Covid-19: Universal Credit

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The right reverend Prelate makes an important point. The £20 uplift has made a significant difference and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, he has outlined some of the impacts that would happen should that be stopped. I am terribly sorry, and I wish it were not the case, but I do not have the Chancellor’s ability to make a commitment today.

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

My Lords, an analysis by the Social Metrics Commission found that, without the universal credit uplift, nearly 1.4 million people would have been pushed into poverty due to the pandemic. With the £20 uplift and other government interventions, however, 700,000 people have been protected, 150,000 of whom are lone parents. Does my noble friend agree that this is a remarkable achievement? What plans do the Government have for ensuring this continued support?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for her acknowledgement of the difference that the £20 has made. I had better say now: “Message received, over and out”. I will relay it and replay it to my colleagues in the department and the Chancellor.

Youth Unemployment

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Bates) (Con)]

We cannot hear the noble and learned Lord, so I shall call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud.

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

[Inaudible.]

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, we seem to be having some technical problems, so I suggest that the House should now adjourn for five minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is now clear that the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic have not been equally distributed across society. Official statistics show that the number of under-25s on universal credit nearly doubled during lockdown, rising by 250,000 to 538,000. What assessment has the DWP made of an age-stratified approach to Covid, which could allow resources to be focused on older people and high-risk patients, while allowing younger and healthier people to keep working and businesses to stay open? Given that the DWP exists to get and keep people in work, what forecasts and representation are the department making to the Prime Minister?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The impacts of Covid-19 are felt differently by different groups, which is why the Plan for Jobs supports people of all ages. We are supporting the most vulnerable through our wider offer and specific programmes, such as job entry targeted support. People need hope in this very difficult time, and I assure the whole House that we will make sure that there is no poverty of hope, aspiration, determination and inspiration for our young people.

Universal Credit: Court of Appeal Judgment

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott [V]]

I am pleased to say that the figure of 85,000 that the noble Baroness refers to is not one that resonates with us. We believe that the number of people impacted by this judgment is in the region of 1,000. We are assessing the situation. We got the judgment only on Monday, but we will keep the House fully up to date with decisions made in relation to it.

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

Will my noble friend the Minister outline what assessment has been made of the resilience and ability of the universal credit system to process such significant increases in applications in recent weeks? Has the digital design of universal credit enabled it to support an unprecedented number of people in recent months?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott [V]]

I can tell my noble friend Lady Stroud that we have been amazed and pleased that the universal credit digital system has shown enormous resilience. We have had a 600% increase in claims, and the vast majority of people have been paid in full and on time. Without wishing to be disrespectful in any way, this would never have happened under the legacy system.

Covid-19: Child Poverty

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott [V]]

The changes we have made to the welfare system are part of a broader range of measures brought in across government to meet the need of those affected by Covid-19. We are doing all we can. The Home Office recently lost a judicial review case—not entirely on the subject of NRPF—but we continue to review the situation.

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

My Lords, we know that families in which two parents are working full-time are the least likely to be in poverty and that over the last few years there has been significant progress in supporting lone parents out of poverty, with a reduction in the number of lone parents in poverty. What steps are the Government taking to support lone parents during this time, when many on low incomes have been furloughed or had their hours reduced, and to protect fragile couple relationships—which we know have been under strain during Covid—to prevent a future impact on child poverty?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott [V]]

I have already mentioned the unprecedented fiscal package we have at our disposal to deal with this, but I would also like to talk about the Reducing Parental Conflict programme, which has a key role in supporting families during this challenging time. We are working with local delivery partners to ensure that the programme continues to be delivered during social distancing restrictions and being flexible and innovative in the ways we can reach families that require support to minimise the negative impacts of conflict on outcomes for children.

Covid-19: People Living in Poverty

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Thursday 30th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, we know that, even before the Covid-19 crisis, families across the UK were struggling to make ends meet, with 14.3 million people living in poverty, around half of whom were living in persistent poverty. We also know that those most likely to be in poverty are disabled families, families in which no one works and families in which those in work are in low-paid, insecure work, or work with relatively few hours.

