Child Poverty: Ethnicity

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is obviously concerning that certain ethnic minority groups still have a greater percentage of children in low-income households than the national average and illuminating that children from Pakistani and Bangladeshi households perform higher than the national average at GCSE level despite this. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley has just indicated, there is a disparity here. Also, white Irish and white British pupils have the largest gaps between average educational outcomes for students eligible for free schools meals and those who are not, while Chinese, black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani students have the smallest gaps. In other words, income is only one determinant that should be of interest to policymakers.

This further substantiates evidence from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that certain ethnic groups, such as black African, Indian and Bangladeshi pupils, perform better than white British groups once socioeconomic status is taken into consideration. The commission partly attributes such achievements to “immigrant optimism” and greater devotion than the native population to education as a way out of poverty. It recommends that the Government invests in research to understand what factors drive the success of high-performing pupil communities, including black African, Chinese, Bangladeshi and Indian ethnic groups, and how this can be replicated to support all pupils.

The CRED report has proven controversial for many reasons, but it contains important messages that we ignore to the detriment of those whom policy should support. Its findings and those of the ONS highlight that poor white British populations should also be seen as ethnicities deserving of policy attention. Poor white people in the north-east of England are the largest group with multidimensional disadvantages, such as income and life expectancy. Importantly, the north-east also has the largest proportion of lone-parent families in England after London. The CRED report made the neglected point that family breakdown is

“one of the main reasons for poor outcomes”,

and that

“Family is also the foundation stone of success for many ethnic minorities.”


Those ethnicities that are doing better educationally also have lower numbers of families where there is only one parent; for example, 40% of black African families and 6% of Indian families, compared with 60% of black Caribbean families. Strengthening families must be central to effective policy to tackle social inequality. As co-founder of the Family Hubs Network, I welcome the Government’s adoption of family hubs as official policy and their continued funding of the reducing parental conflict and supporting families programmes. Will the Minister say what the Government are doing to ensure that family hubs and these other strands of policy are outworked in a way that fully includes families from all ethnicities?

Kickstart Scheme

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 29th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I think I answered that question when I answered the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart. As I said, I will take that back to the department, write to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness and place a copy in the Library. However, as it stands, there are no plans to change the eligibility.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, what are the Government doing to ensure that the Kickstart scheme meets the needs of understaffed sectors of the employment market which are well suited to this age cohort and therefore more likely to sustain young people’s employment once subsidies end? I am thinking particularly of both large and small hospitality employers, which are struggling to fill vacancies as pubs and restaurants gear up to reopen fully.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

We are working closely with a whole range of employers in sectors impacted by the pandemic, particularly the hospitality sector, where we have enabled employers to create Kickstart opportunities sooner than the economy might otherwise allow. We have seen a strong response from the hospitality sector, with involvement from the national academy of food and drink and major employers like Greene King offering Kickstart jobs across the country, and we will continue to do so.

Covid-19: Universal Credit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I give an assurance to the noble Baroness that I will speak to her in more depth about the points she raises. Once I have done that, I will of course go back to the department and talk to those there.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the number of vacancies in the period November 2020 to January 2021 is up by 64,000 from the previous quarter to almost 600,000. What are work coaches doing to ensure that claimants take these vacancies up, and what plans do the Government have to incentivise moving into work by reducing the taper rate and increasing work allowances?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I say to my noble friend and the whole House that we should thank God that we have work coaches. Their training has been enhanced, they are focused on the individual and they make sure that those individuals get the support and access to the benefits that they need. More importantly than anything else, they are getting access to the help they need to get back to work. Universal credit was designed to make work pay, so not all of a person’s earnings are deducted from UC. The department has made changes to improve the financial incentives to work by reducing the taper rate to 63% from 65%. All these things are continually looked at.

Universal Credit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I note the point about the timing of any decision, but that is with my friend in the other place, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Government are redoubling and trebling our efforts for those people who have found themselves in difficulty, including the people from Debenhams and Arcadia who are concerned for their futures, to get people back to work. We are completely focused on it. We have doubled the number of work coaches; we have Kickstart; we have the youth offer; we have sector-based work academies; and the Jobcentre Plus staff, the work coaches and the employment teams are engaging with employers to make sure that we have every vacancy we can get and we get people back to work as quickly as we can.

