Employment: Universal Jobmatch
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, to run a successful economy you need to make sure that you do not run it into the ground. I am very pleased to say that with today’s figures the employment rate, if you exclude full-time students, is now running at the same high level it peaked at before the crash. Therefore we have managed to put the right structural changes in place to get employment up to as high a level as it has ever been.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, Stephen O’Donnell, who runs the National Online Recruitment Awards, said:
“I think it’s criminally unfair to sanction jobseekers for not using such a clumsily built website, rife with spammers … identity thieves and anonymous job ads”.
Will the Minister give a firm assurance that no jobseeker will be sanctioned for failing to use that hopeless website?
Lord Freud
My Lords, I make absolutely clear that it is not a hopeless website; it has been hugely misrepresented. Noble Lords in this House would not take criticism from a competitor interest quite as seriously as criticism from more disinterested sources. However, I can assure the noble Baroness that to the extent that anyone is sanctioned, that sanction does not stand. At the moment we are down to a vanishingly small number.
Welfare: Cost of Family Breakdown
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, the Government place the importance of sustaining relationships and families high up on their agenda and have a number of programmes to encourage that, which include extending childcare, tax-free childcare, and flexible working for both parents. We have worked on support for relationships and for parenting and have introduced a marriage tax break. We are looking at this whole area in our family stability review, which will be published later this year.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I would like to turn the Question around and ask the Minister of his estimate of the cost to family relationships of cuts to social security, which are forcing some families to move, breaking up their family and social relationships, and of the cost to them of ever increasing punitive sanctions, which are driving more and more families to food banks. Both these trends are leaving families under more and more stress, leading, potentially, to the break-up of relationships.
Lord Freud
My Lords, on the issue of food banks raised by the noble Baroness, which we have discussed several times in this House, clearly nobody goes to a food bank willingly. However, it is very hard to know why people go to them. The Defra report said that there was a lack of systematic peer-reviewed research from the UK on the reasons or immediate circumstances that lead people to turn to food aid.
Housing: Underoccupancy Charge
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, I have noted that the party opposite has said that it will be tougher on welfare than we are. If it is going to take £500 million of savings and put them back, and then risk matching that and paying the equivalent amount in the private sector—adding up to £1 billion a year—I do wonder where it can get that money back out of the welfare system.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, almost a quarter of a million children are in households whose benefit has been reduced because of the bedroom tax—we will be debating this later today. What impact will this have on the Government’s child poverty strategy?
Lord Freud
My Lords, we monitor child poverty very closely. I am pleased to say—and as the noble Baroness knows perfectly well—that we now have lower relative child poverty and poverty than we have seen for a very considerable time. We will go on monitoring that figure.
Housing: Underoccupancy Charge
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, the numbers may be small, but it is people’s lives that have been affected, and I do not think the noble Lord the Minister actually answered my noble friend’s question about what will happen to them. Could he please answer it now? Also, it is quite likely that many of these people will have got into debt as a result of this. Will the Government pay compensation to cover the interest payments on that debt?
Lord Freud
The reductions in housing benefit will of course be repaid as we correct the anomaly for this period, so people will be made whole.
Benefits: Sanctions
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Freud
I thank my noble friend for giving me advance notice of that question. Only a small proportion of claimants are sanctioned two or more times. For high-level sanctions, only 5% received two sanctions and 1% received a third sanction. On the specific question about the Troubled Families programme, that provision is delivered by local authorities and unfortunately we do not have the data available at the present time.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, given that the Social Security Advisory Committee warned that sanctions tend to impact disproportionately on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, and given that a recent survey of citizens advice bureaux showed that the new sanctions regime is having a severe impact on physical and mental health, with one respondent saying,
“The strain has quite literally smashed our family to pieces”,
what steps are being taken to monitor the unintended consequences of sanctions, as called for by SSAC? Will the Minister undertake to report regularly on the impact of sanctions on these groups?
Lord Freud
As I just said, we are having one review, undertaken by Matthew Oakley. My colleague the Minister for Employment is also looking at this area very closely, and I am expecting the details of the review that she is overseeing to be published reasonably soon.
