Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Smith of Leigh

Monday 16th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sherlock]

I would like to pick up where the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, left off because he made the point that I was going to make. I want to add just one thing. Irrespective of the debates about where the decisions should be located in general, the point about vulnerability is one that the Government brought into play. He said that the Government made a decision and said, in their own documentation:

“The Government has been clear that, in developing local council tax reduction schemes, vulnerable groups should be protected”.

The Government have put this issue out there, so it is not unreasonable for a local authority to say, “What do you mean by ‘vulnerable’?”. I spoke to one local authority last week that was extremely concerned that, almost irrespective of what definition it chooses, it will end up being subject to legal review because it will exclude some people, and it cannot imagine any way in which it could do that that would not have that consequence. In responding, the Minister may point out that a local authority could choose to adopt the default scheme and therefore the legal responsibility would lie with the Government, but that would work only if the authority has the resources available to be able to make good the difference. It does not apply to any other scheme or variation of it that it could take on.

I am very much with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, who pointed out that there is a very real risk, in addition to the legal point, that the Government are raising expectations by reassuring everybody that vulnerable groups will be protected without explaining what that means. That makes it even harder for local councils to justify whatever decision they take that is short of the total quantum of vulnerability that could be defined out there.

I will make one final point, triggered by something that the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, said. One of the difficult areas in policy and one of the reasons why some decisions should be made centrally is that some kinds of vulnerability are not seen on a sufficiently large scale in an individual area for local councils to be expected reasonably to understand them and make prescriptions about them. It is analogous, perhaps, to health policy where, in commissioning, there will still be certain kinds of rare conditions that are dealt with centrally. Sometimes there are good policy reasons, even if one is being localist, to have guidance coming from the centre so that people can reasonably be expected to understand vulnerabilities that they may not encounter every day. Can the Minister perhaps address that as well?

[Lord Smith of Leigh]

My Lords, I have found this debate and the ones previously on Amendments 76 and 76A fascinating. I need to remind noble Lords that I am still leader of Wigan Council. Therefore, for me, this is not a theoretical debate. I will have to determine a scheme within my authority, with colleagues, that will decide who is eligible, who is not eligible, which group will be regarded as vulnerable and which group will not be regarded as vulnerable. It will not be easy. I was going to say that it is not a zero-sum game, but I remind noble Lords that it is not even a minus 10% game; it is a minus 20% game if we exclude pensioners. So we are lucky in that sense.

I find myself agreeing with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said about localism. I recognise what he said and I agree with it. Where I would differ from him and what we need to recognise is that local authorities come at this with very different needs in terms of the number of people who are receiving council tax benefits, as has been said earlier, and the potential changes, as I mentioned earlier. I already know from being in this meeting that I have 100 more people who will be regarded as needing council tax benefits as a result of their factory closing this afternoon. So these things are changing all the time, and we need to recognise that.

I have had some interesting solutions to my dilemma from various quarters today, such as applying reserves. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is absolutely right. My treasurer is already coming to me to say, “You are going to lose probably £500,000 on your council tax collection because these people are not going to be able to afford to pay the cost, so you have to think about that”. We have talked about the problems of increasing demands on council tax benefits as it becomes a local thing, and I think that the noble Lord is right that we will do it much better than it is done at the moment, so that probably will encourage more people who do not claim at the moment to start to claim.

Earlier in this Bill we talked about the problems of business rates and the fact that they will have some risk element, so we will have to put that in. We talked about the flexibility of council tax, which is a very interesting phrase. Perhaps the Minister could let me know whether he means by “flexibility of council tax” that he is going to allow me to put the council tax up and is not going to require me to hold a referendum. I cannot believe that anyone sensible is going to say that they are going to have a referendum to put council tax benefits up: “Please vote for it and you will pay more council tax”. We would never win that, so it is not going to work.

