Economic Inequality

Debate between Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and Lord Newby

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, bearing in mind the way in which wealthy pensioners, such as many in this House, are protected against the austerity cuts that other welfare recipients face, will the Government consider how to enable us to begin to bear our share of the burden, whether by taxing or means-testing the winter fuel allowance or otherwise?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, one of the commission’s recommendations was that intergenerational equity could be improved if pensioners paid a higher share. That has not been the view that the Government have taken. Particularly given the very high levels of pensioner poverty, against which many noble Lords have campaigned over many years, we have taken the view that the real value of pensions should be protected during this period of fiscal consolidation. However, we accept that there may be more to be done. Indeed, for people who receive payments such as the winter fuel allowance, there are now a number of voluntary schemes under which they can make that payment available via charities so that it can be used for people on low incomes.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and Lord Newby

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the whole House can agree on one thing. We all want to support families with children and ensure that children in this country have the opportunity to fulfil their potential. We have been discussing how we attempt to achieve that in the extremely difficult economic times in which we live.

I will spare noble Lords my speaking notes on the economic context, as we have already had a full debate on that. The only point I make in passing, in respect of the Opposition’s policies on deficit reduction, is that they passed legislation saying that by the forthcoming financial year it would be illegal not to have halved the deficit. It is therefore particularly surprising that they seem to have had no plan at the time to do it and have given no indication since of how they might have done it.

However, I must remind noble Lords again of the baseline from which these savings are being made. Tax credit expenditure increased by 340% under the previous Government compared to the benefits they replaced. Eligibility for tax credits was extended to nine out of 10 families with children and tax credits and child benefit accounted for £42 billion this year, which is over 40% of working-age welfare expenditure.

I will give noble Lords one other piece of context. The latest OECD figures show that of all the developed countries the UK, along with Ireland, spends the highest proportion of its national income on family benefits. We are not a country that takes these things lightly or a country that has not given very high priority to supporting families. We believe that that is absolutely a right priority and we support families with children as much as we can in the circumstances. Child benefit and tax credits exist to do that. However, as we have said, we have to focus resources where they are needed most.

A number of noble Lords, including the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester and the noble Lord, Lord Bates, have mentioned that this Bill is only one of a large number of measures that the Government are taking which affect families with children, in particular poor families with children. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, referred to the pupil premium, which will cost the Government £2.5 billion by next year. This will be worth £900 per disadvantaged child—and that is £900 in hard times. We are extending flexible support for early education. Since 2010, all three and four year-olds have been entitled to 15 hours of free childcare and we are extending this to 260,000 disadvantaged two year-olds from this year. This is immensely important to these families and it will be worth around £2,900 a year for the poorest families who benefit—£2,900 extra per family. We have found these hugely significant sums of money by making reductions elsewhere, because we place such a large priority on the poorest families.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bates, said, we protected the schools budget and the NHS budget. We are spending £1.2 billion on capital expenditure in schools. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has said, one of the most important things we have to do is leave our children and grandchildren with a lack of deficit or a deficit that they can manage. The savings in the Bill attempt to begin to do that.

The first group of amendments would remove child benefit, child tax credit and the lower rate of disabled child addition in universal credit from the Bill. This would remove nearly half the savings from the Bill, which is around £900 million in 2015-16. I should like to make a further point on universal credit, although it has not been the subject of much debate in this group of amendments. I am sure we will be dealing with this important issue in more detail when we debate Amendment 3, to which my noble friend Lady Stowell will respond. Suffice it to say that part of the principle underlying the decisions we have taken on disability and universal credit is the need for simplicity and our desire to target support to the most severely disabled children.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds referred to child benefit and expressed his concern that it had been frozen or taken away from the highest earners. What he did not say was that the Government have increased child tax credit by £180—more than inflation—to more than cover, in the first few years, the reduction in child benefit. Taking child benefit and child tax credit together, we have tilted the expenditure away from affluent families and put more of the cash into poorer ones. I think that is a sensible priority and I am surprised that he appears not to agree.

A number of noble Lords have talked about the impact of the Bill on child poverty. As has been pointed out, the Bill is forecast to increase the number of children in absolute poverty by 200,000 and the number in relative poverty by 200,000. For the avoidance of doubt and in answer to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, my noble friend Lady Stowell wrote to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, copied to other noble Lords, on 13 March. Her letter contained the figure about absolute poverty so, far from seeking to avoid mentioning it, we chose to circulate it. I am not saying that absolute poverty is not something we should be extremely concerned about but the term does not mean what most people think of as absolute poverty. The definition of absolute poverty is 60% of the median income in 2010-11 uprated to take account of inflation. The 200,000 children mentioned in respect of absolute poverty are very largely the same as the 200,000 who are mentioned in terms of relative poverty. You certainly cannot add those two numbers together.

