Family Relationships (Impact Assessment and Targets) Bill [HL]

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 23rd February 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Farmer]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I am heartened by the healthy number of speakers for this debate—although I notice noble Lords disappearing—and appreciate very much the effort that they have made. I greatly look forward to hearing noble Lords’ contributions.

This Bill would, if passed, ensure that all proposed changes to government policy are systematically assessed for their impact on family relationships, so they are supported rather than weakened. I will explain why policy should support families and what that will require, and summarise where we are now in terms of the family test introduced three and a half years ago. While it was a welcome forerunner to what my Bill proposes, there are strong indications that it is underperforming, and my Bill would remedy that.

In my briefing to accompany this Bill I outlined its purpose as follows. Policymakers do not habitually consider, in a systematic way, if and how policies support family relationships. It is as members of families that people usually experience the effects of policies and engage with public services. Families are impacted by policies and influence their effectiveness. Yet the focus of policy is typically on individuals. It is therefore essential to ensure that a family perspective is consistently applied to policy-making. In October 2014 the Government issued guidance for government departments on the application of the family test, which was an important first step. Departments are advised to think about family impacts in a similar way to how they consider impacts on equality to fulfil the public sector equality duty. However, equality—but not family—considerations are required by law. Moreover, departments are advised only to consider publishing assessments. The Bill would put family impact assessments and their publication on a statutory footing and require the Secretary of State to report annually on progress towards family stability targets and objectives.

I shall quickly acknowledge some of the people and organisations in this country who have consistently argued for family impact assessments: the Relationships Foundation, the Centre for Social Justice, Relate, the Family and Childcare Trust, Care and my noble friend Lady Stroud, who I am very glad to see here today. When they were in government, she and my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith ensured that the family test introduced in 2014 focused on family stability and the quality of relationships, not simply on family finances. While these are obviously very important, we in this country have a long track record of tracking household incomes and other indicators of disadvantage but we have been singularly bad at keeping our finger on the pulse of family breakdown. Indeed, the Centre for Social Justice’s 2007 Breakthrough Britain report highlighted that although the last Labour Government recognised eight domains of social exclusion, they collected data on only seven; the eighth, family breakdown, was ignored.

This Government are not doing much better. They last published the English indices of deprivation in 2015, the seven domains of which map loosely on to the former domains of social exclusion. Again, these make no reference to the breakdown of family and other relationships. The Department for Work and Pensions’ workless families strategy introduced new indicators last year. These include the proportion of children in families headed by couple parents who report relationship distress and the proportion of children in separated families who see their non-resident parents regularly. However, the social justice framework included family stability indicators: the percentage of all children not living with both their birth parents and the percentage of poorer children not living with both parents, compared to those in middle-income to higher-income households. These have completely disappeared.

In Committee on the Welfare Reform and Work Act, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, committed the Government to developing:

“a range of non-statutory indicators to measure progress against the other root causes of child poverty, which include”,

among others,

“family breakdown … Anyone will be able to assess the Government’s progress here. The Government are saying, ‘Judge us on that progress’”.—[Official Report, 9/12/15; col. 1585.]

As I have said before in this House, we cannot judge the Government on their progress against family breakdown as a root cause of child poverty when we no longer measure it but instead use the proxy of parental conflict. The DWP has given with one hand and taken with the other.

That makes no sense. We cannot ignore the importance of children being raised by both their birth parents where possible. There is the pain of losing daily contact with one of them, the blame that many children take upon themselves for the separation and the implications for financial hardship of raising children alone. One-third of children living with a working single parent live below the poverty line. Of course the quality of relationships is important but this is only half the story. Moreover, and rightly, the current family test asks questions about family stability and relationship quality.

Why should the Government support families? Well-functioning and stable families are important to all societies because of the considerable contribution that they make in, for example, generating productive workers, caring for family members and ensuring healthy child and youth development. It is always prohibitively expensive for the state to replace the functions that families perform, so Governments have both an altruistic and a vested interest in strengthening them.

When we neglect families, there are enormous fiscal and social costs. The Relationships Foundation recently published an updated headline cost of family breakdown of £51 billion. In previous years, about one-third of the overall cost was due to extra tax credits and benefits; one-third to extra health and social care costs; 15% to housing; a similar proportion to civil and criminal justice; and 5% to additional education costs. However, the sum of human misery is much harder to quantify. To take just one area, the charity Addaction found that more than half the children it was treating for serious drug and alcohol problems were from families that had split up.

The political philosophers Brighouse and Swift point out that,

“all the major political parties in the UK seek to present themselves as pro-family”.

At every general election it is “family, family, family”, but nothing significant appears to get done. All the major parties continue to allow the relentless trend of family breakdown to continue. As Professor Karen Bogenschneider observes, there is typically,

“a feast of family rhetoric but a famine of attention paid to the family concept. It remains one thing to endorse the important contributions families make to their members and society and quite another to systematically place families at the centre of policy design … and implementation”.

We need policies with the explicit end goal of supporting families, so I and colleagues published A Manifesto to Strengthen Families to counter the lack of activity that we have seen heretofore, which is generating some real anger on my party’s Benches. Around 60 MPs have signed it. We are not going to let this agenda go away.

However, Bogenschneider also refers to implicit policies that are not intended to affect families but have indirect consequences for them. The current family test aims to lay bare those indirect consequences so they can be mitigated where necessary. However, here again the Government could be accused of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Departments are not statutorily required either to carry out the test or to publish the findings of the assessment process. The guidance only obliges policymakers to make a judgment as to whether the five questions in the test should be applied and whether the details of any assessment carried out should be published. While they must document the application of the test “in an appropriate way”, ostensibly to build an evidence base about how policies impact families, that documentation seems to be available only to other civil servants. Its operation seems to be shrouded in some secrecy. An evidence base must be accessible if sedimentary layers of knowledge are to be added to it.

