Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Durham and Baroness Maddock

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 35. Observant noble Lords may have noticed that the last part of the sentence in proposed new Section A1AH(2), “its fuel strategy”, should read “its fuel poverty strategy”, as in the rest of the amendment.

The purpose of the amendment is to ask the Government to record and report on the effects of the proposed changes in the Bill on their fuel poverty strategy. I am concerned about this on three counts. The first is the effect of cold homes on children, the elderly and the disabled. Many of them will be pushed further into fuel poverty by the changes in the Bill. Secondly, I do not want to see the possible undermining by the changes in the Bill of the fuel poverty strategy agreed by the last Government. My third concern is the effect of the Bill on the already large numbers of people who are in fuel poverty in the area of the country where I live, Berwick-upon-Tweed in north Northumberland.

The effects of cold homes on people are well known. If people cannot afford to pay their fuel bills and their income goes down, more people are going to be in cold homes and more will be in fuel poverty. Of those who are over 60, over 1 million are at present in fuel poverty. We know that poor and cold housing costs the National Health Service nearly £1.5 billion every year. We have levels of excess winter deaths here that are higher than in most of western Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries where, as we all know, temperatures are very much lower. The inability to keep warm leads to ill health, not just to early death.

I turn to disabled people. As we heard in debates on Monday, disabled people generally require higher levels of warmth than most of us but generally have a lower income to cover the extra costs. That was very well laid out in the discussions we had on Monday evening. There are proposals in the Bill, which we have yet to discuss so I shall not go into them now, to reduce the income of certain disabled people by 30%. If their income is to be reduced by 30%, there are going to be a whole lot more people in the category of fuel poverty.

I turn to children. Cold homes in Great Britain are more likely than not to be damp homes. This leads to very poor health for young children living in them, particularly with instances of asthma and chest infections, and therefore these children will take more time out of school and nursery and will have lower attainments in school and reduced life chances, which is what the Government are concerned about. Someone earlier—I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, who is not in her place now—mentioned the fact that children trying to do homework in the cold is one thing that we know affects their ability to keep up at school.

As was also said earlier, the Government are not very keen on strategies these days. But the second child poverty strategy, covering 2014 to 2017, aimed to improve living standards and prevent poor children from becoming poor adults through raising educational attainment. The Government are still talking about that but—I think this has been well set out in the discussions we have had—this Bill dismantles many elements of that strategy. The Minister has explained a little to us today, but he needs to explain a little more about the mismatch of this policy with other policies.

The statistics on the effects of cold homes are very stark. The risk of experiencing severe ill health and disability during childhood and early adulthood is increased by 25% if an individual lives in poor and cold housing. Children living in inadequately heated houses are more than twice as likely to suffer from conditions such as asthma and bronchitis as those living in warmer homes, and 40% of vulnerable households are faced with the stark choice of heating or eating. This has been looked at and we know that 20% of parents in that situation will often go without food so that their children can eat.

Cold homes are currently a bigger killer across the United Kingdom than road accidents, alcohol or drug abuse. For the statistics that I have laid out this afternoon I am grateful to Age UK; National Energy Action’s fuel poverty strategy, of which I am vice-president; Friends of the Earth; and the Association for the Conservation of Energy.

During the last Parliament, I and many others worked very hard to persuade the Government to adopt a fuel poverty strategy. I do not want to see that work undone. Currently, there are 13 million low-income individuals who, after housing costs, have incomes well below £16,000 a year. Just under half of them are in employment but are still struggling to meet living costs, including utility bills. We have heard more about that this afternoon. We know that increasing household incomes is an essential part—it is not the only part—of tackling fuel poverty. So what figures do the Government have about how the changes in this Bill will affect low-income households that are at present in fuel poverty?

I live in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Every week, when I come down to London, I find that it is at least 5 degrees centigrade warmer. Therefore, it is not surprising that the area I live in has high figures of fuel poverty. In Berwick itself, we have 1,800 households in fuel poverty, which is 15% of our population. In the whole constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, there are nearly 4,500 people in fuel poverty, which is 13%. Across Northumberland, there are 16,000 people in fuel poverty. To add to that, we have some of the lowest levels of take-up of further and higher education in the country. We are also an area of low wages and low skills. No one from our local high school has gone to Oxford or Cambridge for over 10 years, unless their parents paid for them to travel 67 miles to further education colleges and sixth forms in Newcastle. I believe that the changes in this Bill may work against the already poor life chances of many young people in Berwick-upon-Tweed and north Northumberland.

I hope that the Minister will be able to tell me whether the issues that I have raised were taken into account when drawing up the Bill. He mentioned life chances earlier and outlined some of the Government’s thinking, but I hope he can assure me that they will look a bit harder at this. Whatever his answer is, it is clear—and has been made clear in the discussions we have had this afternoon—that this amendment merits serious consideration by the Minister today.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I rise to speak first to Amendment 31. Given the serious enthusiasm that the Government have for introducing “life chances” as a title and theme, it would make complete sense for the Government to want to report on improvement in children’s life chances in the future. So I commend this as being entirely in line with the purpose of the whole Bill—it would make sense to report.

I will speak now to Amendments 36 to 40 and 42 to 45, and I would like to keep us in the north-east of England. Yesterday, it was my privilege to open the new building for Holy Trinity primary school in Seaton Carew in Hartlepool, and to then go to Prior’s Mill primary school in Billingham, both of which are Church of England schools. I add that I have visited the school in Berwick that the noble Baroness mentioned and can confirm what she said; it is a very fine school but it has not produced people for higher education in the way that it should.

The proposal to change from a “Social Mobility Commission” to a “Life Chances Commission” gives us a very rare opportunity to change the title of a government commission so that it is understood by the very children whom it seeks to serve. Most of our departments and so on do not resonate with the life, language and conversations of children themselves. However, in both the schools I visited yesterday, I found myself talking with those children about their hopes and their dreams and their fears, but they were longing to talk about the chances and hopes that they had in life. Those were not purely about money: they were about work and home and family and so forth. Not once did I hear any of them talk about social mobility possibilities.

In all seriousness, I say that it would be a much more sensible heading and title for the commission and it would fit much more accurately with the aims and purposes that the Government have stated for life chances, so I would seize this with every opportunity. It would please the children of the nation if they understood what the commission was about.