Universal Credit

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Wednesday 30th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we are rolling out universal credit on a careful basis right the way through the north-west. We are currently at 38 jobcentres across the country, the bulk of which—32—are in the north-west. On Monday we moved from singles to couples as well, and that will be introduced right the way through the north-west as we finish this rollout this year. In the autumn we will move to families; so there will be a substantial number as we do that rollout. I must emphasise that we are not doing this rollout in the same way as past programmes have been brought in, on a big-bang basis; we are making sure that we understand what is happening and we go at the pace at which we can do it safely.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, as universal credit rolls out to couples and families, the question of the impact of the payment into a single account on women who are subject to domestic violence becomes more urgent. In oral evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights recently, Women’s Aid expressed its fears that the new payment arrangements will endanger such women. It warned that the discretionary power to make split payments—which, of course, will require women to identify themselves as victims of domestic violence—simply will not work. Will the Minister therefore commit to work with Women’s Aid and similar organisations to find a more effective solution to try to avert this very real danger?

[Lord Freud]

One of the things that we are doing as we roll this out is to watch key factors very closely. That is the point of going at this pace, so that we can see small numbers to start with and see what is happening. I will watch this very closely. I talked to the Women’s Aid groups intensively on a number of things of great concern to them and to me, and I will keep watching this one very closely.

Housing Benefit (Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2014

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nye (Lab)]

My Lords, I completely share the views so ably put by my noble friend Lady Sherlock and my other noble friends, so I will be brief.

On the anniversary of the introduction of the bedroom tax legislation, the Government are trying to close by statutory instrument a loophole without any understanding of how local authorities can identify the people affected or the numbers involved. Instead of trying to close this loophole the Government should finally do the right thing and scrap the bedroom tax altogether, because as the Budget figures show, it will cost more money than it saves. According to the BBC, due to the lack of smaller accommodation only 6% of those affected have moved.

I know that the Minister will have heard these arguments many times before, but they bear repeating. He will have heard that the bedroom tax discriminates,

“against the most vulnerable in society”,

and that the Government have shown,

“a lack of appreciation of the housing requirements of children and adults with disabilities and care needs”.

Those words are not from this side of the House but from the motion passed by his coalition partners at their annual conference last year. I welcome the words of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, and I hope that more of his colleagues will join us in the Lobby this afternoon.

The one thing the Government have managed to do is to unite the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, and the Liberal Democrats in the view that this bedroom tax will have damaging electoral consequences for both parties of the coalition. However, there are other voices, too. The chief executive of the CAB says:

“The Government’s solution to spiralling Housing Benefit costs is simply creating more problems. Thousands are being pushed into arrears, 96 per cent of people affected have no alternative smaller homes to move into and some housing associations”—

as we have heard—

“say they are being forced to demolish homes whilst 1.8 million languish on waiting lists”.

The United Nations says that the bedroom tax is taking a heavy toll on the most vulnerable and recommends abolition and that there is a,

“danger of retrogression in the right to adequate housing in the United Kingdom”.

The Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation has described the policy as an,

“unfair, ill-planned disaster that is hurting our poorest families”.

This retrospective “move or pay” tax simply is not working. For instance, in Merseyside more than 26,000 families are affected, but only 155 have moved. The Work and Pensions Committee has found that between 60% and 70% of homes affected by the change contained,

“someone with a disability and many of these people will not be able to move home easily due to their disability”.

It asked the Government to exempt anyone whose home had been adapted. Instead they are closing a loophole to bring more people into its remit.

Of the 660,000 people affected, two-thirds of those are disabled. The think tank Demos reports that £28 billion will have been taken out of disabled pockets by 2018 due to the cuts in DLA, ESA and housing benefit. Empty properties are increasing, in some areas by a third. In South Shields there are whole empty streets because people are afraid to move into larger houses.

If people end up in emergency accommodation, it costs the country more. But the human cost is huge, too. Grandparents cannot have their grandchildren to stay, so childcare arrangements are affected, and single parents are losing children’s bedrooms. Informal care arrangements for disabled people have come to a halt. A room is not a spare room when carers sleep in it, when couples cannot share a bed for health reasons, or when it houses vital medical equipment such as dialysis machines.

Now the Government have realised that they have been telling local authorities to take away housing benefit from people who were entitled to it all along, so they want to close that loophole. That will mean that local authorities will now have to spend more money and time trying to find out from their records—which go back to 1996 and which they may not have in electronic format—the identity of those people who qualify. It causes bureaucratic chaos and will lead to even greater chaos. This Conservative-led Government should be listening to what people—including their partners in the coalition—are saying, and scrap the whole sorry mess.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, as the Regret Motion makes clear, we have to understand these regulations in the context of the impact of the bedroom tax.

My noble friend Lady Sherlock quoted Esther McVey on Radio 5. I will take us back to her rather wonderful interview on Radio 4, in which the interviewer had to drag out of her that the Government’s estimate is that only 8% of people had moved—a whole two percentage points more than the BBC estimate which she had been contesting. She was asked if she was disappointed. She replied:

“Well no, because it wasn’t that you had to move house”.