A review of progress in implementing the family test one year after its launch found that only four departments could cite specific instances when the family test had been applied, while a further four did not provide a meaningful response about how or whether their department was implementing it. More promisingly, the review outlined the many steps that the DWP was taking to ensure that officials in other departments were better able to assess family impacts. These included information exchange sessions and a policy profession course on implementing the family test across Whitehall. I would be obliged if my noble friend the Minister could inform us how many of these sessions and courses have taken place over the last two years, as such training must surely need to be ongoing, given the inevitable churn of personnel.

In response to Written Questions submitted in the House of Commons in December 2017, asking the Secretary of State in 15 different departments to which legislation his department had applied the family test, more than half provided a standard and completely opaque response:

“The Government is committed to supporting families. To achieve this, in 2014 the”,


relevant department,

“introduced the Family Test, which aims to ensure that impacts on family relationships and functioning are recognised early on during the process of policy development and help inform the policy decisions made by ministers. The Family Test was not designed to be a ‘tick-box’ exercise, and as such there is no requirement for departments to publish the results of assessments made under the family test”.

Such responses characterise the family test as highly discretionary, voluntaristic and opaque in its operation. Policymakers need neither apply it, document why they have not done so, nor publish documentation when they do carry it out. Accordingly, the family test is unlikely to achieve the cultural change in policy-making that was its original intent.

Also, language matters. The phrase “family test” is unfortunate because it implies that carrying it out will produce a pass or fail judgment on a government policy instead of a careful assessment of its effects on families in the round. It might unhelpfully disincentivise publication. Hence, the Bill would make it a legal requirement for government departments to carry out and publish family impact assessments where appropriate, using similar questions to those in the existing family test guidance. Family impact assessment is an internationally recognised concept with much good practice to learn from. The Bill would also explore the benefits of extending the requirement to local authorities and ensure that the Government act in a concerted way to address family instability by publishing family stability objectives and targets, and their proposals and policies for meeting them.

Almost half of all children are no longer living with both their parents by the time they are 15 years old. Family instability is undermining our economy, our children and young people’s mental health and our ability to tackle many of the major problems facing the Government, such as housing and social care crises. Addressing it directly is a priority, but so too is ensuring that government action is not indirectly making a bad situation worse. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

That is fantastically good news for the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and the rest of us.

[Lord Farmer]

My Lords, I just agree with that.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

So, we are all agreed about that. I am now looking at new departments and new Secretaries of State with enthusiasm and I am glad the point has been clarified; I will go home a happier man.

Family impact assessments are a very valuable tool and we should be developing them. As this Bill makes quite clear, they allow for some perspective and anticipatory thinking at the policy-making level. I can see the effect of this; I serve on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and government departments are now getting much cleverer about impact assessments supporting, in terms of statutory instruments, the primary legislation that spawns the orders. What we should be doing here, and what I think the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, is trying to do, is to change the culture in departments so that they are always thinking about how this will work through the policy development. If they are doing that right at the beginning, it makes it much easier to get the policy right.

I think that departments—from an opposition point of view, this might be an unusual thing to say—should be braver about talking about the real costs of some of this policy. I was looking recently at some of the predictions and forecasts—we can never be sure that they will happen that way—and, frankly, in the next 20 years, when you look at the demographic change that this country is facing and all the other problems such as climate change, the resources available to do this family support work will get harder and harder to find. In telling the unvarnished truth, nobody wants to frighten anybody about all this, although some of the forecasts are really quite depressing, but we have to be realistic.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Farmer]

My Lords, I have been hugely impressed by the contributions from all noble Lords today. There have been some extremely powerful speeches. Perhaps the Minister can encourage all government Minsters, particularly those at Cabinet level, to read Hansard today and get into their hearts and minds the spirit and power of the arguments that we have heard.

I am conscious of time; there is another debate after this. We have been powerfully involved in this, so it has taken longer than probably anticipated. I will just say that I am extremely grateful to everybody; we have made a powerful argument and there has been broad support. I will not attempt to summarise—as I know some people do at the end—all the excellent points that have been made but, if Cabinet Ministers do read this debate, I just note that we have recently had a Minister appointed for loneliness, as has been mentioned today. Loneliness is very much a part of families, and it would be much better to have a Cabinet-level Minister for families rather than for loneliness. Loneliness often comes particularly in old age, when people no longer have families, perhaps because of a family rift or something. It is a family Cabinet Minister who should address that.

I would like, however, to express my complete agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others that the Government are in danger of being so obsessed with the family test not becoming a tick-box exercise that the right mechanisms will not be put in place to ensure it happens at all, or that it will be carried out in such a way that learning and cultural change—which is what we are talking about today—take place. Given that these are the bigger prizes that the test seeks to deliver, we all agree that it cannot simply be a hurdle for policymakers to jump over—I am sure all noble Lords can see how self-defeating this would be. I agree that passing laws is not always a panacea but, when the Government say that they are not minded to make family impact assessments a statutory requirement, the onus is very much on them to explain how they will boost and monitor the performance of the test. I underline again that the word “test” is a problem; I think “assessment” is a far better description of what is required.

As I have mentioned, there are several respected organisations—which the Minister also mentioned—which not only co-designed the original family test but are also highly motivated to continue helping the Government to improve their operation. Their ongoing involvement is essential. The role that well-functioning and stable families can play in delivering departmental priorities was also made clear, for example by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, regarding social care. At best, family impact assessments will not just reveal how to protect families from unintended consequences of policies, but how families can work in partnership with government to deliver the best outcomes for those policies.

I thank the Minister for her supportive response and her encouragement to keep going. I can assure her that I will, as will many colleagues, I am sure. So, much like a good Boy Scout, she should be prepared. All that remains is for me to thank again everyone who has spoken—it has been a terrific debate—and to ask the House to give the Bill a Second Reading.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Poverty and Disadvantage

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the right reverend Prelate and fully endorse his last point as I am sure noble Lords thought I would. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for reminding us that government must address the drivers of poverty and disadvantage. There is scant time here to revisit the arguments made during stages of the Welfare Reform and Work Act, but it marked an important policy shift away from income-based poverty measures and targets because they are,

“a poor test of whether children’s lives are genuinely improving”.