Research on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis shows that these are the very people who could be hit hardest by the economic crisis that has accompanied the personal and social impacts of coronavirus. For example, overall, more than one in four households say that the coronavirus crisis is impacting their finances. Those on the lowest pay are often the least able to work from home. Compared with high earners, low earners are seven times more likely to have worked in a sector that is now shut down.

Despite the Government’s best efforts through support for businesses, which have been heroic, many hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs and begun to claim benefits. That is why I encourage the Government to develop a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy that would of course look at finances but also more broadly at the lived experience. Will my noble friend the Minister comment on whether she believes that a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy would amplify and cement the positive steps forward that could be taken post crisis?

Social Metrics Commission

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, the Government accept that the current suite of measures is not without limitations. However, the relative poverty line, for example, moves across with average income, which is useful when looking at whether groups are or are not keeping up with the middle of the income distribution over time, but it does not show whether the average income of those on the lowest incomes is improving in real terms. Therefore, if everyone’s income were to double tomorrow, the number of people in relative poverty would be unchanged. The absolute poverty line, on the other hand, moves with inflation, providing a better measure of how the income of those on low incomes compares with the cost of living.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, do the Government believe that the inclusion of debt and assets and the extra costs of disability and childcare are an improvement to the measure and give us a better understanding of the nature of poverty?

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, this is a very important point. I thank my noble friend for introducing a debate on this very subject last week. It is right that we take note of the unavoidable extra costs of disability and childcare. However, so far as we understand it, the Social Metrics Commission does not include, for example, the unavoidable cost for the elderly of social care. In regard to disability, it is important to note that we spend more than £50 billion a year on benefits to support disabled people and those with health conditions. It is encouraging that 973,000 more disabled people have entered into work in the last five years, and we now have much more generous childcare provision.

Poverty: Metrics

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Stroud]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of metrics to measure United Kingdom poverty, in the light of the report from the Social Metrics Commission.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, the Social Metrics Commission was formed three years ago with the sole and express aim of delivering new poverty metrics for the UK. The need for an independent commission to do this was clear. When I was in government, there were two failed attempts to develop new measures in the lead-up to the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. It was obvious to me that whoever was going to be held accountable—the Government—could not in reality develop the measure by which they were going to be held to account. So we brought together top thinkers from left and right to create new measures. That is one reason why I am so grateful to noble Lords from the Labour, Liberal Democrat, Bishops’ and Cross Benches. Their participation, alongside Conservative Peers, reflects the make-up of the commission and the broad support for the proposed new measures.

Why was it so important to create new, agreed measures of poverty? The lack of an agreed measure has meant that Governments of any party have been left unaccountable for their policy actions to reduce poverty. One of the most concerning findings in the report is that, since 2001, and under successive Governments—Labour, coalition of Conservative and Liberal Democrat, and Conservative—although the composition of who is poor may have changed, the number of people in poverty has remained consistent. We cannot allow this to be the reality of our generation and we need an agreed measure to drive accountability, because what gets measured gets done.

The lack of an agreed measure also affects government behaviour. It was my observation of how Governments behave in Budgets and spending reviews that led me to create the Social Metrics Commission in the first place. When it came to the big economic decisions, it was quite obvious that the OBR and the IFS played a significant role in driving the accountability of Treasury decisions. However, there was no such equivalent for social policy decision-making. The events of the past 20 years have also shown that it is not enough just to have a measure of poverty. It is also crucial that it is an agreed measure and that it rewards decision-making that improves people’s lives. We need to move from a debate about measurement to one that drives better outcomes for people. It is too easy for those in this Chamber and in the other place to debate the 200,000 people who moved from one side of the poverty line to the other rather than develop a strategy to deliver improved outcomes for the 7.7 million who are in persistent poverty.

If it is important that we have this new measure, how does it actually improve on what we have had historically? There are many aspects of the commission’s approach to measuring poverty which are a significant improvement on what was previously used—too many to go into in detail in this short debate. However, the changes lead to two key positive impacts: they better identify who is living in poverty, and they provide a greater insight into the nature of that poverty and wider life experiences. The old measure was purely of income. Commissioners felt that this did not adequately capture the nature of poverty. They wanted to identify both the wider resources that families have available to them and the range of different needs that those resources must meet. It is, in effect, a balance-sheet model of available resources versus inescapable needs and costs.

