Universal Credit (Work-Related Requirements) In Work Pilot Scheme and Amendment Regulations 2015

Lord Freud Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Freud]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Universal Credit (Work-Related Requirements) In Work Pilot Scheme and Amendment Regulations 2015.

Relevant documents: 16th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, 21st Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

The regulations before the Committee today introduce powers to test a range of approaches to establish how we can best support working universal credit claimants who are on low earnings to progress in work and earn more. This is a core principle of universal credit.

I take this opportunity to update noble Lords on where we are with universal credit. Universal credit is now in almost 100 jobcentres. Some 55,000 people have claimed and almost 27,000 people—including couples and families—currently benefit from the much enhanced support that it provides. For example, we are seeing that universal credit claimants spend twice as long looking for work than claimants on current benefits. Two-thirds of claimants surveyed believe that universal credit provides better financial incentives to work and earn. Early evidence shows that universal credit claimants are taking up more work when compared to those people on jobseeker’s allowance.

Universal credit is working for not just claimants but for employers, too. It removes the inflexibilities that exist in current systems and means that employers will now have access to a more engaged and flexible workforce—people willing to take up more hours as they are available without the fear of having to stop and restart their benefit claims. This is excellent progress and from next month we will roll out universal credit nationally. By the spring, universal credit will be in one in three of the country’s jobcentres.

A key question we are now looking to address is how we will support working claimants who are on universal credit and in some of the lowest-income households, typically earning less than £12,000 a year. Our aim is clear: we want to help encourage, influence and support low-paid claimants who can earn more to progress in work and increase their pay. The potential benefits of this support are significant and wide-ranging. There will be more people working and earning more, and living more independently of benefits. We will strengthen our ability to tackle and reduce poverty. Employers will benefit, too. They will have a more engaged and motivated workforce and will benefit from the rewards that that will bring. To realise these benefits, it is crucial that we put in place the right help and support. It is a key reform, a unique challenge and it is transformational.

I want to be open about the challenge that we face. It is no easy task. This is the first time any nation has attempted to support working claimants in such a large-scale way to increase their earnings. Because we are one of the first nations to try to do this, there is very limited evidence on what works. For this reason, we must run trials to learn what is effective. We must do things differently if we are to succeed. The approaches of the past—static trialling of rigid, fixed approaches—will simply not work here. We therefore must look to do things differently. Our approach to trials needs to be more flexible. We need the ability to tweak and change things as we learn about what works and what does not. This is about trialling to refine and perfect our approach. Having broadly defined trialling regulations, as we are discussing today, with clearly defined parameters and safeguards will allow this tailoring and tweaking. On the other hand, a traditional approach of defining every element of a trial would have left us locked into one approach, even if it proved to be ineffective. To test changes and variations, we would then have to stop and come back to Parliament to secure brand new powers to test something slightly different.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

I thank noble Lords for what has been a series of good contributions to this debate. These regulations are driving at a very simple question: how best can we support lower-earning, universal credit claimants to progress in work and increase their earnings? Let me try to deal with all the questions.

My noble friend Lord Farmer asked how many people would be affected in relative terms. As he said, there are about 1 million universal credit claimants in low-paid work and that is as a proportion of a total of 7.7 million people. We cannot at this stage quantify the monetary benefits of that in-work support. One of the reasons for these trials is to find out whether it is cost effective to provide support above the bare minimum and whether we get a return. However, universal credit has, bluntly, astonishing returns on its investment, saving the Government and the taxpayer £38 billion from now until 2022-23. When it is fully in, it will have an economic benefit of £7 billion a year.

I was urged by my noble friend Lord German and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, to give extraordinarily precise figures on this. We are ramping up very rapidly now, and by spring, as we said, we will be in one in three jobcentres; we are currently in about one in eight. Clearly that implies that the 15,000 people will be a much smaller proportion of the current 27,000 that we see. However, I am not in a position to give more numbers.

As to the balance between sticks and carrots, an issue raised by my noble friend, most of the areas we are looking at will focus on how we support and help people. We need to learn how to do that. At the same time, we are working closely with employers. We have implemented a couple of programmes to find out what kind of support and incentives work. There is a great deal of emphasis on the support element. Basically, the intensive work coach discussions are a kind of mentoring process in which one goes through the options.

