Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I would have thought that the right reverend Prelate’s point was that we are facing political choices, not ones of financial necessity. We can make choices here and we are choosing instead to go after poor children.

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

I thank the noble Lord and the noble Baroness for the answers they have given each other on this. It really is not my duty, as a Prelate in this House, to give the church’s view on exactly how the money should be raised. It is a task to say that there are alternatives and, indeed, to make suggestions as to how the money might be raised. There is no policy on exactly how it should be and I do not think that it would be for me to try to produce the solution to what we are doing. There are alternatives. I do not believe that they should be placed on children.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, I have added my name in support of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Best, because of my concern, and that of those of us on this Bench, for the needs of children as we pursue the move towards universal credit. I am fully aware that that concern is felt on the government Front Bench as well.

This is an area where a small change to the Bill will bring about help for a significant number of children who are under the most pressure in social housing. What is proposed by the noble Lord in the amendment—whether or not it is itself amended—is a definition of underoccupancy in line with that of Communities and Local Government and which simply reflects the reality of family life. Under the definitions of the Bill, a family with an eight year-old boy and a nine year-old girl in separate bedrooms would be deemed to be underoccupied. That cannot make sense.

There is every reason to discourage genuine underoccupancy. When people think about underoccupancy, on the whole, they think of where a single person or a couple are left in a larger house, probably because their children have moved away. Surely that should not apply to a disabled child, for example, who needs care during the night and therefore needs a separate room. It should not apply to a room used for access visits by children following marital breakdown. It should certainly not apply to foster carers between placements. There is real concern that the Bill, if unamended, will discourage foster caring because the carers will not be able to retain rooms in which to place foster children if the need should arise.

We—or, at least, the Members on this Bench—are going to hear a good deal over the next fortnight or so about there being no room in the inn. The amendment will provide the flexibility so that families can live the sort of lives that most of us take for granted. I hope that we will be able to enable this to happen by the pursuit of this or a similar amendment.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of Broadland Housing Association. I am delighted to support this amended amendment. DCLG says that you are underoccupying if you have two or more spare bedrooms; DWP, in the Bill, if you have more than one spare bedroom—a very tight definition. If you then do not move to somewhere smaller, you will be fined by having your housing benefit cut by 15 per cent.

As my noble friend has said, this is not about finding homes for the 3 per cent of families who are overcrowded in this country. We could solve that tomorrow if we built bungalows or suitable flats for the pensioners who are queuing up for them—full stop. No, this is about cutting the housing benefit bill, by telling a third of our tenants in social housing, most of them disabled, that they have to find somewhere smaller to live. A middle-aged couple with health problems who therefore need that second bedroom will be entitled to only one bedroom. The family of four with two teenage daughters in a three-bedroomed home must move to a two-bedroomed home even though the girls will then have nowhere to do their homework. A disabled woman who sometimes has a carer staying overnight in her two-bedroomed flat must move to a one-bedroomed flat. A couple in their 50s, in a two-bedroomed house, who care for their grandchildren when their daughter with mental health problems cannot—in other words, they are occasional kinship carers—will have to move to a one-bedroomed flat, possibly some distance away, and the whole fragile family arrangement will collapse.

In theory, all the people in these examples are expected to move. The children are expected to change school one year before GCSEs, the middle-aged woman is expected to move away from her mother whom she is keeping out of residential care by her support, the disabled woman to move away from the friends who help her cope by doing her shopping and laundry. Six hundred and seventy thousand families—between 30 and 40 per cent of all tenants in social housing, two-thirds of them with a degree of disability—are supposed to go on the move if they can. Fine, if they can; but for most, even if they want to downsize, they cannot. Even though they may be pensioners who cannot heat their homes, they cannot downsize, and the DWP knows it. The smaller flats are simply not there to move to and all the fulminations of the tabloid press—that Ministers expect them to downsize when the same Ministers know that they cannot—are therefore cruelly irrelevant.