How is that consistent with her statement in debate in the other place? She said:

“The reason that we are putting these measures in place is that we want to ensure we make the best use of our social housing”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/2/14; col. 311.]

In addition, how is it consistent with the constant refrain:

“How can we justify 1 million spare rooms when other people are sometimes crammed together in a room?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/3/13; col. 27.]

Can the Minister tell us exactly how many rooms have been freed up by this policy? As the Work and Pensions Committee report observed, it is,

“a blunt instrument for achieving this”

aim, and one that is causing hardship, as we have already heard from other noble Lords.

Why, then, have people not moved? As has already been said, it is partly because there is nowhere to move to. In the Independent, on 3 March, it was reported that,

“a severe shortage of smaller council homes across the country is being exacerbated by the right-to-buy scheme—leaving many victims of the bedroom tax with no choice but to accept reduced benefits”.

Also, many people do not want to move because they do not want to lose social networks that are very important to them—a point I have made over and over again in this House. We are not talking about housing in the abstract, but about people’s homes within communities that matter to them.

As Demos said, in a study it carried out on social ties,

“policies can serve to actively undermine the kind of self-help and mutual support that families engage in”.

One would have thought that that would be approved of by a Conservative-led Administration who believe in the big society. Reforms such as the removal of the underoccupancy penalty—dubbed the bedroom tax—have left people with a choice of either finding more money for rent from already stretched budgets or moving away from support networks that make life liveable for many.

We have heard about rising rent arrears, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Earlier this week I attended the launch of a report by Community Links on the impact of the first year of so-called welfare reform—although I would call it social security cuts—in the London borough of Newham. The person presenting the findings pointed out that many people prioritise rent for fear of eviction. Therefore, there may not be rent arrears, but what other impact is it having on what people can spend on other essentials, and how many people are turning to payday lenders or, even worse, to loan sharks? That morning we heard tales of utter despair—the result of the cumulative impact of this and other benefit cuts such as council tax benefit.

The suggestion has been made: “Let them take lodgers”. Do we know how many people have taken on lodgers as a result of this policy? Some noble Lords who are following the Immigration Bill will know that later this afternoon we will talk about its residential tenancy provisions. Anyone who takes a lodger as a result of the bedroom tax will be turned into a mini-immigration officer and will have to check the immigration credentials of their lodger. Do we really want people on benefit being turned into mini-immigration officers to prevent illegal immigration?

The Minister, Esther McVey, pleaded that the BBC report showed how complex this is. I can suggest a simple solution: follow the policy of the Opposition—which I hope will very soon be the official policy of the Liberal Democrats—and abolish the bedroom tax.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I think I am the only serving, elected councillor who is likely to speak in this debate, unless the noble Lord, Lord Tope, in his declining days as a councillor—I believe he is standing down shortly—joins in to proclaim the new, belated Lib Dem policy on the bedroom tax. I bring a snapshot from Newcastle, where 5,400 households are affected, at an average cost to each of them of £13.47 a week. If paid, that represents around £3.75 million to be taken out of the local economy, so there is a knock-on effect, quite apart from the housing effect, on that economy. Just under one-quarter of those are working households, one-third have children and, as we have already heard, many have disabled people in them. In my own ward, there are 315 such households.

As has already been pointed out, it is not a simple matter to transfer into a smaller property. In Newcastle, we have 3,558 people seeking one-bedroom accommodation. The average number of available one-bedroom properties per year is 64. It would take a generation or more to accommodate those people. Some 615 are seeking to move down to two-bedroom accommodation. There is, admittedly, a slightly higher availability of this—all of 101 a year. Any effect on the private sector, which in Newcastle is largely taken up with students, will drive up rents. Landlords are increasingly reluctant to take tenants who are on benefits of one kind or another. This policy is not only cruel and inefficient; it is based on a complete misunderstanding—to put it generously—of what happens in the social housing market. It is damaging people’s lives.

I conclude with an anecdote about meeting a couple of people in their fifties—not in my own ward—who benefited from the decision which required the Government to effectively refund the amount paid because of the length of their tenure of the property. I was able to tell them they would be getting the money back but I also had to give the bad news that the Government were seeking to ensure that the money returned to them was spent on paying the bedroom tax. Here were two disabled people, living in a house for just under 30 years, with one of their grandchildren staying with them when I called. This just illustrates the cruelty and incompetence of the measure and I congratulate my noble friend on bringing this Motion of Regret.

Employment: Universal Jobmatch

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[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

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[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

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[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

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[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

Monday 16th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[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

Tuesday 10th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[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

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[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

Monday 21st October 2013 Lords Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

I heard my noble friend Lord Kirkwood’s point about keeping the most informed and valuable audience in the country about this informed and in dialogue, and I will think about it pretty hard.

[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.