Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Pitkeathley

Monday 21st December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I shall be very brief. I support what the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, said about kinship carers. I am delighted that the Minister will come back before Report on the question of carers. I remind him of something he said during the passage of the 2012 Act. He said that one thing the Government were not looking to encourage was a change in the carer’s behaviour so that they stopped caring.

I hope that he will remember that statement—and what he has heard about how strongly Members of this House feel about the inappropriateness or “indecency”, as my noble friend put it, of applying the cap to carers—when he makes these considerations about how to respond to the High Court case.

[Baroness Pitkeathley]

Perhaps I might just add to that. I ask the Minister to bear in mind that we have already heard that many carers are working more than 50 hours a week. That is more than any full-time job and we need to keep that in mind when we consider pushing carers into work.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Pitkeathley

Monday 21st December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, once more we are looking at the problems faced by carers. This amendment would ensure that the full benefits of people on very low incomes who are regularly and substantially engaged in caring rise in line with inflation. As we have heard, Clause 9 proposes that the rates of certain working-age benefits will be frozen for four years at their 2015-16 rate, while Clause 10 makes equivalent provision for certain tax credit elements. The freeze excludes carer’s allowance, attendance allowance and certain disability benefits, but despite their exclusion, we should remember that many carers receive other means-tested benefits as a significant or major part of their benefits package, and as a result will not be protected from the real-terms cut. For example, research shows that half of carers claiming carer’s allowance also receive income support because they are on a very low income. The Government have announced that the carer addition top-up to income support would rise with inflation, but this does not mean that carers are protected. The main chunk of these carers’ benefits will face a real-terms cut of 4.8% over the period 2016-17 and the year after as a result of the freeze. This is on top of previous below-inflation increases of 1% since April 2013.

By 2019-20, carers will be receiving nearly £190 a year less in income support alone than they would have if the whole benefit was uprated in line with CPI. For carers who receive a wide set of means-tested benefits in their households, the cumulative cut in income due to the freezing of numerous benefits will be substantial. Even protected benefits such as carer’s allowance have been the subject of recent real-terms cuts as the indexing base has changed, something with which noble Lords will be familiar. The freezing of working-age benefits such as income support will place further financial pressure on carers, many of whom are already suffering significant financial hardship.

Evidence collected from more than 4,500 carers in the Carers UK State of Caring Survey this year suggests that almost half of carers—48%— are struggling to make ends meet, as we heard earlier from the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. Of carers who responded to the survey, 45% said that financial worries are affecting their health, and of those struggling to make ends meet, 41% are actually cutting back on essentials like food and heating. Some 26% are borrowing from family and friends, and 38% are using up their savings to get by, which suggests that the squeeze on carers’ finances is not sustainable in the long term. As one carer said, “I am already on the edge. How can I be expected to get by with less?” We have to take on board the fact that increasing financial hardship is pushing some carers to breaking point—they may feel unable to continue caring and be forced to seek paid work and relinquish entirely their caring role. It is clear that this makes no moral sense. As my noble friend Lady Hollis would say, it is not decent. Given that carers are saving the nation £132 billion a year, this not only makes no moral sense; it makes no economic sense either. I should have thought the Government would really understand this. I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 98 and 99, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, to whom I am once again grateful for his support.

Amendment 98 would delete child benefit from the list of benefits covered by the four-year freeze. Amendment 99 applies to child benefit the triple lock that currently governs the uprating of retirement pensions, a policy promoted by CPAG—again, I declare my interest as honorary president—and End Child Poverty.

