Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(8 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
My Lords, very briefly, I support the amendment in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham.
I am puzzled. When we considered the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, the Minister rightly commanded the respect of the entire Committee and allowed the proceedings to be lengthened from the original 10 or 11 days to 17 days, in the process of which he negotiated, discussed and shared information because he was determined that the introduction of universal credit would be, as far as was possible, evidence-based. That was something that we all responded to: we were not being motivated by the latest piece of journalism or an ideological twist; it was evidence-based.
What puzzles me about the Government’s position is not that they are seeking to get analysis of the impacts of poverty in terms of well-being measures, adult worklessness, child educational attainment at 16, and so on—it is perfectly sensible to have information about that. But this is not an either/or situation. We all know that we need to know about the income going into a family as well as about the impact of that lowered income on the outcomes that affect the family and the children, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said. This is not an either/or situation. We need both because, above all, government need to know where they can most effectively intervene to ensure that, as far as possible, children and their families have good, strong, decent and well-funded lives. We cannot know that unless we collect the information on both income and on what the Government believe to be the impact. It is not a question of which comes first, which drives one or the other, or which is the gateway. That does not matter—we need both. On the basis of that evidence, we, as a House and as Parliament, can come in behind government to see what levers are most effective in addressing the issues that that evidence has identified.
The Minister is an evidence-based Minister, which is why he has our respect. Therefore, in the light of that and all the work that he did on the 2012 Bill, I urge him not to sabotage it by ignoring crucial evidence of how best the Government should use the resources at their disposal. I hope that he will accept the right reverend Prelate’s amendment.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, we on these Benches are fully supportive of Amendment 2, to which I have appended my name. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham has made a strong case for his amendment, backed up ably by my noble friends Lady Lister and Lady Hollis, and I will not add a great deal to the fundamental case that they have made. However, I do wish to say a brief word.
The Bill has a lot in it which will have a serious impact on the incomes of millions of families in Britain, particularly families with children and households with disabled people in them. I would love to send the whole Bill packing, as I would love to dispatch various statutory instruments recently passed through both Houses, but that is not what we are going to do; it is not our job. Our job over this week is to send back to the Commons for further consideration parts of the Bill where they have simply not begun to understand the consequences of some of what they have done; where the costs can be significant but often have just been shunted rather than taken away.
The great advantage of this amendment is that it does not cost any money and yet it would be incredibly powerful in holding the Executive to account, something which this House always takes seriously.
I have been struck, not only in listening today but in re-reading the excellent debate on this subject in Committee, that the Minister was signally unable to persuade Peers from around the House of the case that he made. Let me summarise the Government’s case. The report to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on the drivers of child poverty said this:
“From the range of academic and institutional evidence reviewed we can confidently conclude that”—
brief pause—
“The key factor for child poverty now is parental worklessness and low earnings … The other main factors include low parental qualifications, parental ill health, family instability and family size”.
It also highlighted child education attainment as a key factor in increasing the risk of a poor child growing up to be a poor adult.
So what have the Government done in response to that evidence? This Bill guts the Child Poverty Act 2010, removes the requirement to report on income poverty at all and requires Ministers in future to report on only two factors—worklessness and educational attainment. That leaves a couple of key questions.
First, Ministers are not saying that these factors equal poverty but that they drive it. So presumably the Government will seek to address those factors and, if they are successful in addressing them, child poverty will fall—but how will we know? If we do not expect the Government to report on the effect on child poverty of the work they are doing, then how do we know whether their strategies are succeeding or failing? The Minister may point to the fact that data on households below average income are currently published, but, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, there is no guarantee that that will carry on indefinitely without a statutory routing. If the Government are so confident, why will they not report on the impact of their policies on child poverty and be accountable for it?
Secondly, Ministers have cherry picked some of the factors on their own list and ignored others. In particular, as has been mentioned, why have the Government ignored the key factor of low earnings, which is the first in their line of analysis of drivers for staying in poverty. Is it because, by definition, it must be an income measure, to which there was therefore a political objection? Or is it because, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, pointed out, they know full well that two-thirds of poor children are living in households where a parent is in work. I will return to this issue in a later group but I remind the House that if the Government continue to damage work incentives by attacking universal credit and cutting the value of in-work benefits they can hardly be surprised to find that work is no longer a route out of poverty.