At previous stages of the Bill, we have discussed the definition of child poverty and the importance of tackling child poverty. We know that if we focus on the relative income line we get some very odd results. We have pointed out previously that in 2010 300,000 fewer children were said to have moved out of poverty, not because anything changed in their lives but because the rest of society got poorer. The estimate on the impact of this Bill does not take account of policies which would cause child poverty figures to move in the other direction, such as universal credit which is expected to lift up to 250,000 children out of poverty, depending on the effect of the minimum income floor. We take the issues of cash and poverty, as currently defined, very seriously, but we also think that we need a broader definition of child poverty. That is why the Government are currently consulting on a wider definition. As I set out two weeks ago, and repeat today, this Government remain committed to eradicating child poverty. We believe that income will remain an important part of any new measure on child poverty, but focusing our resources on benefits alone is not enough. We have to take action to tackle the root causes of poverty, some of which I have described today.

I also take this opportunity to mention, as an example of what the Government are doing to support children and families in work with children, the announcement made today by the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister concerning increasing eligibility for support to five times as many families as is currently the case through a new tax-free childcare scheme. Families where the parents are in work will be able to claim 20% of their childcare costs—equal to the basic rate of income tax—up to £6,000. The scheme will be phased in from the autumn of 2015. More than 2.5 million hard-working families will be eligible to benefit from these new proposals, compared with existing schemes offered by fewer than 5% of employers. Families on tax credits will be eligible to receive support for 70% of their childcare costs, and we have already committed an additional £200 million in universal credit, helping 100,000 more working families.

Today’s announcement of that further £200 million of additional support in universal credit will provide working families with the equivalent of 85% of their childcare costs where the lone parent or both parents pay income tax. That additional support will improve incentives to work and ensure that it is worth while for low and middle-income parents to work up to full-time hours. It will be phased in from April 2016 when childcare support moves from tax credits to universal credit. Together, these proposals will help to ensure that working families are not held back by the costs of childcare. They will remove disincentives to work for many mothers and provide flexibility and support for businesses to generate employment.

I hope I have been able to provide some reassurance that, although we are taking difficult decisions on welfare, they are necessary decisions. We are prioritising limited resources so that they go to measures that help families with children as well as those who aspire to work hard and get on. I therefore ask the right reverend Prelate to withdraw his amendment.

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, I am grateful to all those who have taken part in this debate and, indeed, to the Minister for his extended response to the discussion. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, for her support and for the information that 200,000 children will be in absolute poverty as a result of the Bill. We have also recently had information from the Trussell Trust about the number of children who are now being fed through food banks.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, for his contribution, but this is not simply a variation on the previous amendment. For one thing, it would cost only half as much at £0.9 billion, rather than the £2 billion to £3 billion which has been mentioned in relation to the whole Bill.

There have been a number of suggestions—not just from me but from a collection of other people—as to how this money could be raised. At an earlier stage in our discussions on the Bill, I made suggestions and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, responded that they were indeed possibilities but not ones that fitted in with the Government’s current priorities. That is a perfectly fair response but it is not fair to say that taxing the winter fuel allowance or dealing differently with things such as free television licences, tax relief on pension contributions, national insurance contributions or employer pension costs and so on are not possible. They are possibilities. I was not quite sure what—

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and Lord Newby

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, that was not the point I made. I was talking about aligning the uprating of the adult and child rates, not the halving of the amount. I was making a different point.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked about plans to uprate benefits. Benefits not covered by this Bill are subject to existing legislation, so the Secretary of State will review social security benefits annually, after publication of the relevant price figures. He will therefore decide what uprating will take place when he has that information in the normal way. I will write to the noble Baroness with the details of other benefits that are to be uprated by 1%.

As I have said before, the welfare system provides vital support for many families with children. However, government support for children must be about more than benefits. Securing the economic recovery matters to every household in the country, and only by doing that can we create a stable and thriving future for our children. I hope that I have also been able to provide some reassurance to the Committee that this Government are continuing to take action to support families—action that will change the lives of families with children.

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, and not least to the Minister for his response. I am disappointed that he was not able to respond more to Amendment 17, because it is not an expensive proposal. It will help a significant number of children—real children with real disabilities. I know that money is being provided for disabled people in the greatest need, but the disabilities that are felt and known by those who would benefit from Amendment 17 are real. To accept the amendment would provide real support for a large number of children who could thereby have been enabled to play a greater part in our society, both for their benefit and for the benefit of the rest of us.

I accept that together, the amendments in this group would cost a significant amount of money at £0.9 billion. However, it is not fair to argue that welfare benefits cannot be excluded from the work that we have been doing in order to respond to our fiscal crisis. Welfare benefits have been tackled extensively through the whole welfare reform process. This comes over to me as twisting a knife in a wound. I regret that the Government have felt that this is the area where they have to find that £0.9 billion. I will not repeat the argument that there are other areas where we could have found it.

I am very grateful to all noble Lords who contributed examples of a wide range of people: the corporal in the Army with three children, who will lose £520 a year, the primary school teacher, the nurse, and so on. They showed that a wide range of people will be affected and damaged by the Bill. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for stressing the organisations that support children. It is good to have all the statistics produced, but however many of them there are, the reality comes home to me, not when I read the Children’s Society’s statistics, but when I go to see its work in Leeds and its projects with children who are hungry, who have to cut back on food, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, and whose future prospects are being damaged, as the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, said. We need to do something to look at the ways in which we disadvantage children in practice by so much of the work we are doing.

I hope that we will come back to this issue on Report to see whether there is not something we can do to set down a marker and make a real contribution to the lives and vitality of children in our society. However, for the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.