for those with supported housing in its various forms, although obviously this is a much smaller group. Again their arrears may mount, and again those will pass to the housing association.

Finally—an issue which we have not yet debated—we will certainly face substantial arrears in the move to direct payments to tenants rather than to the landlord.

Each of these four changes in housing benefit from DWP will plunge social housing landlords into mounting arrears. What is my housing association to do? We cannot raise rents to compensate for those arrears because we are at our fixed-target rent and DCLG does not allow us to go above it. We cannot get extra revenues from HCA or DCLG—indeed, they have cut our capital revenues by some 60 per cent. Housing associations could well find their accounts qualified, at which point the banks may threaten to reprice their capital loans because of infringement of a covenant, at which point our building programme falls.

I suppose that we could cut staff but the Tenant Services Authority within the HCA requires us to improve services. A 95 per cent satisfaction rate on any of the criteria it produces is required, which means that there must be staff on the ground, and quite rightly so. The driving-up of standards equals staff, which means that you cannot cut in that field either.

Put those four cuts together and they could send many housing associations into the red. Any one or two of these proposed benefit changes would be difficult to manage, but to face all four would be unbelievably difficult. I warn the Minister that he could be jeopardising the financial stability of a swathe of housing associations across the country. How then will the Prime Minister’s newly voiced concern for affordable housing be met? Given that 95 per cent of all housing stock that will exist in 10 years’ time has already been built, we cannot adjust the stock to meet what I believe is very wrong-headed, and in some places downright indecent, changes to HB. Some of us feel very strongly about this and it would seriously jeopardise our support for UC. DWP’s cuts in housing benefit will be offloaded to housing associations as arrears.

Goodness knows that local authorities are strapped for cash with 30 per cent cuts, but at least they have other financial resources. Housing associations do not. I repeat to the Minister that his savings will be our debt. DWP and DCLG have to get their act together. As I suggested at Second Reading, not entirely jocularly, if we could persuade DCLG to give up its batty scheme of localising council tax benefit with all the savings that accompany it and trade it for protecting the housing benefit, which would finance the homes we need and keep people in the homes that they want, UC would be welcomed widely across the country. I warn the Minister to take this issue very seriously. It will be very difficult for those in the field of social housing to cope when his cuts become our arrears with no capacity to meet them.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Wigley

Monday 14th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that people who had an entitlement under the law as it stood will be paid fully in accordance with the law as it stood, and that there is no question of a clawback coming through retrospective legislation?

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

It is worse than that. Money has been taken from people. The thrust of the noble Lord’s argument suggests that it should be repaid until it has been appropriately legitimised.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Wigley

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I support my noble friend in particular on Amendment 51CEC, which is about the cost of travel. Too often and too easily we assume a London model, with the Tube, regular bus services and so on; although even there, lone parents may find it difficult to access work in the way that they would like. However, in a county like Norfolk, where many villages have a bus service twice a day, you have a very different story. In Norfolk you have some of the lowest wage rates and some of the highest car ownership rates in the country; but those cars are battered, second-hand jalopies, which are taken by him to get to work, leaving her—usually—with the children and finding it very difficult to do anything except use a bicycle. The result is that it is very difficult for the second earner in a family, or—even more pertinently—a lone parent, to cope with travel to work if there is no job available for her in the local village.

We are expecting a lone parent to work 20 to 25 hours per week. She has two children, one of whom has to be delivered to a childminder and the other to the local school, but she has no transport apart from her feet. Finally, after that, she has somehow to get to a job of her own, and she has to do that again at 3 pm or 3.30 pm. It is almost impossible to find a job between those two hours in the locality, let alone further afield, given that she has to allow for her travel time. I remember one lone parent telling me that she calculated that the school bus picked up the children of the next-door village 40 minutes earlier than it picked up the children of her village; so she used to walk her child about two miles to the next-door village in order to put the child on the school bus, which would act as a form of childminder. That lone parent, with a great deal of ingenuity, managed to get to her job for its 9 am start. She was able to do so because the two villages were within walking distance of each other, but there is a real problem here. I think those of us who live in London or cities have no sense of just how isolated those villages can be.

However, the work requirement will apply to women, both lone parents and second earners, in a situation where there is no public transport, no private transport, a bicycle that you cannot actually take a small child on—let alone two children—except with some degree of difficulty and therefore there is only feet. I suggest to the Minister that it requires enormous juggling skill even to hold down a part-time job. Sometimes the jobcentre that the person has to travel to is not even in the whole of a rural district but may be 20, 30 or 40 miles away. I hope that jobcentre advisers will take all that into account when deciding what is reasonable for that lone parent or woman—and it is usually the woman who is the main child carer—in that situation. I ask the noble Lord to be sensitive to those issues, not because there is any lack of commitment but because of the sheer, simple, practical, logistical difficulties such women may face.

[Lord Wigley]

Perhaps I may add briefly that I identify totally with the rural dimension that the noble Baroness has just described. A bus twice a day would be a luxury in many villages in rural Powys and other parts of rural Wales. If a person has been lucky enough to have a job and a lift to work from a colleague, but the job comes to an end and they have no independent transport of their own and are required to go some distance to fulfil their obligations under the Act, that would be totally unreasonable. I would be glad to know what guidance the Minister will give to people who are trying to implement the Act on how to deal with circumstances such as those.