No one is arguing that money is all that matters—the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham expressed that very well. I fully recognise his comment that the idea that money does not matter is often most closely held by those who have plenty of it. I make an exception in the case of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, who despite, as he said himself, having always been comfortable has shown an impressive concern for those who have not had the benefits to which he found himself entitled. I commend him for that. Nobody is arguing that, but when 202 out of 203 responses tell you that you have got it wrong, it really is time to think again. The odds on that only one being the one that is right have to be pretty small.
Pensions Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I apologise to the Committee that I want to raise another substantial issue. After this, I promise that the issues that I raise will get smaller, but other noble Lords’ amendments may be appropriately substantial.
This is about the married women’s dependency pension. This is the first of three amendments. The second amendment is intended to address the issue that widows may face and the third amendment addresses those that divorcées may face. They try to avoid the cliff edge for some vulnerable women—please forgive the political incorrectness. This also applies to men and civil partners, and later amendments apply to male divorcés and widowers.
The peak cost of some £200 million which was suggested by the Minister in the other place would fall in the 2030s for all three groups, including overseas spouses, I gather, which suggests a lower figure, perhaps £100 million a year, during the next 10 years or so. I am grateful to the Box for giving me some additional information on numbers, although I am still not clear about costs. If the Minister can clarify that, that would be helpful.
The Government have rightly helped 10,000 women—it is a diminishing number—who paid a reduced stamp and have put them effectively on to the equivalent of the former 60% dependant pension. At the same time, they are taking that same pension from about 5,000 married women who would otherwise qualify for it each year. This amendment calls for a transitional period of 15 years, as urged by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions on this part of the Bill, having taken a considerable amount of evidence, including some very effective evidence from Age Concern.
This amendment seeks to help women, not many of them, who have, for one reason or another, lived their lives among an older, shall we call it—although I do not mean this to be patronising at all—Daily Mail model, without any expectation that the Government were going to change the rules around them.
On the one hand, the Government are about to reward about 4 million non-working wives with a marriage tax allowance for their husband worth £3.85 a week, costing £700 million a year, and on the other hand they are taking away a £66 per week pension, also derived from marriage—bingo for marriage—at a fraction of the cost of the marriage tax allowance, from older women who have no time to rebuild. The Government are giving to married women with working husbands and taking away from married women who now face retirement with no pension of their own. Husbands—younger men—immediately benefit from a tax allowance transfer which has come as a windfall, while older women lose support that they have been promised all their lives. It is bizarre. Why not spend the first on the second? It will pay for itself several times over and will be far more useful and far more fair for, given their age and such short notice, older women can do little or nothing to build a pension of their own greater than the 60% that they would get as a derived right. That would take 16 years.
Women approaching retirement age had expected the 60% pension and planned their retirement around it. They had, and have, a legitimate expectation. The younger woman and her husband—they are not just cohabiting—receiving the £3.85 household income have not built their lifetime around it and planned for it, unlike the 60% pension. That is simply a windfall. It is unexpected and unplanned and, in my view, much less deserved than the pension that older women were entitled to expect. That younger woman is likely to have many years ahead both to work and gain income and to secure her own retirement with a full pension. I cannot think what mentality, frankly, has produced that juxtaposition and this disjuncture between those two groups, both of whom derive their rights through marriage.
In the other place, the Minister made much of the fact that a significant proportion—more than two-thirds—were male spouses or partners who were born or lived overseas. I now calculate, with the revised statistics that we have had, that huge number to be all of 2,000. However, I have tried to cover that with my,
“ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom”,
which has a good case behind it and which will not trouble the Government.
Indeed, the Minister may also argue, as Steve Webb did in the other place, that he finds it hard to conceive of women who might fall into this group given the wide array of credits—the up to 50 years of working life, which would mean that you start collecting credits at the age of 15 to bring you up to 65, and the 35 years’ NI record requirement. Let me help him, if I may, with two possible categories of women, both of which I am familiar with; I am sure my noble friends have other examples.
