Pension Schemes (Conversion of Guaranteed Minimum Pensions) Bill

Karen Buck Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 25th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) on introducing the Bill, which the Opposition are pleased to support, as we were at previous stages. As the hon. Lady and others have said, it will help occupational pension schemes to correct the basic issue of men and women being treated differently in those schemes because of the impact of a guaranteed minimum pension. It will also help pension schemes to ensure that people do not receive less pension income than they would have received had they been of the opposite sex. As the hon. Lady and others have said, the legislation has been welcomed throughout the industry and there is broad consensus that it is the right thing to do.

We should do all we can to help the pensions industry to fulfil what is now its legal duty to deliver guaranteed minimum pension equalisation, which includes supporting the Bill. In Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) made clear our support for the Bill while making some general points and asking questions about the Government’s approach to communications in respect of this legislation and pensions more generally. He gently pointed out that the Government do not have an unsullied record when it comes to communication and he wanted to know a bit more about the Minister’s plans in that regard. I think the Minister was going to write to him but am not sure whether that has happened; perhaps the Minister could say a couple of words about the Government’s plans to ensure the effective communication of the message.

I reinforce our view that there must be a commitment in the Bill to a full and timely consultation with experts, the industry and others before the introduction of regulations. That consultation should address the conditions that must be met in respect of survivors’ benefits and the details about who must consent to the conversion. We asked in Committee what kind of instrument will be used to introduce the regulations and sought reassurance that parliamentarians will be able adequately to scrutinise the changes. We also asked about the requirement to notify HMRC, about which we have now heard more, which has helpfully clarified that point.

On the wider issues of gender inequality, GMP equalisation is only one way in which imbalances between men’s and women’s pensions need to be addressed. We need reassurance that the Government will commit to continuing to ensure that all aspects of gender inequality in pensions are looked at, because we know that the pensions gender gap is around double the pay gap and that small changes at the early stages of somebody’s pension career can have large repercussions.

In summary, we support the efforts in the Bill to tidy the legislation and make it easier for schemes to convert guaranteed minimum pension rights into ordinary scheme benefits. The Minister may wish to address the few important issues to be resolved, but they certainly do not distract from the Bill’s overall value and we look forward to it passing swiftly through its final stages.

Social Security and Pensions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I join the Minister in thanking all the staff in the Department for Work and Pensions who, year in and year out, do so much to serve people on lower incomes. I can certainly speak from experience of my own caseload, as I know that individual staff in jobcentres and in the various call centres go out of their way to be of as much assistance as possible, particularly over the past two years. That needs to be recognised.

With each passing day we see more evidence of real hardship as the cost of living rises, and that hardship is experienced most by those on the lowest incomes. At the sharpest end, our food banks operated by the Trussell Trust and the Independent Food Aid Network are a stark measure of destitution, but all those on lower incomes are struggling—whether pensioners, working families, working people, carers or those permanently or temporarily unable to work due to sickness or disability—and the prospect of the coming months is filling people with fear.

All the organisations that work with those pensioners and working-age people, from Citizens Advice to the Child Poverty Action Group and many others, will report what is happening at the sharp end of their services as people are increasingly seeking assistance for help with debt and being driven into physical and mental hardship as a result of the financial situation that they find themselves in. This is not an abstract or statistical phenomenon; it is a reality of people in desperation.

The Secretary of State’s statement announcing a 3.1% rise in pensions and most but not all benefits for April 2022 was originally laid on 25 November, when the severity of the cost of living crisis that we are now facing was not fully apparent. We now know that by December annual inflation had already risen to 5.4%, and the Bank of England is forecasting inflation to peak at 7.25% in April this year. We have not seen a cost of living rise of this scale for over 30 years. The result is that in April pensions and benefits will be uprated by less than half of the annual increase in inflation. This shortfall between benefits uprating and actual inflation reflects the traditional lag between the data used for uprating and its coming into effect, as we have already heard.

