Universal Credit

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement.

This is a very large pile of sticking plaster. I am glad that some of it is there—it is better than not having it—but in fact it highlights just what a problem lies underneath that which the Government are addressing. For years, Ministers have told the House that all is well with universal credit, and whenever concerns were raised on these or other Benches, they said that we were scaremongering. Whenever charities or churches raised it, they were scaremongering. Even the NAO joined in last June, publishing a damning report about the impact of universal credit. But I am glad that Ministers are beginning to acknowledge that some issues need tackling, and some steps have been taken today which are welcome.

I welcome the increase in work allowances in universal credit. Noble Lords will recall, I am sure, the time in 2015 when my late and sorely missed friend Lady Hollis of Heigham led your Lordships in demanding that the Government think again about those cuts in work allowances. Ministers agreed to do it in tax credits, but they did not for universal credit. But today they have restored £1,000 of that cut, which feels like a good tribute to my noble friend. However, a bit of me feels that it is still only half of what was taken off in that Budget. I am aware that that sounds a bit grudging. I do not like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but if someone gives me two horses then takes them away, then comes back a long time afterwards and gives me one horse, I will still hanker slightly after the two horses that I had in the first place. Your Lordships will forgive me if I am being a bit disgruntled but two horses are better than one. None the less, one horse is better than none. I will stop the metaphor now.

Other things in the Statement are welcome. The decision to roll on other means-tested benefits for two weeks for those moving across to universal credit is good, but the Red Book seems to suggest that that will kick in only from July 2020. Can the Minister clarify whether, if people move across from other benefits any time between now and 2020—for example, because they move into a universal credit area or they have a change of circumstance—they will get no help at all? Will they still be stuck, having to wait five weeks for all this money? What will happen there? I also welcome the minor change to the self-employed rules, but I still think that UC for low-income self-employed people is an absolute mess that will unravel before very long.

The real new announcements today are about managed migration. This really matters because, as the IFS said in its Budget commentary, this is,

“a huge change quite deliberately creating millions of winners and millions of losers. Something like a third … will be at least £1,000 a year worse off under UC than under the legacy system while about a quarter will be at least £1,000 a year better off”.

Ministers keep saying that no one will lose money as a result of moving on to UC. That is not because of generosity; it is because people have transitional protection which says they will not lose out at the point where they move across. However, Ministers do not often tell us that this applies only to some people. There are two ways you can get on to universal credit: through natural migration, where you move to a new area and have a change in circumstances—with this you get no transitional protection; or, at some point between now and three or four years down the road, the Government will move across anyone who is left, in a process that is called managed migration.

As this process is called managed migration, everyone assumed people would be managed. It now turns out they will not be managed at all. They will get a letter saying, “Your benefits are going to be cut off on this date”—I am glad it could be three months rather than one—“and if you don’t make a fresh claim, you will get no money”. If you make a claim after that deadline but within a month, you will get transitional protection; if it is after a month plus a week you will get no transitional protection even if you got your claim in.

Let us bear in mind that this is a complicated process. Around 30% of people who start an online claim give up before it is finished and put into payment. This could be really serious, especially for vulnerable people. The process essentially shifts the burden of responsibility from the state on to the individual, to deal with the consequences of the state moving almost 3 million people from their current benefits; of these, over one-third are either too sick or disabled to work. This is potentially very serious indeed.

The Social Security Advisory Committee had a number of concerns, most of which have been accepted, often in principle. Anyone who has read one of these reports knows that there can be a big difference between accepting something in principle and doing what the committee recommended. One classic example is that the committee suggested that the DWP—rather than making everybody make a fresh claim—could carefully analyse, segment by segment, and look for ways in which certain groups could be carved out and moved across automatically. The DWP simply said no. It said it needed clean data for everybody or that some people such as tax credit recipients may not be eligible. That is not trying. Why will the Government not take up that recommendation and try very hard to see whether some people might not need to make an application?

The Budget announced a further delay to the rollout, which was scored, by my reading, as a net saving to the Government amounting to around £1.2 billion over five years. Can the Minister explain that? I might be completely wrong, but it seems to me that one of the effects of delaying managed migration is that more people will end up moving across to UC on their own—because they move house, have a baby, or their kid leaves home, or whatever. That leaves fewer people at the end. It also means that all those people will not get transitional protection because they were not there at the end, which costs them money but saves the Government money. Does this change make any difference to the number of people who will eventually be in managed migration? The SSAC also raised some real concerns about deliverability. I do not have time today to go through all my outstanding concerns about universal credit. The Minister is shaking her head. Perhaps I can refer her to the questions the committee was asking about operational deliverability; I certainly had a different take from her on that.

I am deeply concerned that this is a sticking plaster while the underlying body is in serious trouble. I believe this could go badly wrong. There is a reason why the Opposition finally ended up calling for the rollout to stop. I am deeply worried that this is not going to work in the way the Government imagine. For 3 million people, as well as all those on the legacy system who will move across sooner, the benefits system is the only thing that stands between many of them and destitution. We cannot afford to get this wrong.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on her analysis of the changes that have been made. Some are very welcome, but we are still facing a major, dramatic piece of administrative change. It will severely affect vulnerable families who are on low legacy benefits at the moment. I do not think it is safe to do this without somehow making an attempt to get an impact assessment of what the long-term effects will be. This legislation was originally put in place in the Welfare Reform Act 2012. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. We now have some very detailed and complicated regulations. Before we start the process, it would be good to know what the department expects the outcome to be. If we cannot get that, we will to a large extent be flying in the dark.

I welcome the three-month grace period for the minimum statutory notice period for the benefit, but we still have a hard stop at the end of that. Three months is better than one month, but can the Minister explain the sentence in the Secretary of State’s Statement which deals with the one-month period becoming three months? It says that,

“we have unlimited flexibility to extend claim periods for people who need it”.

Can she say what the circumstances are in which someone could claim to need that? Unlimited flexibility could mean that people were not facing a hard stop for legacy benefits, so it would be very useful to understand better what that sentence actually means.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and with the Social Security Advisory Committee, that it would be much safer to try to segment some of the clients we are approaching in managed migration to identify vulnerable people. I do not mean vulnerable only in terms of disability and so on, but also in terms of heavy indebtedness, which means that they are unlikely to be able to withstand a long—or indeed any—gap in benefit provision during transition. We know that data is available, because organisations such as Policy in Practice are already stitching together local authority housing benefit data with Treasury, HMRC and DWP data. There is enough material there to anticipate the households that will have real difficulty facing this. I understand the department is saying that the systems do not talk to one another. During the managed migration period, which admittedly does not start for some time yet, we will not, as I understand it, have the advantage of an ability to mash that data and identify vulnerable groups. It can be done by think tanks and research groups; I think it should be done by the department. Proposals to differentiate the impact on different groups of people is, I believe, very important.

Another thing, from a logistics point of view, is that I understand we have to get these regulations done and dusted by the end of the calendar year. The Minister is very good at offering briefing sessions before these regulations hit the Floor; they are affirmative regulations and will need to come to the Floor of the House. I understand the urgency of getting the legality put in place to cover the department for the trial period—the test and learn period—early next year. I plead with the Minister to give us enough time collectively in this House to understand the full significance of all these changes. Some are beneficial, but we are still facing an enormous difficulty that could have a dramatic impact on low-income families in future.

Universal Credit

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement and for advance sight of it. We welcome the concessions, modest though they are. However, we also need to recognise the limitations of what is on offer compared to the scale of the problem, an issue to which I shall return in a moment. The decision to remove the waiting days is particularly welcome. That period was increased to seven days by the Government as a cost-saving measure and it has significantly added to the pressure on universal credit claimants. So that is good news, although it is disappointing that that will not start until next February.

It is good that people who are in receipt of housing benefit when they begin to claim universal credit will have their housing benefit payments run on for two weeks. However, I have a number of questions about that. There is quite a lot of ambiguity in the documentation—one hopes it is not studied ambiguity, but certainly it is not clear quite what a lot of these things will mean. First, can the Minister confirm that that payment will be available to anyone moving on to universal credit, not just those who are going to get moved on en masse by the DWP in what it calls the managed migration programme? I am sure the answer is yes. If it is not, that would of course mean that if you happened to live in a universal credit area and something changed in your life—you had a baby, you started a new job, you got married or divorced—you would be forced on to universal credit, and you would need that money every bit as much as someone who was moved on in a year’s time. So will the Minister clarify that?

