Charitable Sector: Food Provision

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 27th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I would certainly be very pleased to join the noble Baroness to look at social supermarkets. She will be aware that the main supermarkets do offer some help in this respect. For example, Morrisons offers an average 13% price cut on more than 500 goods, including eggs, beef and rice. Children get a free meal at Morrisons cafés when their parent buys an adult meal worth £4.99.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, how convinced are the Government that the data on food bank use reflects the number of those who would genuinely go hungry without them? About one-third of all food is wasted, with the UK a leading culprit internationally. Increased use of food banks therefore also underlines the need to cut food waste, which we have heard already. How can we better redistribute food that is reaching its sell-by date to those most in need?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

The figures that have just come out help us with a regional focus. For example, 4% of households in the north-east and north-west use a food bank, which is 1% higher than the average for households in England. To answer my noble friend’s question on food waste, we support a broad and holistic approach, with £2.7 million per annum grant funding to the Waste and Resources Action Programme. Crucially included in this programme is the food waste reduction road map and the push for food businesses to follow this tool to target, measure and act on waste, including to redistribute more. It is very important to make the connection between where there might be waste, particularly with foods at their sell-by date, and distributing to those most in need.

Disabled People: Impact from Policies and Spending Cuts

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

The first thing to say is that there are no plans for impact assessments. What I can say to reassure the noble Baroness and the House is that much work has been done to take account of the extra costs that are required for those who are disabled. The extra-cost disability benefits have been uprated every year since their introduction, in line with inflation; these benefits were also exempt from the recent benefits freeze. Over 1.3 million more people of working age are in receipt of an extra-cost disability benefit since May 2013. On her final point about transport. we have done a lot of work on the transport issues. For example, we have enacted the Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Disabled Persons) Act 2022 and published guidance on inclusive mobility and tactile paving, and there is more that I could say.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, my understanding is that Access to Work grants for disabled people are beset with significant delays. For example, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People says that many are waiting close to four months for initial claims to be processed or renewals to be approved. This has a knock- on effect on the support workers they rely on, who understandably may refuse to take bookings from them as they will not get paid. Will my noble friend the Minister say what the Government are doing to cut delays?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend that there have been delays, and perhaps I can give a little thought to this. One matter to note is that the Access to Work systems are currently receiving an increased level of applications for support—for example, there are 24,677 cases. On what we are doing about this, DWP has taken a number of actions: all applications for a job to start in the next four weeks are prioritised, renewal applications are also prioritised where possible, and support is approved using a new streamlined process. We have also increased the number of staff working on Access to Work. We are very aware of the delays and are taking some action.

Universal Credit: Benefit Cap and Two Child Limit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Absolutely. There are a number of initiatives on housing, which I am sure the noble Baroness will be aware of. One example is the discretionary housing payment, which can be paid to those entitled to housing benefit or the housing element of universal credit, particularly those who face a shortfall in meeting their housing costs. It is certainly a matter that I am aware of, and I know that my noble friend Lady Scott will be very much on top of that. We are working across government on this issue.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, can my noble friend reassure me that universal credit still makes work pay despite childcare costs when there is more than one child? Of course, an at-home parent conscientiously doing their own childcare in the early years is, in fact, working. What expectation is placed on claimants to work when parental care is their strong preference?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Yes, my noble friend makes an important point. I should say at the outset that the Government firmly believe that, where possible, it is in the best interests of children to be in working households. That is why the department has continually provided support to help move people into work. To further that, this sort of support in making people financially resilient by moving them into work and also ensuring that they are progressing in work is important; up to 85% of the registered childcare costs each month is paid regardless of the number of hours that they work, compared with 70% for tax credits.

Universal Credit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for securing this debate and focusing on impacts.