I am aware of at least two groups of women who continue to need transitional protection. To get the equivalent of 60% of the future pension equivalent, they would need cover on their own record of at least 16 years—less than that, and they are worse off. Younger women, I readily agree, have time to reshape their plans. They also have appropriate childcare credits, not HRP, which required you to earn actual NI years for it to come into play. Many may have undertaken part-time work above the LEL and may have signed on for JSA, all of this bringing entitlement to a pension of their own. That is as it should be. But women in their 50s do not have that, hence the 15-year transitional period.
Who are likely to lose? The first group is older women with patchy NI years. They got HRP and perhaps did not understand what happened when we replaced it with childcare credits. They did small jobs below the LEL for many years knowing that they would get the 60%. That is what women have told me. They did miscellaneous caring for elderly relatives, credit for which was introduced only in the past five years, which is too late to benefit most of them.
Perhaps their husband’s job took them around the country and they were unable to keep finding new jobs above the LEL for themselves while they moved house and supported his career. As we have discussed, service wives are an extreme case of this. They juggled untidy lives; lives which did not conform to NI requirements. But they knew—or they thought they knew—that they could count on their husband's pension to give them a dependent’s fund. Virtually overnight, as there are no transitional arrangements, that has been taken away.
The Pensions Advisory Service, which I quoted on Monday, completed its survey of nearly 1,000 women and women often commented with additional views. I quote from one of them.
“Had to give up my part-time job when my grand-daughter was born to look after her full-time while her mother and father worked. I’m now desperately looking for work”,
because the NI years have risen to 35. She thought that with 30 years she was all right. She is now 58 and has tried hard to find work but without success. She continues:
“I am getting very worried about the future. I go to bed thinking about it and wake up to face it all again”.
She has a patchwork. She has missing years and we are told that she cannot buy them back before 2006 once universal credit comes into play. Even if she had voluntary NICs, she could not deploy them in circumstances such as hers.
The second group is women who have had poor health for most of their lives—depression, arthritis, angina or diabetes—and they either did not think about or know about incapacity benefits or perhaps believed that the condition was not so incapacitating that they would qualify, especially given the somewhat deliberate stigmatising in the past few years of benefit claimants. Frankly, there has been humiliating treatment of certain claimants by ATOS. I know that the Minister will not want me to recite some of the cases that I have experienced, but they are relevant to this. Their husbands earned enough and, given their poor health, keeping house and perhaps helping out neighbours or local charities was as much as they could manage. If this sounds improbable to the Minister, we are talking about women approaching pension age where the DWP’s own research on benefit take-up among entitled but not claiming pensioners shows how deeply ingrained is the reluctance to claim means-tested benefits.
Such women may have had a few years of NI work behind them but not enough to bring them over the 10-year threshold. If they had nine NI credits or years, they could at least have received £36 a week that they do not in the conventional way, which would normally not have needed to come into play because the 60% was more generous. That de minimis has been removed, although I hope and expect that some women affected will buy an extra year to get over the 10-year hurdle and enjoy £40 a week. However, they probably do not have the time, good health or employability, or in some cases the income, to bring it up to 16 years, or the 60% level that they reasonably expected.
Let me again quote from the TPAS survey. Asked about how they would cope, one woman wrote that she was,
“sick and disabled so unable to save or plan, though very worried as had break in NI due to illness but never claimed benefit”.
Some, but few, I suspect, of the 30,000 affected will be able to afford to buy back missing years. I am not sure whether they can buy them back previous to 2006—we had confirmation on Monday that they could not—where the missing years may have occurred. That relaxation appears to expire in 2015 and the Minister is not continuing it from 2016 onwards.
The Minister at the other end several times argued that if the DWP introduced any transitional period, this would be found by the courts to be arbitrary and would presumably be overturned. He seemed very nervous about the courts; he introduced this argument at least twice when reading his speeches. I am surprised by this. In my experience, if Parliament’s policy intent is clear—see Roe v Wade—it would not fall to judicial review unless it could be shown that it was a decision that no reasonable person could have made. That is quite a high hurdle and clearly not the case here, so if the Minister is going to argue that, may we have proper information about the legal advice that the DWP has received on which the Minister at the other end so heavily relied?
