Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on the clarity with which he introduced and explained this remarkable measure, just as I thank his officials for the way that your Lordships’ House has been briefed throughout, including in their information packs. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, to the Front Bench on this auspicious occasion and I congratulate her too on her own notable speech. Finally, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. It is not the first time I have followed him on a matter about which he knows much more than I do, but we share an affection for cricket and his county and mine are currently inextricably involved in the concluding matches of the County Championship, which is a happy bridge.

Now, nearly half a century of Back-Benchers have a handful of minutes each to analyse and also to celebrate the principle of a Bill whose complexities necessarily are legion and yet whose central purpose is the achievement of maximal simplicity. So here goes, and the thread of my speech will be the case of a single individual, our late immediate neighbour in rural Wiltshire. There is a symmetry to this spotlight because I also mentioned him in my maiden speech 10 years ago next month, to which I shall return shortly.

For the first five years we knew him, in the last decade of the last millennium, he was an agricultural labourer in a tied cottage on our mutual hill, working for another farmer neighbour. He had left school at 14 and was a true countryman, not just in terms of wildlife and country lore, but also in knowing the names of all the fields and precisely when they had changed hands down the centuries. When I entered some damsons at our village show, he quietly told me that they were not damsons but really rare plums, but I was not to worry as the judges would not know the difference. He was the oldest man in our hamlet to have been born there.

Disaster struck when he was 56 and was let go by his employer on grounds of disability at the shortest of notice. He came to us with all his affairs to help sort out what next he was due and how he would cope. The reason I alluded to him in my maiden speech, which was in a debate on financial services, was that 30 years earlier, on a loan to buy a car, he had been mis-sold insurance to protect him against unemployment, which he was still paying off. That was rapidly sorted out without my ever guessing that there were another, as we now know, £200 million of other such cases lurking in the financial woodwork.

Wrestling with pages and pages of material from a social security office 12 miles away revealed cruces of opaque ambiguity sufficient to perplex someone who had been a Treasury Minister and an inner-city MP, let alone a troubled man who had left school 42 years earlier. Happily, another neighbour brought in a public-spirited farmer from 25 miles away, acting for the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, who sorted the benefits out as swiftly as I had sorted out the loan, and between us we were modest if unconscious forerunners of the big society. However, it all took a lot of time, and I can think of many of my former constituents who would have been defeated by a similar predicament to that which he faced. In our local case, the outcome was resources to help him in his disabled retirement, which were comfortable and reassuring. The principle of this Bill is to achieve the same result in a more streamlined and comprehensible way and, in the process, incidentally to create savings which can in the fullness of time be invested in public benefit.

Of course the battery of briefing we have received from outside honourable interested parties would make a colander of this instrument if all the concessions necessary for perfection were to be made. I appreciate that some will say that it is the wrong moment to try when financial resources are short, but we British are over-good at thinking of reasons for not doing something, the doctrine of unripe time being deep in our own DNA. Yet there is an obverse to that converse, since simplification will bring savings that in turn will bring nearer the time when we can afford the extra to do more. In the mean time, the Committee stage lies ahead of us for constructive ploughing. We shall not enjoy the sad dilemmas we are going to be told about, but I hope that we can treat as our watchword—as I sought to do when our neighbour was in the toils—that which the late noble kinsman of the noble Viscount, Lord Slim, who was here earlier, sagely repeated again and again in his remarkable Fourteenth Army tome, Defeat into Victory, that no news is ever as good or as bad as it first appears.

I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister to expand in his wind-up—in this respect I am following my noble friend Lord German—on the plusses and minuses of the computer scenario in support of this legislation. I chaired the government working party planning the government data network back in the 1980s, and I appointed the man who was Oflot to choose the architects and contractors of the National Lottery. I was always sorry that his initials were not AER, as he could have become Aeroflot. I remark on the bonus that we derived from the fact that the man we chose to lead the building of the government data network was later chosen by Oflot, with zero involvement of myself, to build the lottery, so we had the advantage of his having been through the previous experience. I am not pressing my noble friend for more than an update, but I think that your Lordships’ House will be the beneficiary if he were to do so. In the mean time, I shall not seek to be a barometer of his progress or of the legislative process, always remembering the moment when Anthony Eden’s father, an irascible rural baronet, came down to breakfast one morning when it was sheeting with rain outside, tapped the barometer which was set at “very fair”, and threw it through the French windows with the words, “Go out and see for your something self”.

Finally, I return to our neighbour, who in due course went into hospital and into sheltered accommodation, where we continued to visit him until he died. His tied cottage’s status was properly liquidated and its site value on the top of the hill went for nearly £300,000, which I hope my noble friend the Minister can regard as a happy omen. My one regret is that he did not live long enough to hear this modest narrative about him. Of course this Bill warrants profound scrutiny, but its principle also deserves our thorough support.