Public Services: Update

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 29th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

My Lords, I might be new in the game, but I am afraid that I cannot urge the Government because I am no longer on the Back Benches. I can say that the Government understand the critical importance of local authorities in confronting this problem. I will certainly make sure that the noble Baroness’s points are heard and understood by the Chancellor. As I said, I cannot anticipate what financial provision he will make for the future.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, given the latest Public Health England advice that quarantining of new and at-risk prisoners should be in place for the rest of this year, can my noble friend advise us of the Government’s planning for the resumption of prisoners’ family visits and the progress on making virtual visits widely available?

[Lord True]

My Lords, my noble friend raises a very important point. Prisoners are a vulnerable part of the community and mental health is important for everyone, not least prisoners. I assure him that although this is at an initial stage, action has already been taken to ensure that locked mobile telephones can be given to prisoners in settings where there is no access to call boxes. Provision is being made to bring in the kinds of virtual conferences and meetings that he describes. I cannot give him an exact figure on the number of settings, or the timing, but I assure him that the Government are aware of the issue and addressing it.

Universal Credit

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, for giving us the opportunity to discuss this issue, which affects so many lives, both directly and indirectly, in terms of the confidence the general public has in our welfare system. It is vital to stand back and assess what universal credit—UC—is trying to achieve.

If we had not, with our coalition partners, invented and implemented UC, the ineffectiveness of the legacy welfare system would have been a running sore in political debate that would have become a dangerous fault line as we approach Brexit. It would have been far too late to make any meaningful reform, but there would have been urgent calls for it, given the acute labour shortages we would be facing as the number of migrant workers willing to do jobs left vacant by British workers reduced.

Related to this, and before Brexit became an issue, the high unemployment rates that welfare reform has helped us to avoid would have undermined the whole of society. Human dignity is deeply affected by lack of work. For example, while it is a complex picture, Understanding Society data suggests that longer-term unemployment is associated with obesity. This badly affects confidence and employability and thereby further traps someone in a pernicious cycle of poor health and unpromising life chances.

Writing about the legacy benefit system, one of our foremost experts, Nick Timmins, said,

“Like many others, I had come by the mid-to-late 2000s to recognise that it had become horrendously complicated—both in the way it handled the absence of work and in the support it offered once people were in low-paid jobs”.


He notes its incomprehensibility to claimants and administration staff alike, the billions of pounds-worth of unintended error every year, and how it “almost actively encouraged fraud”. Substantial reform was particularly important because moving into low-paid work for those out of it for any length of time felt very risky. It could take weeks to sort out a fresh claim for benefit if the job failed, hence unemployment existing alongside high vacancy rates. He and Professor Roy Sainsbury, an early proponent of a “single working-age benefit”, saw UC as,

“essentially a technocratic change … an apolitical idea that was not rooted in any ideology at all”.

Thus, my concern is that UC has become unhelpfully politicised—a stick with which to beat the Government regardless of the broad sweep of positive outcomes, and the subject of inaccurate and shameful scaremongering.

For example, during Prime Minister’s Question Time in the other place on 11 October, the Leader of the Opposition claimed that Gloucester City Homes had evicted “one in eight” of their tenants—650 in total—due to UC. However, in actuality eight people, all of whom had significant debt arrears before UC was introduced, were evicted. Richard Graham, Conservative MP for Gloucester, flagged up as a point of order that,

“the picture painted by the Leader of the Opposition yesterday was a long way from the true situation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/10/17; col. 497.]

The impression has also been given that there will be a big bang in UC rollout just before Christmas, when most families already feel nervous about their finances. However, the pace of the test, learn and rectify process is staying steady and the proportion of the forecast claimant population receiving UC will reach 10% by the end of January, as preannounced. On the subject of test and learn, can the Minister inform the House what progress has been made in developing universal support, which will help people with debt and other disadvantages as they become used to the new system?