Far from a triple lock, child benefit has been the victim of a triple whammy since 2010. It was first frozen for three years and then uprated by only 1%, and now it is to be subject to a four-year freeze. The upshot is that, according to CPAG’s calculations, it will have lost 28% of its value between 2010 and 2020. In other words, it will be worth less than between a quarter and a third of what it was when Labour left office. A graph prepared for me by Professor Jonathan Bradshaw shows how the gain in value under the previous Labour Government has already been nearly wiped out. It also shows how child benefit represented a much higher percentage of average earnings in the early 1980s under another Conservative Government. However, it was then subject to similar treatment to now, until it was rescued by Sir John Major, who understood why child benefit is important and why its value should be protected. Sadly, his successors do not appear to share his understanding.

I tabled these amendments to encourage a debate about the role of child benefit. I quite accept that it is rather ambitious to argue for the extension of the triple lock to child benefit in the current context, but there is a parallel with pensions. One of the justifications for its application to pensions, and for excluding pensions from the freeze, is that pensioners are among those least able to increase their incomes through work. Leaving aside how true this still is of younger pensioners such as myself, it is in some ways even truer of children. I know the response will be that their parents can increase their income through paid work, but as the judges in the benefit cap case made clear, children’s rights cannot be sacrificed for any failing on the part of their parents.

Moreover, one of the reasons why the family allowance—the mother of child benefit—was introduced in the first place was that wages cannot and should not take account of the number of mouths a wage earner has to feed. In the jargon, child benefit enables horizontal redistribution from those without children, such as myself, to those with, and recognition that we all benefit from children being brought up as healthy, thriving citizens. It may be a bit of a cliché but children do represent our future. Of course, as most people do have children, for the majority it in any case represents redistribution over their own life course.

Child benefit thus has an important function in supplementing wages without the drawbacks associated with means testing. In particular, it cannot be accused of subsidising low-paying employers and it does not create poverty traps. CPAG’s annual research into the cost of a child carried out by my colleague at Loughborough University, Professor Donald Hirsch, shows how the benefit represents core income, not an extra for families, so perhaps it is not surprising that, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said in our first sitting about its unpopularity, a recent poll of 1,000 parents for End Child Poverty found that only one in 10 parents thinks that child benefit and child tax credit should not keep up with inflation. As many as two-thirds thought they should be increased in line with the cost of living or more, with virtually no difference between income groups. As I said, most people are parents at some point in their lives, and many grandparents will share these concerns about decent benefits for their grandchildren.

Moreover, because it is paid to the so-called “hard-working families” beloved of politicians, child benefit can act as a work incentive. It therefore makes no sense to freeze it when one of the primary objectives of the freeze, according to the impact assessment, is to increase work incentives, and it makes every sense to uprate it in line with average earnings. There is also a strong case for uprating it in line with personal tax allowances.

Those of us who have been in the game for a long time, such as my noble friend Lord Kirkwood, will remember that child benefit replaced child tax allowances as well as family allowances. At the time, there was a cross-party consensus that they should therefore be treated as akin to personal tax allowances when it comes to uprating policy. Unfortunately, that consensus soon broke down, but it does not invalidate the argument. For a Government who purport to care about child poverty and making work pay, it makes no sense to sink huge amounts of public money into raising tax allowances while freezing child benefit. Apart from anything else, the latter reaches parents in work earning below the tax threshold who gain nothing from further increases in personal tax allowances. Also, low-income parents earning above the tax threshold lose most of any gains from an increase in the personal tax allowances through cuts in means-tested benefits—a drawback that will increase under universal credit.

A constant thread running through our deliberations these last few days and weeks—however long it has been—has been how, despite government protestations, the best interests of the child have not been a primary consideration, as required by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I fear that this Bill will be used as evidence against the UK when its record is interrogated by the UN committee next year. If at the very least the Government were prepared to remove child benefit from the four-year freeze, it would represent a degree of mitigation.

Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Pitkeathley

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak also to Amendments 57ZB and 57ZC.