[Lord Farmer (Con) [V]]

My Lords, we should keep at the forefront of our thinking that universal credit was designed not to trap people in benefits dependency but to give them every help and incentive to get back into work. This has perhaps never been more important, both for individual morale and to enable economic recovery. What is the DWP doing to support people to get back into employment and enable the economy to recover from the financial impact of Covid?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for reminding us about the principles of universal credit and, at the same time, of the difficult circumstances that people find themselves in. I stress again that we are providing help through dedicated work coaches and engagement with employers. We are supporting people back into work in a whole host of ways, not least the 250,000 green jobs that we want to create. We do not want to trap people on benefits; we want to help them.

Youth Unemployment

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The Government have an action plan that we are putting into action. It is our Plan for Jobs, which is grossed up into a £30 billion fund. I have already mentioned some of things that we are doing with that money; I do not want to repeat them. I take the point about the devil making work for idle hands, I really do, but what is different here is that young people will get a work coach—a personal coach—who will stick with them. We will do everything we can to make sure that young people transfer into work, achieve their destiny and do not fall into activity that we do not want to see them involved in.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, blunt-instrument measures that force the shielding of the old and vulnerable, instead of allowing them to choose to shield themselves, are devastating areas of the economy in which young workers’ careers flourish. This is widening the divide between young and the old. The Government are balancing many considerations, but are they including the impact of tighter restrictions on intergenerational harmony? And, crucially, what are the Government doing to support young people who are not receiving universal credit?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The department is committed to providing targeted support for young people, including those who are still claiming jobseeker’s allowance. This support offers basic skills training, traineeships, work experience, sector-based work academies and support that is funded through other organisations. I would say to the noble Lord that immense work is going on with different businesses. I know that my Secretary of State and the Minister responsible for employment will be going to Pinewood Studios to launch “from aviation to the creative industries”. The Buckinghamshire LEP has done a great job and we hope that there will be opportunities similar to that all over the country.

Low-income Families: Benefits Freeze

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott]

I understand the points that the noble Baroness has raised—you cannot argue with them. One of the major contributing factors was that inflation was twice what we thought it was going to be. It is no excuse, but that was it. I am touched that she thinks I can influence the Chancellor; I will have a really good go and keep her posted. My door is open to talk about this further.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, over a decade ago the Joseph Rowntree Foundation proved that the tax credits approach to child poverty had run out of steam. How are this Government following the evidence on the root causes of child poverty, which include family breakdown?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott]

My noble friend makes a point about tax credits. While I have no doubt that they did a lot of good, some of their ramifications caused difficulty, in that we had an annual rather than a monthly reconciliation, as we are trying to have under universal credit. I believe that the monthly reconciliation under universal credit, while not perfect, is much better than waiting until the end of the year. On child poverty and family breakdown, obviously there are families who have great difficulty fiscally, and we have to try to help them, but the evidence shows that helping parents to move into and remain in work is the best option for moving them out of poverty. We want to see child poverty fall and remain determined to tackle it. My door is open for further discussion on this; I will do anything I can to move things forward.

Child Poverty

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I cannot agree with the noble Baroness that our policies are doing that; in fact, they are doing precisely the opposite. We have increased in an enormous number of ways the support—not just financial but practical—we give to children in low-income families. Indeed, the previous Question illustrates that. On how we measure poverty, the noble Baroness is right: we should debate, and have debated, looking at how we measure poverty. That is why on 17 May the Minister for Family Support, Housing and Child Maintenance announced that new experimental statistics to measure poverty will be developed, working with the Social Metrics Commission and published by DWP in 2020. We are looking to rethink the measures of poverty.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, while the survey findings are challenging, there are clearly additional factors at play—not simply a lack of money. A comment highlighted in the report and likely representative of many others is that:

“Their social and emotional needs are not being met and this is having detrimental effects on their learning and behaviour”.


We cannot assume that this is wholly due to long working hours. What are HM Government doing to ensure that parents struggling to nurture their children are given early help?

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Farmer for the enormous amount of work he has done and continues to do so selflessly in this area. He is absolutely right: this is not just about money. The truth is that support for the family structure is critical. Parents play a critical role in giving children the experiences and skills they need to succeed. Children exposed to parental conflict can suffer long-term harm. That is why we have introduced a new Reducing Parental Conflict programme, backed by up to £30 million. This programme will encourage councils across England to integrate services and approaches that address parental conflict into their local services for families.