For example, we include in the measure the available assets and the obligated debt of a household. Historically, you could be on an income just above the poverty line but in significant debt, and you would not have been considered poor, even if your debt repayments meant that you could not meet your needs. Alternatively, you could have been on a low income below the poverty line and have significant liquid assets, but you would have been considered poor. This seems potentially counterintuitive. Noble Lords may have known that assets and debts were not included in previous measures of poverty, but I can remember being seriously surprised a few years ago when I first came across this fact.

We also wanted to offset those resources against inescapable family-specific costs that had not previously been taken into account, such as the costs of disability and childcare. It is clear that disability benefits are given to people who are disabled to cover the extra costs of disability, but in the old measure they are credited purely as income and not offset against the corresponding extra costs of disability. This gives a distorted view of the available resources for a family coping with disability. The costs of childcare are typically unavoidable and related to working, but we all know that in any household they are offset against income. Having income as our sole measure of poverty does not acknowledge the inescapable and very real costs of working. Does my noble friend agree that understanding the inescapable costs of childcare and disability contributes to our understanding of the measurement of poverty?

The proposed measures also provide a greater insight into the nature of poverty and the wider life experiences of those who are in it. Poverty measures are created from the data housed in the big government datasets. We wanted to understand the depth, persistence and lived experience of those in poverty. Much of the debate in this House is about the number of those who show up in a snapshot of data captured at a single point in the year. While this is important, as it clearly shows vulnerability, we in the commission were even more concerned about those who show up in these surveys year after year, and about how far below the poverty line families actually are. So we created a measure that will assess the depth of poverty, to understand how far below the poverty line a particular family is; and a measure that captures the persistence of poverty, to show how long people have been in poverty.

We also wanted to capture the lived experience of those in poverty: the resilience gap between those who are in poverty and those who are not. So we developed a set of lived experience indicators that look at a range of issues, from mental and physical health, to work, community engagement and family structure, which may impact on the likelihood of people being in poverty, their experience of it and their chances of moving out of it in future. As well as improving our understanding, each of these measures provides clear levers for policymakers to target policy on reducing the number of people living in poverty, and improving the outcomes of those families who do experience hardship. This is one reason why this new measure has developed real consensus. Any genuine and sustained effort by Governments of any persuasion will be rewarded in the metric.

I was delighted on the day of the launch to stand with commissioners from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Making Every Adult Matter and the Institute for Fiscal Studies; to have endorsements from the Child Poverty Action Group, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Centre for Social Justice; and to have academics such as Paul Gregg and Naomi Eisenstadt supporting us.

What does the measure tell us? The good news is that there are fewer pensioners living in poverty than previously thought. This is a tribute to the hard work done to improve the lives of pensioners over the past two decades and shows that concerted policy action can really make a difference. However, there are many other findings that challenge us to sharpen our focus. Some 14.2 million people are in poverty at any one time, but as concerning for me are the 7.7 million people who are in persistent poverty. These people have spent all or most of the past four years in poverty. Perhaps the most concerning finding to come out of the new measure is the link between disability and poverty. In nearly half of all households in poverty there is a disabled adult or child. Disability has been seriously underestimated in historic poverty measurement, and therefore most likely in our strategies.

What happens next? I have been delighted by support from all parties. A few weeks ago we received a letter from the Prime Minister asking us to work with her officials. Last week the chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee asked us to work up a draft Bill that could put the measures into legislation. We believe that there is consensus around these new measures, and we and other organisations will start to use them as we make the code public. We urge the Government to seriously consider adopting them as their own, too. I ask my noble friend to commit her department to exploring how the UK’s measurement of poverty could be improved by using the Social Metrics Commission measure and to outline what steps her department is taking to assess whether or not to adopt the measures as official government metrics.

Family Relationships (Impact Assessment and Targets) Bill [HL]

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 23rd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for his tireless work in bringing the Bill before the House. The first time he and I met, we talked about his commitment to the family, and he has never wavered from fighting to see family life stabilised in this country, particularly among the poorest.