Universal Credit
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, we already have an electronic payments system, so nothing is different or will change in the actual payments system. I think that the noble Baroness was asking: is there a proper back-up to the IT information systems? Clearly, in any IT system—and in today’s legacy systems, which are kept on computers, albeit somewhat older ones—we need to record that information and make sure that we have back-ups in case of loss. We will maintain that principle.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, Howard Shipley told the Work and Pensions Committee that the next stage is couples. That will be a complicated issue as couples come together and divide, and may have children. Things happen. This sort of software is not something that you get on the back of a cigarette packet. Surely it was understood before we got this far that couples come together and separate. Does the Minister accept that the evidence from single people about budgeting monthly tells us nothing about what it will be like for mothers trying to budget on behalf of families monthly?
Housing: Underoccupancy Charge
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Freud
Again, my Lords, it is hard to reach definitive conclusions. We now have £180 million for discretionary housing payments for this year, including £20 million that is by demand, to be bid for. So far, we have had just 13 bids in for that money. Last year, some discretionary housing payment money was returned. We are monitoring this extraordinarily closely to make sure that councils are able to deal with their hard cases.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, there is a body of research showing the importance to families in poverty of local social networks to help them get by in poverty and even get out of poverty. Will the Minister explain how weakening those social networks through the bedroom tax contributes to the Government’s anti-poverty policy and the big society?
Lord Freud
My Lords, there is a misunderstanding here about the nature of the provision of a lot of social housing. Some 61% of people in social housing are single: they are not the families envisaged. Those are the people, by and large, who are affected by the removal of the spare room subsidy. We are looking at that very closely indeed.
Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Claims and Payments) Regulations 2013
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, there are many issues raised by the claims and payments regulations, but I plan to focus on the two that I raised in our debates on the Bill itself: monthly payments and payment into single accounts. These are lumped together in the guidance on personal budgeting support in a way that is not very helpful, because there are different issues at stake—a point to which I will return. Nevertheless, some questions relate to both matters: most fundamentally on both, the Government have rejected the arguments made by many noble Lords for choice about payment arrangements in favour of a convoluted system of personal budgeting support, which I suspect is going to be pretty difficult and staff-intensive to administer.
The clear injunction in the guidance that alternative payment arrangements are not available through choice would appear to contradict the earlier claim in the guidance that they would be claimant-centric—that is, done with, rather than to, the claimant. While I am pleased that the policy is no longer couched in the language of exceptions and vulnerability, designed to make a claimant feel different, this still appears to be the underlying philosophy.
This is also revealed in the argument that alternative payment arrangements should be temporary, to avoid labelling claimants as financially incapable. However, it is the Government who are in effect labelling them as such, by requiring claimants, who may be managing as well as can be expected, to adapt to payment systems that might simply be inappropriate for their circumstances. This determination to change claimants’ behaviour smacks of the kind of social engineering that sits uneasily with both traditional Conservative and liberal philosophy.
In our previous debate on regulations, the Minister said that he would be able to provide more information about the department’s working assumptions on the number and proportion of claimants likely to be deemed to require personal budgeting support,
“as we work our way through”.—[Official Report, 13/2/13; col. 755.]
As that was eight months ago, is the Minister now in a position to provide more information, as requested by my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton in his excellent and passionate opening speech? In particular, will he provide the information regarding those requiring monthly or split payments? Does he accept SSAC’s warning that the range of claimants who require these facilities may be greater than anticipated?
Will the Minister also explain how personal budgeting support will work with couples? In the case of joint claimants, will just one or both need to demonstrate the facts as listed in the annexe to the guidance? Will the decision about whether it is needed be based on a joint interview? Will money advice be offered to both members of a couple and will the Minister also advise us about the progress made with financial products such as jam jar accounts, which he earlier presented as a solution to just about all payment problems?
In July, the Minister was still able to tell the Work and Pensions Select Committee only that he hoped to be,
“coming up with something in the not-too-distant future”.
That is not very encouraging. Has he also taken on board the Social Market Foundation’s warning that jam jar accounts, while potentially beneficial,
“have only partial applicability across the claimant population”,
because of strong resistance from a significant number? Part, though not all, this resistance was because of the likely cost to the claimant. As the Communities and Local Government Select Committee observed:
“More information is needed … on how these accounts would work and who would pay for them”.