We have heard that we should make further cuts. In my authority I am planning £66 million of cuts over four years. The Government thankfully gave me some warning and we have them in place. If I now have to make more cuts to accommodate all this—probably between £2.5 million and £3 million-worth—where are they going to come from? What have I got to do that I am not already looking at? I need to remind noble Lords that it is the vulnerable groups who rely most on councils’ services. If I cut services to vulnerable groups, they suffer. I can put up daily charges or raise the qualification for receiving social care. All these things affect vulnerable groups and there is no easy solution.

The difficulty for me is this. Presumably all the people we give council tax benefit to are regarded as vulnerable people, otherwise we should not be giving them that benefit. If we start to define vulnerability—here I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, as well as the comments of other noble Lords about the needs of different groups in communities—the danger is that we will define who are the deserving and the non-deserving poor. In the future, there will be people who get council tax benefit support and those who either get less or nothing.

A lot of vulnerable groups have strong lobbying sectors, but the ones who do not get that kind of support are the working poor. I remind the Committee that we are talking about a marginalised and alienated group in our society made up of people who do not vote very much at the moment. But they could be tempted to vote by extremists who say, “We will listen to you”. It is happening in certain communities. People are listening to those who are giving them false promises. We know that Respect, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, the BNP or whatever group it is will offer things that they cannot deliver. The result of this Bill and the way we will have to design the council tax support scheme will drive more and more people to the political extremes. Are we doing a good job here?

Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Smith of Leigh

Tuesday 10th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in its excellent report, Reforming Council Tax Benefit, states rather drily:

“It is difficult to think of reasons why the government’s original plan to integrate CTB into Universal Credit was inferior to what is now being proposed”.

Later on, the report says:

“There is no simple way that making only minimal changes to CTB will allow the new council tax rebate systems to interact with Universal Credit in a coherent way”.

I and a number of other noble Lords here spent months sitting through the stages of the Welfare Reform Bill, now the Welfare Reform Act 2012. This country is spending billions of pounds to create it, and the Government are now creating a scheme that will not interact in any coherent way with that thing that the whole country has now been told to expect.

A number of questions need addressing, many of which were raised by my noble friend Lady Hollis in her very powerful speech; I will ask just a couple. First, how is universal credit as income to be treated in the new system? Do the Government propose to give any advice to local councils? There is nothing very straightforward about this, and it is one of the many questions that every council will have to address. If universal credit is not treated as income, that would be much simpler, but it means that people facing the withdrawal of universal credit in addition to the withdrawal of council tax support, as well as paying national insurance and tax, would stand to lose at least 90p of every extra £1 earned, as my noble friend Lady Hollis pointed out. The alternative is that councils face putting incredible pressure on those who least can afford to bear the burden.

My noble friend Lady Hollis pointed out very well, I think, why council tax benefit and its successors are not basically local benefits. The only thing different about them is the extent of the liability. The reason why council tax benefit is national is because all of the assessments made are related to the extent to which the individual needs help in paying that liability, and that, of course, is shown out. For example, in working out how much somebody should get in help or council tax benefit, the starting point is the applicable amount, as I am sure the Minister is only too well aware. I recommend to him the Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook, which shows that the applicable amount is the same for income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance and income-related employment and support allowance; indeed, it is used as the basis for housing benefit and council tax benefit. The point is that council tax benefit is a national benefit because it is designed on exactly the same basis as all the other elements of a social security system related to the need to assess what help somebody needs to meet their outgoings.

It is also based on a national assessment by central government of the amount of money that somebody needs to live on. Separating that out from the rest of the system creates fractures in what has previously been a coherent system. Ironically, it is going in precisely the opposite direction of the creation of universal credit. The point of universal credit was meant to be to bring all the component parts together in one place in order to simplify it both for the individual and for those administering it. Yet now we have a fairly important part of the system that has been broken off entirely and done in a different way.

On 8 March, welcoming the Royal Assent granted to the then Welfare Reform Bill, the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, said the following:

“The Universal Credit will mean that work will pay for the first time, helping to lift people out of worklessness and the endless cycle of benefits. Whilst those people who need our help and support will know they will get it without question. Universal Credit will, from October 2013, replace the current complex myriad of means-tested benefits with a single benefit system. It will be simpler for people to navigate and harder for people to defraud, but most importantly it will make work pay. No longer will it be possible to be better off on benefits than in work”.