Secondly, if it is available to those who are “migrating naturally”—as the jargon has it—as opposed to in a group, what will someone get in housing benefit? Is it two weeks of whatever they happen to be getting? For example, if I were in low-paid work and getting a little bit of housing benefit, do I get two weeks of that, even though the reason why I am going on to universal credit might be that I have lost my job and normally I would get all my rent paid? Is it two weeks of my little bit or two weeks of the amount that I would be entitled to? Who will pay that? Is it the local authority? Is it actually a run-on of housing benefit or is the DWP paying an equivalent amount from the centre? If it is the latter, will anyone have to apply for it?

On the advances, it is good that from January 2018 new claimants will be able to borrow a 100% advance on their first month’s universal credit and that all advances can then be repaid over 12 months, as I believe is the case already for those transferring in from benefits, rather than six months for new claimants. When this is discussed in another place, though, Ministers often sound as if they think that giving people access to money is the same thing as giving them money. My bank gives me ready access to money. Unfortunately, that is called an overdraft; it is not in fact extra money. The Government have created a problem by forcing poor people on to a system where they have to wait six weeks—now five—for money, and the solution that they have come up with is to make them take on more debt. In effect, the system moves them from a six-week wait to a five-week wait and a large extra amount of debt. If you can borrow twice as much money but over twice as long a period, you are still paying back the same amount each month. The fact that UC is less generous than before also means that for a whole year, as well as getting less money, you have to survive on even less because you have to repay each month some of the debt that you were given to enable you to get through the first month.

So I ask for some clarification. Will this higher advance of 100% be offered to all claimants, not just to those coming over through natural or managed migration? Will it be an entitlement? At the moment, the DWP can refuse to give you an advance if it thinks either that you cannot afford to repay it or that you have money anyway or could get it. Will everyone be allowed to do it?

Most obviously, why did the Government not just move to two-weekly payments? There is already provision in DWP guidance for some people to ask, and to be allowed, to be paid fortnightly. Why did they not let everyone choose to do that instead of creating this five-week problem? Most people will not benefit from the housing benefit extra bit and will just get a six-week wait reduced to a five-week wait.

My other big point concerns the rollout. The Minister explained that the Government will slow down the rollout of universal credit, but the various things that she mentioned come on at different times. Some things start in January, there are other bits of help in February and the housing help starts in April. Why do the Government not pause universal credit for, say, six months, so that at least by the time it starts again, all those bits of help are in place? Otherwise, if you have the misfortune to find that it comes to your area in January, February, March or April, you will not benefit from some of them, although that is not your fault. Why do they not just pause it?

The Government pledged that universal credit will be simple to access, make work pay and lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty. In the excellent debate we had last week led by my noble friend Lady Hollis, we heard that it is failing on all fronts. During that debate, with the exception of a few touchingly loyal Members on the Government Benches, Members raised a whole range of problems about universal credit, of which only the most obvious was the six-week wait. None of those have been addressed at all. There was nothing in the Budget Statement to improve the taper or restore work allowances to make work pay, nothing to deal with the mess for self-employed people on UC.

The Minister mentioned in the Statement the problem of cliff edges in the previous system, but there is nothing to deal with passported benefits. A consultation out at the moment suggests that if a family earns over a certain amount, it immediately loses all entitlement to free school meals, so an extra hour’s work can mean that you lose free school meals for all your kids. That is the very definition of a cliff edge. Crucially, there is nothing to deal with the year-on-year cut in the real-terms value of universal credit, which has been frozen, along with most other working-age benefits. So I am sorry to say that there is nothing to stop the inexorable rise in inequality—especially child poverty, which the IFS has modelled so carefully.

I really do welcome these measures, but they are modest. They are worth about £300 million a year in the context of many billions of pounds of cuts. I fear that universal credit is like a great big liner. As it steams along, the Government have put a bit of water on the fire on the deck that everybody was pointing to while not, I am sorry to say, doing anything to stop the ship heading for the rocks, having already been holed by the Treasury in successive, very significant cuts. I urge the Minister to turn her attention next to the substantial problems within universal credit.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, I am happy to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and I agree that the statement that we had in the Budget deals only with the journey on to—the gateway into—universal credit. I welcome the Statement. To be realistic, if the Government had not said something, it would have been impossible to resist the pressure to delay the further rollout of universal credit, and I do not agree that that would be sensible—I never have.

I have two questions for the Minister. For the reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, set out at length, the delivery of these changes will be difficult. Can she assure us that they will land, be locked in and operate to the benefit of claimants in future, without fear of further disruption, letdown and distress? It is a very tall order. Some of these changes start next month. Given the background to the operational implementation of universal credit, it is not unreasonable to be suspicious about the implementation of the immediate changes that have been announced, welcome as they are. Can the Minister assure us that she personally will ensure that they all work and will make claimants’ lives easier, and that she will report to the House regularly on the success or otherwise of the rollout?

But these are only gateway measures; they are only easing the transition to universal credit. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, is quite right: the rising costs and fixed benefits that low-income households are facing will condemn some of these families to a very bleak future. That necessitates my second question: will the Government start planning to use some of the £3 billion annual savings within UC alone—never mind the other ongoing cuts and freezes—to ease people’s road into work by increasing work allowances and tapers? If we do not do something of that kind, it will be very difficult successfully to promote the programme of progression through work into sustainable longer-term jobs and careers.

Once the difficulties of getting people on to universal credit are overcome, and people are in a steady state of receiving their universal credit payments monthly, the next big political battle will be trying to get the Government to be more realistic about the money available to support people when they are on universal credit.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Monday 7th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 19, standing in my name and that of my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton, and to the other amendments in this group, which I support.

The case has already been so well made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley that I will not add much more. However, I want to get a sense of scale. Contact a Family reports that there are 770,000 disabled children under the age of 16 in the UK. That equates to one child in 20. Most struggle on alone with only 8% of families getting services from their local social services. As we have heard, it costs up to three times as much to raise a disabled child as it does to raise a child without disabilities. We have heard the figures from official statistics showing the much higher rate of poverty among families with a disabled member and the high proportion of children with a disability who live in households in poverty

Families are already struggling. It is very good that we will retain the disability element, which covers some of the additional costs of disability, but the child will still have to be fed and clothed and cared for. The reality is that not only do disabled children cost much more but it is much harder for parents to increase their income, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. Suitable childcare for disabled children is much harder to find and more expensive when it is found. For some children the nature of their disability makes it very hard for anyone other than the parent to be able to take care of them.

As the Children’s Society pointed out in its briefing, the child disability element for children other than those on the high-rate care component of DLA has already been effectively halved within universal credit. Currently a family with a disabled third child would receive a maximum child tax credit entitlement of £5,920. Following the reduction of the disability component and the two-child limit, they get a maximum of just £1,513, little more than a quarter of their entitlement in the current tax credit system.

The Minister has said repeatedly today that this is about choice and that we want to enable families who are on tax credits and universal credit to make the same choices as other families. Will he acknowledge that having a disabled child is not a choice a family makes? Often the family will not know that the child is going to be disabled when the child is conceived. Either the disability may not be known, or the child may develop a disability or an illness which causes a disability after birth. The family are therefore not in a position to know the additional costs they are going to be taking on. I have problems in general with this policy, as I will explain in a later stand part debate, but one of the reasons for having so many exemptions is to try to get the Government to explain the rationale of exempting certain categories of person and not others. The Minister needs to be consistent. If his intention is all about clear-eyed choice, then can he explain how that applies in this case?

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 3, and I support the powerful speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and other contributions that we have had in this short debate. I want to make a simple point about disability. I had the distinct impression that, although the Government were determined to force through their £12,000 million savings, health and disability were going to be a priority for Ministers over the next five years. There are signs that that is true. Some of the attempts that we are watching unfold to bridge the disability employment gap and issues of that kind are welcome, as far as they go. That should give the Minister some cover to go back to the Treasury and say that there should be some identified exemptions for working families in particular. We are trying to encourage people to sustain employment in the future. Some families have young members with different levels of disability as well as mental health issues and disabilities. There is a little more emphasis on this, thanks to the excellent work that was done during the coalition Government days. There is a real peg on which the Minister can hang an approach to these tragedies which says that something needs to be said and some provision made for disability in the context of Clauses 11 and 12.

