Child Poverty

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

The number of children in workless households has been coming down rapidly. It has come down by 390,000 and is now at a record low. We are looking to encourage more families back into the workplace through the financial incentives around universal credit, the new national living wage—clearly, a very direct incentive—and free childcare, and we are working to boost the number of apprenticeships from 2 million under the last Government to 3 million under this one.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the devil for today clearly is in the detail. It is working parents who depend most on tax credits to make work pay and lift their children out of poverty but, while a single parent with two children who is working 16 hours a week will gain £400 from the new national minimum wage, which is very welcome, sadly she will lose more than twice as much in cuts to tax credits. How can this be right? How can the Minister tell the House that working families are better off when it is those very elements of tax credits and universal credit which make work pay that have been cut today? How can that be the security for families of which the Chancellor boasts?

Universal Credit

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is a bad day to answer that question. The real point is that as we move from the combination of the benefit and tax credit systems into one universal credit system, the incentives will be restructured to encourage people to work their way down the taper.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for wanting to update us—in fact, he sent me a lovely letter last week telling me how well universal credit was going—but the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, was that we were expecting 1 million people to be on it by last year. In fact, in two years’ time there should be 7 million people on it. So if the Minister wants to update us, given that there are currently just 65,000 people getting universal credit, will he not follow the advice of the National Audit Office and tackle the secrecy surrounding the programme? In particular, will he agree to publish the full business case for universal credit and a proper plan with milestones, so that we can judge it and reassure people how their money has been spent and when universal credit will be rolled out? He will know that his good friend the Prime Minister has said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Is it not time to throw open the windows of DWP and let some light in?

[Lord Freud]

We have completed the strategic outline business case and will be doing the outline business case this summer. We have actually put out quite a lot of figures, in particular on the amount that this programme is costing, which is down from the original £2.4 billion to £1.8 billion. The letter which I sent to the noble Baroness and various others, and which is available in the Library, tries to deal with the main changes going on in this programme. It reflects my determination that this House will be kept informed of developments as they come up. I have made a commitment to do that and I will do that.

European Union (Approvals) Bill [HL]

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for explaining the measures in some depth and with the kind of enthusiasm which they frankly merit. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for raising the question of process.

I read the Bill and the Explanatory Notes and, indeed, the report of the House of Commons scrutiny committee quite carefully, and that is half an hour of my life that I am not getting back. By the end of it, I was still not much clearer as to what it was that was of such import in these measures that primary legislation should be required—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. Can the Minister enlighten the House? I fully accept that this is not my area of expertise—I do work and pensions. Are there any far-reaching consequences flowing from the draft decision on the participation of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as an observer in the work of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights? Does that in any way have an impact on any possible timeline for an application from Macedonia for future membership of the EU? Are there any other consequences which are not immediately apparent from the documentation?

I wonder if I can help the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, on the draft decision in relation to the tripartite social summit. Initially, the former Minister of State for Employment, Esther McVey, seemed to take a similar view. She initially questioned the legal basis on which this was brought forward. The House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee reported the Minister as saying that the Government would,

“ask the Commission more fully to substantiate its reasons”,

for proposing Article 352 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union as the legal basis for the draft decision. Further, because an Article 352 measure is subject to the requirements of Section 8 of the European Union Act 2011, a further assessment would then be needed by the Government to determine whether one or more of the exempt purposes set out in Section 8(6) of the 2011 Act would apply, as the Minister knows.

The committee asked the Minister to explain her reservations and whether she considered that there was any other legal basis on which this could have been brought forward. The committee said that it could not see that any of the statutory exemptions would apply in this case and asked the Minister to let it know what the basis was for her reservations. The Minister came back and confirmed, basically, that the Commission had taken the view that it had to bring it forward under Article 352 because there was no other suitable legal basis. She then explained the Commission’s reasoning for it. So we never really got to find out the Minister’s reservations in the first place. Could the Minister perhaps tell us whether there was any alternative to doing this? If not, the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, is a good one. Are we going to see a succession of minor measures coming through, all of which will require primary legislation?