We phased in the rise in people’s pension age over a decade. We are scrapping the pension that they might have drawn at pension age, effectively overnight. I do not think that is fair. If we feel the need to give adequate warning when raising the state pension age, as we did, we should provide adequate warning and therefore transitional arrangements for the most obvious group of real, not notional, losers. It is not difficult. We have the precedent of the reduced married women’s stamp, which we should follow. I beg to move.
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 23, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Browne, and to Amendment 12 in the name of my noble friend Lady Hollis, who has outlined the basic issue at stake here. I need not repeat that. As we know, the single-tier pension will be based solely on an individual’s contribution or credit record. Everyone will get out depending on what they put in; as they sow, so shall they reap. But we are concerned in this group with people who chose to sow as a couple, expecting to reap in like fashion, when from now on it will be every reaper for himself or herself.
Changes in labour market participation rates and social structures mean that we recognise that, in future, a system built on individual contributions is the right way forward. This year, 75% of those retiring will have complete contribution records of 30 years. It will be interesting to know what happens when that moves up. However, it is obviously important that the appropriate protections remain in place for those who have caring responsibilities or childcare responsibilities and that adequate information is put out. Subject to those caveats, we accept the direction of travel.
However, we are concerned to understand fully the impact of this provision in the short term on those who will lose entitlements derived from a partner’s NI contribution record on which they may have done their retirement planning. It is crucial, for the reasons that my noble friend outlined, that the transitional arrangements are fair and seen to be fair. We have had representations from groups working with older people, particularly older women, highlighting a range of circumstances in which women did not build up any entitlement. There are women who were entitled to credits but did not bother to claim them as they were planning to piggyback off their husbands’ records and there was no advantage in doing so. Then there were women who worked part-time around caring commitments, as my noble friend described here and in the last amendment. There were women who chose to do voluntary work, knowing that their husband’s pension would support them and who were often the pillars of their local community. I see a lot of them in Durham, who helped to support their neighbours and really were the backbone of the local community.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Why does the Minister think that the courts would not support us in having transitional arrangements for those who are ordinarily resident? I am not a lawyer, but, in my somewhat limited experience of judicial reviews, there have been a number of challenges. The two criteria I lay down are: was Parliament’s intention was clear—Roe v Wade—and would it be a position that a reasonable person would think was not unreasonable. The addition of ordinarily resident would seem to fit the criteria for transitional arrangements. If the Minister could help us on why that is not the case, I would be interested.
Baroness Sherlock
My question is slightly different, but perhaps the Minister could answer them both at once. Are the costings net of any additional expenditure on pension credit?
Pensions Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, I am happy so to confirm. As I say, for existing pensioners we have no plans to make any changes to the way that pension credit works. I have got a little bit more information. The cost of £10 billion is to get everyone on to single tier, and that is the cost to get all current pensioners to the illustrative £144 per week. I can confirm that cost is £10 billion per annum. This is a figure taken at 2016 and clearly that would reduce over time. The other issue that we discussed as we went through this was the 75% of people who see a change of less than £5 a week: this is not an average and most people will see only a small change compared to the current system.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I will first follow up on my noble friend’s point on savings credit. The Minister says that it will remain unchanged, but given that it is going to be CPI uprated, where the guaranteed pension credit is earnings related, at what point does the Minister expect savings credit to no longer exist because the guarantee has caught up with it? Therefore, although it is technically true that there will be no changes none the less it is surely also true that, X period of time on, given assumptions about inflation and so on, savings credit will in practice no longer exist.
Baroness Sherlock
I thank my noble friend. I think that when the Minister comes to read Hansard, he may notice that I asked him to confirm that its value would not change and I am sure that he meant to clarify the level rather than the value. One of the reasons is that, since they came to power, the Government have frozen the maximum level at which savings credit can be obtained. I wonder whether they intend to carry that on, in which case would we find that its value did, in fact, diminish.
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Would the Minister agree that the last increase she mentioned has come about by increasing the additional cuts that people will have to face as a result of the bedroom tax?