I say again to the Minister, and I mean it, that the Committee will weigh carefully what he says in terms of the exemptions or otherwise. So far he has been playing a pretty straight bat and holding the line on behalf of the Government, by which I think he means the Treasury. I understand all that, but he has to be very careful. I have said this before, and I will say it again in the clause stand part debate, that he risks losing some of these clauses, if he is not careful, if he does not appeal to good moderates such as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and me. No, I take that back—it will damage his political career in the new Labour Administration.

There is an opportunity in the context of Ministers rightly focusing again on work and health. If that is applied to the amendments that have been so ably moved, I think there is some room for compromise. If there is not some give and take, I think that the Minister is going to have trouble carrying some of this Bill through the rest of its proceedings.

Jobseeker’s Allowance (Supervised Jobsearch Pilot Scheme) Regulations 2014

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for the lucid way in which he introduced these important regulations. I declare an interest as a non-executive director of the Wise Group in Glasgow, which works in JSA service provision.

I am grateful also to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which looked at these regulations. It does excellent work; it is hard to overestimate the value it brings to some of these very complicated schemes. The committee came to the conclusion that it was not impressed. There are two issues here: the policy behind the pilot and the structure of the pilot—whether that is worth the candle. I want to rehearse some of its concerns, because they are self-evident to anybody who has studied these things. Pilots are very useful; they have played an important role in the past in developing policy and I am sure the Scrutiny Committee accepts that. But how do we expect to get real value out of something that starts on 6 October and ends on 15 April, when we are dealing with the possibility and the opportunity that these regulations provide, as the Minister rightly described, in helping people into sustainable work? In my book, sustainable work is a 12-month contract, with support that a jobseeker can take advantage of from being on benefits into that sustained job outcome. I have severe doubts, as does the Scrutiny Committee, that we will get anything of value in what I think is insufficient time. Why are we stopping on 15 April? Obviously, there is an election. I can see that coming—I am not that stupid. However, it is more important to get this policy right than to have niceties about purdah or any other technicality of that kind. I have serious doubts about what value we will get from the shortness of the period of the pilot. Indeed, client groups of 3,000 are not that useful, either. Before the debate started the Minister helpfully handed us a long list of exclusions of clients who cannot be included.

We have a very limited pilot here, and I think we could have had a much more useful opportunity to test some of these things. We have very minimal information about what will actually happen. Jobsearch is something that, if people have been in the Work Programme, should have been deployed for two years—and intensively, I would like to have thought. Now we have supervised jobsearch, which comes six months after two years so it will be really intense. The new system of Universal Jobmatch—which I have seen; it is very good—takes only about half an hour to prospect for jobs across the United Kingdom, because it is so efficient. This is a full-time commitment. People are being mandated to come in for 35 hours a week. How many hours will they spend over a Universal Jobmatch machine? They can get the full value out of it in half an hour, in my experience. It would help me to understand the value of these pilots better if the Minister could flesh out what would be done over this extended period of 13 weeks at 35 hours a week. What on earth are they going to do? We are told at paragraph 7.19 that:

“On day one, the provider must: assess the claimant’s skills and experience”,

et cetera. Then we are told:

“In week one, the provider must: carry out a number of activities with the claimant … On an ongoing basis, providers must: review and update the claimant’s portfolio, CV and action plan”.

These are things that I always assumed would be taken account of in the Work Programme anyway. Now they are doing it full time, for 35 hours a week for 13 weeks. I am in favour of providing support for people, but I do not know how that intense job-searching activity will look different from what they are supposed to have been doing for the previous two years.

I am interested in the pre-Work Programme group, because I do not understand where it came from. There is a logic to involving people who have been in the Work Programme. In any commonsense view, if someone has been unemployed for two years despite being in the Work Programme, in which they get a lot of help, it would suggest that more than their CV needs fixing. I do not know if it is possible to translate those people into the Troubled Families Programme; I hate that term, but the programme is interesting. It takes a holistic view, going beyond the front door of the family home, looking not just at the CV but at everything that is going on. Somebody who has been unemployed for two years despite the Work Programme’s assistance has got some serious issues behind the front door of the family home. It would be much more sensible for some of these people to at least be offered the option of taking a different route from that of looking at a Universal Jobsearch machine for 35 hours every week. That would drive me crazy.

The Scrutiny Committee says that there is scant information about the cost-benefit ratio for this. We have been told that there is a cap of £5,000 per head. I understand that if this is to be competitively tendered for, the department has got to be a bit canny in determining costs for contracts which will be bid for. However, Parliament requires a little more information, particularly given the department’s straitened circumstances, with departmental expenditure being squeezed so ruthlessly.

In passing, the whole-time staff equivalent costs are being substantially reduced. I looked at the annual report which came out a couple of days ago. In 2012, there were over 100,000 whole-time equivalent staff in the DWP. It fell to 98,000 in 2013. It is now 88,000. We are laying extra layers of responsibility on to a smaller cadre of hard-pressed staff. These job coaches will have their work cut out to do the work they already do on top of this pilot. The Minister was helpful in his introductory remarks, but any more information we can have about what will actually be done during this intensive period of job searching would certainly help me a lot.

I am looking at the Autumn Statement 2013, where the Chancellor said that,

“the Government will invest £700 million over 4 years in a new Help to Work scheme”.

He went on set out what that would do. He said it would,

“require all JSA claimants who are still unemployed after 2 years on the Work Programme to undertake intensive, often daily, activity to improve their employment prospects”

Is this part of that? Is this part of the £700 million four-year programme that the Chancellor set out in the Autumn Statement? I would like to know about that because, if it is, it would make it possible to place this pilot in a wider context. I must sit down. I have just realised how long I have been talking for.

My view about conditionality and support for getting people off welfare into work is captured accurately in the study that Paul Gregg did in 2008 for the previous Government. If the Minister will promise to read it at the weekend, I will say no more about it. That is a deal that he had better accept because, otherwise, it will take me another 20 minutes to explain its detail.

There are some opportunities here. I understand that. I am not against sanctions. I think sanctions should be restricted to a much smaller band of people than the 800,000 or 900,000 that we are headed towards. I am prepared to look at this. I know the Explanatory Memorandum states that the results of the evaluation will be published. I hope the Minister will confirm that on the record because that would give it some solidity and be an assurance. I hope this pilot produces something useful. I have great doubts that it will, but I understand why the Government are taking the powers they are taking. I wish the pilot well and I hope it works.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction to this order and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, who should not have worried about going on too long. I should apologise because I intend to go on for a great deal longer than that, I fear. My speech will be composed mostly of questions to which—like the noble Lord—I struggled to find the answers. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and I have been together wandering around the Palace hunting. I was so much driven by desperation that I even went to watch the House of Commons Delegated Legislation Committee debate these regulations yesterday. I have to admit that that the exercise was slightly more entertaining than it was informative—and it was not actually that entertaining, in truth. It was an attempt to try to find out what was behind it. Yesterday, the Minister did not manage to answer many of the questions, but I have confidence in our Minister who I know will answer them. If he cannot, I ask him to write on any questions that may be outstanding at the end.

The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, mentioned the report by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. It was interesting reading. It might be worth reading a bit into the record. It commented rather drily:

“While the Committee has in the past commended well-structured pilot exercises as a means of informing policy development, it is unable to do so on this occasion due to a lack of information on how the scheme will work in practice. The Explanatory Memorandum provides minimal information on the pilot scheme and none at all on the cost of the exercise. We found virtually no material in the public domain about this proposal. No evidence is offered on why DWP expects the format and 13 week duration to be more successful than the existing interventions or why a shorter intervention might not be more cost-effective. We understand that the pilots will cost more than the existing programmes to run but not how they are expected to provide value for money, particularly when the candidates selected will be those who have failed to engage with the Work Programme”.

Apart from that, it loved it. It goes on:

“We therefore suggest that, before the House is asked to approve these Regulations, DWP offers … a revised Explanatory Memorandum”.

I discovered this morning that DWP had produced a revised Explanatory Memorandum which was put on the website last Thursday. Will the Minister take back a thought, which is one for all sides to consider? In circumstances such as this, where a department revises an Explanatory Memorandum very late in the day, he might reflect on the best way to bring that matter to the attention of Members of the House who might be interested—which I say, for the purposes of the avoidance of any doubt, would include Her Majesty’s Opposition on occasions such as this. I wonder whether he might consider whether there is any way we could make the communication process work better.