All noble Lords who have contributed are interested in the safeguards that we have in place. There are a number of regulatory safeguards to ensure that conditionality is applied to claimants only when it would be appropriate. The trials are limited to those in the all-work requirement conditionality group. In other words, they explicitly exclude those who are disabled, an issue which was of some concern. Claimants in the other conditionality groups will not be part of these trials and those in specific circumstances, such as recent victims of domestic violence, will be excluded from the outset.

Beyond that, as a more formal protection, we realise that claimants will have individual circumstances and it will be for the work coach, after discussions, to work out what the tailoring requirements should be. That will give the work coach the scope to set reasonable, achievable requirements and earnings goals, taking into account the kind of commitments mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, in regard to caring responsibilities and so on. The result will be a personalised claimant commitment that places reasonable expectations on clients.

My noble friend made a point about transparency to Parliament. Given that we are trying to ensure that we have an accountable and flexible process—that is the delicate balance that we are trying to achieve—for transparency we will share information as we change the trials with the Social Security Advisory Committee. We will do that by letter and I shall ensure that the information is placed in the Library so that Parliament can see what is happening.

In response to a question from my noble friend, we are discussing with SSAC the issue of self-employed people trying to start businesses. We will take account of that circumstance, among others, and people building businesses will be able to do so and guidance will be provided.

In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the regulations expire after three years of being in force. Where we need to gather more evidence, we can extend these regulations by a further period of up to 12 months without returning to Parliament. Such an extension does not expand the powers within the regulations, which strictly define limits to testing work-related requirements and will have been subject to full scrutiny. All it does is extend the period.

My noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked about the business case, the question asked by Steve Timms. A letter has been sent to Steve Timms, which I can give chapter and verse on. The strategic outline business case approved contained a light-touch regime and £15,000. The objective of that £15,000 was to find out, against the control of that light touch, whether we can do better.

The core of the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, was about how we treat people. The real protection, which is not explicit in the regulations but is nevertheless there, is that under these regulations our expectations of in-work claimants cannot exceed what we expect from out-of-work claimants. The level and extent of sanctions will therefore be within those existing constraints. That is the constraint we have for this trial.

Getting into some of the detail of the trial, the reason there is a figure of 15,000 is that 5,000 are the control. We are looking at two main types, which I described in my opening remarks. Then we will segment that 5,000, looking at four or five different categories and geographically. That is how the numbers add up as we run this trial to 2016.

As we see people, we will start supportive conversations with them almost immediately. We will start to have tougher conversations after a person has been in work for two months. That is the initial testing. I think I have dealt with carers.

Ethics are a very interesting issue as we move into other, more elaborating trialling. This first trial is rather straightforward and is within the context of the kind of conditionality we do anyway, and we have a requirement to be reasonable to the individual with the safeguards I have described. However, I appreciate the point the noble Baroness made that for future trials and as the system develops we may have to think about ethical controls more on a medical model. For this trial, we have SSAC overseeing it, which means there is a group of experts having a look as we run along.

The noble Baroness asked about couples versus individuals. Members of a couple are treated as joint claimants so their earning threshold is set on a joint basis and conditionality is imposed on the basis of their combined income. If that exceeds the household threshold, neither partner will be part of the trial. That reflects the underlying philosophy of universal credit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Sherlock]

The Minister has done very well. I do not like all the answers, but he has done very well at trying to address many of the points. I will just pick up a couple of them.

First, can he tell us who will deliver the support? Will it be Jobcentre Plus staff or others, and what are the resource implications for the public sector? On the business case, if the £15 million and the light-touch control group are in the original business case, what about the rest of it? I may have misunderstood his comments on that, but where is that to be found?

As for tracking outcomes, obviously RTI works for those who are paying tax and national insurance, but for this to work properly the Government would also need to track people who were not to be found on the system and to find out why not. I am sure the Minister would rebut this, but there is a growing concern—he will have seen both recent media reports and the work of the Work and Pensions Committee—that the ways in which sanctions are being imposed at the moment are completely arbitrary. The only success measure for Jobcentre Plus staff is how many people are driven off the benefit rolls rather than into work. No one bothers to find out the numbers, but the suggestion is that only about one-fifth of people leaving benefits go into work—nobody knows what happens to the rest.