The Bill matters. Family stability in this country is in crisis. The UK has one of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe, and the fact that, as we have already heard, almost half of the nation’s children are not living with both birth parents by the time they are 15 should be a source of serious concern to us. Almost half of children in our poorest communities have seen their parents split by the time they start primary school. These statistics matter, because each one represents a personal story of human pain. They matter because family breakdown entrenches poverty: poverty levels for children growing up in lone-parent families have almost double the “poverty risk” than children living in couple families. They matter too because they affect children’s life chances, as we heard. Children who experience family breakdown perform less well at school, gain fewer qualifications and are more likely to be expelled from school.

But it is not just the nuclear family that is impacted by family breakdown. In the UK, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, more than 1 million older people say that they go for over a month without speaking to a friend, neighbour or family member, and more than 2 million people in England over the age of 75 live alone. According to the 2017 report published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, more than 9 million people in the UK often or always feel lonely.

David Cameron said:

“Families are the best anti-poverty measure ever invented. They are a welfare, education and counselling system all wrapped up into one”.


He said that,

“if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start … So: from here on I want a family test applied to all domestic policy. If it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keeps people together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it”.

The step that he took, as we have already discussed this morning, was the creation of the family test, an excellent way to ensure that issues affecting families are assessed and addressed. But the family test at present is not effectively applied across departments and is not applied in a uniform way.

The Bill seeks to address that by doing two things. First, it would require the Secretary of State to publish objectives and targets for promoting “strong and stable families” and for the Government to report on their progress towards meeting these objectives. Why is this so important? In policy terms, government machinery has little idea how to support family stability, let alone what approach would promote strong and stable relationships. It was my experience from five years serving in the DWP that politicians and civil servants were comfortable talking about childcare, parenting, or flexible parental leave, all badged under supporting families, but not about how to support the adult relationship that is at the heart of a family and from which family stability is achieved. I can remember the negotiations required within the coalition just to be able to collect and report on family stability data, and the moment we left the DWP, as my noble friend Lord Farmer said, the statistical set was discontinued.

The requirement in the Bill provides an opportunity to reverse some of the human pain that comes from the breakdown of the family, and improve the life chances of many, and will give civil servants the opportunity and mandate to gather the evidence base for recommending the best policy interventions from around the world that really support and move the dial on family stability. There are reasons why the UK has the highest levels of family breakdown in Europe, and we do not need to accept that this has to be the case.

Secondly, the Bill requires government departments to publish family impact assessments, setting out an assessment of the impact of a policy proposal on families and family relationships. I welcome the clarity that my noble friend Lord Farmer has introduced in defining the specific areas of impact that he is calling for. This provides clear benchmarks by which civil servants can undertake an assessment. He calls on government to consider family stability factors ranging from a person’s ability to play a full part in their family’s life through to factors that impact on the family formation, and from families undergoing transition such as the birth, adoption or fostering of children through to families where relationships are fragile.

For an impact assessment to be applied, Ministers and officials need clarity. This is by far and above the hardest judgment area for a civil servant. I can remember our work in the DWP when considering the family test on welfare reform. It was complicated. Would increasing the work requirement on a lone parent lead to better life chances for a child or increase stress at home? What was one measuring? Would the benefit cap lead to increased incentives to partner with the father of one’s child or to a greater likelihood of relationship breakdown? These are not simple areas. We also found that civil servants and Ministers were quick to equate more money with greater family stability and less money with greater vulnerability, rather than drawing from an evidence base of what factors strengthened and stabilised vulnerable families.

It was my observation that officials who applied the family test needed better evidence of what strengthens and what weakens families, and that departments needed to be helped to use this evidence base when preparing, designing and delivering policy rather than treating an impact assessment as a means of checking policy once it had been decided.

The strength of this Bill is that it clearly provides a definition of strong and stable families as those that have relationship qualities that contribute to the emotional health and well-being of the family, including that the parents or guardians with whom a child lives remain consistent over time. It clearly lays out the requirement for the Secretary of State to publish objectives and targets for promoting “strong and stable families” and for the Government to report on their progress towards meeting these objectives. It then clearly provides guidance on which areas need to be reported on for impact. This is all hugely helpful.