Universal Credit and Child Tax Credit: Two-child Limit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, the noble Baroness’s question is across government, but it is important from our standpoint at the Department for Work and Pensions that we concentrate on lifting people out of poverty so that they can support their children and develop as role models. A child living in a household where every adult is working is about five times less likely to be in relative poverty than one in a household where nobody works, so we support parents into work. For example, the Government spend £6 billion on childcare each year, which is not reflected in our poverty statistics, to help parents go out to work, support their families and develop a responsible living situation where they can properly feed their children.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, financial stability is important for healthy child development, but so too is relationship stability. The Government have replaced the family stability indicator with parental conflict measures, yet many divorces and separations take place in low-conflict relationships. Research shows that these are more damaging to children than when high-conflict relationships end. What are the Government doing to prevent family breakdown, not just reduce parental conflict?

[Baroness Buscombe]

My noble friend makes a good point. Although our welfare reforms—and, in particular, universal credit—are already transforming lives to lift children out of poverty and support parents into work, child development and family stability depend on so much more than financial stability and benefit payments alone. That is why the Government are, for example, helping local authorities across England train front-line practitioners to identify relationship distress, provide appropriate support and refer as appropriate.

Poverty: Metrics

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Stroud for obtaining this important debate.

Parliamentarians have an opportunity to transform lives, society and our economy by tackling the root causes of poverty and taking an approach to social justice which changes the lives of the poorest and benefits everybody. When families on the margins find stability in work and escape the social breakdown that holds them back, more adults and children can thrive and become net contributors within society. Demands on the public purse are reduced, and we all gain. However, given the shortness of time this evening, I will be brief and to the point.

By asking about social factors around poverty, the Social Metrics Commission has helpfully highlighted that, as my noble friend Lady Stroud mentioned, many people with disabilities are living harder lives than some ever realised, and that households earning up to £200,000 can receive childcare support, yet lack of quality affordable childcare continues to keep the poorest families out of work.

But it is with regret that I have to challenge the claim that the commission has united left and right, and point out that it has instead missed the elephant in the room. Why do I say that? First, although there is a greater focus on the social conditions of poverty, it remains a relative financial measure and will drive a financial rather than a social response. This runs counter to the Government’s emphasis on improving life chances in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, which enabled policymakers to paint from a much richer palette. My noble friend Lord Freud, from whom it is a pleasure to hear again on this subject, committed the Government to,

“look at all the root causes … They include addiction, problem debt and family instability. The approach will enable anyone to hold us to account for the actions we have taken and the progress we have made”.—[Official Report, 9/12/15; col. 1599.]

I therefore urge the Government again to reintroduce the family stability indicator. Previously the Minister, my noble friend Lord Agnew, told this House that evidence,

“tells us that the quality of relationships within a family had a greater impact on child outcomes than the structure of the family”.—[Official Report, 2/11/17; col. 1539.]

While the family stability indicator did not provide a complete picture, it is essential to have in the mix—hence my second and perhaps even greater criticism of the commission’s work. It once again misses the biggest driver of poverty in the UK today: family breakdown. We will never adequately address poverty by ignoring this national crisis or failing to include indicators to measure it.

This is where left and right should concur. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently found that persistent poverty hovers at around one in 10 of most household types; for lone-parent households, it is one in four and rising. The commission’s own measure shows that most family types hover around a 22% poverty rate, while the rate for lone-parent families more than doubles, at 54%. Without adequate regard to the fact that we are a world leader in family breakdown, any commission, however well meaning, will fail not only to unite politics but get to grips with this ultimate root cause of poverty.

Benefits: Reductions

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, for giving us the opportunity to talk again about the benefits that will accrue to families and society as we test, learn about and, crucially, invest our way into developing a world-class benefits system. Although the implementation of universal credit has been a bumpy ride, tellingly, civil servants and politicians from other countries want to learn how we have gone from having one of the highest levels of workless households in Europe to one of the highest levels of employment in Europe.