It placed a new duty on the Secretary of State to report annually on the educational attainment of children in England and on the number of children in workless families.

As I reminded the House during the debate on A Manifesto to Strengthen Families, which I published with many colleagues here and in the other place, the Minister for Welfare Reform also promised that alongside statutory measures of education there would be,

“a range of non-statutory indicators to measure progress against the other root causes of child poverty, which include but are not limited to family breakdown, addiction and problem debt”.—[Official Report, 9/12/15; col. 1585.]

When I asked the Minister why the existing family stability indicator had been dropped when the new indicators were published earlier this year, he replied that the quality of relationships within a family had a greater impact on child outcomes than the structure of the family. I urge the Government not to pit family structure against relationship quality as both are important. Saying that people parenting alone, who are usually women and frequently on a low income, face disadvantages that make one of the hardest jobs much harder does not stigmatise them; rather it does credit to the challenges they face instead of minimising them.

My second point, is that Sir Martin Narey, chair of the North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area, told the “Today” programme yesterday that what underlies everything, and is not about money, is parental engagement. He wants to get parents, especially those of disadvantaged children, to realise how much better in life their kids can do if they have good literacy, speech and communication skills.

I went to see Ed Vainker in Reach Academy Feltham at the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, when he was Schools Minister. Ed Vainker also realises that engaging parents in his school is essential for fulfilling his ambition to crash through the attainment ceiling. He is working with his local authority and other local partners to set up a family hub in the school so that parents can get any help they need with parenting skills and in other areas. The overall aim is for teachers to work in harness with them so that children enjoy the best conditions for learning at home as well as in school.

Will the Minister inform the House how opportunity areas are partnering with parents to improve their children’s learning and well-being? Strengthening families should be their first priority and the thread running through all they do. If it is not, another important initiative to help another generation of children will fail.

Benefit Cap

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I accept one part of the right reverend Prelate’s question: it is valuable for all concerned, particularly children, to live in households where all those who are likely to earn are in full-time employment. It is work that is the benefit to children. I can assure the right reverend Prelate that the number of children living in workless households is now at a record low. We have seen falls there; the number is down by more than 80,000 in the past year and well over half a million since 2010. We need to wait to see the evaluation of our further changes to the benefit cap before we make any further promises of the sort that the right reverend Prelate is seeking from me.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the Government made it clear during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 that the aim of the benefit cap was to achieve positive effects through changed attitudes to welfare. Beyond the employment statistics that we have heard today, are there any other signs of a shift away from a culture of welfare dependency towards a culture of work dependency?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for highlighting that point, something ignored by noble Lords on the other side. Trying to get away from the culture of welfare dependency into a culture of work dependency is exactly what we are trying to do, and it is what we have achieved. That is why I wanted to highlight to the House—I could repeat it to my noble friend but I do not think that that is necessary—just what the 2014 evaluation showed. We will look for an evaluation of those further changes in due course.

Child Poverty Unit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I cannot give the noble Lord the precise figures he asks for, but what I can say is that we have a secretariat based in the Department for Education looking at these matters, and that goes across the department. If there are any appropriate figures, I would be more than happy to send them to the noble Lord and set out just why, as I made clear in my original Answer, I think that this approach is better than the original measures of child poverty.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is encouraging that the Government have committed to make and measure progress against the root causes of poverty—not only worklessness and educational failure, but also family breakdown, addiction and problem debt. Can the Minister inform this House what progress they have made in developing the additional measures and policies promised?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, focusing these matters on the Social Mobility Commission secretariat is, I believe, the right way forward. As I also made clear in my original Answer, we will publish a social justice Green Paper shortly. I hope that that will set out what we hope to do, and we look forward to my noble friend’s comments, and those of others, on it. I say again, as I said in my original Answer, that I believe the focus on worklessness and a child’s educational attainment is the proper measure of these matters.

Universal Credit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress they are making in rolling out Universal Credit, and what assessment they have made of its impact.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted and grateful that so many of you are here to participate in this debate, the final flourish not only of 2016 but also of the Minister’s tenure at the helm of welfare reform. Perhaps others with a longer history in this place than I have will be able to recall similar moments. Even if not unique, it is still historically momentous that a Minister of State, who was such an important architect of the reforms for which he guided through the enabling legislation, will close the book on his ministerial career by informing this House of what has been achieved and what remains to be done. To cap it all, the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court, is making his maiden speech, to which I very much look forward.

At its simplest, universal credit rolls six means-tested in-work and out-of-work benefits—child tax credit, housing benefit, income-related employment and support allowance, jobseeker’s allowance, income support and working tax credit—into one. Even a rudimentary understanding of the implications leaves no doubt that universal credit is a genuinely big idea, a far-reaching reform that has the potential to effect a massive shift in the social and economic landscape of our country.

We are all aware that big ideas and massive shifts rarely, if ever, come from a clear blue sky, or from the efforts of a single political party or Government. The thinking behind universal credit can be traced back to the 1960s, when politicians from all three main parties—Conservative, Labour and the-then Liberals—began to grapple with the complexity and unfairness of the benefits system.

Half a century ago, we knew that low-income families could be better off on benefits than in work, and thereby caught in a dispiriting and pernicious poverty trap. Various measures such as family income supplement, family credit and then an array of other tax credits were adopted to ameliorate this by a string of famous names in politics: Sir Keith Joseph, Kenneth Clarke, Peter Lilley and then of course Gordon Brown.

Although the financial circumstances of many low-earners were improved significantly through the incremental changes introduced, we eventually ended up with a highly complex system comprehensible to very few. One former stockbroker with several children who claimed tax credits described it as utterly impenetrable. The interaction of several benefits and different withdrawal rates for each meant that the marginal gains from work could be quite slight, not cover costs such as travel and be insufficient to de-risk the process of having one’s family’s benefits recalculated, with the pauses in payments that it entails.