The Care Bill currently being debated in another place is making major changes to adult social care law. We have already put those changes through this House. It brings forward important and welcome new rights for adults caring for other adults. This Bill already strengthens the rights of young carers. These new rights will make it easier for other carers to have the impact of caring on them in their care assessment and to receive support services. I commend the Government most heartily and sincerely for the progress that we have made on this issue. However, as I said when it was discussed in Committee, these changes leave parent carers of disabled children as the only group of carers who will be left with the lesser rights to assessment and support provided in old legislation that will be largely superseded by the new Bills.

The purpose of these amendments is to bring the rights of parents of disabled children into line with the rights of other carers and ensure that they are consolidated into primary legislation where they can be better understood and used. Amendments 57ZA and 57ZB update the existing law that gives parents of disabled children under 18 the right to have a carer’s assessment that looks at the impact of caring on them—the parent carers. It updates and aligns these rights with the changes being brought forward in the Care Bill for adult carers of adults, and in this Bill for young carers. Amendment 57ZC replicates the new duty to promote well-being that is being introduced through the Care Bill in relation to adult carers of adults, and applies this same duty to parents caring for disabled children.

As a result of the Government’s changes, parents of disabled children will be the only group of carers with lesser rights to assessment and support, as the rights of other adult carers and young carers are consolidated and strengthened. Their rights will be left in rump legislation as the rest of the Carers Acts are repealed. These amendments are supported by the Law Commission and the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

I know that the aim of the Government’s legislative reform is to produce a clearer, consolidated social care system that is easier for professionals and individuals to use. However, I must point out that this aim will not be realised without consolidation and enhancement of parent carer rights. Without this, frontline professionals will have to navigate complex legislation in order to assess and provide support to those caring for children. There is little or no guidance in place to support social workers to use the existing rights for carers to receive assessments, currently sitting in three different Acts, each taken through Parliament by Back-Benchers with cross-party support. I was one of those Back-Benchers on a couple of occasions.

A lack of guidance and understanding by children’s social services already means that parents of disabled children find it hard to have their needs as carers recognised. Parent carers are being passed between adult and children’s services and are falling through the cracks. I was most grateful to the Minister for agreeing to meet last week with the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, myself and several parent carers and representatives of Carers UK. He was able to hear at first hand about—and understand—their current difficulties and duties. These and other parent carers whom I have met simply do not understand why they are not subject to the same rights as others. They told the Minister this in no uncertain terms. I very much hope that he will either agree to these amendments or agree to bring something back at Third Reading.

I turn briefly to the need for a well-being duty for parent carers. The Care Bill introduces a new statutory principle that embeds the promotion of well-being as the driving force underpinning the provision of care and support. This new principle is widely welcomed. I cannot overemphasise how strongly this has been welcomed and how important it is. The well-being duty in the Care Bill does not, however, apply to parent carers. Unless we put it in here, it will not apply to them at all. They face different challenges to other parents, but they have often struggled to establish rights as individuals on a par with other carers, and they are at particular risk of having their own rights as individuals overlooked. Too often they are seen only as parents, and their needs as carers are not identified or supported.

At this late hour I will not give many of the examples that I planned to give. However, I will end with the words of a particular parent carer, who said that a carer’s assessment,

“would help me loads, I feel very alone with massive pressure on my shoulders, I desperately need a key worker for my son, and a lot more time for me before I crack up … I lost my job because I was taking too much time away from work … caring has caused me nothing but sadness and loss of all dignity”.

I hope that we will be able to have a positive response from the Minister, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to support these amendments, to which I added my name. My noble friend mentioned that the Joint Committee on Human Rights has supported her amendment, and as a member of that committee I wanted to say a bit about what it said in its report on the Care Bill, which was published this week.

The committee expressed its dissatisfaction with the Government’s response to it on this issue, and recommended that the Government bring forward an amendment, either to this Bill or to the Care Bill, to give parent carers of disabled children an equivalent right to a needs assessment for support. The committee acknowledged the existing provisions, but stated that,

“they do not equate to a clear and single duty in law which requires a local authority to carry out a needs assessment of parent carers of disabled children and to meet the eligible needs of such parent carers”.