The National Housing Federation says that 180,000 households in two-bedroomed flats would have needed a one-bedroomed flat last year, but just 68,000 such flats—about a third of the number needed—became vacant. In future, the needs of pensioners who really want to move can never be met because, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, absolutely rightly, any smaller place that becomes available will have to be offered to much larger families who, however, do not want to move, rather than to the single pensioner who does. It is a cruel nonsense.

The department admits that, in its own words, there is a mismatch, and that the smaller properties that people are expected to move to do not exist. The department expects that 85 per cent of all of these tenants will stay put and take the cut in housing benefit because they have no alternative, as the impact assessment admits at the bottom of page 2. The Government are counting on people not moving, despite telling them that they should. So the Government’s savings are going to come not because people do what the Government tell them to do, but because people do not do what the Government tell them to do: they stay put, because they have no option, and then they are fined for doing so.

What do the Government suggest that they should do to cover the shortfall? They should find work. Well, of course, if they could they would, and we welcome the support given for finding work within the universal credit system. Alternatively, it is suggested that they could take a lodger; but with small children I do not think that that will happen. The other suggestion is that they use—actually, use up—their savings. As the noble Lord, Lord Freud, reminded us on Monday, the average savings are only £300. That will last for four or five months of shortfall. After that, what then? It will be debts, arrears and pass-the-parcel. To pay the council tax, because their council tax benefit is being cut by 20 per cent, they will raid their housing benefit. However, that now does not pay the rent, so to pay that, they will fall behind on their utility bills, which are also on the rise. Threatened with their gas and electricity being cut off in winter, they will cut back on food, until ultimately the whole Ponzi debt pyramid created by this clause of the Bill will collapse. They will then face food parcels and eviction.

However, as the eviction is not their fault, as the Minister agreed in Committee, they will not be intentionally homeless, so they will be put into highly expensive B&B at taxpayers’ expense with all its cost and all its misery, as, with a history of arrears, they will not be accepted by any private landlord. In time, they will be rehoused—quite probably, if my housing association is anything to go by, in a house that is still too large, because that is all we have—and the whole vicious spiral one year on will start all over again, taking disabled adults and children through a relentless cycle of cuts and evictions.

The alternative, of course, is that housing associations such as mine carry the arrears because we know the social and financial costs of eviction and the awful stress that it involves. Then what? Over time, the housing association goes into the red or, alternatively, we stop building and save the debt charges on erecting new homes, the money being spent instead on debts that come from cuts in housing benefit, thus guaranteeing that the shortage of social housing that is undermining the housing market continues for the next decade.

It is so unfair. Let us take JSA as an example. If people break the rules on job search, we cut their benefit to change their behaviour. However, if they observe the rules and, after a proper job search, cannot find a job given the unemployment figures, we do not cut their benefit because it is not their fault and they cannot change their behaviour. That is the social contract of social security. You sanction people when they break the rules and should change their behaviour; you do not sanction or fine them but support them when that is not possible. It is what we do with JSA. The DWP is, in this clause, breaking that social contract with these changes to housing benefit. In all my time in the social security field, I have never known that contract to be broken in this way.

Grant Shapps said that we should not bully people out of their homes. He is right. Yet in this Bill we are saying to people who have lived in their homes all their lives, done what was asked of them and behaved responsibly—two-thirds of them having some disability—that their benefit is being cut from underneath them through no fault of their own but just because we in Westminster are changing the rules. We tell them to downsize while knowing that they cannot do so, so we fine them instead for what is not their fault and for what they cannot change. It is morally wrong to punish people for something that is not their fault and to punish them when they are innocent. That is not decent, it is profoundly unfair, and we should not do it. If noble Lords agree, they will support the amendment today.

Pensions Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, I have put my name to these amendments because I want to talk about the speed with which the goalposts are being moved and the unfairness between individuals that that represents. I speak as the Bishop who has had major responsibility for changes to the Church of England clergy pensions scheme and the reduction in benefits that is involved in that. I have had to present those to the General Synod and I bear some of the scars for doing so. I am under no illusions as to the difficulty of this task for the Government.