I feel rather strongly about this matter, as I work in pensions often with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and I have stood in the Moses Room scrutinising repeatedly the entire detail of universal credit, which is a reform of all working-age benefits, done in secondary legislation that this House cannot amend and on which scrutiny is limited. The Childcare Bill is going through this House at the moment, and most of the detail will be in secondary legislation. Yet we are assembled in all our grandeur here to look at the detail of what seem on the face of it, to my inexpert eyes, to be rather minor measures. I am quite sure that I have misunderstood it, and I very much look forward to the Minister’s explanation.

Disabled People: Access to Work Fund

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann]

We will carefully monitor all our programmes. Access to Work is one of the many programmes that we have introduced and are planning to roll out to protect the disabled and help them to work if they want to, as many do. Last year, we ensured that nearly a quarter of a million more disabled people had work. That is a tremendous success, and our programmes are working.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been rolled out. It is already out there, and the Government are limiting the budget. Will the Minister follow up on the questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the right reverend Prelate? Of the 200 people affected, 90% are deaf. They will not be protected in the long run; they will lose the money to pay for their interpreters. Advice is helpful. Interpreters are essential. How will the Government protect them?

[Baroness Altmann]

We are introducing a range of programmes. Access to Work was never designed to be an unlimited-cost programme. We will ensure that all those who are potentially affected by the cap will have more flexible support to help them as they require it.

Family and Relationship Support

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann]

I can confirm for the noble Lord that the commitment to £7.5 million per annum is a firm one, and we will be spending at least that amount. The total government-wide spending for family, parenting and relationship support is approximately £6.5 billion, with a number of different programmes, including the troubled families programme, help and support for separated families, the innovation fund and, of course, childcare support. In our manifesto we have guaranteed funding for relationship provisions every year over the Parliament. We were the only party to do so.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to what I think is her first Oral Question and I look forward to debating with her on DWP matters. The Minister mentioned the family test, which the Prime Minister announced in 2014 and that was going to be five questions that all policy or legislation across government would have to be subjected to by civil servants before Ministers would sign them off. Today’s papers are full of reports that, according to the Prime Minister, tax credits for children will bear the brunt of the £12 billion welfare cuts. Could she tell the House whether that policy has been subject to the family test and, if so, what the result was?

[Baroness Altmann]

Clearly there is speculation in the papers about all sorts of things. I certainly cannot comment on that particular issue, but I repeat my assurance that all polices are subject to the strict family test.

Housing: Under-occupancy Charge

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister does not have to take the word of my very well-qualified noble friend Lady Hollis; perhaps he should talk to the Tory MP Nigel Mills. He highlighted the plight of tenants who wanted to downsize but could not, so were hit with higher rents—the very point he is making. He went on to say:

“It … wasn’t desperately fair on them or desperately good politically”.

He also said that the bedroom tax caused,

“a lot of grief for what wasn’t the hugest amount of money”.

Or he could talk to Daniel Kawczynski MP, who called for a “root and branch” review; or David Cameron’s former speechwriter, Clare Foges, who said of the bedroom tax:

“It is not working as has been hoped and will remain a fly in the one-nation ointment”.

She urged the Prime Minister to move on from it. We keep hearing evidence. Is it not time that the Government admitted that we all make mistakes and that this one is a very bad mistake, a very expensive mistake and a very cruel mistake? Please will they put it right?

[Lord Freud]

There are signs of people both downsizing and going into work on a policy that was designed to save the state £0.5 billion a year and is doing so. One of the side-effects that is not properly appreciated is the extraordinary change in the numbers in social housing who are out of work. They have now reached the lowest levels that we have ever recorded.

Personal Independence Payment

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

We will continue to support the disabled and the vulnerable in months to come.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, maybe I can follow that up a little more. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, specifically asked for an assurance of the Prime Minister’s guarantee that he would continue to support disabled people and that their benefits would be protected. Let me give the Minister the opportunity to give that. The Government want to make £12 billion of welfare cuts. Will he say today that none of those will fall on disabled people?

[Lord Freud]

I repeat what I said: we will continue to support disabled people and the vulnerable through that process.