The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, asked about context. These pilots were first announced by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, at the 2013 Conservative Party conference. Their aim was made clear when he said that,

“alongside the Mandatory Work Programme and our tough sanctions regime, this marks the end of the something for nothing culture”.

That is the context. To understand what this is about, it is worth looking at those two other bits of the package because what is happening here is connected directly to the Work Programme.

Its record, as noble Lords will know, is not hugely encouraging. Its performance is inconsistent and it has helped primarily those who are already closest to the Labour market. In another place the Minister of State, Esther McVey, responded on this point by talking about unemployment levels. Thankfully, I know that we have in the noble Lord a Minister who is better able to distinguish between the level of employment and the contribution made to it by the Work Programme, which is carefully evaluated.

While it is good news when anyone gets a job, there are significant gaps in the Work Programme. Over 1.5 million referrals have been made to it but fewer than 300,000 job outcome payments have been made. The success among disabled people is particularly bad, and not much more than one in 20 people on ESA are getting a sustained job outcome. However, the key point is that that means that 477,480 people have gone back to Jobcentre Plus after two years on the scheme. This is over two-thirds of participants who have completed their allotted time. Can the Minister tell the Committee if it is the intention to roll out this scheme, should it be deemed successful, to all of those 477,000 people?

It may be the case—given the piece of paper he handed to us at the start—that once those 11 categories of people who will be excluded are taken out, the number is smaller. If so, by how much? What is the size of the population who would potentially experience this, should it be rolled out? If so, what would that cost? My back-of-envelope maths suggests that at £5,000 a head, the cost will be about £2.4 billion. Are the Government really considering spending that on rolling out this programme to 477,000 people? If not, why are they piloting it?

I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, is of a more generous spirit than me—which I confess is not always hard—but I am ever so slightly suspicious that it was announced that the Work Programme was not doing well but there was nothing to say what you do to people who get to the end of it. Labour had suggested all kinds of things such as compulsory job guarantees. This scheme is not a good thing, but it is a thing. I will wait for the Minister to correct me, as he often does.

In relation to sanctions, the other part of the package, we have heard a lot of complaints repeatedly from people concerned that jobcentres are being pushed to sanction too many people, or inappropriately. As regards communication, the Minister has a job to do in reassuring the Committee about how the Government will make sure that anyone who is sanctioned is sanctioned appropriately.

There is, however, a serious issue behind this, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, pointed out. We need to do something to redress the position of those who are still struggling, even after having received considerable amounts of help. The Government could usefully look at a more effective process of assessing jobseekers right at the beginning. Also, the Government’s proposals are not ambitious enough for the long-term unemployed. The Minister knows the Labour approach. We would offer a compulsory job guarantee to any young person out of work for a year, and to anyone else who was out of work for more than two years; basic skills tests; a more devolved model of commissioning; and different support for young people. However, these regulations are what the Government have produced, so I should be grateful if the Minister would tell us why their proposal will make a difference that our kind of schemes will not.

I have some specific questions, and I apologise for their number. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, asked, can the Minister tell us what people will do for 35 hours a week for three months? Will they all be doing the same thing as one another? Yesterday in the House of Commons, Esther McVey said that the Government were refining and tailor-making support for individuals. How individualised will the programme be? Will all the participants from any one provider be doing the same thing or different things? What range of things will they be doing?

The Minister there also suggested that they would vary according to client need and provider inclination. How then will the Government ensure that provision and supervision will be of good quality? If a provider bids low and does only what the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, suggested and keeps claimants in a room with a computer screen and Universal Jobmatch for 35 hours a week, will that pass? It might be value for money because it would not be very expensive, but would it pass the quality threshold? The noble Lord is wrong to think that he would go completely mad; he could probably read the adverts for careers at CosaNostra Holdings several times to amuse himself before he became too bored with Universal Jobmatch; so he need not do it down too much.

Regulation 3(a) states that the scheme is to provide support,

“for up to 35 hours per week over a period of up to 13 weeks”.

Is it the intention to test varying periods and durations, or will everyone be expected to be there for 35 hours a week for 13 weeks?

Universal Credit (Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2014

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Wednesday 18th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for that speech and indeed for this opportunity to question the Government on the progress of universal credit. I do not think that he need worry too much about whether he strayed from the regulations. The points that he made were precisely the areas that I too had zoned in on from the regulations, so it is certainly my view that his questions are within the spirit, and clearly the content, of tonight’s business.

Before I turn to the content, I want to ask the Minister a process question. Could he explain to the House what the rush was for the consideration of this Motion? I saw these regulations appear on the green sheet certainly no more than two or three sitting days ago, and it was only yesterday that it was confirmed that this debate would take place tonight. There may have been other noble Lords with an interest in this subject—there were certainly plenty of us during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act—who wanted to participate in the debate.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

I have to leap to the defence of the Minister. This is my fault: I tabled the debate and was offered a slot, and the Government were very generous in giving me a slot on the Floor so I took it early. That is entirely my fault and was nothing to do with the Government or the Chief Whip.

[Baroness Sherlock]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention and for leaping to defend the honour of the Minister. The only point that I make is that it may not be widely understood outside the House that no one consults, for example, the Opposition to see whether a spokesperson is available. This gave me 24 hours to get these regulations out, read them and understand what they were about in order to be able to hold the Minister to account. The process should allow for that. I was not suggesting any conspiracy on the Minister’s part—I know that these matters are far above his pay grade and mine by some considerable distance—but I simply place that point on the record. I think that we would get better debates if we all had a bit more notice when things of this complexity were coming forward. It is not as though universal credit is in a rush. It is not about to be rolled out across the country next week or next month.

The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, raised the question of the speed of transition. I think he was rather generous to the Secretary of State. On 1 November 2011 Iain Duncan Smith promised that 1 million people would be claiming universal credit by April 2014. So how does it look now? The noble Lord pointed out that the case load now, far from being 1 million, is 5,610, and the signs are not promising. In January this year, 1,010 people started claiming universal credit, in February it was 630 people and in March it was 560 people. Only 6,550 people have claimed anything at all since the scheme began. That is an enormous difference.

The Secretary of State has insisted repeatedly that universal credit would meet its deadlines of first national rollout from October 2013 and final replacement of housing benefit, child and working tax credits, income support and non-contributory JSA and ESA by 2017. I am with the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, on this; I would not bet the DWP pension pot on that deadline being met at the moment.

The noble Lord asked a question about what “reset” means. He is right not to believe everything he reads in the papers, but the papers were pretty much of the same view that the reason the project had to be reset was that it had previously had an amber/red rating from the Major Projects Authority and was probably about to get a red rating, so in order not to get a red rating it was reset so that it did not get any rating at all. I very much hope that that is scurrilous suspicion on the part of the media and that the Minister can correct it and explain the process to us.

However, it is not the first time. Whenever criticisms are made of the project, the department comes back and Ministers say that those criticisms are not fair because they do not take account of changes that have recently been made. There comes a stage when, if problems keep arising and changes are made, it is legitimate to say: how can you persuade people outside, never mind the House, that the department has learnt enough from previous mistakes to have any confidence in the next level of management development that has been put forward? I hope the Minister will be able to give us some reassurance on that front.

Recently, there have been even more worrying reports about problems in the pilot universal credit areas with claims that administrative errors and computer glitches had led to increases in personal debt, rent arrears and evictions.

The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, raised the question of value for money. In four years, more than £600 million has been spent and, as he pointed out, the Government admit that £40 million has been totally wasted and a further £90 million “written down” because the IT bought was not fit for purpose. That is a lot of money for 5,610 people to be claiming universal credit. That context means that the Minister will understand why there is nervousness about the fact that these regulations seem to give the Government considerable discretion in deciding how the rollout should take place in future.

First, as the noble Lord pointed out, unlike the 2013 transitional regulations, these regulations give that discretion to the Government. They no longer contain proposals for categories of people to be brought on to universal credit. Rather, “gateway conditions” for universal credit claimants will in future be spelt out in commencement orders which, as the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments points out, are not subject to parliamentary scrutiny. Secondly, the regulations permit the Secretary of State to stop taking universal credit claims altogether either for certain categories of people or in certain parts of the country. That is a really significant shift in powers from Parliament scrutinising or passing regulations to the Secretary of State. Will the Minister give us some indication of whether there is any limitation to those powers? Could he, for example, decide not to include several benefits? Could he decide not to do Wales? Could he decide not to do the north of England? Is there any limitation to that discretion? If so, what does that mean for our understanding of what the transition timetable will be, a point pressed very effectively by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood?