I fully accept the arguments for equalisations and those based on longevity to which the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, has just been speaking. Change is needed, but I cannot accept that this speed of change is necessary. From my own experience, from my clergy postbag, and from my postbag about the Bill, I know that the two things that potential pensioners most resent are changes to their expectations with comparatively little notice and perceived unfairness. These proposals fail under both those headings, and the amendments put forward by the noble Lord do much to mitigate that unfairness and failure.

Individuals find changes in pension planning extremely complex and difficult to implement on a personal level. Many of the women who are affected here have taken time out to care for elderly parents, having worked long enough to qualify for the full pension. They have done that deliberately and they have responsibly assessed the way in which they are approaching retirement. Now they are simply being told, with only five to seven years’ notice, that they will have to cope on existing resources for one or two more years than they had anticipated—and than they had been told to anticipate as recently as the last changes in 2007. That is actually draconian for a group of individuals, notably the women, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, who were born in that month of March to April 1954. They face an immediate two-year increase in their state retirement age. Some 33,000 women are unfortunate enough to have been born in a particular month. It is not a tiny number, although it may be a small proportion of those who in one way or another will see a reduction in their pension expectation through the timetable of the Bill. We are often exhorted to plan carefully for retirement. It is understandable that people see little point in doing so if, for some, the goalposts are then moved to the other end of the pitch. This may not technically be retrospective legislation, but in practice that is exactly what it is for a significant number of women.

It causes changes to expectations at short notice and, secondly, unfairness. The proposals as they stand create a situation in which a woman born in 1950 obtained her pension in 2010 whereas her sister, born in 1954 and four years younger, has to wait until 2020 for hers—a six-year increase in the pension age, the best part of a decade between the times these sisters receive their pensions. When we look at the figures, it is easy to see the need for change, but we must also take account of the unfairness that that creates between neighbours, family groups and work colleagues, and the tension and pressure on friendships and relationships. That is why we need to think again on the timetable. The changes in the Bill bring no additional savings until 2016. The savings do not contribute to tackling the present economic crisis. It is a matter of justice for a significant number of women that we change that timetable today.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I, like others, very much support these amendments. I have here the coalition programme for government, drawn up 10 months ago. On page 26, it makes seven promises on pensions relating to the earnings link, the Hutton review, a review on early access and so on. I agree with almost all of them and the coalition Government are honouring almost all of them—which is great—except for one. The coalition programme states:

“We will phase out the default retirement age and hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66, although it will not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women”.

I agree with the coalition programme on that too: it is a clear and reasonable promise that was made just 10 months ago. We need to equalise, in a steady way, and that coalition commitment would have delivered that. Now in this Bill, just a few months later, that key coalition agreement promise—the one that most directly affects women, and poorer women at that—has been torn up and junked.

Whereas women before 2016 are seeing their pension age rise gradually, in steps of one year for every two years, suddenly from 2016 the rate at which their pension age is deferred extends, so that they have to wait three years instead of two and four years instead of three. From then on, half a million women will have to wait more than one year for their pension, 300,000 for more than a year and a half and 33,000—as the right reverend Prelate emphasised—for two years. It means that Susan, born in March 1953, will reach pension age at 63 in 2016. Her cousin Barbara, born a year later in March 1954, will reach pension age in March 2020, when she will be 66—one year younger, and she waits a further four years for her pension. Is that fair? Of course not. Is it necessary? The Government ran two arguments in their impact analysis and in Committee: first, given the deficit, that we need to find savings even from the pensions of the poorest women to sustain fiscal futures; and secondly, given increasing life expectancy, that we need to raise the pension age faster than anticipated.

Neither of these arguments, in my view, is valid. Given the deficit and the need to find savings—as has been mentioned by my noble friend Lord McKenzie and others today—and given that this acceleration starts in only 2016, we are already beyond the deficit period. Anticipated savings of £30 billion—virtually all from women—are not part of the four-year plan. Is it necessary, however, for longer-term fiscal stability? In the longer term, yes; it is the speed that we are objecting to and the unfairness for women dependent on the month in which they are born as to whether they get a reasonable or a very bad deal from the state. It is a lottery, my Lords. The Government, unlike the markets, should not engage in lotteries with people’s pensions.