Inadequately responsive annual assessments led to under and overpayments which could be of significant magnitude. The latter were to reach £9 billion by the time the coalition Government came to power. This did not just mean a huge dent in the public finances but thousands of families with worrying levels of debt that many had not knowingly incurred but were expected to repay.

Tackling this complexity was certainly on the “to think about” if not the to-do list of the previous Labour Government. A certain David Freud was asked to review their welfare-to-work programme, and his 2007 report included a chapter floating ideas for a single working-age benefit. The concept was revisited the following year in a Green Paper from the Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell, who was, according to the Institute for Government’s Nick Timmins, a single benefit advocate.

However the risks of change—the complexity and uncertainty that lives would be better as a result of making the shift—ultimately deterred the Labour Government from taking the plunge. It is far too easy to criticise those making decisions and carrying the very onerous daily responsibilities of government. However, there is an irony here that their inactivity mirrored on a macro scale the decision of many individuals who might have wanted to make a shift into work or increase their hours appreciably to refrain from doing so because they were not sure life would be better on the other side.

So it is very much to the credit of the coalition Government that they took up the concept of universal credit, rigorously argued in the Dynamic Benefits report from the Centre for Social Justice. I would here refer noble Lords to my entry in the register of Members’ interests. This was at a time when taking any risk with public finances would have seemed foolhardy, had it not been so desperately needed. Perhaps the profound economic shocks of 2008 were actually decisive in creating the appetite and conditions for change. It became impossible to pretend all was fundamentally well in our financial affairs. Universal credit was an idea whose time had finally come.

Social policy theorists Gyu-Jin Hwang and Hugh Heclo have explained how,

“‘new’ ideas can become influential in times of uncertainty when the dominant paradigm faces a crisis. … what is new is the heightened attention they receive within policy-making circles as decision makers search for new ideas that can help solve the crisis. … ‘politics finds its sources not only in power but also in uncertainty–men”—

and women—

“collectively wondering what to do”.

Simply put, hard times force you to innovate.

However, if dampening uncertainty is one of the underlying aims of universal credit, evaluating its impact on that, even though it is rather harder to measure than actual numbers in employment, is imperative. Can the Minister explain whether and how the psychological effects of universal credit are being studied? Do claimants feel more in control of their own and their families’ futures? Is there a greater sense of optimism? Crucially, is the stigma associated with being on welfare reduced under universal credit?

Obviously, behavioural changes are also very important to track: 86% of people on universal credit are actively looking to increase their hours, compared with just 38% of people on jobseeker’s allowance; and 77% of people on universal credit are actively looking to increase their earnings, compared with just 51% of people on JSA. This augurs well for the Government’s intention to move people up the scale in terms both of pay and hours worked, and out of needing universal credit at all. But how successful are job coaches at ensuring in-work progression actually happens?

Also, there is no doubt that one major challenge to starting afresh with the benefits, system which caused previous Ministers to baulk—and understandably so, given the short-termism that plagues our political system—was the length of time that design and full rollout would require. The Minister has often talked about the test and learn approach this Government have taken to welfare reform. I am encouraged, as a businessman who, like all of your Lordships, wants good government and sound management of the public finances, that an agile approach to this very large project was adopted, albeit eventually. My impression is that we have learned invaluable lessons for future large-scale projects by taking the time to get this right. However, this has also meant taking a damaging amount of political flak for the significant delays universal credit has encountered. Can the Minister explain to the House what contingencies and other factors are built into the latest timescales so that the public can have full confidence that they will be met?

Finally, I want to offer my sincere congratulations to my noble friend Lord Freud for defying the maxim that all political lives end in failure. He is leaving office after securing the future for the reforms he has spent more than a decade working—unpaid—to deliver. However, I cannot quite believe it really is the end of this exemplary public servant’s political life. Certainly he will not be leaving the House of Lords and he is entitled to remain on the Front Bench as a privy counsellor. So, I am choosing to believe it is the end of a successful chapter, with much of the book yet to be written. We wish him a very happy, healthy and productive retirement.

Improving Lives: Green Paper

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Yes, some of the technologies that one sees are remarkable. The noble Lord, Lord Low, who is not in his place at the moment, demonstrates that for the blind every time he stands up—I cannot imagine how he can do it—as did one of the members of my private office, who was also blind. There are amazing technologies to help support in that case; I know that it is also true elsewhere. We want to adopt and take on new technologies. One of the interesting and heartening things with Access to Work, where we have been a little concerned about the take-up, is that we have just introduced a digital offer there and we are encouraged by the response to it. There will be other areas where we can get a lot of benefit from going with new technologies.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, as we have heard, this Green Paper is to be recommended. It will obviously need some broad support to get it through. Can my noble friend tell us what he is doing to garner broad support for these changes?

[Lord Freud]

We have deliberately designed this Green Paper to ask for responses from a lot of key areas. Noble Lords may remember that when we started off on this process, it was by looking down a direct White Paper route. We have pulled back and gone for the Green Paper route, with a lot of areas for consulting. We plan to hear from and work with disabled people and people with long-term health conditions. We want to hear from employers, health and care professionals, the voluntary and community sectors and the devolved Administrations. We really want to build a consensus on what we can do and get the widest support that we possibly can for any changes.

Life Chances Strategy

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to deliver the Life Chances Strategy to transform the lives of the most disadvantaged people in Britain, as outlined by the Prime Minister on 11 January.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that time has been found for such a debate this side of Her Majesty’s most gracious Speech next week. I cannot think of a better way to spend precious time in your Lordships’ House so near the end of this Session—

[Noble Lords]

Order.

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

I am sorry, but some of my noble friends are walking in front of my noble friend while he is trying to introduce his debate. I ask my noble friends to leave the Chamber in such a way that does not cut across in front of my noble friend, because I know that those who are remaining for this debate very much want to hear him introduce this very important Question and hear what he has to say.

