Benefit Changes: Vulnerable People

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend, whose speeches always repay later reading because of her expertise and experience in these fields. I particularly agreed with one of her earlier remarks when she talked about the difficulty the department has—and I think this is true—in that it seems to be turning a deaf ear to some of the complaints. Now, I do not think that demonstrates anything other than a misperception of how the department works, and I understand the Minister’s perplexity and why she feels the need to defend the professionals in the department, and she is right to do so, because they are excellent people. But it is true that the perception left outside the department is that, because there is so much difficulty in trying to resolve some of these problems, the department keeps founding on the fact it has an 80% approval rating, which it has. People who have work experience, computer knowledge and a bank account in positive balance always get a very good service, from my experience. I have studied this and watched cases being enrolled on to universal credit. It is partly why the employment rate is so high, and I think that will continue.

On the other hand, a benefit change of this kind, where you get six benefits in one payment, is a big change from an array of small payments that had previously been studded through the month. If anything goes wrong with that—whether it is bad process, partly the slightly strange ideology behind it or the lack of generosity of some of the benefit payments—and it does not come through the door on time or it is wrong, the household’s finances are severely affected immediately. The Government would be well advised to confess a bit more readily that, when it is in full rollout to 7.7 million households, payments of this kind will always go astray and there will always be people who will need help.

In satisfaction of trying to deal with that, I think that we should consider some sort of triage system, because there is a lot of data in the department and a lot of clever people who can cross-tabulate it. I cannot help but remember that dynamic benefits—the basis for universal credit—was set up in 2008. A huge amount has evolved about how people can creatively use data to identify cohorts within populations. The department should now be able to identify the vulnerable cases much more specifically, so that work coaches and advisers can be given a case that has a red flag on it that says, “This case needs special treatment because, if something goes wrong with it, children will suffer”—or whatever, because there will be consequences or it is a riskier than normal case. That can be passed on to the housing authorities and anybody acting on behalf of the applicant so that we can be much better prepared to stop people being thrown out of their rented accommodation because their UC payment is late and then sent to Yorkshire from London with three young children—

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

What is wrong with Yorkshire?

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

There is nothing wrong with Yorkshire; I was just referring to a programme I saw on Channel 4 last night. I see hard luck stories and bad stories for the department all the time. The department has to understand that, with a rollout cohort of 7.7 million families, it will always have difficulties and bad stories. It will get better as UC rolls outs.

My noble friend also mentioned the importance of getting more flexibility into the hands of the caseworkers. They are not using enough flexibility yet. I noticed that the Secretary of State was in Scotland this morning. There are some really excellent new flexibilities for people coming out of prisons. That is really positive and it was a good news story in the Scotsman today. That is good, but we should have more of it. No doubt the Minister will say that there are all sorts of things going on that we do not know about—and I believe that to be true—but it is perplexing that we are not better at identifying vulnerabilities. That is the point I am making, because if the professionals dealing with the cases had a bit more information of that kind available when they make judgments on the case it would make a significant difference.

I did not mean to say any of that. I meant to start by thanking my noble friend Lady Janke for introducing the debate in an excellent way. Her analysis was really good. It set the scene. The timing of the debate is very important because we are looking at, we hope, a comprehensive spending review and a Budget that might happen sometime in the autumn or maybe even later—if we still have a Government. Departments such as the DWP should be thinking clearly and carefully about what their asks are for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whosoever that may be. That work would then inform what happens in the next three years. That three-year period has to be used constructively to repair some of the damage that we have seen since 2010, some of which is still with us and some of which still has to be visited on us. The noble Lord, Lord Livermore, was quite correct in identifying that previous Governments have dealt with low income quite deliberately and politically by pouring money into the tax credits system, which saved an enormous amount of extra heartache from the financial crisis of 2008-09. If that had not been there things would have been much worse. The noble Lord was right to say that.

The right reverend Prelate was also right to advert to the two-child limit. I am old-fashioned about adjusting levels of expenditure. In social security, levels of expenditure are enormously high, not in proportion to national wealth but in nominal terms. Social security should be increased or decreased annually by adjusting the rates of the benefits. If money needs to be taken out of child support, there are ways of doing that without adopting ridiculous policies which will almost certainly be overturned by future Governments. There is no security or stability in this policy area. It will continue to fester, it will not prosper, and then it will change, and there will be another level of complication for the people that have to suffer the benefit changes that are the subject of this debate. We need a longer-term strategy. We need to find ways of raising resources during the CSR as well as spending them. I would lean a little more heavily on wealth rather than income to generate extra resources. There are other clever ways of doing that. I understand that extra money has to be found to correct some of these problems.

I want to make a point in passing about housing policy. In both Governments—this is over a longer period of time than just since 2010—housing costs have crept up. For low-income families, they are a significant cause of poverty. I attended an IFS presentation last week. In an article about it for the Times of 24 June, Paul Johnson wrote,

“low-earning households have housing costs a good 50 per cent higher than they were 20 years ago, while housing costs for the highest-earning households have not risen at all, on average”.

That is not easily fixed; it cannot be done overnight. However, it is absolutely insane that we spend £23 billion every year on housing benefit, and it goes to landlords— sometimes housing associations and councils, but mainly private landlords. We cannot go on like this. I do not have an answer—I am not a housing expert—but it is an area that deserves urgent, cross-departmental treatment. We need a housing policy that is worthy of the name. If we could do that, it would take a lot of pressure and some of the costs off these low-income families.