Finally, there will be a projected £70 billion in savings to the public purse as a result of the shift away from the legacy benefit system, not because of parsimony, but because of people moving into work. Have the Government modelled if and how savings might be improved by lowering taper rates still further than the recent drop from 65% to 63%, albeit at an up-front cost of £1 billion over five years? There would be a similar cost in reducing the taper rates from 63% to 60%. But what would be the likely return to the Exchequer, given that lower taper rates—and of course improved work allowances—increase work incentives?

Queen’s Speech

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I start by welcoming the prominence of the issue of life chances in Her Majesty’s most gracious Speech, thus fulfilling commitments made by my noble friend Lord Freud in this House. At Second Reading of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill he described how:

“In the past, Governments spent money in an attempt to solve problems rather than drive real change in people’s lives, and our approach is different: we believe that … we must relentlessly focus on tackling the root causes of child poverty to improve the life chances of our children”.—[Official Report, 17/11/15; col. 122.]

Hence the new statutory measures on worklessness and educational attainment.

My noble friend also promised to develop indicators to measure progress against other root causes of child poverty, including family breakdown, so their inclusion in the Queen’s Speech was essential if the Prime Minister is truly to launch,

“an all-out assault on poverty”.

I need hardly say that indicators in themselves change nothing—what matters is that, to quote my noble friend Lord Freud again, they,

“drive action which will make the biggest difference to the most disadvantaged children, both now and in the future”.—[Official Report, 17/11/15; col. 32.]

Will the Ministers assure the House that bold policies commensurate with the scale of family breakdown in this country, also implicated in our high rates of mental ill-health among the young, will be brought forward?

Efforts to improve family stability could be game-changing in preventing children growing up in poverty. Joseph Rowntree Foundation research by Smith and Middleton highlights the fact that 85% of children who avoided poverty over a five-year period had lived continuously in couple households. Children in intact families are also less likely to experience behavioural problems; leave school and home earlier; become pregnant or a parent at an early age; report depressive symptoms; and smoke, abuse alcohol and use other drugs during adolescence. They are more likely to perform well in school and need less medical treatment. Family breakdown is not inevitable, and noble Lords have heard me outline solutions before such as family hubs. Noble Lords may wonder whether I will ever move on from this issue but I am compelled by the facts and the need for concerted action if we are to get ahead of this epidemic.

As well as implementing the family test, the Government need to have a Minister in every department who has the departmental responsibility for proactively addressing the causes and effects of family instability: Defra, for example, will know that relationship breakdown can undermine rural productivity when it leads to the division of family farms, loneliness and isolation, and, as we heard in Oral Questions today, even suicidality. More positively, the Ministry of Justice also knows that efforts to strengthen families are essential for the rehabilitation of offenders. The Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove, told governors this month :

“Critically, education should also help prisoners to acquire the social skills and virtues which will make them better fathers, better husbands and better brothers. Ensuring that prisoners can re-integrate into family life and maintain positive relationships is crucial to effective rehabilitation. Families are one of our most effective crime-fighting institutions. And we should strengthen them at every turn”.

A cornerstone of the justice reforms in the Queen’s Speech is the greater freedom that governors will have and the accountability for outcomes, particularly from education, that will be a key trade-off for greater control. Dame Sally Coates’s recently published review lays out a holistic vision of education for prisoners that includes family and relationship learning and practical skills for parenting, finance, and domestic management. HMP Parc in Bridgend, Wales, is a clear example, copied across the world, of a prison that has managed to change the culture around family visits without compromising on security. Similarly, HMP Winchester has transformed how prisoners engage with their families while inside. When the first week induction process includes a session that brings home to you how hard it will be for your children to have a father inside, it can lay a totally different foundation for how someone serves their sentence.

There are potentially other important knock-on effects: these prisons have found that good-quality contact with family members can make the difference between ingesting new psychoactive substances—what Prisons Minister Andrew Selous refers to as “lethal highs”—and deciding against doing so. If you know you are going to attend a homework club with your child that week or it is the day for you to write home, then even if you want to escape to drug-induced oblivion because life is so tough, these family ties can act as a strong disincentive to do so. Dads’ clubs on the wings also bolster inmates’ resolve to make good choices.