Personal Independence Payments

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

We have been working very closely with the providers to make sure that there is an identity of approach in training, right the way through the two different providers and DWP.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have taken to using a variety of unpublished statistics in relation to PIP. When my noble friend Lord Dubs asked a Question on this very subject on 15 January, the Minister answering said that the backlog was down to 107,000—but was then obliged to write and say that that was not the case at all. So can the Minister tell me something very specific? The latest published figures cover only new applications for personal independence payments, not reassessments of the kind mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. People suspect that those on disability living allowance are having much slower assessments in order to enable the Government to fast-track new claims. Can the Minister reassure the House that that is not true and also tell us what the waiting times are for DLA?

[Lord Freud]

The two processes, for PIP and for DLA—or rather, for the WCA, which I imagine is what the noble Baroness meant—are separate, and separate contractors operate them. Indeed, Maximus has come in to run the WCA process. As for the figures, statistics will be released next week, on 18 March, giving the PIP clearance times and the waiting outstanding times. That statistical release has been preannounced, in accordance with the normal protocols.

Employment Levels of Older People

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting short debate. I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for enabling us to reflect on this issue today and for her many years of championing older people in our society. I also thank my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya for pointing out that we have Moses presiding over us today. I remind him that we also have a very young Daniel presiding over us. Perhaps that tells us something about the importance of both young and older people and the wisdom that they both have to offer to us in our judgments.

The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, have done a fine job of debunking the lump of labour fallacy, thereby saving the Minister and me the need to do that. However, it is worth dwelling on it briefly. I am amazed by just how hard it is to persuade most people that something that seems as obvious as the idea that if more older people work, younger people will not be able to may not in fact be true. That is something for the Government to think about. How does one go about trying to make sure that everybody understands that things are a bit more complicated than that?

In the pack that the House of Lords Library made to help us with this debate, which was very helpful, they kindly included a very interesting report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies from 2008 called Releasing jobs for the young? Early retirement and youth unemployment in the United Kingdom. It could almost have been written for today. Of course, the IFS evaluated the job release scheme, which was designed precisely to release jobs for younger people, but also looked at the measures that Governments took between the late 1960s and 2005. Its findings precisely backed up the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. On the job release scheme, it found,

“some evidence that it reduced employment of the old but no positive effect can be found on youth employment”.

It went on to say:

“When looking at the entire 1968-2005 period, labor force participation of the old is positively associated with employment of the young … Overall we find no evidence of long-term crowding-out of younger individuals from the labor market by older workers. The evidence, according to a variety of methods, points always in the direction of an absence of such a relationship”.

So the evidence is really very strong, and I hope that we can all agree with that.

That said, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that there is an issue about youth unemployment, which needs quick and careful attention. I agree with my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya about the importance of focusing on NEETs and the importance of skills, a point also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. However, despite the welcome improvement in employment rates generally, young people are now almost three times as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the population. The youth unemployment proportion is 13%, whereas it is only 4% for 25 to 64 year-olds. So something is going on there. Young people are now faring, comparatively speaking, worse than at any point since 1992, which means that the UK is now towards the bottom of the league table internationally when it comes to giving young people a fair chance, with the gap between the youth unemployment rate and the overall rate higher in the UK than in all but five out of 39 OECD countries for which data are available.

We need to see some good help being given to young people, but only 35% of young people find a job after two years on the Work Programme. Indeed, more people return to the jobcentre than find a job as a result of the Work Programme. Last summer, the Government announced that they had decided to scrap the Youth Contract ahead of its planned closure. The latest figures published by the DWP showed that two-thirds of the way through the scheme’s three-year duration, the Youth Contract had delivered less than 13% of the promised job placements, with 20,030 wage incentives paid rather than the target of 160,000. So there is reason to be concerned and need for action.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya about the importance of careers and mentoring and getting education right, but we need more direct intervention, too. Labour would tackle this problem by bringing in a compulsory job guarantee for anyone under 25 who has been on JSA for a year or more, as well as reforming the Work Programme and introducing a new youth allowance to ensure that unemployed 18 to 21 year-olds who do not have the skills they need to get a decent job are training as well as looking for work. We simply cannot afford to have young people scarred by damaging periods of unemployment, which can carry on having effects throughout their working lives.

Then there is the position of older workers, described very movingly by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. If you want to see the effects on older people of being able to turn up every day for work, to feel that they have a sense of worth and something to contribute and to mix with friends and colleagues, we do not have to look very far from this Room. The House of Lords shows just what a positive effect having a role to play in society can have on some people at quite a considerable age.

However, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, pointed out, there are still too many older people who would like to work but cannot get a job or who lose their job in their 50s and then struggle to get back in, despite having great skills and experience. If the state pension age is to continue to rise, we need to ensure that older people can stay in employment on the kind of wages that enable them to carry on saving for a pension. Otherwise, not only will they end up struggling to get by on benefits designed for those who are temporarily unemployed, they will not be able to build up the kind of pension provision that they will need to have a comfortable retirement when they get there.

The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, mentioned that the DWP will be giving more tailored support, and I will be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say. At the moment, it is not working. In fact, the Work Programme works even less well for older workers than for younger workers. In the latest figures available, 30% of 18 to 24 year-olds achieved a job outcome, but of 50 to 54 year-olds it was just 17% and it fell to 13% of 55 to 59 year-olds and of those who were 60-plus fewer than 7% achieved a job outcome. Whatever is happening now is simply not working for older people who want to get back into the workforce.

Labour would reform the Work Programme, devolving it to make it more responsive to the needs of older people in different areas of the country. We would also introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee to ensure that older jobseekers who have been unemployed for more than two years are guaranteed the offer of a paid job, and we would look to help more older workers save for a pension. With the latest figures showing that less than a third of self-employed workers are currently saving into a pension—older workers are more likely to be self-employed—we would act to find ways to help older self-employed workers to save for a pension. We would cut red tape for older workers. The new universal credit rules threaten 600,000 self-employed workers with a huge increase in red tape, and that is something that Labour is committed to addressing. We would also introduce a higher rate of jobseeker’s allowance for those who have contributed for longer, funded by extending the length of time for which people need to have worked to qualify.

I will be very interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s strategy is to address that very serious problem. I have two other specific questions for him. First, what thought are the Government giving to ways in which employers as a whole can think about the way workers move into retirement? We have known for a long time that it is not always the most healthy thing for someone to go from a full-time, very high-stress job into nothing at all. It is not good for their physical or mental health and is certainly not good for their spouse or partner in many cases. Have the Government given some thought as to how strategically as a country we might approach that? Secondly, have the Government considered what impact, if any, the new pension freedoms might have on the pattern of labour market participation by older workers?

There is a challenge for us as a country to ensure that neither older nor younger workers are left behind as the economy slowly recovers. Fortunately, I do not believe that the people of our country will warm to a public debate that divides generation from generation. After all, many older people are deeply concerned about the opportunities and prospects for their children and grandchildren, and conversely the young do not want to see their parents and grandparents thrown on the scrapheap at 50 when they have so much to contribute. Apart from the individual costs, our country can ill afford to lose the talents and energies of either our younger or our older workers. If we do not tackle those challenges, we will all be the poorer.

Universal Credit

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord German, for giving us the opportunity to debate this issue again and to all noble Lords who have contributed tonight. I am particularly grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth for sharing his experience. It was a brave thing to do, and we benefited greatly from it—and to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for the same thing. To come to the House and share things from one’s knowledge is one thing, but to share it from one’s experience is quite another. I really appreciate that.

I, too, have some experience, but from rather longer ago. My mother died when I was eight, and my father had to cope. He did go out to work, but that had consequences as well. It may have been unrelated—and I did not realise it until some time later—but I went on to run a charity that worked with single parents, so I met a number of single parents who had become so involuntarily, because their partner or spouse had died. I am very conscious of the consequences of that, so I am grateful to have the opportunity to talk about this today.

We heard evidence during previous stages of the Bill, when many of us were assembled—and particularly from the noble Lord, Lord German, who talked about the longitudinal study, to which he referred again tonight, and about the importance of the capacity and availability of the other parent. So we know quite a lot about what it is that makes a difference. I absolutely take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, that the impact on the children is often hard to detect from their initial behaviour. They can be told to be brave because mummy or daddy is struggling—so they can often end up behaving in ways that may seem not to be distressed when, actually, they are.

I am very grateful to the Minister for having agreed during the passage of the Pensions Bill to take this issue away. When he comes to reply, I would be very grateful if he could take the House through what happened in the review, as the noble Lord, Lord German, suggested. What advice was he given and what brought him to make the decisions that he or the Government did in its wake?