Baroness Sherlock
I am sure the Minister is aware that the IFS analysed the distributional impact of tax and benefit changes between January 2010 and April 2015 as if universal credit were fully in place. It modelled the real-terms changes in household income at today’s prices with all the measures announced and UC fully implemented. It suggests that a one-earner couple with children will be £64 a week worse off. How does that equate to what she is saying?
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, I want to take this opportunity to ask the Minister a question. I do not want to add to the very important issues outlined by the noble Lords, but I am prompted by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, to ask what is happening to ensure that advice agencies are able to give the appropriate advice to people who may find themselves in the kind of debt described in this amendment to make sure that they avoid having enforcement action taken against them, or to get advice in dealing with it if it does happen. I am very conscious that there have been cuts to advice agencies nationally and locally and that social welfare law has been taken out of the scope of legal aid in its entirety. Given that and the speed with which this change is being introduced at the same time that the entire benefit system for working-age people is facing a revolution, what steps has the department taken to satisfy itself that advice agencies will be up to speed in time and will be sufficiently resourced to enable them to advise clients to make sure either that they do not face enforcement action or that they have somewhere to go for advice if it is applied to them wrongly?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
To reinforce my noble friend’s point about advice agencies, my local Norwich CAB, whose income for the current year will be £1 million, will find a fall of £400,000, down to £600,000 next year, because every penny of the £400,000 it gets from the Lord Chancellor’s department is being withdrawn. As a result, people are not going to be able to use its services, staff will be laid off and the very issues that my noble friend has raised will impact on those who most need help.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, I understand that. The fact is that the noble Lord is not trying to make people want to work but telling them that they have to work. The evidence may be complicated. For me, the point of the objective is simple. I do not think that the state should be substituting its judgment for that of a parent of a young child as to when it is better to go out to work. That should be left to the parent.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Perhaps I could reinforce a point. We know from all the research, going beyond Jane Millar right back to the American research, that a lone parent who goes out to work and retains that work, if it is sustainable, benefits from the lift out of poverty. I entirely accept that that is important for the family as well as for role models. However, that is possible if and only if she has childcare that she trusts. Very often that childcare is from a family member, who is often a grandparent. The grandparent can address the problems of the child in the transition period and so on. Yet time and again we are doing nothing to recognise the role that grandparents may play and instead we are going to impose in-work conditionality on them, taking them out of the caring function that they would voluntarily and willingly embrace for everyone’s benefit. We will expect two generations to work and for the child to be somewhere out there.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I deliberately did not follow my noble friend after such a full, strong and powerful speech; however, my name is also on the amendment. I appreciate the dilemma that the Minister is in: there is a cash constraint and he is making policy choices. The last thing I would wish to see is a diminution in the earnings disregard for the first earner in order to vire it across to a second earner because you are trying to see which poor people would be most hurt in that situation. It is a dilemma and I would not wish to go down that road.
The Minister is right to say that under universal credit the position of women improves for the most part. However, the position of partnered women does not. The distinction my noble friend was drawing was about the situation of partnered women, not women overall. All the moves between in-work and out-of-work benefits, the 16 hours and the extra disregards for lone parents are welcomed, but we are now talking about partnered women and much of the noble Lord’s response dealt with questions that we did not raise.
Let me refer the Minister to page 6 of his own document. This is what happens if Bhavna also starts work for 10 hours a week at the national minimum wage of £6 an hour: she brings in an income of just over £60 a week, and the household has a net gain of just over £20 a week. So she earns £60 and the two specific examples given by the Minister show that she has a gain of £20. As my noble friend emphasised repeatedly, this excludes any childcare costs. I have been doing some sums. If her children are not of school age and she is using a child minder at £2.40 an hour per child—which she may well do—and allowing an hour for travel at each end of the 10 hours that she is working part time over the course of two days, I reckon that, out of that £20 gain—her 30 per cent—her childcare costs would take up £19. So she is left with £1, out of which she has to pay her travel costs, let alone extras such as lunches, food at work, different clothes and so on. Some £19 of that £20 could go on the existing childcare costs, leaving £1 for travel—in other words, she would be out of pocket if she worked. That is based on the Minister’s own figures, and that is what concerns us.