[Lord Farmer]

Thank you. I will begin again. I am delighted that time has been found for such a debate this side of Her Majesty’s most gracious Speech next week. I cannot think of a better way to spend precious time in your Lordships’ House so near the end of this Session than to talk about how the Government can most effectively help the most disadvantaged people in our country.

I thank from the outset every participant in this debate, for whom the striving for better life chances is not just an agenda item but a lifestyle: a cause that gets them out of bed in the morning and wakes them up in the middle of the night.

I am sure that much personal insight will be shared today. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, has a towering reputation not only as a former chief executive of Gingerbread, which campaigns tirelessly for parents raising children on their own, but also played a crucial role in the riots commission. This body came to the very important conclusion that at least half a million families in this country were close to breaking point and has, I am sure, been a prime mover in the expansion of the troubled families programme. We are indebted to her; strong and stable families are the wellspring of good life chances and her work has obviously borne much fruit with the present Government and the previous coalition Government.

I am similarly eager to hear what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro has to say. As chair of the Children’s Society, he represents an organisation that has an impressive track record in championing all children and especially the most vulnerable. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, will I am sure have many insights from the time when she led Relate most ably before she came into this House. She has been a leader of cross-party efforts to ensure that mental health is at the forefront of all our minds. She also chairs CAFCASS, which assists families going through contested complex court cases at that most stressful time of divorce, separation and public law proceedings. Finally, the quality of representation from my own Benches could not be higher than those who have kindly put their names down to speak at such short notice—for which I am deeply grateful.

To set the scene, the championing of life chances by our Prime Minister is the maturation of a process that has unfolded over the 10 years that he has led my party. On his first day as leader he went to London’s Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, which nurtures and develops the leadership potential of young African and Caribbean men—often living in disadvantaged communities—and enables them to succeed. Moreover, the first policy group he set up to give him the ideas that he would need to transform Britain was the Social Justice Policy Group, led by lain Duncan Smith and charged with looking at the full range of root causes of poverty. The focus desperately needed to be shifted away from the simple redistribution of money and on to tackling the drivers of the problems that poison life chances. As soon as he became Prime Minister, he asked Frank Field MP to lead a review on poverty and life chances. This again signalled his intent not to ignore poverty—this has never been the way of one-nation Conservatism—but to address it root and branch, broadening the focus away from the income targets that had impoverished the poverty debate.

The poverty plus a pound approach can callously leave people behind if, say, alcoholic parents are deemed beyond the concern of government when a financial transfer tips them over an income line but their lives and those of their children remain unchanged. Since 2010 a deep evidence base has been laid by one review after another: for example, on the importance of early intervention and the early years. These led in turn to the establishment of several What Works centres, such as the Early Intervention Foundation, which act as guardians of effective practice to improve poor life chances.

The new life chances strategy will stand on a sure foundation of academic research and tried and tested solutions that work across the whole of people’s lives to eradicate disadvantage. Similarly, the very concept of life chances has not just been plucked from a spin doctor’s playbook. It has an unimpeachable intellectual pedigree reaching back well over a century to one of the founding fathers of sociology, the German Max Weber. His concept of Lebenschancen, or life chances, is a social science theory of the opportunities that each individual has to improve the quality of his or her life. It is a probabilistic concept concerned with how likely it is, given certain risk and protective factors, that a person’s life will turn out a certain way.

I am sure that today we will be articulating not only what these risk and protective factors are—what will likely produce bad and good outcomes for individuals and families—but also how to boost the good and counteract the bad.

Chief among protective factors is the influence of safe, stable and nurturing relationships, which are essential foundations for human flourishing. If tiny babies, children, young people and adults do not have these, it is very hard to tackle the root causes and effects of poverty, such as addictions, serious personal debt, educational failure, mental ill health and worklessness. It is also nigh on impossible for those with disabilities to thrive if they do not have supportive relationships.

As I said in my maiden speech, my own origins were filled with shame, neglect and poverty, caused by my parents’ alcoholism and bankruptcy. My father died very early but bequeathed me a contact in a London Metal Exchange company, which enabled me to start my career there, albeit at the very bottom. This relationship gave me a much-needed starting opportunity as I did not cover myself in glory at school—partly, it must be said, because my family was collapsing around me.

I therefore speak from personal experience when I say that our epidemic levels of family breakdown act against the likelihood of having people to help one through adversity. Efforts to tackle this, particularly in our poorest communities, have to be front and centre of the life chances strategy. Two-thirds of children on our poorest estates are no longer living with both their parents by the time they are 15; half of them are in this position by the time they start primary school. This is not just about money: the stability of poor couples who are married is far higher than those who are not.

For example, we have to support marriage more effectively at the poorer end of the income spectrum, where its collapse has been most extreme yet where aspirations to marry remain high. Marriage is a social justice issue because it is so much harder to overcome cultural and financial barriers to marrying for those who are poor than for those who are comfortably off. Will the Minister take back to the Treasury the proposal that we should sharply increase the marriage tax allowance for those in the poorest parts of the country, where rates of single parenthood can be as high as 75%? Ironically, the money to do this is already in the budget because of the low take-up of the current trifling tax allowance.

Yet family support has to go beyond this. I have been speaking to Ministers across government about the need to have policies to support family stability in every single government department. We have universal healthcare, universal education and policies to encourage full employment, but all these social goods and reforms will be undermined by poor family functioning and the breakdown of relationships.

Universal family support, which would mean that all struggling families have somewhere to go where someone has the answers, such as family hubs, requires cross-government buy-in. The Department for Education has a clear interest but so do the Ministry of Justice, given the need to support prisoners’ families in the community, and the Ministry of Defence, which has thousands of service families who would also benefit—to name just two. This debate will, I am sure, cover many different areas, and it is clear that there will be no lasting success in any of them without several government departments and organisations working well together. Will my noble friend the Minister lay out what is being done to make sure that this is the case?