The questions I would like to ask the Minister are these. First, why are these changes necessary? What was wrong with things that were done previously when regulation was used? What is necessary? What is it about the process and, more importantly, what do the Government think the process is going to look like in future that means they need these powers?

Secondly, how will Parliament be enabled to scrutinise the decisions taken by the Secretary of State to control who is entitled to universal credit? The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, flagged up one of the points made in defence of universal credit, which is that it will give various benefits to categories of claimant. If that is the case—certainly the Government have used that defence in explaining why they had to cut existing benefits—that is a considerable power. How can Parliament hold Ministers to account for deciding who is and is not entitled to access a system created by Parliament with an expectation that it would by now have been experienced by 1 million people and would be entirely rolled out by 2017? That is a very serious constitutional question.

Pensions Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Monday 16th December 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to add a more operational note to the questions raised by the important amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Turner of Camden. She makes a powerful case, but the financial circumstances suggest to me that there is more likelihood of eventually getting into the position that was explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, than she was suggesting.

The implication of the amendment is that it would extend the single-tier pension to all pensioners. I have some questions about the operational capacity of the system to deliver sensibly some of these significant changes. In the first place, the Green Paper suggested that we should be looking at this by 2017. That has been brought forward; there are obvious advantages to that but it has caused some people to raise questions with me. Some of that is informed by the current controversy about the efficacy of the systems for universal credit, which are of course of a different order in terms of the IT systems. It also has to be acknowledged that the Pension Service has a very good record of implementing some of this stuff; when pension credit came in, it was done in a way that got very high marks from the National Audit Office, as I recall. So it may be that everything is going to be fine, but if the national insurance records are not all clean data then we could be facing some serious difficulties in delivering the payment of pensions on time. There are other operational matters that I am sure are concerning people at Longbenton in Newcastle, as they should be.

Speaking for myself, I would be very pleased to get some kind of assurance at some stage in Committee that with regard to this huge and significant change, affecting a number of very vulnerable households, the department, having regard to the recent reductions in staff and all the other matters, is in place to be able to deliver this efficiently and on time in the way that is proposed.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, in speaking to Amendments 1 and 2, I look forward to a productive time in Grand Committee. I assure the Minister that there will be cross-party consensus over the direction of travel; this very much carries on the direction that Labour took in government, and I look forward to being able to debate the detail. This first group has already highlighted a number of the issues that we are going to want to explore over the next few weeks. The point about cost made by the noble Lord, Lord Flight, and my noble friend Lady Hollis is an important one, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give us an indication of both the cost of bringing all these people into the system but also the cost drivers that might help us to understand better my noble friend’s point. If he could cost her ingenious scheme before we got to the end of this stage of the Bill, that would also be very helpful.

The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, about operational issues is going to become very important. There are amendments later on in which we will begin to explore how the department will communicate with people, and that will surface many of those issues. The Minister may want to be prepared before we get to that stage.

I, too, have heard concerns from all kinds of people. I know that Age Concern has been very worried; it has been getting letters, e-mails and phone calls from people who are anxious about the fact that they will not get this new pension that they have read so much about. One of the requirements on the Government from a very early point is going to be to try to manage their communication better, as I will say later on when we come to discuss information. The Select Committee found a huge amount of confusion among the public about who would get what and when. It is not surprising, therefore, that people are as anxious as they are.

Will the Minister reassure the Committee that the Government are alive to the concerns of those who have already reached state pension age or will do so before implementation, and will carry on listening? Will they consider the impact on those pensioners as the system is brought in? Will the Government, maybe at the next Committee day, take the opportunity to explain to us the impact of the new amendments tabled in the wake of the autumn Statement? That could be helpful, and we could look at it later this week.

Will the Minister help the Committee to reflect on the position of those who retire before implementation on modest incomes? Will he clarify that those who have saved with the second state pension or its predecessors will find that any amount they get in future which is above the single-tier pension is in fact uprated only by CPI? There is a perception that everybody before the transition gets one thing and everybody after it gets another, when in fact, as we will unfold, it is going to be a lot more complicated than that.

Is the Minister concerned at all about the distributional impact for those in that area of modest earnings? He will know that S2P is distributive because it treats anyone earning between the lower earnings limit of £5,668 and the lower earnings threshold of £15,000 as though they earn £15,000. That distributive element is quite important in protecting those on modest incomes and making sure that they can save for the future.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, I will make just a short intervention on this amendment so ably moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I entirely concur with her view and analysis. I want to add, however, the fact that I am now very frightened about what is happening in the short term. There is a complacent view held among policymakers generally that the Work Programme and universal credit are all that need be done. I support both, and will not cast any aspersions on any Governments or make any party political points, but both these important reforms will take at least 10 years to go into steady state and be of assistance to our most hard-pressed, low-income households in the United Kingdom.

If I am right about that, and about the prognosis for the United Kingdom’s level of economy over that period, we face a really difficult period of activity where we cannot rely safely on the Work Programme and universal credit to provide the social protection that this country needs and expects. We need to do something in the short term that seeks to understand what is going on. More than anything else, this is a plea for really rigorous and urgent monitoring of everything going on: every bit of evidence from every constituent part of the United Kingdom. We need to watch carefully what is happening. The noble Baroness is quite right: malnutrition of children will result over the next five to 10 years if we are not extremely careful.

Now, this is no one’s fault. I understand perfectly well the need to get austerity and deficit reduction properly balanced in the nation’s future policy at a financial and fiscal level. But nobody could have foreseen the difficulties or longevity of the recession, or the lack of growth that this country will have to deal with in the short term of five to 10 years. That does not seem like a long time and I do not take anything away from the long-term need to get universal credit and the Work Programme put together and rolled out, but nobody is paying enough attention to what is going on in the short term.

If you refer to the sensible policy professionals who look at this, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is first among them and there is the work by Loughborough University, Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, and all these experts. We have better professionals in the United Kingdom than any other European country. I say that because I have worked with most of them for the best part of 25 years. The noble Baroness is one of them— she nodded at that point. This is a serious point: we have internationally recognised experts on this yet we are deaf to what they say to us. A growing body of opinion says that something different and more than what has been put in the policy framework to date needs to be done to be sure that we do not face levels of financial adversity with which the public will not be comfortable.

I know that there is a view that people are against welfare spend and we have had discussions over the Welfare Reform Act and this Bill about the language used nationally in the public discourse on this important area of public policy. It is important because £200,000 million a year is spent and it is still creating problems. We need to face up to that. We need to have a much more adult discussion about what is going on.

Certainly, concepts such as the minimum income standards need to be part of that discussion. We need to look at the cumulative effect of everything that has happened since 2010 that has made the circumstances dramatically worse. People know that I am a professional, paid-up pessimist—I accept that—but we have to be very careful about how we assess the evidence.

I want to make a couple of quick suggestions about how we might deal with that in conjunction with looking at the principles in the long and short term and how we perform the monitoring and evaluation. What is happening in the devolved legislatures of the United Kingdom is very important. There are positive responses in Wales, and in Scotland, which I know best, where the need is recognised. We must first promote the need to do things differently. That may mean financing food banks—that is not something that I want, but if the alternative is malnutrition in children, we cannot ignore that. It is easier in smaller countries which have shorter lines of communication and a smaller scale. They can move more flexibly and faster. Working with the legislatures in Cardiff and Edinburgh, I think that there are some quick wins that central Government could help to promote. I hope that we will do that and keep the channels of communication between London and the constituent legislatures throughout the rest of the United Kingdom open and dialogue promoted urgently.

As the second part of that, working with local authorities will be so important. The evidence coming back from housing authorities, particularly in local authorities, presents variable geometry—we are getting different messages from different parts of the country. There is a spatial dimension to some of these issues which we should not ignore. In the past, we have always safely relied on a centralised, unified United Kingdom social security process as the right thing to do. I have less confidence about that working in the next five to 10 years. We need to look much more carefully at how housing and labour markets are aligned in some regions of our United Kingdom and be sensitive to changes happening in those fields.