The Social Market Foundation cites evidence from the financial inclusion taskforce of the lack of appetite for financial products among about half of the unbanked. Those without a bank or Post Office account will be able to use the Simple Payment service to receive their benefit. As the Minister confirmed in a Written Answer, the problem with this is that it requires claimants to withdraw the whole amount, and not part, of each benefit payment at the same time, up to a limit of £600. This is potentially a lot of cash to withdraw in one go and leaves the claimant vulnerable to both robbery and temptation. Although it is estimated that only about 60,000 working-age claimants will be paid in this way, it is a cause for concern. Why is it not possible to draw part of the payment, as this would surely often be the responsible thing to do?
This brings me to the question of monthly payments, because if it were a more frequent payment, this would not be such an issue. Since noble Lords from across the House first raised concerns about monthly payments, evidence has been mounting to demonstrate just how un-claimant-centric this policy is. It is clear, from both government and independent research, that a significant number of claimants—particularly those out of work—see this as posing a real risk to their financial security. They fear it will upset their budgeting strategies and leave them running out of money.
In a DWP press release about early findings from the direct payment demonstration projects, the Minister acknowledged that the findings,
“show that most people on low incomes manage their money well.”
As SSAC has noted, one of the key lessons was that:
“Budgeting support needs to recognise that people on low incomes often budget on a fortnightly or weekly basis.”
Has it not occurred to the noble Lord that there is a connection here? As the demonstration projects show, many people on low incomes use fortnightly or weekly budgeting strategies as a means of managing their money well. Research shows that mothers, in particular, often take great pride in doing so. By forcing them to change their budgeting strategies, the Government could be setting them up to fail, a message that comes across clearly from the SMF study cited by my noble friend.
That is likely to have an adverse impact on morale, as well as living standards and, in doing so, could undermine the very objective of making claimants more work-ready. Where a more frequent payment is agreed, it will be paid in arrears, in addition to the new seven-day waiting period for some claimants. As the Women’s Budget Group has pointed out, this means that,
“claimants would be paid only half what they are owed for the month seven days after the end of that month and will then wait another half month for the remaining half. This would seem to contradict the Government’s wish to help those who find monthly payment most difficult and can result in hardship cases and requests for advance payments.”
Women’s Aid, to which I am grateful for its briefing, warns that most survivors fleeing domestic violence will have no alternative to claiming a budgeting advance. I appreciate why the Government are not keen to make a half payment in advance, but does the Minister accept that it would create fewer problems than paying in arrears?
As I said earlier, the question of payment into a single account versus a split payment raises rather different issues to that of monthly payment, even if both are likely to have adverse gendered impact. It is about access to, and control over, money rather than about managing it. The erroneous treatment of split payments as a management issue is illustrated by the guidance on when to review alternative payments. It says that the adviser,
“will decide that the claimant is now capable of managing the standard monthly payment.”
Where a split payment has been granted because of domestic violence, as opposed to a partner’s financial mismanagement, such advice is surely irrelevant. On what basis will a decision whether to continue a split payment be made? Does the Minister accept that there may be some situations where it cannot be treated as a temporary measure?
At present, the guidance seems to suggest that split payments will be an option only in cases of financial abuse or domestic violence. Can the Minister confirm that they will not necessarily be restricted to such cases? With whom will an adviser discuss this question and, even more importantly, the initial decision to make a split payment? Will it be both partners, and if so, will it be discussed separately or together, or will it be just the partner in need of diversion? If the latter, what will the other partner be told about the interview? How will advisers negotiate with gendered power relations which are likely to be at work between the partners to ensure that they have a true picture of the situation?
The department’s study of the implementation of JSA DB easement revealed a reluctance to disclose domestic violence to advisers, a concern that was raised by SSAC. This is likely to be the case here too. How will advisers detect domestic abuse, particularly when it is not manifested physically? Where a male partner uses the threat of abuse of various kinds to control a female partner, it could well be kept hidden. What steps can be taken to ensure that a split payment, which reduces the money paid to the perpetrator, does not provoke further domestic violence? Will the Minister indicate what training in financial abuse and domestic violence is proposed for universal credit advisers? More generally, what is the department’s response to SSAC’s recommendation for an effective training programme designed to ensure that advisers have a sufficient understanding and capability to manage the complex and dynamic nature of risk and vulnerability within universal credit?
It is important that the evaluation does not conflate the effects of wrapping up a number of benefits in one payment with payment into a single account under the rubric of a single payment, as did earlier departmental research.
