Domestic Abuse: Universal Credit Payments

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, with regard to Scotland, the Scottish Government have discussed split payments with stakeholders and are now starting to think about developing their own policy. We will continue to watch and observe how that proceeds. But I have entirely understood what we are talking about today and I think it is really important to make clear that we want to simplify the system for everyone making claims under universal credit. It is important that we simplify the system. Noble Lords shake their heads, but we want to treat people in the normal way, whereby they have a joint approach, in most instances, to receipt of their income, to managing their household bills and to managing how they can cover their costs on a monthly basis—but with exceptions where people who are suffering abuse or any other kind of coercive action can ask for and will be given split payments as a matter of course.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister please answer two questions? First, is this purely because of cost savings, in that it may be more costly to deliver split payments? Secondly, what about preventing abuse in the first place? If women have their own money, it quite frequently prevents abuse.

[Baroness Buscombe]

On the latter point, I have to say that the charity Refuge has made it clear that it is not convinced that split payments help. In fact, they can exacerbate violence if the perpetrator of violence knows that their partner has her own pot of money. We have to be extremely careful about this: each individual case is different. This is nothing to do with cost savings. The reality, I know, is that this is all about the legacy. Noble Lords opposite prefer the legacy—the complex, difficult system that the party opposite preferred, which kept people trapped on welfare. It was much more complicated. We are simplifying this through universal credit, which is delivering a much simpler to understand system to support people into work and support them to manage their household finances.