If we really believe that families are the best anti-poverty measure ever invented and that they are a welfare, education and counselling system all wrapped up into one, let us ensure that it is not government policy-making that undermines this key building block of a healthy society, and let us do everything we can to ensure that this valuable and precious unit of love, care, affection and identity is protected and supported with all due care.

Universal Credit

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

It is an honour for me to follow the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson. I congratulate him on his maiden speech and welcome him to this House. His contribution to the topic we discuss today is huge. As he said, he was PPS to Gordon Brown as he created the tax credit system, and then Permanent Secretary to George Osborne throughout the introduction of universal credit. The care that he gave to steering the Treasury through the financial crisis at the same time as undertaking the biggest reform of welfare in a generation is highly commendable, and we look forward to seeing his wisdom and experience, benefiting us all in this Chamber.

But today is important for a second reason. There were many days when I doubted that we would discuss the progress of universal credit, so the title of this debate alone is a source of huge encouragement to me. However, it is also a day when we celebrate another heroic effort. It is an extraordinary feat to be a Minister in one department for six years; it is still another to leave at a time of one’s own choosing.

As my noble friend Lord Farmer has already said, my noble friend Lord Freud disproves in one easy stroke the old adage that all political careers end in failure. He has stayed long enough at the coalface to ensure success. The story of universal credit is the story of real courage, sacrifice, endurance and painstaking policy work, and much of this story belongs to him.

In 2008-09, when we were developing the concept of universal credit at the Centre for Social Justice—I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests—there were key dynamics that we wanted to be built into a reformed welfare system. We wanted to ensure that it encouraged more people into work and made work pay, smoothed the transition into work, making the choice to take work a logical choice, and tackled poverty through increased reward from being in work.

The rollout of universal credit was not a smooth one, as my noble friend Lord Freud and the noble Lord, Lord McPherson, can attest to, but we now have a silent revolution taking place. Universal credit claimants now spend around 50% more time on job searches than comparable JSA claimants, they earn more than similar JSA claimants and they move faster into work.

However, given that universal credit is rolling out successfully, and given that it is Christmas, I want to finish my few allotted minutes with my Christmas wish list for universal credit. I was one of the first to congratulate Theresa May and the Chancellor on their choice of investing in universal credit and beginning the pathway to reversing the cuts to work allowances. I encourage them to use each Budget and each spending review to continue investing in the work allowances and taper. That is the best way of supporting those who are just about managing.

Secondly, there is one more step to take with childcare in universal credit. If you are on a higher income outside of UC, you can claim the tax-free childcare offer for as many children as you have. That is not the case for universal credit claimants, although with an investment of about £50 million it could be. Thirdly, a strong and continued commitment to universal support, extended beyond financial and digital inclusion to include family, mental health and skills support, could provide the safety net that vulnerable people need.

Many people on all sides of this House are committed to the successful rollout of UC. We thank our noble friend Lord Freud for staying at the coalface long enough to ensure safe passage for this hugely significant reform, at significant personal cost. We reassure him that his efforts have not been in vain but that we will continue, as a House, to safeguard this reform.

Unemployment: Disabled People

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

The way we are now addressing this will effectively encompass what the noble Lord is asking for. We are preparing to launch a work and health Green Paper and there will be a lot of work following it. We will need to work with the sector, the health system and employers to make sure that we have something that really starts to achieve our aims.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, one in six people who develop a disability while they are in work lose their employment within a year. Can the Minister explain to the House the structural changes he is making to universal credit in order to keep disabled people close to the workplace, particularly disabled people with fluctuating conditions, and to support employers?

[Lord Freud]

The fundamental change in the new benefit structure—a single benefit in the form of universal credit—allows people to stay in their benefit while they have varying amounts of work. Some of the main beneficiaries will be disabled people, many of whom do have fluctuating conditions. Today, they are frightened of going into work if they are having a few good months, because they could lose their entire package. At the moment, there are silo packages and a person can be labelled and told, “You are in this disability package; you cannot go into work”. Under UC, you can move up and down the taper depending on how you are doing, which is one reason why I was able to relax the permitted work rules when we went through the Welfare Reform and Work Bill. With universal credit, we no longer have to patrol so tightly the legacy system.