At present, the guidance seems to suggest that split payments will be an option only in cases of financial abuse or domestic violence. Can the Minister confirm that they will not necessarily be restricted to such cases? It is not always possible to foresee situations in which they might be appropriate, and it would therefore be wrong to rule out other scenarios in advance. Indeed, Fran Bennett, to whom I am grateful for her briefing, suggested adding the scenario where a lone parent with children from a previous relationship takes an unemployed new partner into her rented accommodation. It may not be conducive to the success of a new relationship if one partner has control of all their joint universal credit.
I apologise for asking so many questions, but I cannot find the answers in the public advice and guidance. Reading that guidance, I am not convinced that the department fully appreciates how delicate and difficult an issue this is in any couple where there are difficulties of any kind with regard to control over money. Indeed, only last week, in discussing other regulations, the Minister drew attention to the extent of domestic abuse. If the fears of organisations such as Women’s Aid are realised, I suspect that the Government will have to revisit the policy and rethink the default position to ensure that both members of a couple have direct access to their share of universal credit, if they want it.
The Government’s refusal to listen to reason on these key payment issues could derail the successful implementation of universal credit, which is already looking somewhat shaky, to put it kindly. During the passage of the Bill the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said,
“if this is the nail in the shoe that gets the whole thing discredited because it does not work or gives rise to disturbing social consequences, we will have lost the great prize of universal credit that many of us want”.—[Official Report, 10/10/11; col. GC 434.]
We should remember the lessons from the child support legislation, when widespread consensus about key principles meant that insufficient scrutiny of the practical details led to one of the worst examples of social policy-making in recent history. I hope that even at this late stage, the Minister will take heed and remove the payments nail from the universal credit shoe.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, I agree with some of the sentiments that we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and with some of those that we heard in the opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. It seems that there are questions which need to be asked and questions which are still outstanding. However, perhaps some of the clues to the answers that we need to those questions can be found within the noble Lord’s opening speech. He said that we do not yet have the evidence from the rollout of universal credit to give us the learning pattern that we need to establish the route forward for some of the detailed questions which lie before us. They are real issues.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
I am very sorry to prolong matters. I quite understand that it has not been possible to answer all the questions asked, but will the Minister undertake to write to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate with detailed responses to the questions that have been asked?
Lord Freud
I have tried to answer absolutely everything. I will double check. If I have missed anything, I will write on it, but my answers are on the record. I think that I answered virtually everything, but if there is anything more, I will make sure that I cover it.
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Elton
I assure noble Lords that it is very difficult to get close to my marriage. My noble friend put forward an arrangement that gave the Government time to think and gave the Secretary of State the power to review and to act if it seemed appropriate. I think I was a little ungracious in moving my own amendment because I was so pleased with how clever my own drafting had been. However, that was the principle that I sought to support.
I was rather surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Alli, who had been quite supportive of my amendment in Committee, came forward with all sorts of reservations and was unable to support it earlier. Your Lordships will now be expecting me, with a certain satisfaction, to say that I cannot follow him so far. However, I am a man of principle, and I think that we need to have equality through this Bill. Amendment 84A gives the Government the power to pull out of this if necessary. I remind them that, during the time that they are considering, reviewing and consulting, they might go through the same reviews and consultations with the insurers as they have done over, for instance, flooding. The Government are used to talking to insurance companies and can at least find out where the shoe pinches, and this amendment would allow them to do so. I do not support the first amendment in this group, which locks them in, but I believe that the second one is a reasonable proposal, which honours the principle that we reluctantly have accepted; but, having accepted it, I think we should be gracious about it.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
My Lords, I support the first amendment for reasons of principle, about which the noble Lords have spoken. The principle of equality is very important. It seems to me that, in Committee, the Minister was unable to respond with any arguments at all based on principle. They were purely pragmatic arguments, which I do not think noble Lords found very convincing.
Amendment 84A, which I support, is very much in line with the recommendation of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which argued that,
“we consider that the Government should carry out a full review of pension provisions in relation to survivor pension benefit entitlements of same sex married couples and civil partners to ensure that there is no unjustifiable discrimination in pension scheme provisions”.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I have added my name to manuscript Amendment 84A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Alli, because we believe that this is the most sensible course of action at this stage. Like my noble friend, we want to ensure that there is no discrimination in the Bill and that there are not two tiers of marriage. I, too, am extremely grateful to the Minister for managing to arrange a meeting with the Pensions Minister yesterday.
