Welfare Assistance Schemes

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, as always it is a great pleasure to follow my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett. I share her concern. This is a very risky area of policy to continue in the current vein. I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for drawing this important matter to the attention of the House.

The first point I want to make is that these are not local welfare services; these are local crisis and emergency services. When the right reverend Prelate went into his speech, he lapsed out of the jargon into crisis and emergency services. He is absolutely right about that. I hate the word “welfare” because it is so pejorative and indicative of a patronising and wholly inappropriate way of treating people in emergencies. Language and approach are all-important in this.

I absolutely agree that it is not good enough to say that £74 million is better than a slap in the face with a cold fish. We need this to be put on an ongoing basis, and it is incumbent on the Government to do so. Of course they cannot commit future Governments—I will be interested in what the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, who is also my friend, says about what the future might hold. It is no good saying, “We’ll put this in place and see what happens”. This is the safety net, the last resort. People have nowhere else to go and there is no other port of call. Leaving this to local authorities and not ring-fencing the money is taking a huge risk. The five questions that the right reverend Prelate asked are interesting. If the Minister has not got time to deal with them adequately, I hope he will write to the right reverend Prelate and the rest of us to give us some comfort because all these questions are absolutely appropriate and need an answer.

The context for all this has changed quite dramatically. We underestimate the level of household debt being experienced by the lowest one or two deciles of household income distribution. People are now using credit cards to pay for weekly day-to-day expenditure. I have been as interested as my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, in all this for more than 35 years. I have never known a situation such as now where households are making ends meet by borrowing money. You cannot do that indefinitely. We are storing up trouble for ourselves if we do not understand that.

Emergency and crisis provision takes no account of the ability to enter into any kind of preventive and advisory support and sustaining services. I do not think local authorities should provide them; central government needs to do it. We might be doing some of that with universal credit—if it works, when it works. Universal credit’s so-called local delivery, the support system which is applied to claimants at their universal credit application point, is something we need to work on to make sure that it dovetails with what is being provided by local authorities.

Coming from Scotland, you might expect me to say this, and everybody else has said it so I do not want to be left out: Scotland does some of these things better. The national monitoring framework is an essential tool that must be put in place in the future to make sure that things get done right. In the old days, there used to be systems of appeal. There used to be a Social Fund commissioner whose responsibility it was year on year to produce a report for Parliament saying what he thought was being done with the increased money that used to be available. Now we have nothing of that kind. There are no appeals and there is no guarantee that people have any certainty about where they can go if their applications for so-called local welfare provision payments fail.

I endorse everything that has been said so far, but I want to make two extra points. First, DCLG will need to accept responsibility, and I hope the Minister will, for the co-ordination of all the agencies that are now involved in this area of public policy, not just DWP and the LGA but including the devolved Administrations and civil society. Somebody has to co-ordinate things. Secondly, I hear on the grapevine that Northern Ireland has just agreed a settlement that gives discretionary grants for community distribution. I do not know how much money is involved, but I would be very pleased to hear whether that is a bit of best practice which might be considered for sharing in the future. I hope that DCLG and the ministerial team involved in this will look carefully at these things. I hope we will get some answers to these important questions. I am much less happy about getting £74 million because I do not think it is enough.