I reiterate the potential for good that our time together today holds. One of the paramount roles of good government is to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to flourish, whatever their starting point. This debate will, I am sure, brim with ideas and examples of good practice, and I look forward to seeing the trace of our passion expressed today in the life chances strategy shortly to be unveiled.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 21st December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure I speak for many in your Lordships’ House when I say how pleased I was that funding for the troubled families programme was extended into this Parliament and that the Bill will create a statutory duty to report on our progress in supporting these families with multiple, highly complex problems.

In more than one in 10 of the original troubled families on the programme, an adult moved off benefits and into continuous employment, which was a huge achievement since, on average, troubled families in the first programme had nine serious problems to overcome. Surely I am not being too optimistic in assuming that this reporting obligation signals an intent on the part of this Government to keep helping such families in the most effective ways possible and to renew the necessary funding.

Although ongoing accountability and financial commitment are obviously essential, I have to confess to a nervousness about the wording of Amendment 70, which talks about,

“the adequacy of resources given to local authorities”.

My understanding of when and why troubled families programmes have worked best is that one crucial common factor has been the wider system reform that the funds have helped to effect. In early speeches about the intent of the programme, a recurring theme was that if social services were to help families turn themselves around, this would require the service landscape in a local authority area to be no less transformed itself.

The Government never intended to foot the bill for business as usual but to make a contribution on a payment-by-results basis to the bigger prize of system reform. Local authorities would not get the results they needed on the per-family spend alone—indeed, the first financial framework document published in 2012 was explicit that they would get only up to 40% of the unit cost of the intensive interventions that work with this group of families. Government were priming a pump, not signing a blank cheque. This should remain the guiding principle: a level of funding that incentivises services such as the police, health and social services to work more closely together to reduce costs, not a level of funding that is adequate in isolation to fund the support provided for troubled families.

This brings me to Amendment 71 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor. She argues that the report should specify which types of interventions were used and which were a success or failure. But this seems to ignore the evidence that a whole system has to become relentlessly focused on supporting families across the spectrum of need if a local authority can truly be deemed to be successful. Taking an intervention-level approach runs the risk of ignoring the importance of synergy and the whole-system emphasis also seen, for example, in the way in which Ofsted is now examining the entirety of a council’s services to support children, using the single inspection framework.

Local authorities, such as the Isle of Wight, which have gone through profound reform, have integrated their troubled families work and funding with early years obligations, delivered through children’s centres, by forming family hubs. These help families with children right up the age range and across the spectrum of need, so are able to offer early help as well as the more intensive help typically associated with troubled families. This is highly relevant, given the Prime Minister’s recent announcement that local authorities which fail to safeguard children adequately will be taken into special measures, because that is what happened to the Isle of Wight. It was taken over by Hampshire, forced to rethink all its children’s services and make prevention of harm the watchword. It is now modelling a better offer for all families.

Increasingly, family hubs are the visible manifestation of a system that integrates troubled families work with full-spectrum support in a sustainable financial envelope. Surely the future lies in evidence-based interventions being locally tailored into better functioning systems. I am not convinced that reporting at the level of interventions would capture the most important learning, which is surely the priority.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

I spoke today to the officer in Newcastle who is responsible for the programme. We do not call it the troubled families programme in Newcastle; we call it the families programme. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, is right to say that we need a title that does not imply some kind of stigma.

Newcastle has been extremely successful in the way in which the present scheme has been working. However, it was interesting to learn in a little more detail from the officer in question—I declare my interest as a member of the city council—what is occurring on the financial front and with progress on the ground.

In moving her amendment—I support both amendments in this group—my noble friend Lady Sherlock referred to the financial basis that was initially for a grant of £3,900 or £4,000. Two-thirds went on a fee for mounting the programme, while the other third went on a success fee. That has been turned around so that the larger proportion is spent on the success fee. Now, of course, the amounts have been reduced by roughly a third, so the total figure is in the order of £2,600 although, as I have said, the proportions have been reversed. That may in itself be a source of some difficulty.

However, other issues need to be considered. One of the criteria is getting people into employment. Of course, that is important and makes a significant difference, but those criteria will not necessarily apply evenly across all the relevant authorities. It will, frankly, be more difficult to get someone into a job in Newcastle and other parts of the north-east than in some other parts of the country, simply because of the state of the local economy. Too much weighting on that one factor could be regressive. That needs to be considered.

Then there is the question of what outcome we are looking for from the programme and, in particular, whether we are looking over a sufficiently long period to be able to judge what is happening and what is successful. I hope that, in any kind of survey of what is going on, we can take that long-term view—over several years rather than only two or three—to see what approaches have paid a dividend.

Another aspect that occurs to me is that the Labour Government made a mistake, frankly, in dividing children’s services from adult social care. I was chairman of the social services committee in Newcastle in the early 1970s, when the two services had been brought together. Dividing them, particularly in the context of families, is potentially difficult. It means that you are working across departmental boundaries, possibly less efficiently than would otherwise be the case. It is time—not only from the perspective of troubled families but generally, given the pressures on social care and children’s services collectively—to reopen that issue. It is worth revisiting whether that decision is now applicable.

The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, referred to changes and savings that might be made. We must bear in mind that at the moment—I speak with some unfortunate knowledge of what is likely to happen in Newcastle—financial pressures are such that we will see significant cuts in both adult social care and children’s services. We will lose experienced staff because we are facing a reduction of some £32 million in the resources available to the authority. I suspect that, to a greater or lesser extent, that will be the case across much of local government, particularly in the areas with greatest need.

Although it is obviously right to bring people together as far as possible, so that we do not have a succession of different bodies or individuals working with the families in question, it will stretch the capacity of local authorities to be able to cope with this without depriving some other potential or current recipients of the support they also need. We need to look at the totality of funding across the range of services provided by local authorities and their partners in the health service and elsewhere to deal with these issues.