It has been said that the national insurance increases announced this week will hit the poorest and younger workers hardest, and these categories will often include UC claimants moving into employment, so not maintaining the uplift could be a double whammy for those cohorts. Can my noble friend the Minister give us an indication as to the impact of the interaction of these two measures? If a claimant is paying increased national insurance on their earned income, does that mean that there is now, effectively, an even higher taper rate and they lose more than 63p of every £1 they earn? I am sure my noble friend will put me right if I am misunderstanding how UC and NI work together.

Much has been written about a decade of underfunded reform, but the focus should be on adequately resourcing the principles of UC, which promised to make work pay. I am particularly interested in the impact on work incentives of not maintaining the uplift. Instinctively, it can be argued both ways. Has modelling been done to establish whether its retention is a marginal disincentive to moving into work or, in fact, a security blanket that keeps morale high and makes moving into work less daunting?

As the Government are rightly very exercised by job vacancies and skills shortages are very high, work incentives are of paramount importance. Strengthening these would make better use of any ongoing increase in the welfare budget than this emergency blunt instrument, which boosted the incomes of almost all claimants regardless of circumstances. If the Government decide against maintaining the uplift, they should decrease the taper rate so that it is closer to the 55% level mooted in early design of UC in 2009-10.

My noble friend Lord Freud was unable to establish properly the system of universal support to run alongside universal credit to help those who will always struggle to get into work, with all the advantages to well-being for them and their children this entails. What progress is being made to help those furthest from the labour market to overcome barriers of addiction, mental ill health, poor education and family relationship problems which a more generous basic welfare payment would barely touch?

Child Maintenance Service

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to reform the Child Maintenance Service.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, in the few days since I secured this debate, I have been contacted by a large number of organisations and individuals expressing strong views based on very difficult experiences as either paying or receiving parents in the child maintenance system. The parliamentary digital engagement team did sterling work to publicise this debate and elicit testimony from the public to inform it. I am very grateful to every one of the 1,524 people who took the time to respond and I hope to do some justice to their stories in my remarks.

That the number using the Child Maintenance Service across Great Britain is high is unsurprising, given that an estimated third of all children grow up in separated families. In December 2020, the Department for Work and Pensions reported that 756,500 children—roughly equivalent to the whole populations of Bristol and Newcastle cities combined—were covered by CMS arrangements. This fairly small cohort of speakers today does not represent the importance of child maintenance reform to those directly involved, their extended families and wider society. At least we will have longer to unpack properly our concerns in this highly contested area of policy. To quote Professor Patrick Parkinson, a key architect of the Australian child support reforms, it

“involves making compromises between the conflicting interests of mothers, fathers, children and the state … A win for one interest group … is a loss for another. Child support policy is a complex and contentious area involving zero sum calculations in political terms.”

No pressure then, Minister.

The contention is wholly understandable: the process of separation, however amicably achieved, is usually emotionally and financially stressful. A once-intimate relationship undergoes significant change, sometimes at the behest of one partner and strenuously resisted by the other. The indissolubility of parenthood and the important shift away from clean break divorce mean that both parents will still need to co-operate, at the very least around money and contact.

History has taught us there are no silver bullets and a whole host of potential unintended consequences when it comes to reforming child maintenance. Nearly 40 years ago, the seminal Finer report proposed a dedicated agency for administering maintenance payments. The ground lay fallow until 1993, when the Child Support Agency first opened its doors following the Child Support Act 1991. Just two years later, more legislation was required to fix its considerable problems, setting the tone for the sporadic reforms that produced the current system, in place since 2012.

We appear overdue for another wave of change, especially as universal credit is now a much more mature welfare system. The interaction of benefits with child support payments is a particularly salient issue. A reformed child maintenance system must do even more to ensure that paying and receiving parents, and the children both are raising, albeit not under the same roof, are not living in financial poverty as a result of its operation.

