Personal Independence Payments
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Baroness Hughes of Stretford
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact on disabled people and their families of changes being considered in the review of personal independence payments announced by the Prime Minister on 19 April.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Viscount Younger of Leckie) (Con)
My Lords, we will shortly publish a consultation on personal independence payments. This will explore potential options to reshape PIP, to ensure that support is focused on those with the greatest needs, and will run for 12 weeks, ending in July. Outcomes for disabled people will be considered before implementing changes. There will be no immediate changes for current PIP claimants. I encourage all stakeholders to input to the consultation when it has been published.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)
I thank the Minister for his Answer. In his announcement, the Prime Minister singled out people with mental health problems as a particular group that could be excluded from personal independence payments in the future. As we know, these were introduced to help to meet the higher cost of daily living associated with long-term disability and ill health. The Prime Minister stated that people with mental illness would be better helped by treatment and services, but he failed to admit that there are currently 1.9 million people on waiting lists for NHS mental health services in England; they simply cannot get the treatment, because of chronic under- investment by the Government. Mental health services are, frankly, on their knees. Families living with disability are already disproportionately represented among the millions of our citizens currently struggling to meet the rising cost of living. If they are to be denied access to personal independence payments, does the Minister conclude, as I do, that these families would be pushed even further into more severe hardship and poverty?
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
We need to take a step back. It has been over 10 years since the introduction of PIP, and we need to ensure that our system is fair and accurately targeted at those who need our support most. In the decade since PIP was introduced in 2013, the nature of health and disability has changed. The noble Baroness mentioned mental health, and she is right, but there may be better ways of supporting people to live independent and fulfilling lives. This could mean financial support being better targeted at people who have specific extra costs.
Child Poverty
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
I note that the noble Lord has raised this point in the House in the past, and the Government certainly support the provision of nutritious food in schools. It ensures that pupils develop healthy eating habits and can contribute to concentrating and learning in the classroom. As he will know, we have extended free school meal eligibility several times and to more groups of children than any other Government over the past half a century. We provide free meals for 2 million disadvantaged pupils through the benefits-related criteria.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister was quite selective in the figures he gave in his Answer because, in fact, by every official measure, child poverty has been rising faster in the UK than in most OECD and EU countries, many of which have actually reduced child poverty during this period. It is the fastest rise we have seen for almost 30 years, and this is not an accident; it is the direct consequence of the Government’s political decisions, taking money away from the poorest families to benefit the better off. Does the Minister not agree that it is now imperative that the Government bring forward the sort of comprehensive plan to which my noble friend referred, to start to restore the incomes of these families and children and take them out of poverty?
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
I beg to differ with the noble Baroness, because analysis shows that the Government’s cost of living support prevented 1.3 million people falling into absolute poverty after housing costs in 2022-23. That includes 300,000 children, 600,000 working-age adults and 400,000 pensioners. The £96 billion I alluded to earlier included £20 billion for two rounds of cost of living payments for more than 8 million households on eligible means-tested benefits. I gently say to the noble Baroness that she should bear these very important initiatives in mind.
Youth Unemployment
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Hughes of Stretford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the call in the report by the Commission on Youth Unemployment published on 6 February for action to address youth unemployment.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)
My Lords, the Government share a number of the concerns raised in the report produced by the Commission on Youth Unemployment. We are already taking action to address youth unemployment and have a clear strategy to support young people into work.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Answer. However, as he will know, the analysis in the report not only scotches the myth that youth unemployment is being driven up by immigration or the minimum wage; it demonstrates clearly that the Government’s measures, welcome though they are, are wholly inadequate to deal with this rising crisis and prevent another generation of young people, as well as the country, paying a terrible price. Will the Government respond specifically to the report by front-loading the youth contract to double the number of job subsidies this year, extending the work programme beyond the 10 per cent only of young people who are currently on it, and bringing in a specially targeted approach for those 600 hotspots that, the report shows, now have double the national average of youth unemployment?
Lord Freud
My Lords, the noble Baroness might have been interested in one of the annexes in that report that indicated that actually there is concern about the national minimum wage. The point that she makes is towards the end of the report. There are a lot of measures to solve youth unemployment. I will pick up some of those that the noble Baroness mentioned. The first one is rebalancing the youth contract, to which she referred. We are already front-loading the wage incentives that we are introducing in April. We are doing more than the average in that period. We are trialling a community action programme for people who have been through the work programme, and we are looking at how we work in areas in an equivalent way to the youth employment partnerships.
Social Fund Maternity Grant Amendment Regulations 2011
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, for reminding us of some of the attitudes that still live strongly within the Conservative Party. I am astounded that no Member on those Benches leapt to their feet to dissociate themselves from those remarks.
I commend my noble friend Lady Sherlock for tabling this Motion. I know that she feels passionately about the issue and that it is only unforeseen circumstances, to which she has to attend, that prevent her from being here today. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Touhig for stepping into the breach and moving this important Motion and to my other noble friends for their contributions to the debate and for setting out so clearly why this, of all the Conservative cuts, is emblematic of the unfairness in the way in which the parties opposite have gone about reducing the deficit and in the political choices that they have made in doing so, as my noble friend Lord Liddle said. It is far from the case that we are all in this together, as the cumulative impact of their cuts falls hardest on women and children, as many commentators have demonstrated, and on the poorest families. Before I touch on that broader issue, I shall deal, first, with the anomalies in the amendment as it stands in its own terms and, secondly, with the manner in which it was introduced.
This grant was designed, first, to help low-income families—not all families, as it was targeted on those with very low incomes—with the essential expenditure that we all know is considerable around the time of a baby’s birth. Secondly, in a point not yet touched on tonight, the grant was made conditional on receiving advice from a health visitor or midwife to try to ensure that those women who particularly need maternal services but who often do not seek them, or do not seek them early enough, were introduced to antenatal services.
The amendment to the regulations, as we know, will restrict the grant from this April to low-income families where the baby is the only child under 16 in the household. If this grant has to be restricted, and I do not accept that that choice was inevitable, the threshold of 16 years for other children in the household is ridiculously high, for all the reasons that my noble friends have given. It will exclude families who, for example, contain older children from a previous relationship, a young sibling or another young relative of one of the parents. It will disproportionately affect larger families, including those who tend to feature in some minority ethnic groups. It will particularly hit poor families in overcrowded accommodation where the space to keep bulky equipment for years on end is well nigh impossible. The first question that the Minister has to answer tonight is on why the threshold of 16 years has been chosen. Why not, at the very least, accept the much more reasonable and understandable recommendation from the Social Security Advisory Committee’s consultation of five years? What is the rationale for 16 years?
The restriction of the grant will also mean that some of the most disadvantaged mothers will not now have to have that early appointment with a health professional and so will be less likely to access antenatal services when they should. Gingerbread has pointed out that many low-income single mothers have poor experiences of maternity services and are more reluctant to get involved with them. Research published last year by the Royal Society of Medicine shows that single mothers were less likely to have accessed antenatal care within 12 weeks of pregnancy, to have had a scan, to have had a postnatal check or to have initiated breastfeeding. This lack of early care has serious and long-term consequences for the well-being of their children. We know from the nurse/family partnership projects the long-term benefits in the quality of the parenting and the impact of that on positive child development and maternal well-being that follows from close engagement with antenatal and postnatal services.