Any nostalgia about the tax credits system that universal credit seeks to replace ignores the very real difficulties that it presented to claimants and society. Instead of providing a safe runway into employment, it trapped many families in a shadowland of complete welfare dependency, with some saying, “I cannot afford to work”. Cliff edges and high marginal tax rates severely sapped any ambition or incentive to progress in work. Couple penalties made it financially foolish to live with—or to admit to living with—the father of one’s children. Fraudulently claiming as a single parent was incentivised to the extent that a 2006 analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies concluded that the Government were paying benefits to around 200,000 more lone parents than lived in the UK. Claimants found themselves in £5.86 billion of debt because of overpayment and other errors in the legacy system. Despite a sustained period of economic growth and job creation between 1992 and 2008, a sizeable group of working-age people were left behind, locked out of the benefits of prosperity. I will not labour those points because there was consensus among politicians of all colours that change was essential and that a new approach which made work pay was urgently needed.

Yet delivering that was always going to be an epic feat requiring grit and perseverance. Nick Timmins called it,

“the mother and father of all challenges”,

an earlier and less ambitious version of which Gordon Brown’s Government had decisively ducked. On the technological front, the senior responsible owner for the universal credit project in August 2015 told Civil Service World:

“If you spool the world back to 2010, we [in government] didn’t even have things like smartphones and iPads then, so it was just a very bad time, I think, to start developing an IT project”.


Reading that reminded me of the gutsiness and almost insuperable difficulties of getting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Signage in the Kennedy Space Center reveals:

“A million mysteries had to be solved if we were to get astronauts to the moon and back in safety ... we had to invent everything from scratch ... with … computers the size of boxcars, slide rulers instead of calculators, and communications systems not much better than jungle drums – at least in the beginning”.


Unwavering political leadership was decisive. President Kennedy said:

“We choose to”,


do these things,

“not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win”.

He said that failure was not an option. The same could be said today about why we must collaborate to overcome the difficulties of UC.

Many on the Opposition Benches seem to want to throw in the towel, possibly for reasons of political opportunism. Perhaps they have not had first-hand experience of the calibre and dedication of work coaches like the ones I met on a recent visit to a London Jobcentre Plus. Two things were impressed upon me: first, the freedom that UC gave work coaches to do whatever it took to help someone get into work; and, secondly, how utterly demoralising it is for them and how terrifying it is for prospective claimants when the media are saturated with negativity about the new system. More money has been allocated, so the scaremongering must stop, and solutions must be found. In the debate in the other place last month, two Conservative MPs described how they had pulled together new local support partnerships to ensure that no one was left behind. Sadly, no Labour speakers described doing anything so constructive. Most just criticised without suggesting any improvements.

Now that we have an extra £l billion to help welfare claimants transfer to UC, we should all work together to ensure that this precious public money is used wisely. Therefore, I ask my noble friend the Minister to apprise the House as to how this fund will be disbursed and how she will avail herself of front-line experience and wisdom to that end.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. I particularly like his idea that it would be useful to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Freud, thought about Patricia Hollis. I think that through gritted teeth, he would give a generous appreciation of the experience he had in Committee in 2012 during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act, where she took the noble Lord to pieces and put him back together again. I must say that I had something of the same treatment. In 2003, when I was chairman of a Select Committee, we went to the extreme of requiring the then Minister, Lady Hollis, who was in charge of reform of the child support systems, to give evidence during the Summer Recess. We invited her twice; she came, and got a bit fed up with all of that. At the end, it seemed that it was me, as chairman, not her, who was answering the questions. I hope the House will understand if I say that on that occasion, I was pleased to see the back of her. She was a very effective Minister, and we will miss her. I will certainly sign up for the annual debate—I want to put in an application in perpetuity to recognise her work.

This has been a valuable debate, and we can take some positives out of it. I take the view generally that we are in some difficulty, particularly in the economic context, in spite of some of the advantages of the Budget that we saw on Monday. We face uncertain times as we withdraw from Europe—or not, as the case may be. I wonder whether we are properly prepared to help vulnerable families.

The systems we have in place work perfectly well for people like me and, indeed, for other Members who took part in the debate this afternoon who were defending universal credit. I defend the architecture of universal credit; I have been arguing for a working-age benefit that is blind to work for 35 years, and that is what the architecture provides. Before 2008, the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who has distinguished experience in this area that I respect, did valuable work constructing a report called Dynamic Benefits. However, that was a very different proposition. Because of the levels at which the taper rates and working allowances were set, it was a poverty reduction measure that did not have as many of the behavioural nonsenses we are suffering from, which were added in the implementation. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, knows better than anybody about the ways in which the money is allocated, the periodicity of payment and some of the other flaws that will need to be ironed out—and which can be. Our Conservative colleagues do not therefore need to be defensive about the architecture of universal credit. We just want the original version, and want the money put back into it.