As I suggested at the outset, this new Session gives us a fresh opportunity and impetus to undertake far-reaching and much-needed social reform to strengthen our economy and enhance our security. I urge our Government to deliver a life chances strategy that rises to the scale of the challenges our society faces and Members of this House to do all we can to do likewise.

Palestine: Recognition

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Steel, for this debate. I must acknowledge that many among your Lordships know far more about this long-standing conflict than I do. However, the shakiness of the implicit premise of this debate concerned me so deeply that I felt unable to keep silent.

I am deeply uneasy about glossing over the very real stumbling blocks that justice prevents us from treating as minor irritations, most notably the statements in the Hamas charter of murderous intent towards its neighbour, the State of Israel. We are being asked to treat the Palestinian state as equally valid with Israel when there is an explicit commitment to destroy the people who live across its borders. I am fully committed to the Government’s approach of working toward a negotiated and meaningful peace agreement that results in an independent Palestine thriving alongside a safe and secure Israel, but both of those are essential.

How can Israel be safe and secure when Palestine is committed to its destruction? Further, I have grave concerns that this would be a state that violated the human rights of minorities living within its borders to practise their religion freely. The recognition of Palestine, without a negotiated settlement with security for adherents of all faiths at its foundation, would exacerbate the already precarious situation for Christians in the Palestinian territories, and especially in Gaza. Under Hamas, the official religion of Gaza is Islam, the country exercises sharia law, and the expression of other religions is challenged.

The Guardian and other newspapers report how in Gaza public displays of faith and the open practising of Christianity is extremely risky, and that Christians avoid celebrating festivals such as Christmas in public places. Along with accounts from Reuters a couple of years ago, there is ongoing evidence to suggest that Christians are strongly compelled to give up their faith and become Muslims, whether through the inducement of jobs and houses—which is powerful, as many Christians live in poverty—or through social and more sinister pressure. Proselytisation by Christians in Gaza can be punishable by death. Fear is growing that the population will be completely eliminated through Christians fleeing the territory and forced conversions, whether through the influence of militant Islam or economic pressures.

Without wishing to idealise Israel, in terms of tolerating other religions it stands in stark contrast particularly to Gaza. At a recent lunch I attended, the Prime Minister remarked that Israel is a vulnerable country and yet, against all the odds, it has become an oasis of freedom where the call to prayer mingles with church bells—where Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic echo down narrow souks.

Creating an environment where Christians are free to worship and flourish is no mean feat in the Middle East given that other countries are also seeing their Christian populations dwindling. Writing in the New Statesman, former British and UN diplomat Gerard Russell describes the decline of Christian populations right across the Middle East, whether in Egypt, Iran, Jordan or Iraq. In 1987 Christians in Iraq numbered 1.4 million. Nearly 30 years later the country’s population has doubled, but its Christian population has dwindled to 400,000. Of those who remain, many have been forced to leave their homes as a result of militant Muslims’ efforts to establish an Islamic state, or caliphate. Russell paints a picture of an impoverished cultural landscape left in the wake of this flight. Historically, Christians have contributed greatly to the preservation of the heritage they share with Muslims, whether that is the Aramaic language in Iraq or Pharaonic hymns in Egypt. The schools run by Christians in the Middle East have educated generations of Arabs and other Muslims.

In summary, I am deeply concerned about what Christians’ fate would be in a Palestinian state, given that Hamas is grounded in radical Islam. This, alongside the deeply troubling commitment to the destruction of Israel, which would of course sweep away Christians and other non-Jews, raises questions that have to be considered head on, and can by no means be made the subject of wishful thinking. They will certainly not be made to go away by unilaterally acknowledging Palestinian statehood; in fact they could become harder, not easier, to resolve after that had happened.