Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it has been a long evening and we are now in injury time. I will try to dispose of my winding-up speech with as much dispatch as I can. I am bound to warn the Minister at the beginning that, as my noble friend Lady Manzoor said at the end of her excellent speech, my noble friend Lady Thomas is not able to be with us because she managed to break her right patella while opening her mail. She obviously gets more exciting mail than I do, but the message I got said specifically that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, must understand that she still has one whole patella left. I do not know with what malice this was meant, but I pass it on, for what it is worth. She will be watching us on Parliament TV as we speak.

I characterise the Bill as one that would never have seen the light of day had any Liberal Democrats been left in the Government. I could say more about that, but I will save it for Committee, where we will all be manning the barricades yet again. I look forward to that. However, there is an unreality about the debate. It has been a very well-informed debate—I would expect nothing else—but we are all in the difficulty that we do not know what is happening in the comprehensive spending review. That will change the game in a way that will not help.

I see all this as a second squeeze. The first squeeze in 2010 was more understandable. This will be a harder sell. The Government will find this very difficult politically when it all beds down and the consequences are fully known and understood. I say that not just because of the deficit reduction programme embedded in the Bill; it is on top of everything else. One of my biggest disappointments in the coalition Government was that, despite the DWP having 200-odd researchers, they never got round to the interrelated, total evaluation of how some of phase 1 of the squeeze in the last Parliament was affecting individual, low-income families. We still do not know that. We are now putting extra pressure on low-income families who are in a much worse position than they were in 2010 when this went through its first iteration. Another thing that is different is not just that they are worse off than they were, but that the public services on which they could rely in 2010 are much degraded. That is almost as big a factor as some of the reductions in finance available to these low-income groups.

We really need to move in this direction with massive caution. I know and trust the Minister. I know that this has less to do with him than it does some other people, but he understands the importance of monitoring, piloting, watching and learning. He gets that. We are relying on him to maintain as much of that as he can keep hold of. Obviously he is not in charge of everything —I do not think that he would be here in the first place if he was—but we will need him to be in listening mode. Committee on the Welfare Reform Bill in 2012 was a model of what a Minister should do in response to some constructive but positive criticism from an Opposition who, I am sure, will continue to be constructive in the way they approach Committee on the Bill.

We have 32 clauses. I hope that the business managers understand that we need time for the noble Lord, Lord Freud, to work his listening magic. He needs time to reflect on what we say to him. The business managers may say, “32 clauses; we can do that in three or four weeks”. We seriously need to take time on this. My former colleague in the House of Commons, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, spoke about being a former Chief Whip. Once a Chief Whip, always a Chief Whip; I was a Chief Whip in my time. I would not like to be whipping the government side.

Although some powerful and well-informed speeches were made by the Opposition, they were all about the need to get reports made to Parliament. Annual reports are terrific, but they change absolutely nothing and they make no one any better off. That does not mean that they are not important, but they are insignificant compared to some of the other changes that got the House’s attention. Clearly, I consider those to be Clauses 13 and 14. There has been a powerful set of speeches from all sides of the House about the need to change the provisions for the ESA WRAG group clients. That is clearly something we need to think about.

The child poverty measures will take time. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, made a powerful speech, and I always agree with everything that she says. In particular, however, I agree with the reference to the LSE British Politics and Policy survey by Nick Roberts and Kitty Stewart, which looked at the results of the consultation on child poverty indicators. They looked at 230 of the 257 submissions under a freedom of information request. They said:

“There is very strong support for the existing measures, and near universal support for keeping income poverty and material deprivation at the heart of poverty measurement”.

That does not exclude any of the other things mentioned, a point made earlier. I am in favour of expanding some of the measures. What I am absolutely not in favour of, and I do not know anybody sensible who is, is ditching income. It does not make any sense at all. It makes us the laughing-stock of our European neighbours. We have academics—the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, is one of them—who understand these things better than anybody else in the world. Theirs were among the 230 submissions that were looked at by the LSE group, and that was their conclusion. It was a serious piece of work looking at what we need to do to get that set of indicators correct.

I want to say something else in passing—I have no time to develop it. Parts of the Bill affect Scotland. Parts of it, however, do not. I invite the noble Lord, Lord Freud, to come to Drumchapel and Easterhouse. He and I will go around advocating low-welfare and low-tax policies in the coming May elections in Scotland for Holyrood. Let us see how we get on. I promise the House that this could be used by the Scottish nationalist propagandists. They are grudge experts; we know that. This is meat and drink to them. It will make the job of the unionist parties, including the Conservative Party in Scotland, a lot more difficult than it otherwise might be. There are unintended consequences that we need to deal with. This is a very important Bill. I could say more, but I hope the Minister will be able to arrange some serious time in Committee to deal with this.

As a final point, I want to explore the idea of preventive spending. The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, whose maiden speech was excellent, and whose work I know—although I do not always agree with her conclusions—made a very powerful speech. What she was actually saying was that if we were cleverer about evaluating the outcomes of preventive spending, the kind of things that she does would be an absolute no-brainer. However, they cost money and you cannot do bespoke preventive spending on an invest-to-save basis without giving some basic income support to keep people alive while you are doing it. I want to use Committee to explore some ideas about that through probing amendments. I hope that we will have a constructive Committee. We need to: this is an important Bill. It is important that we get it right. It would not have happened if there had been a Liberal Democrat in the Government.