Both amendments encapsulate the correct approach: we should regularly be taking a significant look at what will be a long-term programme. I return to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and encourage the Government to change the name, because it implies a certain stigma and it would be better if more neutral terminology were applied.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and an honour to follow my noble friend Lord Polak—I am not sure he can hear me as his left ear is to this side—particularly after a maiden speech that was remarkable for both its humaneness and its humility. The tone he struck rings completely true for those who, like me, have known my noble friend in his previous incarnation as director of Conservative Friends of Israel and now as the organisation’s unsalaried honorary president. I have always been moved and touched by my noble friend’s consistent work in improving relations between Britain and Israel for the common good of each country. He will, I am sure, make a uniquely valuable contribution to the work of this House. We welcome him to us.

I am pleased that this important debate has also enticed other new Peers to make their voices heard in this Chamber. I congratulate my noble friends Lord Lansley and Lord Lupton on their impressive contributions. Given her important role in designing universal credit, I am particularly looking forward to hearing the contribution from my noble friend Lady Stroud, and I want to acknowledge how fitting it is for to make her maiden speech in this debate. What better occasion to express the compassionate and one-nation conservativism—and I believe it is—that is not a new-fangled device cynically constructed to sweeten the bitter pills of difficult decisions? Rather it has a deep seam of tradition and a valued history in our party that goes back to Disraeli, Baldwin, Chamberlain and Butler—and today reaches Iain Duncan Smith and the Prime Minister.

As my noble friend Lord Polak said, government must take responsibility and it is vital to remember what the coalition inherited in 2010: a welfare system run by 35 different IT systems and a monster of complexity that constantly had to be fed and kept satisfied by myriad accretions of former Conservative and Labour Administrations alike. As he entered the last days of the 2010 election campaign, Gordon Brown promised a tiny toddler tax credit of just £4 a week, threatening to add further confusion to a system of 51 different benefits even highly numerate people found extremely difficult to understand.

In 2005, the National Audit Office said:

“Simplification is not an easy option. Radical reform is a rare, costly, time-consuming, and potentially controversial act”.

So it is hugely to their credit that the coalition Government embarked on the costly and ambitious project of root-and-branch welfare reform, so that we did not repeat the mistakes of previous downturns, when it became pointless for claimants who fell on hard times to get back into work. We urgently needed a system with an internal dynamic that responded to extra effort and other kinds of behaviour we want to see across the whole working-age population—and in the rising generation for whom they are role models—so that they benefit from the better health, social networks and sense of achievement and self-esteem that comes from earned, but not benefits, income.

The starting point of universal credit was the need to tackle relative poverty effectively. In the boom years of the mid-2000s, the DWP’s households below average income statistics showed that someone who had spent five years in low income had no more than a 10% chance of escaping poverty the next year. Large tranches of our population, often concentrated in poorer communities, were locked out of the record growth this country had been enjoying to 2008.

In 2009, by the time the recession had well and truly begun to bite, 5.9 million people were claiming out-of-work benefits, but throughout the preceding decade of high growth that number was only 500,000 lower. This speaks of a structural problem: high-participation tax rates preventing people in precarious economic circumstances moving into work and high marginal tax rates deterring them from working longer hours and progressing. Now, however, the British jobless rate has decreased to 5.3% and is at the lowest level since April 2008, when employment was at a record high.

Yet getting people into work is not the only priority. My understanding is that the ambition of ongoing welfare reform is to help people secure more hours and progress to better rates of pay so that they eventually no longer need tax credits at all. The 2009 Family Resources Survey showed that one in seven households were dependent on benefits for more than half of their income, and this may still be the case. Could the Minister explain to what extent underemployment, particularly as a result of working part-time, is contributing to low earnings, and not just unacceptably low wages? Surely progression towards full employment must distinguish between full-time and part-time work so that the Government hold themselves fully to account.

There were also penalties in the system that discouraged people from activities that could decrease their dependency over the long term, such as forming a stable family unit. Couples who had previously claimed as single people stood to lose far more income from benefits by moving in together than they saved through the economies of scale of sharing a home. If they were simply cohabiting, many continued to claim as single parents. In 2013, ONS and DWP figures suggested that well over 200,000 couples were pretending to live apart, with the couple penalty in tax credits a likely prime mover in this particular form of benefit fraud.

Married couples cannot hide their status and this is surely a major contributor to the social gradient in marriage. Wave 3 of the Millennium Cohort Study found that around half of new parents on a low income are married, compared to nearly 90% of those earning an annual salary of more than £52,000. Given the far greater stability of marriage, this has a terrible knock-on effect. Sadly, only half of children in poor families are still living with both their parents when they start school, compared with over 90% of those from higher- income families. Can the Minister explain what progress has been made in reducing the couple penalty in universal credit?

While on the subject of fraud, which is, after all, stealing from the taxpayer, your Lordships should also be aware that a tax credits system that pays for every child has created perverse incentives—for some migrants, for instance. Social workers in the borough of Westminster have made known to me that some are bringing in a large number of children, at least some of whom are very unlikely to be their own. If children are being treated as cash cows by exploitative adults, this is wholly unacceptable and must be exposed. It also puts the two-child limit for new claimants into a somewhat different light from what we have heard today.

To conclude, I was encouraged that, at earlier stages of welfare reform, noble Lords across the House acknowledged how complex, burdensome and inefficient our benefits system had become under successive previous Governments, and that universal credit offers a desperately needed runway out of poverty at a time when deficit reduction remains a pressing concern. The challenges predicted by the National Audit Office have been significant but surmountable. Universal credit is being relentlessly rolled out, and well below budget. I hope that the Bill will be similarly welcomed and given co-operative support, and that we can work together to ensure that this Government fulfil their elected mandate—for the common good.