I think that we need a short-term anti-poverty strategy. The principles covered by the amendment of the noble Baroness are important and must be kept in mind for the longer term, but all my instincts tell me that the next three, five or seven years will be difficult in a way that nobody has previously been able to get a grip on. If we do not respond to that by looking at some of the ideas contained in the amendment, we will pay a heavy price in terms of child poverty, in particular. We have an important amendment coming up next on that subject, and I hope that we will think carefully about that as well.

In strongly supporting the concept behind the amendment, I would like the Committee to consider not just the longer and medium term but some of the emergency state provisions that we as a country will be forced to face over the next five to 10 years.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, this has been an interesting brief debate, introduced by my noble friend Lady Lister with her now characteristic blend of expertise and passion. I am sure that we are all grateful to her for opening up the question so well. The quotes that she shared with the Committee about children arriving hungry at school and mothers missing meals and going without themselves to protect their children from the effects of poverty were, on one level, not a surprise to any of us, but they are still shocking. They should be profoundly shocking.

I found the point made by the right reverend Prelate very interesting and I understand why he would like those assurances from both sides of the Committee. My noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton made Labour’s position clear at the beginning of our first day in Committee. It is this: if we were in government right now, we would be uprating benefits in line with inflation. However, we cannot make a commitment at this stage for the next Parliament. My view is that that is not a good idea anyway. We are fundamentally opposed to the whole principle in the Bill of fixing the levels of uprating for a period. We have perfectly good mechanisms for uprating benefits annually in line with inflation in the light of prevailing economic circumstances. To be honest, I would not want to be tempted into anything other than maintaining that position, but I fully understand why the right reverend Prelate is pressing the concerns that he is pressing.

I also found the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, very interesting. He drew in the spatial dimensions of poverty and the wide-ranging regional issues. That is something that we may come back to. I particularly agreed with his point about the need to monitor what is going on. The next amendment that I shall move encourages the Government to look specifically at the impact on child poverty. I also support the noble Lord’s point about the need for a cumulative assessment of all the changes between 2010 and now—a point made very strongly by my noble friend Lady Hollis at earlier stages of debate.

Since the Bill cannot help but drive down standards of living for families, what assessment have the Government made of the likely impact on the well-being of the poorest adults and children of what is effectively a real-terms cut in benefits and tax credits, not just over the year ahead, but over the three years covered by the first uprating and the two years of this Bill? It would be very helpful to the Committee to understand what assessment the Government have made. At a time when three new food banks are opening every week and even families in work are finding it a struggle to make ends meet, the state needs to take particular care to demonstrate that resources are gathered and distributed in a way that is fair to everyone. In the light of that, I shall be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, Amendment 12 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton. This amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish and lay before Parliament a report assessing the impact of the order on the number of children living in the four measures of child poverty set out in the Child Poverty Act; namely, relative low income, combined low income and material deprivation, absolute low income, and persistent poverty. The aim is very simple. It is to force the Government to face up to the consequences of their actions and to come clean about the impact of these measures on child poverty.

I am sure that the Minister is closely familiar with the coalition agreement. I know that I read it regularly, so I expect no less of him. My favourite bit is paragraph 14, the first bullet point of which reads:

“We will maintain the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020”.

That is rather lovely and has a beauty in its simplicity. I will repeat it:

“We will maintain the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020”.

In keeping with that commitment, the Government have previously published the effect on child poverty of Budgets, spending reviews and Autumn Statements. But in the last Autumn Statement we did not get the kind of detail that we were expecting. Why could that be? We got a hint in a Written Answer in another place from the honourable Esther McVey when she said:

“We estimate that the uprating measures in 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16 will result in around an extra 200,000 children being deemed by this measure to be in relative income poverty compared to uprating benefits by CPI”.—[Official Report, 15/1/13; col. 716W.]

It probably is important to look at the backdrop to this. Since the goal of ending child poverty by 2020 was first announced in 1999, the UK has made real progress. Some 1.1 million children were taken out of relative child poverty between 1998-99 and 2010-11, and 2.1 million children were taken out of absolute child poverty between 1998-99 and 2010-11. But now we are going into reverse. The rise in child poverty likely to be caused by these measures is on top of a net rise in child poverty of 400,000 by 2015 and 800,000 by 2020, resulting from the Government’s current fiscal policies, as seen in the IFS analysis of 2011.

If that is right—the Institute for Fiscal Studies has a pretty good record on these things—that means a rise in child poverty of at least 1 million children under the relative low-income measure is now likely by 2020. However, the relative low-income measure is just one of the four poverty measures in the Child Poverty Act. I should like to ask the Government why Ministers have not given any figures on the number of children who will be pushed into absolute poverty by the Bill, despite the fact that the Government have the same capacity to produce an estimate on that measure as on the relative low-income measure. I look forward to hearing the answer because, as the Minister will realise, the Government have a statutory duty to reduce absolute child poverty under the Child Poverty Act. Therefore, they presumably must be able to measure it to know if they have fulfilled that statutory duty.

Similarly, the Government have given no assessment of the likely impact of the Bill on material deprivation, despite again having a statutory duty to reduce material deprivation under the Child Poverty Act. Even if Ministers did not feel able to produce a numerical estimate, I cannot see any reason why they could not produce a narrative assessment, a point made repeatedly by the Child Poverty Action Group. Finally, and at the risk of being repetitive, we have seen no assessment, not even a narrative one, of the impact of the Bill on persistent poverty, despite the fact that yet again the Government have a statutory duty to reduce persistent child poverty under the Child Poverty Act.

This really is a disgrace after all the careful progress that has been made. The reason the previous Government took child poverty so seriously was that it had risen so dramatically under the previous Conservative Government. The researcher, Jonathan Bradshaw, who has already been mentioned today, found that child poverty increased nearly threefold in the 1980s alone and that the well-being of British children compared unfavourably with that of children in most developed nations. That was the reason the Labour Government acted. It was also the reason why, by the time of the last election, there was apparently cross-party support for that goal of tackling child poverty in Britain. We are now in the position of having to ask what it means for the Government to say that they will maintain the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020.

This is perhaps a philosophical point, but what does it mean to have a goal if one takes no steps towards it? I may say that I have a goal of being a concert pianist, but if I do not take lessons to learn to play the piano and I never practise, no matter how many times I say it, the odds of my becoming a concert pianist must be seen to be slim. In that case, on what basis can Ministers say they are committed to eradicating child poverty in the UK if they keep bringing forward Bills that drive it ever higher? It may be time for them to come forward and say that they do not in fact have any intention of eradicating child poverty and perhaps never did.

The amendment really is for the Government’s own good. If they are committed to the goal of ending child poverty by 2020, they need to understand the impact of their policies on child poverty. Otherwise, they cannot possibly achieve that. If they are not committed to that goal, the nation has a right to know that and still to understand what the impact of these measures would be. That is all the amendment does. It requires the Secretary of State to tell Parliament and the nation what the effect would be of these measures before he implements them. What could be more reasonable than that? I beg to move.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, I hope to make an even shorter contribution to this important debate. I agree that the amendment relating to child poverty is apposite and important. I want to confine myself to seeking further clarification from the Minister, if she has the information to hand. It would be to the Committee’s advantage if we knew more about what we can expect from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, because it relates directly to the substance of this amendment.

I was pleased that there was a recent change to the membership of the commission and that our very own noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, has joined it. I am pleased about that because she is an experienced hand and I trust her judgment. I look forward to seeing the fruits of her work within that commission. It is important to us all. However, I was disappointed to learn recently that the first annual report of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission is not now to be with us before 26 September this year. We were expecting it in May. I make that observation because it is a sign of drift, potentially. If I am wrong about that, I hope that I will be put right.

I was very uneasy about adding social mobility to child poverty. The original terms of reference of the 2010 Bill as put forward by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, were the correct ones. The Deputy Prime Minister, of whom I am a great fan, as I am sure people understand, was wrong. Social mobility is a different subject altogether. It is much longer term and in the short term, we are dealing with a situation that is more of an emergency than the aspiration of social mobility, which of course we all accept. We really need to understand what contribution to child poverty this commission will make. If the Front Bench can tell us anything about that in the course of this amendment, that would be very useful.

