Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

I have very little to add to what has been said by a number of speakers this afternoon because they have covered the ground extensively. I was particularly interested in Amendment 86ZZZD because it refers to,

“financial support for applicants fleeing domestic violence”.

We shall shortly be considering domestic violence in another context, that of legal aid, which has some reference to domestic violence. The important thing about this in the local government context is that domestic violence frequently takes place within a family environment. Therefore, the individual against whom it is practised has to find some way of getting out. I am interested that this amendment refers to “applicants fleeing domestic violence”. Very often these women and girls simply have nowhere to go. Therefore, this amendment places a responsibility on local authorities, if money is made available, to provide the necessary financial support for people fleeing domestic violence.

That is very important in the current situation. I have recently attended other meetings in that connection. It appears that probably about one in four women has suffered from domestic violence at one time or another. Very often, of course, it is practised in families against very young people, very young girls. It is very important that there should be some authority and resources given to enable this to be dealt with. It is dealt with quite adequately in this amendment and I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about it.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, this is an unexpected, generic intervention. Although the Committee seems to be making real progress, I reassure my noble friend the Whip that I shall be brief. It relates to a period even earlier than 1986 and to a different and extreme subject, but there is a moral to what I am going to say, to which I gather Her Majesty’s Government in the Commons is responsive.

Twenty-eight years ago I became the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Higher Education. I inherited quite considerable cuts to the higher education budget and I decided that my time as Parliamentary Under-Secretary was going to be spent going round the country, available to any higher education institution that chose to invite me, and I would be St Sebastian responding to their observations about the cuts. I had two and a half years of pure joy because they made it extremely attractive to me to come and gave me a marvellous experience of seeing what they were up to. The experience of St Sebastian was cheap at the price.

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.

Pensions Bill [HL]

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure for me to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, not least because she was so staunch an ally in relation to the City of London during the later stages of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. She has just made a much better speech than I shall. I am batting higher up the order than I should be.

I come to this subject as an innocent and shall describe my motivation in a moment, but first I should declare one interest not contained in the Register; namely, that my brother is a retired Lord Justice of Appeal, which will, at least in my view, preclude me from speaking on Part 4 of the Bill. I suppose, given the actuarial dimension of this subject, that I should declare an intellectual interest, which no one in the same condition so far has done, in belonging, like many in your Lordships' House, to that two-decade cohort uncovered by my right honourable friend David Willetts, MP and Minister, who were born between 1930 and 1950, and thus find that the austerity of their upbringing, with its beneficial effect on their health, adds at least four unexpected years to their lives beyond the normal expectations of the mortality tables.

I call myself an innocent, but a reckless ignoramus might be more appropriate. Briefly, in the dying days of the second 1974 Labour Administration—those halcyon days of the Rooker-Wise amendment—I joined a small band of volunteers under my now noble friend Lady Chalker—then a DHSS shadow spokesman in the Commons—to take an interest in these matters. A co-volunteer, in those days before the big society was christened with a name, was my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. My only qualification to join was that a definition I had constructed for the benefit of my own small firm to illuminate the difference in purpose and detail between a 364—or was it a 384?—scheme and a 379 one in the then pensions legislation—the digits come back from long ago—so impressed our auditors at Arthur Andersen that they sought my copyright approval to use it throughout their practice’s literature. However, the fall of the Callaghan Government on 28 March 1979 marked the last parliamentary interest I took in this subject through different ministerial responsibilities thereafter.

Wiser men, especially those who have listened to my noble friends Lord Higgins and Lord Skelmersdale, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, and the late, great Earl Russell—Conrad Russell—discussing these subjects in the past decade, would maintain their distance from these technicalities, whose language to an untrained eye seems sometimes as arcane as Sanskrit, though to no one’s discredit. But for better or worse I regard the reconstruction of a major social part of domestic government, which is being so nobly essayed by my noble friend Lord Freud in this and future related legislation, having as good a chance as any in the spectrum of the coalition’s programme of being the monument by which the coalition will be remembered. I do not imagine that I shall myself add many pebbles to that notable cairn, but if one is to be a bystander at the making of history, it is better, if possible, to be an informed one.