However, what I do not understand is that in a system that is increasingly, in the digital age, being billed as flexible and responsive, we are unable to ensure that in the exceptional circumstances that we now face there is not greater responsiveness to the kind of shift that has left people exposed to rising bills. The Minister referred to there being a practical problem in being able to respond to the sharp change in circumstances we have seen over recent months, but he did not spell out what those practical limitations are and why, 12 years into a Conservative Government, it has been impossible to be more responsive to them.

The measures that the Government have put forward, as outlined by the Minister, fall far short in addressing the inflationary shock that households are now facing. The Government have opted for a “Buy now, pay later” scheme which means that, in order to avoid taxing the super-profits of the energy companies, customers will have to pay a forced levy for the next four years, while at the same time allocating targeted support according to 30-year-old property values.

The latter scheme means that some of the poorest households, pensioners and families with children are excluded from help if, for example, they happen to live in a housing association property built 20 years ago which, by virtue simply of being slightly newer, falls within a higher council tax band. We are allocating assistance on the basis of decades-old estimates of property values while ignoring the reality of data we happen to hold on the locations and identities of those in the lowest income bands. This also continues the recent trend of funding schemes through local councils that are not only much more unwieldy to administer but replace entitlement with discretion and easily risk missing out those most in need. That is true of the hardship fund, it has been true of discretionary housing payments, and it is now also true of the council tax scheme that the Government are seeking to adopt.

In contrast, we have put forward plans that will offset the energy price shock for low to middle-income families without requiring them to pay the energy companies back. This would be worth £600 to households on lower incomes, with a cut in VAT and an extended and increased warm home discount would be sufficient to provide a £400 warm home discount to 9.3 million households who would be entitled to receive it. Households that would be newly eligible include all working families with children that are claiming universal credit—currently, only those with incomes below £16,000 are entitled. In addition, our plan would extend eligibility to nearly a quarter of a million pensioners in the savings credit group.

We must also recognise the permanent impact of decisions on benefit uprating over the years, which are a contributing factor to the cost of living crisis. The crisis did not emerge fully formed in the last three or four months. My hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) will say more about the specific issue of pensions later, which was debated in the legislation that suspended the triple lock, but I will talk about working-age benefits.

Apart from the benefits for which inflation uprating is fixed in statute, the uprating of working-age benefits, how they are uprated and whether they are uprated at all has been subject to an anarchic approach over recent years, driven by short-term political calculations of Ministers and Chancellors that have long-term consequences. Since 2010, the only consistency we have seen is that the departure from normal annual uprating with inflation has been in one direction only: downward, with rises capped at arbitrary rates or simply frozen.

To fully catalogue all the freezes and caps that have been introduced since 2010 would keep us here all evening. Fortunately, the Department’s recently published abstract of benefit rate statistics summarises the impact of the main DWP benefits. Between April 2010 and last April, the real-terms value in 2021 prices of child benefit fell by 16% and the real-terms value of jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance fell by 8%. Remarkably, looking at the data for jobseeker’s allowance and its predecessor, the real-terms value is now 10% lower than it was in 1965. Meanwhile, the real value of the universal credit standard allowance for a single person over 25 fell from £348 per month in 2013 to £324 per month in 2021 after the removal of the £20 uplift—a fall of 7%.

Those uprating choices have had permanent effects on benefit adequacy that are not reversed when benefit freezes come to an end. Policy choices since 2010 have ensured that families today are in a much weaker position to deal with a period of rapidly rising inflation than they would have been otherwise. We have come into the crisis with child and pensioner poverty rising, families already experiencing fuel stress and destitution rising. As last month’s Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust report stated:

“Broadly speaking, there seems little prospect of reversing the trends since around 2012/13 of rising child poverty (which rose by four percentage points to almost a third of children by 2019/20) and rising pensioner poverty (which has risen by five percentage points to almost a fifth of pensioners by 2019/20)”.

The cost of living crisis for low to middle-income households did not start with a surge in energy prices; it has been building for years.

Apart from the permanent effect of the policies enforced between 2010 and 2020, the order also enshrines a continuation of the freeze of local housing allowance rates. The uprating statement made a rather pathetic attempt to claim that the Government had decided to maintain LHA levels at the elevated cash rates agreed for 2020-21, as if the default position would have been to reduce them in cash terms. Let us be clear: the Government have decided to freeze housing allowance rates for the second year in a row. That is a policy choice, so Ministers should own up to it.