As I understand it, the Government’s intention is that bereaved parents should not have conditionality applied for the first six months of universal credit after bereavement. I confess that, when I was trying to go through all the repeatedly amended regulations, I struggled to find the section where that is set out. I would be grateful for my own ease in my future work if the Minister would share that with us. The Government then brought forward the Universal Credit and Miscellaneous Amendments (No. 2) Regulations 2014, which amended the universal credit regulations. Regulation 8 seems to have the effect that work search or availability requirements may not be imposed on a parent or responsible carer claiming universal credit in the event of the death of the child’s other parent or carer or a sibling or another adult living in the family, or if the child has suffered or witnessed violence or abuse.

The bit that I am not clear about is that, from my reading of the regulations, the suspension of conditionality seems to be available not if the parent can demonstrate the distress of the child but if they can show that their childcare arrangements have been significantly disrupted as a result of the events that have happened. Could the Minister clarify that? When the Minister for Employment, Esther McVey, made a ministerial Statement in another place on 23 October 2014, she said:

“We do not intend to seek evidence of the child’s distress, but rather on how the situation has impacted the day-to-day functioning of the parent/family”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/11/14; col. 82WS.]

She gave the example of having to go to statutory appointments. Is that the intention, and could the Minister elaborate on that?

I would like also to understand a few other questions. First, is anyone currently affected by these provisions? The answer may not be known because of timing, but perhaps the Minister could advise us on that. Could he give us a sense of how many parents he thinks might be eligible when it is rolled out fully, and what sort of take-up he expects? Furthermore, what steps have the Government taken or will they take to make sure that any parent who is eligible is aware of these provisions, particularly the extra one-month provisions?

When we debated the Pensions Bill in Committee, my noble friend Lady Hollis expressed a lot of concern about the level of discretion being awarded to young staff. The question of the training of work coaches has been raised by various noble Lords. In addition, what work has been done with decision-makers? He may be able to explain this to us, but my understanding is that, if a bereaved parent does not fulfil the work requirements because, for example, they have not been able to demonstrate what is needed to get the extra month, or maybe they need more than a month, presumably the work coach would refer them to a decision-maker in the department, who would sanction their benefit—in other words, stop or reduce their universal credit. Is that the case? Could the Minister confirm that? If so, what steps have been taken to train the decision-makers to understand the consequences of these provisions? If that is the case, if the person then wished to challenge a decision, would they have to go through the process as with other benefits of first seeking mandatory reconsideration from the department before being allowed to appeal a decision? If so, how long could that take? We are getting reports of delays of many months with regard to other benefits—but I hope that that will not apply here.

The Childhood Bereavement Network was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I am sure that we have all had briefings from that organisation, and the Minister will be aware that it remains very concerned about the provisions. What plans do the Government have for evaluating those provisions, and at what stage? Would the Minister be willing to commit to sitting down again with key stakeholders at a certain period, perhaps after a year or two, to discuss with them the evidence and see whether it has worked as they hoped it would?

On the childcare point, if it is the case that the parent would have to demonstrate that their childcare arrangements had been significantly disrupted, what would happen in the case raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, of a teenager who manifests some behaviour—for example, by developing an eating disorder or getting into trouble at school? A teenager would not necessarily have childcare and a parent of a teenager would be expected to go to work full-time. So there may be no disruption to childcare in that case, but the parent might then feel that the right thing would be to be at home every day when that teenager came home from school to make sure that the new problems that had manifested themselves were dealt with. How would that work?

Finally, how will in-work conditionality be applied for this group? If a bereaved parent of a teenager takes a job below the target for a single earner—in other words, less than the equivalent of a full-time job at the minimum wage—as I understand it, the in-work conditionality rules for universal credit would mean that they would be called and then required to go out and increase their hours. What steps will be taken to make sure that they may need to work only school hours or fewer hours in that circumstance? Could the Minister explain that?

I want to say how much I appreciate the fact that he has taken the issue away and taken the time and trouble, as with so many aspects of universal credit, to supervise it personally. I know that he cares very much about how it works in practice. Therefore, I look forward to what he has to say.