I commend the Government—because not many people do and I do not often get the chance to—on the employment rate that has been achieved, which I think is excellent. I would not have thought it would be high or have stayed that high; with a bit of luck it will continue to stay at that level. But two things flow from that. It is really good news that we have a high employment rate—the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, referred to this as well—but we need to increase hours within employment now, to deal with in-work poverty. We need to start concentrating on that, and it is quite complicated for Government to do, but we need to increase hours available for work. Secondly, we need to have more emphasis on in-work progression. That is really important.

I come back to where I started. As I recall, the National Audit Office report of June 2018 made the comment that the DWP could not really identify the vulnerable cohort particularly of its universal credit caseload. Hopefully, that is something that the Government will do. I hope that when the Secretary of State returns from Scotland, she will also explain how the Scottish child payment of £10 per week, starting in 2021, can be replicated here in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Kirkwood said what a privilege it was to follow such an expert as my noble friend Lady Thomas. I have the privilege of following them both. They are both experts in this area; I am not. I shall make a few general comments from the perspective from which I see this—casework in my role as a humble local councillor, in which I see people who get into real difficulties and need help sorting it out.

The role of jobcentres—Jobcentre Pluses, as they are now called—has changed in the many years since they were set up as labour exchanges. I have two anecdotes. The first is about a mother with two young boys. Her partner had moved out quite some time previously but was now homeless. To get his benefit, he had to put down an address. He gave the address that he used to live at with this lady and her children and, as a result, she had her benefit stopped because they said that he had moved back in. It took months to get such a little thing, which was nothing at all to do with her, sorted out. Clearly he was not living there, but that is what happened. She had a part-time job but was not getting tax credit. It got to the stage where she kept her children off school because she was not entitled to free school meals as she was not on benefits. She could not afford their dinner money or to heat the house properly, so they were being kept in bed all day. It was sorted in the end but it should not have taken so much time and trouble.

The second example is of a fairly elderly gentleman who suffered from mental difficulties and could not get out of his flat. He was not able to admit strangers into his flat and therefore failed to turn up for an interview, so that when people did a flat visit he failed to let them in and lost his benefits for a considerable time. Those are just two examples of how Jobcentre Plus people are now not there to help people. In my view, they are there to control them and, too often, to penalise and sanction them.

When the labour exchanges were first set up in 1909 by the great Liberal Government, they were a tremendous step forward because they meant that jobs could be advertised for free by employers in a central exchange where people could go to find out what there was. Before then, a lot of people simply had to tramp the streets from one mill to another, or to a factory or whatever, knocking on the doors and saying, “Have you got a job, please?” The exchanges were not perfect and faced a lot of political opposition from the Tories and the Labour Party at various times, but overall they were a great success. They were turned into employment exchanges, which was largely a change of name, and then into jobcentres, where the administration of the benefits system and the system of advertising jobs were put together.

I wish any noble Lord who wants to go into a so-called Jobcentre Plus with a client now the best of luck. You would first have to argue your way in—to argue that you are allowed in with somebody to help them. If you overcome that argument, you would then find that the centre is actually a means of administering the benefits system. These centres do two particular things to people. First, they will try to put them on training courses, some of which are on how to apply for jobs. In my experience of talking to friends about them, many of the courses provide training in doing things that those people will never be able to do well. If they manage to understand things such as managing a simple spreadsheet, they will never get a job that requires that kind of training. However, there may be others that are more useful.

Secondly, people have to spend a lot of time applying for jobs online and proving that they have done this. Instead of tramping the streets, as people had to do before 1909, they now sit at computer screens applying for jobs—we all know that people who advertise jobs now get large numbers of applications—which, in most cases, they will never get. There is a huge amount of wasted time and effort in the system. As I said, I do not believe that the fundamental job of a so-called Jobcentre Plus is helping and supporting people any more; it is about controlling and, too often, penalising people.

I agree very much with everything that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester said about the two-child limit. I have a copy here of the report that he referred to, All Kids Count: The Impact of the Two-Child Limit after Two Years. I recommend that everybody reads that report and wondered whether I should say a few things about it but he said it all. The only thing I want to add is how ludicrous it is that we invite some of the most vulnerable families in the world—refugees from Syria, for example—to come and live in this country, and then impose something like the two-child limit on them.

Again, looking back in history, the present system goes back to the introduction of the family allowance by the Labour Government in 1946, based on proposals that originally came in the report from that great liberal of the last century, William Beveridge. But when that allowance was originally introduced, it was the other way round. The first child did not get the benefit, as it was assumed that it was the subsequent children who really needed it and that they would be in poverty if a family had more than one child. In my own family, I remember the great glee there was in 1956 when the eldest child in the family—that is, me—became eligible for family allowance. For my mother, that was a great step forward. The point about family allowance was that it went to the mother and was paid in cash every week. That made it an unbelievable addition to the resources that she had. In some families, it meant the children could be brought up—I would not say in relative affluence, but certainly out of poverty in the circumstances of the day.

I am told that only 60% of universal credit now goes to the main carer, who is usually the woman, but not necessarily nowadays, as we know families have changed. But it is not the same benefit it used to be. We had battles over the years on family allowance and child benefit. I go back to battles in the 1960s and 1970s, and I remember working then with the Church of England and Child Poverty Action Group. Some things seemed to go round and round, and never change. We all ought to unite and campaign, across the parties, whoever we are, to abolish this two-child limit. It really is ridiculous, because it undermines the fundamental principle of the benefit, which is that the resources should go to the children. You cannot say that they should go only to the children of families of two and not to families of four, because families of four will clearly be in more difficult financial circumstances. It is a top priority for this to happen.