If I were a council leader, I would be asking the Minister this question: how can I structure my scheme of council tax support to do both of the things that Mr Iain Duncan Smith pledges on 90% of the funding? I can see that I could simply cut support to all but the poorest, but that would have the effect simply of reducing work incentives. I could try to protect work incentives, but that would have an effect on the poorest. That is the choice I have. So the question for the Minister is: how can a council structure it so that it can help the poorest to get the help and support they need “without question” and ensure that people are always,

“better off in benefits than in work”?

Can the Minister explain? I have every confidence that councils all around the country are waiting to hear the answer because those that I have spoken to have not been able to figure it out for themselves. If the Minister cannot answer the question, is she going to break it to Iain Duncan Smith, or shall I do so?

[Lord Smith of Leigh]

My Lords, I support my colleagues in their contributions, which covered some of the points that I was going to raise. We thought that in Greater Manchester, where we worked together closely, we would try to work out a scheme of council tax benefits covering the 10 authorities. It has proved to be absolutely impossible. The reason is that we all start from different financial positions and we therefore approach the onset of the council tax benefit scheme from very different situations.

The point that my noble friend Lady Hollis raised about the poll tax is something that we should not forget. In the days of the poll tax, the cost of collection took a huge amount of the revenue that was collected. That was the law, we had to encourage people to pay, and if they did not pay we had to go for them in ways that were not as satisfactory as one would have liked, but that was the only way we could go forward. It created the problems that my noble friend mentioned. The unintended consequence was that a whole load of young people disappeared from Wigan and neighbouring authorities. They never registered for the poll tax; they never registered to vote because that would have exposed them as being liable to the tax; and most of them were probably not too bothered about voting. Someone said they had all moved to Spain. Well, not that many Wiganers were moving to Spain at that time. Again we are introducing a system whereby local authorities will be collecting very small bills from people who find it difficult to pay. In her response, the Minister might provide us with a calculation of the estimated extra costs of collection.

On the point about risk, my noble friend Lady Hollis made it clear that for a local authority the situation is very unpredictable as regards council tax benefit. We can devise a scheme for it, as I am doing at the moment, but I can tell noble Lords that that is not an easy task. The outcome of that scheme is unpredictable because we do not know, even when we set it to start on 1 April, how many people will be eligible to claim the benefit during the year. Clearly, treasurers will be advising local authorities that they have to cover that risk with additional balances. They cannot make an assumption. My authority covers 300,000 people and is therefore relatively large compared with other authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, comes from a smaller authority, but if, as we mentioned last week, one of the factories in his area were to close, the impact upon the scheme in Pendle would be huge. The money would have to be found for that and, at the same time, as noble Lords will remember from last week, the authority would not be receiving the business rate to cover the increase in benefit—so there would be a double impact.

At Second Reading, the Minister suggested that we can pay for this scheme by the new proposal to end discounts on empty properties and second homes. It may come as a surprise to your Lordships but there are not many second homes in Wigan. It is not a preferred choice for people who want to buy second homes. Unfortunately, that is not a source of revenue that I look forward to collecting money from. What about empty properties? We have empty properties and some have been empty for some time. I therefore asked for some information, and the number is less than the Government seem to think it is. Empty homes in Wigan are a reflection of a number of things. One is the state of the housing market, which is in great difficulties and people who need to sell their houses cannot do so. Maybe they want to move away for work, or have done so and left the house empty, and still cannot sell the property because there is no demand; I notice that the noble Earl’s organisation, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, has today announced that house prices are going down, revealing the state of the housing market. It is not there. They cannot sell the properties that they wish to sell. Many are people who have inherited properties from their parents and, again, cannot sell the property. Many of these properties are on terraces, so not desirable for modern couples. I cannot believe that there will be a huge amount of money there.