Welfare Reform

Lord Katz Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

My Lords, we have 10 minutes left. We have plenty of time to get everybody in if we are orderly about it. Let us hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser.

[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

Thank you very much. I declare my interest as chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland. I want to continue in the tone of my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott and support the Minister on the importance of supporting people to work. She will know, because she confirmed in a Written Question to me in April, that the average waiting time for applicants on Access to Work to receive a decision is 84.6 days, and 62,000 people are waiting for their applications to be processed. I will read the Minister an email I got from an adult with cerebral palsy this week, who said:

“The government has … cut Access to Work support … without any warning. All of a sudden they don’t fund things that they did until recently. So people are losing their jobs, purpose and ultimately their sanity. They will end up back on the benefits that are being cut”.


What is the Minister doing about Access to Work now, rather than waiting for all the various reviews?

UK Poverty 2025

Lord Katz Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I did not say “£20 billion”; bear with me.

The noble Baroness raises an important point. The Child Poverty Unit is looking at the full range of tools available to it, and it will look at depth of poverty, different family types and all the different levers out there. The noble Baroness will understand that I am not in a position to make any commitments today, but we are absolutely determined to produce a child poverty strategy that will, over time, address the range of challenges in our economy and try to move us towards a sustainable alternative. We need to lift children out of the poverty into which so many were driven in recent years. We have to begin addressing this, but in a systematic and sustainable way.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

My Lords, as my noble friend has just said, the JRF report makes clear not only the lamentable performance of the previous Government over 13 years in reducing child poverty, but the importance of housing costs and especially social rents in ameliorating poverty among those in work and out of work. Does the Minister agree that the Government’s noble ambition of building 1.5 million more homes is important, and can she tell the House how they are going to prioritise affordable and particularly social housing as part of that measure?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that excellent question. He has hit on something quite important. If we are going to try to tackle poverty, tackling the cost of housing in our society is fundamental to that, because the housing market is essentially broken. My noble friend mentioned that the Government are committed to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation, but key within that is prioritising the building of new social rented homes. We also need to do more to protect the stock of existing homes, which we are going to do by reforming right to buy.

There will be a housing strategy from this Government which will set out a long-term vision for a housing market that works for communities. It will go through the new actions we are going to take, as well as what we have done. But I can reassure my noble friend for the moment that support is available in the short term from my own department to help those who are struggling with their housing costs. For example, discretionary housing payments can help with advances, shortfalls in rent and rental deposits. We are going to tackle this, short and long term.