What the Secretary of State refers to as the elevated cash terms of 2021 was simply the policy of setting the housing allowance at the 30th percentile of the rental market. We know what happens when the local housing allowance is allowed to fall away from rent inflation, because we have been here before. Before the pandemic forced the Government’s hand, the housing allowance, like other benefits, had been frozen for four years following years of below-inflation uprating. But of course, rents were not frozen.

By 2019, the average shortfall between the housing allowance and rent for a two-bedroom house was £1,250—equivalent to 7% of the total income of a typical renting universal credit family. According to the Office for National Statistics’ experimental data on rental prices, rents rose by 3% just between February 2020 and December 2021. For many households, that rise alone is enough to cancel out the effect of the Government’s much-vaunted £150 council tax rebate.

I have, then, another question for the Minister to answer when he responds to the debate: what is the Government’s policy on the setting of housing allowances? Is it to give the lowest-income families access to the bottom 30% of the local private rented sector? Is it that housing allowances should fall in cash terms every year unless the Government decide otherwise? Or is it simply down to the whim of whatever the Chancellor of the Exchequer happens to decide? Housing allowances have real-world impacts: they affect people’s ability to secure somewhere to live and to face a shortfall between the rent they actually pay and the income available to them, and, as in so many aspects of benefits policy, they feed into the work of other Government Departments, particularly in respect of rising homelessness.

Finally, it is important not to forget the effect of the limits and caps on benefits that hit living standards in unpredictable and arbitrary ways. Those limits and caps include the bedroom tax, the two-child limit and the benefit cap, the latter of which has not been uprated since 2016. The rationale for the cap was purportedly to limit benefits to the same amount as the average incomes of working families. That rationale was always a sleight of hand, but surely even those who accept it have to ask why its value should be fixed at 2016 levels.

We see again the same pattern that has been a hallmark of uprating decisions since 2010: anarchic policy making and indifference to the living-cost pressures faced by people in ordinary households who need to rely on social security benefits. Working people, retired people and people with families are all categories of people on lower incomes. The cost of living crisis is upon us now; the time to act is now. We need to supplement this year’s uprating with a targeted package of support that offers real help to people who are struggling. That is what the Government should do and that is what Labour would do.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Rutley]

I strongly agree. I have seen the amazing work my hon. Friend does in his constituency and did previously in Brent and he sets out our clear direction. Through our plan for jobs, and now, in a time of record vacancies, we are putting huge focus on the Way to Work, which I think he will agree provides even more incentives for those getting closer to job readiness to move into a job and then advance their career.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

We know from the Department’s own recently published abstract of benefit rates statistics that the real-terms value of child benefit fell by 16% between April 2010 and April 2021. How many fewer families would now be in poverty if that and universal credit had been uprated consistently in line with inflation?

[David Rutley]

Questions on child benefit are obviously for the Treasury, but the work we are doing to improve the universal credit taper and the work allowance will help a huge number of families to have greater financial security over the years ahead.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[David Rutley]

It is really important that we get more people into work, and there are 1.3 million vacancies. We need to help those who are unemployed into work, which will be the biggest, most sustainable way that we can get them on to their own two feet. As I have said, we have the household support fund, and in Cambridgeshire that comes to £3.6 million, which will help the people whom the hon. Member is talking about.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

With housing costs a major driver of poverty, the Government have decided yet again to freeze the local housing allowance, hitting millions of renters. As the Minister well knows, neither discretionary payments nor the winter hardship fund will do anything like meet the shortfall in that gap. Meanwhile, rents are anything but frozen and more than half of all renters have a shortfall between their rents and the help available. Will the Minister tell us when the Government decided not to link the support for housing costs to actual real world rents, and what assessment have they made of the impact of that on household incomes?