My noble friend gave an example of the effect this can have on parent carers, who do such a hard job already. Their job is made that much harder by the lack of clarity about the law and what they are entitled to.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights quoted from what the Minister said in Grand Committee:

“We are clear that any change to the Children Act 1989 to assess the needs of parent carers separately would change fundamentally the principles of the Act and risk the needs of the children becoming second to those of their parent. Recent serious case reviews for Daniel Pelka and Keanu Williams have shown starkly what can happen when the needs of parents are put ahead of those of the child. Our approach to legislation and statutory guidance is that the needs of the individual child are paramount”.—[Official Report, 20/11/13; col. GC 479.]

The committee said:

“While we are clear that the best interests of the child are a primary consideration in all actions concerning children, we do not consider the references to cases of child abuse and neglect to be appropriate in the context of discussing the rights of parent carers of disabled children to a needs assessment for support”.

I have to say that I was shocked when the Minister said that in Grand Committee. The JCHR went on to say:

“Children’s rights are not in conflict with parents’ rights in this regard. Indeed, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises that a child is not isolated from his or her family”.

Speaking about the UN convention, a UNICEF global study of independent human rights institutions for children spelled this out:

“An important aspect of the convention is that it does not consider the child as an isolated individual. Instead, it situates the child as a member of a family and community, recognizing his or her need for support to develop and thrive. Action to realize the rights of children can thus be envisaged as taking place within and through a triangular set of relations involving the state, parents (and/or guardians) and child”.

These amendments embody the spirit of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and I very much hope that the Minister will be able either to accept them or to bring forward alternative amendments on Third Reading.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Pitkeathley

Monday 16th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I do not have that evidence and no charity has written to me asking to be exempt, but there may be other noble Lords who can act as the referee in this dispute.

A point which has not been made yet is that the Electoral Commission has said explicitly that it does not support this amendment, and surely that must count for something. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, talked about what have been very seductive arguments, but I say to the Minister that I hope he will not listen to the siren voices of his noble friends.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am a fan of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips. I have every reason to be grateful to him from when I was running a charity myself, but I cannot support his amendment. I, too, have had words with a great many charities and have been surprised by how many of them are opposed to this amendment and have not taken any comfort from his faith in the Charity Commission doing the excellent job that he appears to think it would do in this regard.

Some of the charities I have spoken to have been opposed to the idea of exemption for personal reasons. For example, the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign would not have wanted to go through the process of registering as a charity to gain exemption. Those involved were too busy with their campaign. I have spoken to other charities which point out that coalitions are often formed across sectors so that they make up coalitions not only of charities but of social enterprises and, indeed, of commercial organisations. I certainly have had experience of that in my campaigning background. What we have to remember is that the NGO sector, whatever it is, is increasingly diverse. We are constantly coming across different forms of NGO-type organisations. There is a great potential for confusion among the public and supporters. We should focus on the activity being undertaken, not on the type of organisation undertaking it. I understand that some legal opinions have suggested that going for exemption may be a legally unviable option and much too open to challenge. There is also a widely held view that it is unfair to make non-charitable organisations subject to tighter regulation, thus making it more difficult for them to highlight the problems which this legislation is increasingly going to bring about.

We come back to the point that this legislation is being introduced without proper evidence and without proper consultation. As I said at Second Reading, it is very much a sledgehammer Bill to crack what was, at best, a small nut of misbehaviour by some non-charitable lobbying organisations. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, himself said that it is complex, there is a great deal of bureaucracy and there will be a diversion of philanthropic effort. It puts a disproportionate burden on organisations and is wholly unnecessary. This does not seem to be an argument for exempting charities but for amending the Bill in the way your Lordships are trying to do.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Pitkeathley

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley]

My Lords, I support this amendment, to which my name is also attached. Because of the scheduling of business in your Lordships’ House this is the first opportunity I have had to speak on the Welfare Reform Bill, but I know that many, indeed most, in the carers’ movement owe a huge debt of gratitude to the noble Baronesses and noble Lords who have been speaking throughout Committee stage.