This was a real issue, as I am sure the Minister is aware, in one well known phase of welfare reform in the United States. Researchers tracked people longitudinally and found that a lot of them had simply ended up dropping out of the system completely. At this stage I am not making a value judgment about that, but for this to be properly effective the Government would need to follow those people through and find out what had happened to them to understand what the consequences of that were.

The Minister mentioned skills and the kind of support that is available. If one of the barriers to someone’s progression that is identified is a lack of skills, will the pilots be able to provide skills, or resources to enable people to get skills, which might enable them to earn more and break free of the threshold that would be constrained by this? I also asked whether the same income threshold would be applied for entry to or exit from all the pilots. Is that one of the things that is going to be flexed in any way? Is it the same for all of them?

On the question of ethics, the Minister said at the start that these regulations comprise strictly defined limits. In a manner of speaking they do, but only in the sense that I am strictly defined by the law of gravity, which still gives me quite a lot of latitude in how I go about behaving. The Minister also said that he will give us no information on numbers. Presumably, that could theoretically mean that the entire universal credit population could be put into this without any need for further recourse to Parliament. Is that right? In other words, when does this stop being a pilot? I am trying to establish whether the regulations were really designed to be able to pilot something. The scale of this is such that I am beginning to wonder whether Parliament would really see this as being a pilot. Although I am very glad that the Minister is going back to the SSAC, there is no obvious way to scrutinise this here. Will he give some more thought to that?

Finally, I want to clarify something relating to the sanctions. If the Minister is saying that the requirements will be no worse for people in work than for those out of work, my response would be that I would hope not, otherwise the incentive for getting a job would seem to be rather small. However, that presumably means that somebody could lose all their universal credit for three years for a failure to comply with a brand new requirement exercised by his staff—something that has never been done before. Is the Minister confident about that? I realise he has said that nobody will be sanctioned without good cause, but we both know that there are plenty of examples of people who have been simply because there is a significant amount of error in the way that the guidance has been applied. Cases are constantly being brought forward, and he will be aware of that. How will he check up on that? How will he quality-test the nature of that?

I am aware that I have asked a lot of quite specific questions. I would be grateful if the Minister, with his normal customary kindness, would allow his officials to go through the record and write to me on anything that has not been picked up.

[Lord Freud]

I will certainly go through the record but I am doing my best to answer everything. There is a technical question about income in and out. At the top end, a single person stops being in this trial when he or she hits 35 times the minimum wage—I think, from memory, that it is £116-something. I may be corrected, but that is the top end. The bottom end for a single person is, effectively, £76, and for a couple it is £116, we think.

Essentially, we are trialling this group because people would have come off the out-of-work benefits system at 16 hours times the minimum wage up to where they would get out of conditionality entirely because they would have satisfied 35 hours times the minimum wage. We do that for singles and couples. My figures are being hastily checked but that is the principle behind the answer.

[Baroness Sherlock]

Is that for all pilots? It is not a variable?

[Lord Freud]

Yes. Let me make absolutely sure that I have got the figures right. It is £76 for the individual. However, it is not £116 but £126 for the couple. The figure for an individual at the top end which gets you out of conditionality is £230. So it is within that range of earnings. Clearly quite a lot of people may be doing fewer hours if they are earning rather more.

[Baroness Sherlock]

I am grateful to the Minister and I thank him for establishing those ranges. However, what I am trying to get at is whether exactly the same ranges will be applied in all the different pilots, or are the Government testing whether the ceilings should be set at different levels?

[Lord Freud]

We are going to stay in that range because that is the group for which in-work conditionality would apply. There is no point in testing other ranges. However, we will have information, which I think is the underlying point of the noble Baroness’s question, on how different segments of earnings within that range respond to the different types of regime.

[Baroness Sherlock]

The Minister is being incredibly helpful. I apologise for my having to work this out on the hoof, but I think the Minister is saying that only people whose earnings are within that range will be subject to a pilot. I am trying to establish whether people who are at different points in that range may be subject to different trials. I will say that again. Will people on the same income within that range be subject to different pressures or levels of support requirements?

