Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Boswell of Aynho Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

My Lords, I welcome the Welfare Reform Bill. I believe that it represents significant progress in social policy. In particular, it will help to make work pay—an aim that is clearly shared by all sides of this House.

It is estimated that the Bill has the potential to lift 350,000 children and 600,000 adults of working age out of poverty. It will eliminate six separate benefits and reduce the opportunity for fraud and error. These are great prizes and strategic advantages. Of course, I accept that any changeover on anything remotely like this scale cannot be ideal. Whatever benefit system we have is governed by the inexorable iron triangle of the number of people covered, the rate of taper on the withdrawal of benefit and the overall Exchequer cost.

In this case there are also particular issues of timing. The first is the need for overall cuts in public spending, particularly on programmes that are prospectively exploding, like DLA. Even if the change to universal credit is going to incur substantial upfront and continuing costs, we are spending for the advantage we get. There is never an ideal time for reform but at least we have the opportunity now and the courage of the Minister and Government to devise the architecture and grasp the nettle of the basis of this change.

Another factor, of course, is that the labour market is soft but, even so, the private sector has shown some potential for creating additional jobs, just as in parallel we must support those who are coming forward to employment. There are also loose ends to be tied on the administrative side, as there are interactions with many other benefits—for example, for carers who remain formally outside the system. At the same time the universal credit is going to sweep up previously discrete benefits like housing benefit, which attempt to cover the many and varied circumstances of our lives; for example, outside the benefit system there are annually over 10 million job changes and some 3 million changes of address.

Finally, the system has to be made conceptually administerable and, through IT, technically deliverable. Like many other Members of this House, I have received extensive, thoughtful and sensitive briefings from outside bodies rehearsing a wide variety of difficulties as they see them. I accept that my noble friend the Minister, who spoke with a great deal of sensitivity and care today, is working hard to expose the issues to us and to deal with the problems as they arise, and also to explain the rationale of government decisions where there may be hard decisions to take. To be fair, I think many of the objections that have been laid have been in relation to potential notional future setbacks rather than immediate issues.

However, rather than delve into detail now, I shall just indicate my particular interest in families with children. Children are at best indirect beneficiaries of the benefit system; they cannot make their own choices or be autonomous. On enforcement of child maintenance support, I incline to the view expressed by the Select Committee in another place, and echoed eloquently by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern this afternoon, that parents who have done their best should not be penalised by an administrative charge even if it means taking more off delinquent parents who have not been prepared to comply. More widely, the pattern of childcare costs varies very sharply, particularly regionally and in London. It would clearly be wrong to sanction lone parents when childcare costs for them are unaffordable.

As a former chairman of the Conservative Disability Group, I should also record that I am bound to be taking an interest in many of the disability issues that have been discussed in the context of the Bill. I will also, as an ex-Education Minister, want to say a little bit about the 16-hour rule and the changes there, and about some of the awkward transitions and interaction with the education system. I also note a point that has been mentioned by other noble Peers today about the transfer of discretionary payments to local authorities. Whatever the conceptual case for this—and Beveridge, who is often quoted, wrote a book before the First World War on the possibility of using agents for discretionary payments—if we remove the element of discretion from the Social Fund, other than simply for the budgeting of loans against expectation of benefit, we need to ask what the future of the Social Fund is. I think Ministers have sort of said something about that, but I cannot see why a clutch of regulated benefits would need separate badging.

If we are going to secure an overall beneficial outcome from the Bill we need to proceed very carefully and with no false sense of haste or triumphalism. This is perhaps my main message to Ministers. I hope that they will pay particular attention to the possibility of overlapping dates—not everything needs to start at once. They should also pay attention to the vital transitional arrangements. There needs to be within the regulations enacting the Bill sufficient flexibility if not to reverse direction—which I do not seek—then at least to be able to flex and modify policy as detailed inputs and wrinkles are revealed. We also need to build up an improving picture of the overall impacts; for example for disabled people, in the context remembering that some of their support is passported through the programmes of other government departments or agencies while their physical services, on which they may well depend, are also inevitably subject to budget stringency and present difficulties.

All this, however, is no counsel of despair. I believe strongly that the Bill provides a basis for dynamic change by tilting the scales from dependence to properly supported and incentivised work. This can bring both social and economic benefits, but if we are to scale this Everest of achievement, we cannot do it in one bound from our present base camp. The Bill sets the objectives, but it does not by itself represent the achievement. In this process, including the long and very full Committee stage we need, we will have to work out where we are going, and every step in the implementation of this must be well considered for its consequences and systematically secured as we move from base camp to camp 1 and up to the summit. In doing that, however, it is the right thing to do and we must be resolute in pressing its direction.