Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Greaves and Baroness Tyler of Enfield

Monday 23rd January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

My Lords, I support the amendment, to which my name is also attached. We have heard a lot today about fairness. It is important that people in work feel that there is fairness in terms of how much money can be received by those out of work and on benefits, and that there is a clear incentive for all those capable of work to do so in order to r themselves and their families. I place on record that I welcome the measures being taken by the Government, such as the work programme, to give intensive help and support to people needing a lot of help to get back into the jobs market.

There is another aspect to fairness, though: fairness to children, irrespective of the circumstances of their birth. I shall run through the reasons why I feel that child benefit should be exempt from the calculation of the benefit cap. First, as we have heard, it is a non-means-tested benefit paid to all households with children. We have already heard this question posed today, but is it fair that children born into small families with earnings in excess of £80,000 a year receive child benefit while those born into larger families with a benefit income of £26,000 a year do not? I do not think that that passes any fairness test.

Secondly, child benefit is paid to assist with the costs of raising children. In my view, it is not about sending signals or penalising adults who do not work—and I add that all adults who can work should do so. Thirdly, this measure would have a disproportionate impact on children. We have heard the figures from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and the right reverend Prelate, and I do not intend to go through them again. Fourthly, it is a question of a compromise solution between children in large families receiving the full current level of state support and receiving nothing at all, which I perceive to be unfair. Fifthly, reducing the impact of this policy on large families would reduce the couples penalty that is currently built into the benefit cap.

The reason why I am concerned about the current situation is the issues raised compellingly in the debate earlier by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. This is about families having to move abruptly to cheaper areas and the disruption that that will cause to children’s schooling, often halfway through a school year. It is about families feeling, rightly or wrongly, that they will have to split up because if they created two households instead of one, parents would then be entitled to £26,000 a year in benefits. That cannot be right. Experts in the field have said that there is a substantial couples penalty built into the cap that is completely at odds with my own view, and that of the Government, of the need to support strong and stable families.

I am concerned about the impact on children who might find themselves homeless, perhaps in unsuitable and expensive temporary accommodation. With children and young people’s services already very overstretched, there is a real danger of children at risk simply disappearing from view below the radar, which raises child protection and safeguarding concerns.

I will summarise by saying, as was said earlier today, that children should not be the innocent victims of this policy. The vulnerability of children is very important to people on these Benches, and I look forward to hearing what safeguards the Minister has to offer in this area. I heard him say in the previous debate that he saw the transitional issues as a second-order issue. I do not consider the welfare of children to be a second-order issue at all.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have not spoken in the Welfare Reform Bill debates so far and I will be brief now. On the specific issue of child benefit, the Government seem to have got it seriously wrong. What is being proposed undermines the whole principle on which child benefit—and before that, as many of us will remember, the family allowance—has been based. If the Government are going to do that, I fear that that is the beginning of a slippery slope, and they will have to explain to us very carefully why they think the basic principles no longer apply.

In illustration, I go back to the example given by the noble Lord, Lord Best, about typical, ordinary—perhaps very ordinary—accommodation in the East End. There has been lots of fancy new development in the East End in the past decade or two, but most of it is still not regarded as being the most desirable part of London. People living in other parts of London in particular usually find themselves paying a great deal more than £350 a week for an ordinary two or perhaps three-bedroom flat. According to the paper today, for a four-bedroom house in the least salubrious part of Kingston—I did not know that such places existed, but it appears that they do—£400 a week is not unusual. That is four times what you would pay for an ordinary, perfectly decent house in my part of the world, but there you go.

If as a family whose benefits are being capped you receive £500 a week, and you are paying out £400 a week for rent, that leaves you £100 for everything else. I challenge any Members of your Lordships’ House to tell us how well they would do at bringing up a family of two, three or four—or perhaps more—children, plus one or two adults in the house, on £100 a week. It can be done, and many people in many parts of the world survive on far less than that, but this country is now almost the most prosperous that it has even been, if you take away the last five years. We are still incredibly well-off. If Members of your Lordships’ House think back—most of us are getting on a bit—to our childhoods and the circumstances that we were brought up in, they will see that this country is now incredibly rich and well-off. To require families to bring children up on £100 a week for everything apart from their rent is unacceptable.

When the media are encouraged, I have to say by some politicians in this country, to rant and rave about how these people are getting £26,000 a week and that everyone ought to be able to live on that—I apologise, £26,000 a year; some people are on £26,000 a week, but they are rather different—the debate really ought to start at what you have left after your rent. The state of the private housing market, and indeed rents in the public sector, is not the fault of people who have to live in these houses. There is a scandalous situation in which commercial landlords are ripping off people—indeed, they are ripping off the state, if people are getting housing benefit—by charging ludicrously high rents that are not justified by the cost of maintaining those properties but that are what the market will bear. If the Government and the rest of us want to do something about the state of the private housing market, we should look at housing policy and perhaps at the way in which the private housing market works. But that is a different issue all together. It is not the fault of the people. To try to do this—to try to force rents down or to try to regulate the markets and move people around the country by capping the benefits of the people living in those houses so that they can no longer live there—is penalising the tenants when the people who ought to be penalised are the landlords.

I have digressed a little from child benefit. I apologise for that. Child benefit, as my noble friend and others have said, has always been a non-means-tested benefit that goes as of right to families with children. It has always been paid on a per capita, per child, basis. That is a fundamental principle. The first child gets more nowadays, then each child after that gets the same, in order to assist the work of bringing up that child. To abolish child benefit, which is what is actually being done in this Bill, for people who are at the benefit cap and who are getting other benefits that take them up and beyond that cap, as is highly likely, is a fundamental attack on the whole principle of child benefit.

This ought to be resisted. Your Lordships ought to resist it, and we really ought to ask the Government very seriously to think again on this particular issue.