My noble friend was surely spot on when she said that to have a second earner in the family is protective of all family forms. This is what matters; it protects the existing family. We know a larger family will still remain below the poverty line on minimum wage unless you have a second earner in play—and it is the second earner who takes a working family out of poverty. It protects the family and it also protects the woman, should anything happen to her in future.
While I accept the fact that the Minister is up against cost ceilings—I certainly do not wish him to stop viring earnings disregards between the two members of the family—it would help the Committee if he was able to give an undertaking that this will be a priority and that any additional resource would be aimed towards readdressing the issue of the earnings disregard for the second earner. Believe me, all the gains that he is offering, in terms of mini-jobs and so on, are going to be wiped out because of the tougher treatment of childcare costs and the fact that, as a result, it will not be worth your working, even though the Government claim it is.
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, I want to save the Minister getting up twice, as I want to ask him a question on a similar point. I have been trying to wrestle with some of the briefing that has come in on this issue. Can he answer two simple questions? Is it possible for somebody to face MDRs of higher than 100 per cent if they are, for example, a second earner with childcare costs? Secondly, if somebody would actually be worse off in work, would they still be sanctioned for failing to do it?
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I have just a query for the Minister. What he is saying is wise. He understands that we fully support both the principle of UC and the continuum between not being in work and being in work. There is no dispute between us. However, I worry about the huge area of responsibility and effectively discretion that will fall on first level Jobcentre Plus staff. As my noble friend said, no one doubts their goodwill or that they will do the best they can. However, given the centralisation of Jobcentre Plus offices, the fact that staff are often young and that the office may be in a town or city with a substantial choice of jobs compared to rural areas, from my experience they will often have very little understanding of the difficulties experienced in a rural village where the only jobs may be part-time cleaning, childminding if you are lucky, picking mushrooms or cleaning caravans. Those are the options, and none of them would fulfil the work conditionality without serious travel that would impede people’s capacity to look after their children and meet school hours.
I say to the Minister, in capital letters, that so much of the effective delivery of what we all want will rest on the shoulders of junior staff: AOs, with luck supervised by an experienced EO, working in local offices and living some 40 or 60 miles away from the circumstances of an individual in a rural village of which they will have no knowledge. I do not know how far the Minister can go in giving assurances. Of course he will want the best possible training, but I am worried about this. Perhaps the answer will involve intensifying supervision and scrutiny by more experienced senior officers at the review level—the EO level—to make it more possible, so that this does not migrate upwards into the tribunal system that my noble friend identified. We have picked up this problem in the past, and it will become more acute as more people are brought into the conditionality realm. So much will hang on the experience of the staff handling their applications.
Baroness Sherlock
Perhaps I may clarify something. I may have misheard the noble Lord and I apologise for delaying the Committee. Did he say in his response that there might be circumstances in which somebody would not be better off, but that they should take a job anyway? I see that he did. I will quote from the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. In his introduction to the Green Paper he referred to people of working age and stated:
“We will help them to find work and make sure work pays when they do. They in return will be expected to seek work and take work when it is available”.
Was that not the contract he laid before the British people? What the Minister said appears to contradict it.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
It is very interesting that the noble Lord should say that, because it was exactly the advice I had from civil servants at the time. None the less, it did not stop us introducing NI credits for grandparents who did more than 20 hours’ care a week for their daughter, releasing her to work. If you can do it for national insurance and pensions, you can certainly do it for childcare, and it would be much easier to do it with conditionality.
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, perhaps I could suggest to the Minister that Jobcentre Plus could encourage the grandparent to train as a childminder. The daughter could then claim help through universal credit to pay the grandparent for childcare. You could simply cycle the money round that way—it might be a better way to do it.
Lord Freud
My Lords, I am really grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, for her imaginative way of manipulating the system. I am sure that it is something we should look at very closely. No, come on; I will look at this. This is very difficult so I am not promising anything, but I will look at it.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
It is already the case that grandparents can mind a grandchild if they are a registered childminder, with the childcare taking place in their own home, and look after at least one other child. That is already done.
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, I am aware that irony plays rather poorly in Hansard. Just to clarify for the record, I am not actually recommending this scheme to the Government. I simply want to raise the fact that one has to be careful not to build perverse incentives into the system and overformalise relationships that might otherwise find a way of working out on their own.