[Lord Farmer]

I would just like to correct the noble Lord: the Lord Farmer he was talking about was not me.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

I beg the noble Lord’s pardon. I had understood from the way he was making his argument that he was involved in the Centre for Social Justice work that led to—

[Lord Farmer]

I was indeed involved with the Centre for Social Justice work, but as a supporter and an encourager from outside.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

It sounds as if the noble Lord is being a bit defensive about the results of the work, but I will move on.

There was a theme in the debate: that all this is doable not just by the DWP, and that is correct. We need to work with local government colleagues much more; indeed, there was a very good Local Government Association briefing on this. The noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, talked about the need to put more effort into mental health; we need the Department of Health to assist with that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, spoke about housing, which is absolutely critical. We are handing huge amounts of money to private landlords at the moment, and that is destined to get worse. A recent Centre for Social Justice report suggests that we will be paying £75 billion by 2050 if we go on at current rates. That is clearly impossible. There is a welcome understanding across the House that the DWP needs to use its important influence within government to get more cross-departmental support for the development of these policies. It may seem that there is enough to do at the moment, but that is important.

I keep saying that the arguments across the House leave us talking past one another. Members of the Government, perhaps understandably, say that reasonable people should be able to work their way through the complications of applying for benefits and so on. But universal credit has some real complexities, an example being digital access. “Digital by default” is a real problem for many families. It will lessen as the system develops, because more people will be educated at school to use technology, but people are frightened. A couple of noble Lords mentioned fear; the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for example, mentioned the real fear that people have when making applications.

The Government are saying that for people like me, should I need to apply for universal credit, it is a breeze. I know it is because I have been to the centres and listened to applications being made. The system works, and there are other advantages too. Indeed, in theory, in future nobody should miss out on benefits because take-up is accounted for under universal credit. It can be massively beneficial for people like me; but for those with big household debts, two or three credit cards that they do not know how to pay off, a disability, a lack of digital skills or family problems, it can be very difficult.

The Government need to fix this, and I guess the best vehicle for doing so is universal support. I welcome the extra £1 billion that is coming in. We will talk about that in more detail when we get the managed migration regulations, because that is where this sits. It would be helpful to get an idea of when the regulations will be coming, together with the SSAC report to which the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, rightly referred.

If people on the Government side are trying to defend the situation and are frightened that universal credit will be swept away, the one thing they can do is ask for more support, because it works. They got more money from the Chancellor—I did not expect that package. It was down to Conservative Members of Parliament saying, “We need to do something about this”. They now need to go back and say, “We need more put into universal support” to help the 10% to 15% of households who will really struggle to find a way through the difficulties, in addition to the sanctions that they face. There are things we need to do to guarantee the future of universal credit as a successor to the legacy benefits that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, has rightly raised in his Motion.

Between now and next November’s comprehensive spending review, we need to put more support into universal credit so that it can be guaranteed to work. If I were to get the assurance of extra resources, I would become a stout defender—subject to dealing with the behavioural issues that still need to be fixed. I would be much more encouraged to defend the architecture of universal credit if it had a more effective system of universal support attached to it.

The noble Lord, Lord Livermore, was absolutely correct to mention the real mistake that was made. The decision to put money into tax allowance increases as opposed to unfreezing benefits was unconscionable. It was a political choice and, at this stage in the game, when we face uncertainty over Europe and everything else, flatly wrong. It was a big mistake. It was a choice that the Government made and they will be held to account for it, and rightly so.

Finally, I was encouraged by reference in the Red Book to providing better access to affordable credit. A lot of the families that I am talking about, and continue to be concerned about, are at the mercy of loan sharks day in, day out. Using assets from dormant bank accounts can help to deal with that. It is not a huge amount of money but if it works, it could be extended. I hope the Government will take that forward, because it would be a very positive move.

This has been a very good debate. Such a debate should be held annually, but we need not just to “take note” of things; we need to get them fixed.