My second point is that of course we know that there is a consultation on child poverty measurement. I am taxing my memory here, but I think we were expecting the end of the consultation to be earlier this year—some time in February. If that is the case and my memory is correct, I hope we can be told that the Government’s contribution to the further development of child poverty measurement will be vouchsafed to us sometime soon. It will certainly be important to get hold of this around the time of the Budget, if we can. Some of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessments of future policy in terms of the Budget should be seen against the background of the Government’s view about how they will treat child poverty measurement in the future.

I am slightly nervous about some of the things that I have been hearing are being factored into the measurement of child poverty in the future. It may be that I am misreading signals but I hope that we do not lose focus on the fact that, at the end of the day, child poverty can be addressed only with money. Regarding any attempt to dress that up and expand the measurements too widely, while I am in favour of having all the data and metrics that we can access, for the reasons I explained on the last amendment we are facing an emergency situation the extent of which I did not anticipate.

The difficulties are mounting up, as we heard earlier. The decisions to be taken by the Government in the near future on measuring the data on child poverty are very important. If the Minister can help us to understand when we might expect information of that kind, it would help the Committee’s consideration of this Bill not just today but over the rest of its proceedings.

Public Bodies (Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission: Abolition and Transfer of Functions) Order 2012

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Thursday 12th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, first, I apologise to the Minister for having missed the beginning of his opening remarks. I am afraid that I misjudged the timings somewhat. In speaking to these regulations, I remind the Committee of my registered interests. In particular, although the Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission had a brief life, I managed for two of its years to be a member of its board, serving as a non-executive director until 2010, shortly after I entered the House. I also declare that I am a former chief executive of One Parent Families, now Gingerbread, to which I am grateful for the briefing.

These are small regulations to effect a major reorganisation. I want to ask the Minister a couple of questions, picking up some points made by my noble friend Lord McKenzie. When CMEC was set up by the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008, its primary objective was,

“to maximise the number of those children who live apart from one or both of their parents for whom effective maintenance arrangements are in place”.

The wording is significant. As the Minister knows, this does not refer simply to maximising the number of maintenance arrangements made through the statutory system but to maximising the number of arrangements in total. In other words, CMEC had a duty, which it took very seriously, to maximise the number of private maintenance arrangements alongside those undertaken using the statutory system. Given that, what assurance can the Minister give us that this objective will be taken on by the Secretary of State, to whom CMEC’s functions are being transferred? How will that be discharged? The noble Lord, Lord German, suggested that perhaps a report to Parliament might work.

Before CMEC was created, when the Secretary of State had responsibility for child maintenance, the Secretary of State actually issued targets and then reported publicly to Parliament on the extent to which those targets had been met—or not. That might be something that the Minister might like to take on board. Can he tell us if the Secretary of State would be willing to do that, and if not, what other mechanism is there for reporting to Parliament and for ensuring that Parliament can have some criteria for judging the report that is thus made?

The Minister, I am sure, will have read the report on CMEC by the National Audit Office of 29 February 2012, as well as the report of the Public Accounts Committee from April. In relation to the decision to charge parents for using the statutory maintenance service, the PAC report noted:

“A successful fee regime will depend on the Commission being able to deliver reasonable standards of service”.

However, it also said that because of problems with the service, there was a danger that parents would not want to use it. The committee noted:

“The risk is that parents who cannot agree private arrangements and do not trust the statutory system are left without effective child maintenance arrangements and that could impact on child poverty. The Commission should work with stakeholders to monitor whether more separated families agree their own arrangements and understand any service-related reasons for lower than expected applications”.

It also suggests that:

“The first monitoring report should be carried out six months after the introduction of fees”.

What is the Government’s response to that recommendation from the PAC? I apologise if the Minister mentioned that in the first five minutes of his opening remarks. Will the Government accept that recommendation and the timetable, and if not, by what other means are they going to address the concerns raised by the PAC?

Can the Minister give the Committee some assurances about the readiness of all involved for this transfer? The PAC report also noted that the commission’s plans to deliver the £117 million of cost reductions imposed on it by 2014-15 were “high risk”. It said:

“There is a £16 million funding gap for 2014-15 which could widen by some £3 million for every month the new IT system is delayed. A further shortfall of up to £30 million could arise in 2014-15 if projected fee income does not materialise”.

What assurances can the Minister give the Committee that the statutory service has adequate funding to deliver the service promised when the Welfare Reform Act was passing through this House?

Finally, I know that the Welfare Reform Act has made the decision to transfer this but can the Minister tell us what lessons the Government have learnt from history? The department has had the opportunity to see the CSA operating both inside and outside government. In bringing it back in, what lessons has the department learnt and how does it hope to avoid some of the very considerable problems the CSA had in the early 1990s?

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, because she said just about everything I had in mind to say. I concur with the important points that she made.

I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, offered us a meeting later in the year. That is part of his unique way of doing business and it is very helpful to the rest of us as we try to understand what is going on. I understand that he and his colleague in the other place are putting a great deal of work in to this important area.

I will stress—because it is easily forgotten—that the client group with whom we are dealing may be disproportionately affected by the impact of the austerity measures that the country faces. I am sure that the Minister and his advisers are already aware of this. As a board member of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, perhaps I could draw his attention to the analysis by James Browne that was published by the IFS for the Family and Parenting Institute in January 2012. It predicted an 8% net loss of income for working single parents and a 12% loss for non-working single parents. We are dealing with a particularly vulnerable client group here, and we all know that. The IFS analysis is useful as a reminder of the importance of getting it right. I know how concerned the noble Lord, Lord Freud, is about these vulnerable groups because he is doing a lot of work on universal credit to try to make sure that these issues are addressed.

In addition to the points addressed to the Committee by the noble Baroness, I will say that other NAO and PAC reports that came out earlier this year—particularly on client fund accounts and on CMEC’s plans to reduce its own spending, which was in an NAO report on 12 February this year—raised matters about which we should all be concerned, including the ability of CMEC to achieve its estimated £117 million savings between now and the fiscal year 2014-15. That is something I would like to put on the agenda for the meeting later in the year, which I would be very pleased to attend—if I get an invitation after this speech.

The NAO was also concerned about the plans to levy charges. I do not need to repeat the point that there is some disjunction between the early planning and the work that the NAO did in highlighting some of the gaps. This will have been worked on and I hope that there will be further and better particulars available. At any future meeting I would like to try to understand how much risk there is in the levying charges policy that is currently being publicly promoted, at least by CMEC.

I agree with the NAO analysis about planning for a 71% take-up of the new statutory system. I have no way of knowing the metrics, systems or processes that CMEC has for measuring that 71%. It is relying very heavily on that as an income stream from which it hopes to move forward. The Comptroller and Auditor-General, the NAO and the PAC were interested to learn more about that, and again expressed concerns. I will also reinforce the point about maximising payments. That is an important duty that will be lost. Any system, whether or not it involves annual reports, should underpin efforts to win back as much of that as we can in the circumstances. That would be useful.

Finally, we still expect a consultation on charging mechanisms. That is a very important piece of outstanding work in which the community, pressure groups and others to whom this area of public policy applies are particularly interested. Perhaps we could add that to the agenda of what now looks like quite a busy meeting some time in the autumn.

This is an important area. I am very ambivalent about this change but I can understand that the costs have to be reduced in a sensible way. I just hope that we are able to do that in a way that does not disproportionately affect the client group we are seeking to serve here. But I have trust that my noble friend Lord Freud is aware and alive to all these things. I hope that the Committee can look to him to give us reassurance, whether privately or publicly, going forward.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Monday 21st November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

It may be putative, for all I know, but the conjunction of subsections (1) and (8) worries me greatly. There may well be other precedents, but perhaps people who know better than I do will leave me alone so that I can finish my speech quickly.

I move on to my third point. Clause 93(4) talks about regulations, and that subsection is also worrying. Paragraph (b) states that regulations may,

“make provision as to the welfare benefit or benefits from which a reduction is to be made”.

There is absolutely no qualification there. It refers not just to workless benefits but to welfare benefit or benefits. The Minister slightly gave the game away earlier by saying that we have all the power we need in Clause 93, and he is absolutely right about that. There is nothing that he cannot do by regulation. My point is: what is the House of Lords for if not to say that Clause 93 is a step too far?