Universal Credit (Waiting Days) (Amendment) Regulations 2015

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2015 Lords Chamber

We know—the Minister confirms it and he is right—that test and learn is a part of the 2012 legislation framework. I hope that, if these regulations are implemented, we will try to test how we can mitigate some of the effects of these extra waiting days. They will be bound to increase the hardship experienced by people who are subject to the new universal credit regulations. I think the House will want to return to this in future. If the Minister is serious about trying to defend his policy and make it work sensibly, the generality of the people who are claiming will find universal credit much easier to use, but waiting days, particularly on top of digital by default, are going to mean that we could damage the proper, sensible rollout of this policy if we do not pay attention to the bottom 15% of the household distribution who will need help the most. If we do not get that right, the House will be failing households in this country who will suffer in future as a result of these changes.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, while the noble Lord, Lord German, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, raise important points for consideration, I have to disagree with them both and speak against these Motions. In fact, I would go further and say that in the light of the £12 billion taken out of welfare in last week’s Budget, I am surprised that they are asking the Government to find yet more savings in other places. This is the implication of these Motions.

The waiting days measure, which is consistent with the wider landscape of welfare in this country, is projected to save around £150 million per annum, although there may be some debate on that. Indeed it is a save-to-spend measure, and so removing the housing element and delaying implementation will sharply decrease the amount of funding available for a number of programmes to get people off benefits and into work. I think noble Lords would all agree that we need to make the best possible use of taxpayers’ money and focus spend here. So I am concerned that, in particular, the proposed Motions will curtail the amount of help the Government can continue to give the long-term unemployed, such as quarterly work search interviews for all claimants and voluntary programmes available to lone parents with children aged three to four years old to help them become work ready.

I have been reading the Government’s response to the Social Security Advisory Committee and note that the SSAC’s recommendation to take housing benefit out of the waiting days regime would cut savings by around a half to two-thirds, costing £70 million to £100 million, as well as increasing the complexity of the universal credit payment from the point of view both of IT and the user. The onus is therefore on those tabling these Motions to say where they would cut the £70 million to £100 million to enable these important initiatives that started last year to continue.

Looking first at the concept of waiting days before entitlement to employment-related support, noble Lords will be aware that waiting days have been a long-standing feature of the benefit system and already exist in other working-age benefits, such as jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance. In addition, it must be recognised that many people who make a new claim for universal credit will have come from a previous job and will therefore have final earnings or other income to support themselves until their first benefit payment.

Again, taking this approach to universal credit is consistent with the wider benefit system, which is not designed to cover very short periods of unemployment or sickness. Waiting days are also more consistent with the world of work, where very short breaks between jobs are unpaid as no employer is receiving the benefit of any work. This Government’s determination to ensure as far as possible that welfare mimics the world of work is the right approach.

It is my understanding that the safety net for vulnerable people is not being dismantled and that a number of groups are exempt from this change, including people who are terminally ill, victims of domestic abuse, care leavers, 16 to 17 year-olds without parental support, and prison leavers. Also, those who are in work and receiving universal credit who lose their job will not be subject to waiting days as they are already in the system.

I was pleased to read about a range of other targeted exemptions, which seem to be a better use of scarce public funds than treating all people as equally in need. I am, however, concerned about those who are long-term unemployed and have no savings or incoming final payment, and this is where it is vital that claimants receive timely and effective personal budgeting support as well as, if necessary, cash support in the form of a universal credit advance. Again, I would say that this Government are right to take a more finely grained approach and help those who particularly need support in the very short term, instead of assuming that everyone is in the same position.

I turn to the other elements of universal credit not tied to employment support, especially the housing benefit element that is the concern of the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord German. My understanding is that as universal credit is simplifying the welfare system, not least to make work pay, it would run counter to that goal to treat the housing element separately. I think that this was said earlier, but paying universal credit as a single monthly sum to households aims to help to prepare claimants for the world of work or to keep them in that mindset when they drop out of the labour market.

Quite rightly there is an expectation placed on households to manage their own budgets. Obviously housing costs do not cease when someone finds themselves having to move on to universal credit, but neither do they cease when someone is between jobs. However, I was relieved to find out that protections are in place for tenants who fall into arrears and alternative payment arrangements are available. In other words, it is not a sink-or-swim situation but we are encouraging the norm that very many of those who are in work try to live by, which is saving something for a rainy day.

In summary I support the Government’s position on waiting days, on the grounds that when there is such a tight financial settlement it is imperative that the welfare system is simple but concentrated on those who need it most. However, I echo the Social Security Advisory Committee’s plea, which we have just heard, that this change be subjected to the test-and-learn approach that was a hallmark of welfare reform under the coalition Government. It is essential that we can irrefutably say that the exemptions and other fine print of the waiting days measure are delivered as promised.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

Before considering the individual arguments, I think it would be useful to understand to whom exactly waiting days actually apply. It is not the most vulnerable: care leavers, the terminally ill, victims of domestic violence, youngsters without parental support and prison leavers have all been exempted. It is not those coming from other benefits such as jobseeker’s allowance or employment and support allowance. We have to remember that because universal credit is a benefit for low-income people in work as well as a safety net, many people in low-income and unstable employment will remain on universal credit as they move in and out of work. Hence, the very people for whom much of the concern has been expressed today will not be affected.

Noble Lords, and indeed the Social Security Advisory Committee’s consultation, highlighted a series of examples of cases that might be affected. These included the effect on a single mother reducing her hours to care for her sick child; the effect on those who have not been able to build up a cushion for a rainy day because they have been in low-paid work, on zero-hour contracts or in in-work poverty; the reluctance of claimants to take short-term employment as they fear they may have to serve waiting days again when the job finishes; the concern of landlords that their tenants might not be able to pay their rent because they lose a week’s housing and the disproportionate effect that that will have in London; and the fear that low-income people may borrow from payday lenders and loan sharks to keep afloat, a point made by the noble Lord—I find it hard not to call him my noble friend—Lord German.

I understand why these examples cause concern. They would cause me concern, too, if I was not confident that in such cases waiting days would not affect the most vulnerable. The single mother, the low paid, and zero-hours contract workers will most likely already be on universal credit while in work if their income is low. If on universal credit, they will not serve waiting days. Even if a person on a zero-hours or a short-term contract comes off universal credit, they will be exempted if they reclaim within six months. People moving from other legacy benefits are also exempted.