[David Rutley]

As the hon. Member will remember, we increased the local housing allowance rates to the 30th percentile of local rents in April 2020. That is a boost of £1 billion in support and an average gain of £600 for each person in private rented accommodation who needed housing support. We have also maintained that at cash levels, which will be a real help, and there are also discretionary housing payments for those who need them as well.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend is right to praise Buckinghamshire Council, which was allocated £2.4 million from the fund. It is fair to say that local authorities delivering the household support fund have access to elements relating to health visitors, social workers and housing departments, and access to the benefits system through the Searchlight portal, to identify people who may need help at this time and are most in need. Of course, people should turn to their councils for that support, and they should be warmly welcomed.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

According to the Resolution Foundation, the combined effect of the removal of the £20 universal credit uplift and the Budget measures means that 3.6 million households on universal credit—three quarters of the total—will still be worse off this winter. These measures take £3 billion out of support for the poorest, so how far does the Secretary of State estimate that the £500 million household support fund, which is equivalent to just one sixth of the amount that has been removed, will reduce the level of hardship for people this winter?

[Dr Coffey]

The hon. Lady will recognise that some of the announcements made in the Budget recently will, I expect, provide some direct support for people working or, indeed, encourage people into work. However, the £500 million, being a targeted fund, will be a great support, with people identified by local councils that know who to target in this regard. It is also fair to say, as has been said many times, that the uplift was temporary, recognising the situation that we are in, and candidly, it was far more generous than ever happened—or rather, never happened—when we had the 2009-10 financial crisis.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Today, the Government have announced the infrastructure programme, with a mixture of public and private sector investment of £650 billion over the next 10 years. We believe that will generate 425,000 jobs in the next four years, and these will be well-paid jobs. Between my Department and the Department for Education, we will be trying to make sure that as many people are as upskilled as possible to take advantage of the higher wages of the jobs being created.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation indicates that nearly four out of every five families with children are receiving universal credit or working tax credit, rising to 45% or more of families with children in the north-east, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the west midlands. Can the Secretary of State share her Department’s assessment, which we heard about at the end of last week, of how these families are expected to manage the income shock of losing £1,000 a year due to the impending cut?

[Dr Coffey]

It may surprise the hon. Lady to know that more than half of recipients of universal credit are actually households without children. We are conscious that this support had a widespread impact when we had the impact of the pandemic. However, what the hon. Lady will know about is that in the last year, collectively across Government, we have injected several hundred million pounds specifically to help people with children with the difficulties of some of the financial challenges they have. However, now that the jobs market is well and truly open, we will be doing whatever we can to help people get into work, and get into better-paid work as well.

[Ms Buck]

It is not clear from that answer whether the Secretary of State has actually undertaken any form of assessment of the income shock. However, it is not only about the impact on individuals’ and families’ incomes; it is also about the wider economic consequences. According to the Resolution Foundation, a quarter of all households in the north-east will lose £1,000 a year from the cut, which will strip millions of pounds from the economies of some of the poorest communities in the country. Has her Department carried out an assessment of what the economic impact will be of the cut coming into effect in just a few weeks’ time?

[Dr Coffey]

My understanding is that, as we always knew the uplift was going to be temporary, an impact assessment was not undertaken because we knew it would be for a limited time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mims Davies]

The hon. Lady will be keen to know that, even in these current times, people moving out of the benefit cap and into work is going in the right direction. There are multiple vacancies in the hospitality, construction, care and logistics sectors. The benefits system provides a crucial safety net for people at their time of need and the benefit cap also provides a strong incentive for claimants to get into work and increase their hours so that the benefit cap does not apply.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Last week, former Work and Pensions Minister Lord Freud described the benefit cap, which is now hitting 120,000 more households than at the beginning of the pandemic, as “ghastly”. Efforts to protect incomes during covid have been undermined as increased universal credit and housing allowance rates led to more families being capped, with numbers rising as the grace period for universal credit expires. If the supposed aim of the benefit cap is for families to go into work and to cut their housing costs by moving, will the Minister explain how families have been supposed to do that in the past 12 months, when neither option was effectively possible?