I will vote not only against Clauses 93 and 94 but against the regulations that flow from those clauses, because that is the only way that we can protect entitlement. From where I am sitting, the concept of entitlement is sacrosanct in the benefits system. I am up for a discussion about reducing the social security budget total by £270 million. We can do that—we can have the debates; we know the process; we can choose the benefit and we can look at the effects. We do a lot of work in creating these entitlements and I should like to think that we do so carefully, line by line, particularly in the House of Lords. We all know that that certainly does not happen any more in the House of Commons, so this is the last place where on occasion we can protect people’s entitlement.

We should remember that we are talking about the lowest two deciles of the household income group in this country. They are the most vulnerable people in our communities throughout the length and breadth of the land. We need to be safe in the knowledge that we are doing what is right, benefit by benefit, but I think that Clauses 93 and 94 take away that security of knowledge. If we pass these clauses, everything can be capped by regulation. By convention, we do not vote against regulations in the House of Lords, and there are very good reasons and precedents for that. However, this is a game that any Government can play. My noble friend is a sensible and good man, as we established earlier in the Committee. We might make sensible decisions about some of these things but they will be enshrined in law. Another Government will use this power and it will subvert the role of Parliament. That is my objection. I understand and agree with a plea for exemptions left, right and centre, but I feel in my heart that if we pass this legislation we will be crossing a bridge that will lead to consequences which are not easily foreseen.

Speaking for myself, I will not vote for these clauses. I think that on Report the House should not just concentrate on some of the important, powerful speeches made in attempts to win exemptions but give some consideration to the parliamentary ramifications of Clauses 93 and 94. If that does not happen, we will be surrendering a power that we will never win back.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I hesitate to follow that speech from the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, because I want to address a particular category. In fact, part of the reason I want to do that is for the reason he has just outlined, which is that it is important that if the Government are to ask this House to pass the Bill they should understand the implications of doing so. One of my difficulties with the way that this clause is framed is that it makes it very hard for noble Lords to understand the consequences of the decisions that they are being invited to take.

I wish to speak specifically to Amendment 99B in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, although I also support other amendments in the group. My amendment would specifically exempt from the cap households where a child is a subject of a child protection plan, a children-in-need assessment or a common assessment framework team, or is waiting to be subject to any of those.

I tabled my amendment because I am concerned about the possible effect of forced moves on vulnerable children, and I want to give the Minister the opportunity of reassuring the Committee and, through us, the House that he does not expect any such impacts. We have already discussed whether or not forced moves will happen. Briefly, we have heard the Minister’s suggestion of three ways that someone could avoid being forced to move: negotiating a reduced rent, which the Minister acknowledged may not be possible; moving into work, although we have already established that the clear majority of people likely to be affected by the benefit cap are not required to work; or using savings or other income.

We all know that most of the people we are talking about will have little or no savings. Even if they do, there are already mechanisms in means-tested benefits—as there will be in universal credit—to decide how treatment of savings income should be taken into account. There is therefore no need to double-address that point. We must accept that there will be forced moves, and we may debate elsewhere how many there will be. I want to address what will happen to the most vulnerable children when forced moves happen.

We have all had many briefings, and noble Lords will be aware that charities working with vulnerable children are concerned that the cap could force families to move, perhaps repeatedly, as rents rise faster than the cap. Research clearly shows that housing problems are a frequent theme in serious case reviews. I cite just one example of a report from a London Safeguarding Children Board paper, which found that 47 per cent of people in a sample of serious case reviews completed in the capital between 2006 and 2009 had rent arrears, had been evicted or were on the verge of eviction.

It is interesting to drill down further into that. It became clear that the highly mobile population in London and associated issues came to the surface. That kind of mobility interferes with the ability of professionals who work in child protection to focus on the most vulnerable children. This report showed that 21 per cent of families were known to two London Safeguarding Children Board areas, and 13 per cent to four or more areas. Noble Lords may also remember from the Laming review of the case of Victoria Climbié the concern that was expressed about what happens when a child potentially falls between two boroughs. Anyone who has ever had cause to look at a serious case review will know, as I heard another member of the Committee explain eloquently, that where everyone gathers around the table for the first time and shares all the information they have from their different perspectives, they always say, “If only we had done this sooner. If only we had all known then what we all know now, this may not have happened”.

That is hard enough within a single authority. It is clear that when people move across boroughs, children fall between the cracks. I am therefore very concerned that this House should not be invited to do anything that might make that more likely to happen, because we understand that the consequences are very serious. I am not attempting to get into shroud-waving. I simply want to give the Minister the opportunity to explain to the Committee whether or not he believes that this will happen, given the evidence that I have set out. If not, why not? If it does happen, what are the Government going to do about it?

I offer the Minister some suggestions. He has already mentioned that help will be available for hard cases. Perhaps he could tell us how hard cases will be defined and whether the children that I have described will count. Secondly, the Minister mentioned transitional relief. Can he tell us more about that? Will households containing children at risk definitely be covered by transitional relief, and can he explain how that will happen? What assurance can he give the Committee that boroughs with an influx of safeguarded children will receive adequate resources to cope? In particular, can the Minister tell the Committee that he has confidence that the kind of boroughs that will receive an influx of children have the resources and systems to support them? If so, can he provide us with the basis of that confidence? If the Government are going to undertake a move that will specifically increase the chances of families of very vulnerable children moving, I simply invite the Minister to explain to the Committee how he can defend that.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, I am provoked into joining this discussion, which I was going to leave until the next group of amendments.

First, underoccupation is one of the most serious concerns in this Bill, and I think that those concerns are shared across the Committee. I do not think that it helps to start picking away at the positions of individual members of the Committee at this time. What I think we are trying to do is to make it clear to the Government that the current proposals are unacceptable. They are unacceptable to me for two reasons. One is process—and we touched on the discussion about transition. On 1 April 2013, between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the case load, which is arguably 67,000 working-age families, will be tipped into debt. It is a brick wall that they cannot avoid. It is very unusual for a social policy change of this magnitude not to have built in a transitional provision.

With a little bit of application and consideration, we might be able to address the issue of overoccupation, which it would be sensible to do in the long term. Speaking for myself, I think that Amendment 44 is close to doing that, although Amendment 40 is not far away. I got a very interesting note from Moat housing the other day, which suggested that:

“Two bedroom properties or below should never be regarded as ‘under-occupied’”.

It is as simple as that. That is another way of expressing it. I do not know what it would cost, but the Committee is right to explore some of these circumstances, which have ramifications for social landlords as well as everyone else. What worries me more than anything else is that on 1 April—that may be an appropriate date—in 2013, that change will be made, and people have very little protection or room for manoeuvre.

The other very interesting suggestion that Moat housing made to me, which I had never heard before, was that a “soft start” could be adopted when people were demonstrating that they were taking steps to address the underoccupation that they were allegedly facing at the time. They could continue to get the full support until they had made the appropriate arrangements. It would probably take 18 months or two years to work out in the wash; that may be too tight a period—it might take longer than that to do safely. As a Committee, we are looking for a safe transition process and a way of limiting the brick wall of debt that 670,000 of our social tenants in the United Kingdom will face on 1 April 2013. That is a matter of concern across the Committee, which I think we should represent to the Government in a way that will occasion constructive change on Report.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, there is very little left to say, particularly after the astonishingly impressive opening speech of my noble friend Lady Hollis. If I were a Minister facing that speech across the Table I would have run the white flag up and gone to the pub, but the Minister is clearly made of sterner stuff than me, which is probably just as well.

I have two questions, the first specific and the second general. First, what discussions has the Minister had with colleagues in other departments about the position of children in relation to the implementation of these provisions? Like many other noble Lords, I have had a number of cases raised with me on the position of disabled children, to which we may return, and children with health problems, as discussed by my noble friend Lady Lister. Also, Barnardo’s, for example, raised with me the position of families in which a child or children are in temporary care. For example, they may live temporarily under a residence order with their grandparent, and while the family is trying to get the children back it may look as though they are underoccupying when they are not. There is a whole series of exceptions. I am interested in the specifics, but more generally has the Minister talked to colleagues in other departments about the impact on child welfare, safeguarding and well-being or child poverty when this policy is implemented?

The second question is one the answer to which I would be very interested to hear. We have talked a lot about modelling and transition, but the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, talked about what seemed to me to be an astonishingly simple amendment. She said that somebody should not be required to do something that they are incapable of doing. What is the Minister’s philosophical reply to that?