Before leaving the great sweep of history, let me say how apposite it is that this essay, in the French sense, is being conducted by a coalition in which the great Liberal Party tradition of Lloyd George and Beveridge is so vitally and vividly represented. Of the six members of my family who have sat in the House of Commons in each of the six generations since the Great Reform Bill, the first four sat in the Liberal interest, and only my late noble kinsman and myself sat as Conservatives. I do not think that my late noble kinsman, who was in the Clintonian phrase more of a policy wonk than I have ever been, or shall be, would dissent from the felicity of this coalition coincidence.

What is certain is that we are engaged in the early stages of a massively monumental project. Anyone who doubts it need only go back to the dinner Lloyd George gave on the evening the Third Reading of the 1909 Budget Bill concluded. He gave it for the colleagues who had assisted him at the Dispatch Box during the passage of the Bill. Mischievously, the menu card that evening listed the voting records of those present during the course of the Bill. We think that yesterday’s Third Reading was the culmination of a prolonged battle, but the scale of activity in the Division Lobbies during that Bill resembled largely that manoeuvre of my military youth—a tactical exercise without troops. In 1909, 554 Divisions were recorded on the menu card, with Lloyd George heading the role of honour at 462 personal appearances and Winston Churchill concluding it at around 200, with the engaging parenthesis “(twice in pyjamas)”. That index of all-night sittings may eventually overtake us on this Bill and its successor universal credits legislation.

One of the iron behavioural laws of your Lordships’ House is that if you put your name down to speak at the Second Reading of a Bill, anyone interested in briefing interested parties will immediately do so. The price you pay is that you then sit through the entire Second Reading debate, however long. I agree that in an emergency you could put your name down and then withdraw it, but you could do that decently only once. I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on, and thank him for, devising a Bill that is intellectually interesting without being incomprehensible to the layman, and which has had the effect of reducing the number of speakers by a third compared with those who will speak on postal services tomorrow. Of course, I am creating a rod for my own back, especially in understandable and reasonable correspondence from women approaching pensionable age, but in other respects the Second Reading duty works effectively, as I did not put my name down to speak until tea time yesterday. Yet Ros Altmann’s admirably clear briefing from Saga was put on my desk between 7 pm and 9.30 pm last night. I realise that it is nothing to the torrent that may follow, just as I also realise that my noble friend Lord Freud is, in these cash-hungry days, between a rock and a hard place. Resolving these dilemmas lies ahead of us.

I do congratulate my noble friend on the ingenious intelligence which has gone into devising the auto-enrolment procedures. I appreciate that it was always the case that the big battalions, the small platoons and their collective champions would react differently to the procedures and that a decently lengthy Committee stage to examine this Bill sympathetically stretches out ahead of us. However, I am pleased that the TUC regards the project at least as well as it would a curate’s egg, and, since the TUC approves the principle and resiles only from the detail, it may be an archdeacon’s egg anyway.

I support my noble friend’s praise for those who have prepared the Bill. I also congratulate my noble friend on the impact study, especially because it is noticeably not written in Sanskrit. My only whispered dissenting note on the Bill’s initial presentation today is best reflected in an episode from my past, when in the 1970s, before I entered the other place, I was responsible for helping Rolls-Royce, then a somewhat inbred company, to recruit the chairman of another FTSE 100 company to its board. After his first board meeting, he took the company secretary aside and said that there had been 55 acronyms in the board papers without an accompanying legend, and that he would not attend a second board meeting unless he was provided with a code. The company secretary was apologetic, and within 24 hours he generated a list of 89 corporate acronyms and their underlying rationale, saying that in a fair number of cases the acronyms had been new to him as well. The problem is nothing like so severe in the departmental briefing, but the explanations are not universally reliable, and it is easier to approach the Sanskrit passages if a Sanskrit dictionary is to hand.

I look forward to the remaining stages, which have the lure of a seminar. As a penance for not adding more solid pabulum for these proceedings, I conclude with the light relief I was offered by the Treasury when I had to travel the country as Paymaster-General, explaining to British business the obligations placed on it by the Single European Act. This took the form of an illustration of a non-tariff barrier in the context of a level playing field; namely, that in the life insurance industry a British actuary could tell you how many people were going to die, whereas a Sicilian actuary could give you their names and addresses. To be fair, I suppose that in our marvellous continent a Sicilian insurance broker might be similarly mystified by the character in Saki who had to have his 21st birthday three years running because it would have been indelicate for him to move on and up until his mother admitted to more than 35 years. However, all these minutiae are for tomorrow. The Bill is a necessity today.