[Mims Davies]

I remind hon. Members that the benefit cap is set at the equivalent annual salary of £24,000, or £28,000 in London, which importantly provides fairness between taxpayers in employment and those with working-age support. Claimants can approach their local authority for discretionary housing payments if they need additional support to meet rental costs, or indeed for hardship grants. The hon. Lady should look out for the forthcoming in-work progression report, which will look at all these matters. We should take all this in the round.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. We continue to work very closely with the MHCLG to find long-term solutions to housing challenges. Work coaches are trained to identify people with potential housing issues and to provide tailored support, including referrals to homelessness services or debt advice. Discretionary housing payments are available, and the Government will make available a £310 million homelessness prevention grant for local authorities. However, I would of course be very happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss what further measures we may be able to take.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

With the end of the eviction ban imminent, more than half of claimants needing help with housing costs face a shortfall between the help available and their actual rent—£100 a month in the case of universal credit claimants. The Government always say that discretionary housing payments are the answer to these shortfalls, so can the Minister explain to us why discretionary housing payments have suffered a real-terms cut and will be lower this year than they were before the pandemic?

[Will Quince]

I thank the hon. Lady for that question. We take this issue incredibly seriously. That is why we pumped an additional nearly £1 billion into the local housing allowance and have frozen it in cash terms for a further year, and why we have the two-week run-on of housing benefit, direct payments to landlords available, £140 million in DHPs, the homelessness prevention grant, work coach support and, of course, Money and Pensions Service support. We stand ready to support any tenant who needs that support to sustain their tenancy and prevent homelessness.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 8th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. He is a strong advocate on these issues. As I say, managed payment to a landlord is available where universal credit claimants are unable to manage monthly payments and are at risk of financial harm. That can be requested by the tenant, landlord or work coach. Our relatively new online tool makes it easier for landlords to request a managed payment to landlords. UC also enables a landlord to request recovery of rent when a UC claimant is in arrears or once a tenancy reaches two months’ rent arrears. I agree to some extent with my hon. Friend. Rent arrears concern me too and we continue to monitor the situation very closely.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab) [V]]

Of the 1.3 million universal credit households who are claiming housing support for their properties in the private rented sector—that is, the people who are most at risk of homelessness as a consequence of rent arrears—in more than 700,000 cases, so more than half, there is a shortfall between the rent being charged and the help available. That number has grown by a quarter of a million since the start of the pandemic. With housing support being cut again in the Budget, will the Minister answer this one question? Will that number have gone up or fallen during the remainder of 2021?

[Will Quince]

We increased the local housing allowance rates in April 2020. We invested nearly £1 billion in LHA, lifting rates to the 30th percentile, giving an average increase of £600 more housing support per year than would otherwise have been received. For 2021-22, all LHA rates will be maintained at the increased level, ensuring that claimants continue to benefit from the increase. For those who require additional support, £140 million of discretionary housing payments are available next year.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

As I have said, the universal credit uplift is still in place for the remainder of this tax year. Discussions remain ongoing with Her Majesty’s Treasury, and a decision on the future of the universal credit and working tax credit uplift will be taken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in due course.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab) [V]]

But the number of children in poverty has increased by 600,000 after housing costs since 2010, and that has been in substantial part due to the £9 billion that the Government have withdrawn from social security since 2015 alone. The universal credit uplift and other measures taken since the beginning of the pandemic will have reduced the number of children living in poverty to 300,000, but can the Minister confirm that if the Government proceed with ending the £20 UC uplift, together with rising unemployment, that will mean, by the end of this Parliament, that they will have seen 700,000 more children cast into poverty than at the beginning?

[Will Quince]

We take the issue of poverty, and tackling poverty, incredibly seriously, and as I made clear, active discussions are ongoing with Her Majesty’s Treasury. But I have to say that I fundamentally disagree with the approach of Labour party: simply throwing money at our benefits system—an approach that, under the last Labour Government, left a generation trapped on benefits, trapped in poverty and incentivised not to work by punitive cliff edges in the legacy benefit system. We will not be going back to those dark old days. We know that work is the best route out of poverty and, under universal credit—our modern, dynamic, agile system—work always pays.