We have always accepted that there would be some direct cost to private pension schemes. However, £18 million, which is the figure often quoted, is a drop in the ocean for schemes worth an estimated £76.4 billion. The Government have asserted that equalising pensions benefits for civil partners and married couples of the same sex after this Bill could leave the public sector liable for costs of up to £3 billion to £4 billion. However, they have been far more reluctant to explain where those costs might come from.
As my noble friend said, the Government have already acted to equalise survivor benefit entitlements for civil partners with those of widowers for public sector and contracted-out schemes. The £3 billion to £4 billion estimate is based on the assumption that the removal of the legal exemption for civil partners will leave the Government being forced to equalise the entitlements of widowers with widows, thus levelling everyone back to 1978. But why they believe this to be a significant risk remains unclear.
The 1978/1988 distinction between widowers and widows was based on the historic position of women as being largely dependent on their husbands for income. Indeed, the courts have only recently upheld this distinction in the case of R v Iain Cockburn and Secretary of State for Health, where the judge ruled that there was an “objective and reasonable justification” for this because there had been, as the Government argued, a progressive realisation of gender equality and the initial rules had been set up to recognise the weaker economic position of widows.
Without the provision within this Bill, female spouses of same-sex marriages would, we presume, simply be treated as widows for the purposes of survivor benefits and male survivors as widowers. But nothing in my noble friend’s Amendment 84 would affect the historic male/female distinction that the courts have so recently upheld. To argue against this on the basis of retrospectivity is also flawed as the Government violated this principle themselves when levelling civil partners back to the entitlements of widowers, as they quite rightly did for public service pensions and contracted-out schemes.
In some sense, it could be said that by creating a different entitlement for widows and widowers of same-sex marriages from those of opposite-sex couples the Government are actually weakening their case against future challenges to widow/widower distinction. However, despite agreeing with my noble friend that the Government’s argument here is extremely tenuous, we want to offer the Government an opportunity to remove this inequality in the most appropriate way, as noble Lords on the Benches opposite have also said, and that is why I have added my name to the manuscript amendment today.
By voting for Amendment 84A, noble Lords will be saying, “We are not happy about the provisions within the Bill as it stands so we are leaving them there in parenthesis, as it were, for now until the Government have come forward with firm proposals for how to deal with this clear inequality”. It is quite clear to us that, one way or another, the Government will have to sort this out. It is better to do this through a process that they can own rather than be forced by the courts to do it later, as undoubtedly they would have to do.
I urge the Minister to accept Amendment 84A. I realise that the Government may well have to come back with tweaks at Third Reading but we want to right this inequality and this is a very fine way forward. It gives the Government some space to reflect, to look, to review and then come back, using the order-making power, to get rid of this inequality. I trust that the Minister will be able to accept this amendment.
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Alli
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Alli. The best thing I can do is to endorse everything that the right reverend Prelate has said. If this is a Bill about equality, we have to treat people equally. As that is what we are told it is, that is what I expect will happen.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
My Lords, a very powerful case has been made. I simply want to draw attention to what the Joint Committee on Human Rights has said on this and to the oral evidence that the Minister gave to the committee, where he talked about wanting to find the fairest place to put same-sex married couples within the pensions framework. What we have heard this afternoon shows that this is not the fairest place. I would be very interested to hear how the Minister can justify this discrimination as being the fairest place.
When he gave evidence to us, the Minister gave some large sums and made it all sound incredibly complicated. He talked about £3 billion to £4 billion. It is not at all clear to me where those sums come from. It would be helpful if the Minister could clarify why such large sums are being bandied around. The committee called for a full review of pension provision in relation to survivor pension benefit entitlements of same-sex married couples and civil partners to ensure that there is no unjustifiable discrimination in pension scheme provisions. What we have heard sounds like unjustifiable discrimination. We call on the Government to provide precise information about the potential costs of equalising pension rights.
Baroness Barker
My Lords, I rise briefly to support this amendment. When the Civil Partnership Act went through, it was interesting to note that employers were already ahead of the law and that a number of private schemes already recognised partners. When the civil partnership law was enacted, many more then did so. It is fair to say that in this House there are people who may have forgotten more about pensions than I will ever know. However, in the greater scheme of things, this is not very much money in terms of the overall pension contributions, yet it means an immense amount to individuals; those people who are doing all the things that we would encourage others to do, like being judicious in provision for their later life. It seems to me wholly wrong that they are not rewarded in the way that every other person would be if they did the same thing.