Looking briefly at how the current system works, many separated parents agree and adhere to private family-based arrangements. The Child Maintenance Service, which replaced the Child Support Agency, is for parents who have been unable to do this. Around two-thirds of children are covered through direct-pay arrangements, where the CMS calculates maintenance liabilities and parents arrange payments between themselves. A third are covered through collect-and-pay arrangements, where the CMS collects and manages payment between parents. Paying and receiving parents experience this system very differently, as evidenced in responses to the parliamentary survey. Almost half were from paying fathers and almost all the receiving parents, 40% of respondents, were mothers.

Emerging themes from this exercise map on to those in the academic literature and other cases I was sent. First, paying parents highlighted how the nature of CMS calculations could lead to financial hardship, which was unalleviable by working longer hours, as any additional money would be directed towards child maintenance. The Social Security Advisory Committee recently asked the DWP to examine ways of improving the child maintenance formula and its link with earning thresholds to address such concerns. My first question to the Minister is this: has there been any progress on this issue, given the DWP’s commitment to inform future policy development with the views expressed in SSAC’s consultation?

Secondly, as the receiving parent obtains less money if children stay overnight, this can disincentivise sharing care. Thirdly, and correlating with these previous two themes, paying parents reported impacts on their mental health, suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts. Fourthly, many reported issues with customer service, errors in calculations and inconsistencies, as did many receiving parents.

Three other areas stood out among receiving parents’ responses. First, they were dissatisfied with the effectiveness of action taken to collect payments. Secondly, they felt inadequately safeguarded in situations involving domestic abuse; for example, the continuation of control by withholding payment. Finally, self-employment and zero-hours contracts were deemed to create loopholes, so paying parents could hide income. I hope other noble Lords will go into more detail on this wide range of issues, which I have been able only to touch on, and suggest solutions to the Minister.

Paying and receiving parents diverge in what they perceive to be acceptable ways of resolving systemic difficulties. For example, internationally, many child support systems now rely on both parents’ income when determining liabilities, where most women work. In the parliamentary survey, 93% of paying parents said both parents’ incomes should be included, compared to 18% of receiving parents. Admittedly, counting mothers’ income can reduce incentives for workforce participation, but changes in Australia actually increased incentives for more qualified mothers, such as nurses and teachers, to return to work or increase hours. Their reforms, which have helped diminish the extent to which child support is a source of mass grievance, required designing a markedly complex formula, which had to be fair across a broad cross-section of circumstances. This took an expert committee eight months and significant research. A similarly intense process would be required here.

The other health warning is that, as child support systems interact with a country’s welfare system, translating ideas from one jurisdiction to another is always problematic. However, can my noble friend say whether the Government have any plans to consult on the merits of aligning Great Britain to other child support systems by including both parents’ incomes?

Finally, one theme that did not emerge in the survey but was raised by the Social Security Advisory Committee in 2019 was whether separated parents are getting the support that they need through a challenging and stressful time in their lives. The committee pointed to the need for an overarching, joined-up government strategy for separated parents, covering all relevant departments and child maintenance. Necessary, but not sufficient, is the commendable cross-departmental work to reduce parental conflict.

I declare my interest as a director of the Family Hubs Network and say that access points to services offering far more holistic support could be provided in the family hubs that the Government have promised to champion. Such access was instrumental to the progress made in Australia: family relationship centres, integral to its 2006 family law reforms, provide a gateway to the many different kinds of advice and support that parents need. The germ of such an idea was in our own landmark Children Act 1989, which specified that local authorities should provide family centres, where families could get help to overcome difficulties, including when parents separate. Can my noble friend the Minister inform the House how different departments of government are working together, including to deliver family hubs?

In conclusion, child maintenance will always be a system under scrutiny or being “reformed”, but state action must also be accompanied by a cultural shift in attitudes towards parental responsibility. We need to get to a place where there is a strong and pervasive expectation that, first, both parents will always share the cost of raising children, and, secondly, with the holistic support that I have described, they will sort out the thorny post-separation issues that stem the flow of child maintenance.

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.