The amendment proposed so ably and passionately by my noble friend seeks to ensure that the universal credit does not put up a further barrier for those people who want to combine caring with work. Given that the aim of the universal credit is to support people into work, it seems wrong to reduce the work incentives for one of the groups for which that support is most needed.

I agree with the Minister’s aim to encourage carers to combine paid work with their caring. Let us think of the reasons why we want to do that. First, it would increase their income; we have already heard that caring takes place in poverty. Secondly, if carers are not in work, they build up poverty for themselves in future through the reduction in their pension contributions. Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, being in a paid job helps carers with the stress, which is often very great, of their caring role. It enables them to maintain social contact and skills and to have a bit of respite from the caring situation. So we want to help carers stay in work as long as possible.

We know, however, that carers already face significant barriers to work. According to research commissioned by Carers UK and the DWP for carers’ rights day in 2009, some 1 million carers—that is around one in six of the figure that we have heard of 6 million carers—have given up work or reduced their working hours in order to remain as carers. A major barrier is the availability of suitable replacement care. In a separate survey, over 40 per cent of carers who gave up work did so due to a lack of sufficiently reliable or flexible services. A similar number, 41 per cent, said that they would rather be in paid work but services available do not make a job possible. In addition to that, for those who are able to juggle work and care, stress and poor health are common. Nearly half of the respondents to a survey of working carers for Employers for Carers and Carers UK indicated that their work had been negatively affected by caring and that they felt tired, stressed and anxious. Employees with heavy caring responsibilities are two to three times more likely than those without caring responsibilities to be in poor health. For these reasons, carers are just the sort of claimants to be working a few hours a week in low-paid work. We estimate that 50,000 of them might be affected by this change.

I know that the Minister wants to encourage carers to start working more than a few hours, but because of the other issues I have mentioned, for many carers a small or even a tiny increase in working hours is impossible. Because the Government argue elsewhere in the Bill that increasing earnings disregards will incentivise work, it seems inconsistent here to suggest that reducing the carers disregard will encourage additional work. I hope the Minister will agree that there is no logic to discouraging carers from juggling paid work with caring as long as they can and leaving them worse off than they are. I very much support the amendment.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, I am not going to add to the very powerful case that has already been made by my noble friends Lady Bakewell and Lady Pitkeathley. I simply wanted to seek some clarification of what was said in Committee, when a number of us put the case for a carers disregard, and the Minister said in his reply:

“Rather than going through the complexity of the separate disregard route, we have provided an additional element that is included in the gross amount of the universal credit for carers. That is a change from carer’s allowance”.—[Official Report, 1/11/11; col. GC 443.]

I am rather confused by this, because it seemed to me that it was muddling up carer’s allowance—a very important benefit, which some of us would like to see higher than it is at present—and the support provided to carers through means tested benefits such as income support.

Because I worry about my memory for the intricacies of social security I did not challenge the Minister at that point, but afterwards I sought guidance from Carers UK. It, too, was very confused by what the Minister said, and wondered whether or not the Minister—I hate to say this—was perhaps confusing carer’s allowance and means tested support for carers. Because the position is not changing, I do not see how the removal of a disregard can be justified on the basis of what happens with carer’s allowance. Universal credit is not replacing carer’s allowance. There is an element in means tested benefits for carers that will continue, but it is nothing to do with whether there is a disregard or not. It wondered whether the Minister is promising a higher premium for carers under universal credit. That would be excellent news if it were the case, but I rather doubt it. Could the Minister perhaps clarify what he meant in Committee, because it did not seem to me that it was answering the kind of case that has been made by my noble friends; namely, why is it that carers are the only group to lose the disregard that they currently have?