[Lord Freud]

The answer to that is no. We will put people in within that range. We will then have a process of personalising and tailoring the claimant commitment, which may contain an element of what their earnings are or could be. So I can answer no and yes. It will not be done at a mechanical level but may be done at an individual level.

[Baroness Sherlock]

I am very grateful to the Minister—I had not understood that at all. In that case, we are saying that each of these 15,000 people might have a different target of earnings that would allow them to exit from the conditionality and the programme. That raises some very significant ethical questions and I would strongly ask the Minister to consider giving more thought to this. I am very slowly doing a PhD. Before I am allowed to do anything involving other people—human subjects—I have to go to an ethics committee which puts me through my paces quite carefully. The consequences here are not just differential levels of support but that, potentially, two people in almost identical circumstances might do the same things, but one would lose three years’ worth of universal credit while the other loses nothing. That is a radical step for the Government to take. Has the Minister really thought through the ethics of that?

[Lord Freud]

This is how one delivers personalised support. The claimant commitment is in the system. Elements of the claimant commitment have a mandatory aspect but with others it is just an agreement. In reality, in the trials we will set the claimant commitment rather carefully. It is an agreed document between the work coach and claimant. Elements of that claimant commitment may be mandatory but quite a lot of it will not be. The likelihood is that as we run the trials we will look extraordinarily closely at making sure that we do not have any unsatisfactory sanctioning behaviour. We will test for that. This is a trial.

Although 15,000 people sounds a lot, when universal credit is fully rolled out, we will be dealing with 20 million people—8 million-odd households, comprising 12 million-odd adults and then a number of children. We are talking about a very small number so that we can micromanage it in terms of that kind of concern. The noble Baroness, rightly, is focused on us getting that right, and we are utterly conscious of that particular issue. The numbers will allow us to make sure that there are not those kind of arbitrary differences, as she described them, particularly when the sanctioning regime can move quite rapidly.

Skills is clearly one area where we could do a lot more development as we find the programme beginning to work. In this first trial, we plan to signpost the National Careers Service and colleges. There will be money available to support that through the adviser discretionary fund.

On RTI, the figures are that around 94% of people in formal employment are captured in the PAYE process. Some self-reporting may be required but we will get the bulk of them. Clearly, we will look at other things than just the RTI, but the RTI should give us a good feel for this. We will look at whether there are some anomalies going on where people fall off the system. That is one of the most important things that we will find out from the trial.

The light-touch regime in the business case is funded. Clearly, we will only introduce a less light-touch regime if it offers value for money. That will be part of a negotiation, if we discover it is worth doing. We will not spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a regime that somebody made up in a darkened room when it has no effect. That is why we are doing these trials. Who will deliver these trials? To start with, it will be Jobcentre Plus, as I have described. That is the first iteration; we could go on to other iterations. I described, I hope, the light-touch regime, which involves two work coach conversations. One happens when someone enters work and the other occurs eight weeks later. That is what the control is based on.

I think that I have dealt with the question of sanctions. The noble Baroness will be quick to correct me if I am wrong, but I think that I have covered everything. However, on her point about the numbers, by March, we will have moved to one in three jobcentres. I am sure that she will be the first to acknowledge that, and she will have seen the escalation: 54,000 have already applied for universal credit and the figure is moving up rapidly. That is when we will start pulling out the people on universal credit who are in work to test them.

This is about the commitment by this Government to deliver a universal credit that genuinely supports working-age people when they are out of work and then in work. It gets rid of the distinction which, in my view, has been invidious in our support system. If we are going to do that, we have to understand how best we can support the in-work claimants and get them to get their earnings up. The regulations before us today combine oversight and flexibility in the optimum way.

During the passage of the Bill I was very clear that, in driving through this approach, we would do it through a regulatory structure, so that we could have these debates, keep an eye on it and get that balance. It is a very delicate balance but we will build an evidence base on how we can improve people’s careers and improve earnings among the low-earning. If we get this right and learn how to do it properly, this piece of research will be a key element in improving the economic performance and productivity of the country. That and the fact that people’s lives will be better when they earn more are the two fundamental reasons that I commend these regulations to the Committee.

Motion agreed.