Older Persons: Provision of Public Services

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to contribute to this debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, whose timing is always politically immaculate and who makes this subject more apposite today than it was last week.

It is an important subject. Both of these concessions form an important part of the network of social protection that the country has embedded in its social security set-up. I have a question which may sound technical—but that does not mean that I do not concur with all the powerful and emotional speeches that have been made.

My noble friend Lord Addington made a point about the BBC not being the DWP. This is passporting that it is getting involved in, with pension credit guarantee; it is passporting undertaken by a non-government department. Passporting cannot be done all that efficiently by government departments; they are struggling to make passporting work with universal credit and still trying to find solutions to some of those problems. It may be premature to ask some of these questions, but can I have an absolute assurance that, if this unfortunate plan proceeds, the Government will cross-examine the BBC on how they are going to do it?

Means-tested benefits always involve cliff edges; they involve disincentives to saving in this case, and they are difficult to administer. We already know that pension credit take-up for 2016-17 was only 60%. If we are looking for extra money and there is a shortfall in take-up of pension credit of that dimension, surely the answer is to get more people to claim what they are entitled to. Then we will all have more money and do not have to start doing the strange, untoward things being contemplated now.

There are 1.2 million entitled non-recipients of pension credit. A question that might occur to people is: what is happening to them? There is an unclaimed amount of £3 billion for 2016-17, and that has been on the books for some time. What is the administrative framework for how this works? The whole question of enforcement comes to mind. Working with households of 75 year-olds often means dealing with advisers and family members, so implicit consent will be necessary to make this work. There will be appeal and verification processes. What happens when one reaches the “can’t pay, won’t pay” brigade? Are we seriously saying that the BBC will take some of these people to court to get the money back? It is deeply concerning that it is assumed that the pension credit link will solve the problem. It will be very difficult. I wish the BBC well, but I do not think it will work as easily as it thinks.

My next point will not please the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, but sometimes I do not. Sir David Clementi, the BBC chairman, has said:

“The Government could of course choose to step in and close the gap from their own resources”.


My personal view—it is not a party view—is that if the upcoming spending review is looking at the triple lock, which is guaranteed only until 2020 anyway, restricting the triple lock to a link with earnings for valorising pensions in future would produce a significant sum of money, which could certainly pay for all this and probably more. It is time to start looking at such things. If my preferred method of raising money, which is increasing the uptake of pension credit, does not work, it is worth looking at the triple lock to find some extra resources to help Sir David out of his difficulty.

The final thing to say, as everybody before me has, is that this is the Government’s responsibility. It lies squarely at the Government’s door. If the Minister thinks that he will get away with shuffling off the blame politically to the BBC in the elections and doorstep discussions that we will all have in the future, he is wrong. This will stick. It has happened on his watch, and his Government will have to answer for it in the fullness of time.

Digital Understanding

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, I am happy to concur, as always, with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, has said. His remarks are well worth careful study. I want to draw colleagues’ attention to something that those who work with the Parliamentary Digital Service will already know—that tomorrow is the last day for our retiring director, Mr Rob Greig. As a former chair of the Information Committee I shall take this opportunity to wish him well in his career and thank him for the leadership—which is worth mentioning in dispatches—that he gave to the response to the recent cyberattack. Without his leadership that would have had a much worse impact on our institution. He has done two and a half years, and he has made a difference. We wish him well, and thank him for his work.

I was particularly interested in the reference by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, to the way in which we run Parliament. Listening to the debate, I realise that with her, with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, and others, we have an enormous amount of talent among the membership of your Lordships’ House. I am also pleased that the Senior Deputy Speaker has taken enough of an interest in this debate to be present today, because he has a key role in trying to make sure that we do business in a way that is fit for purpose in a digital age.

I agree with some of the speeches made earlier. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, made a powerful speech, and he has done great work in dealing with training needs. He says that we need to catch up with Estonia, and he is correct. That is how bad things are. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans made a powerful speech about fairness. Obviously, I would subscribe to that, because if we in this House are passing laws relying on “digital by default”, it is not right if we do not know what we are asking our clients—applicants for universal credit—to know and understand, because we need a better grounding. We need not only a grounding but an understanding—that is a good word; it is not just digital skills that we need, but an understanding of what a modern Parliament needs.

My plea, following on from the important speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, is that, working with the Lord Speaker—I know that he has a genuine interest—and the new interim director of the PDS, we should be operating with a much closer interest by Members to try to make Parliament much more effectively digital. If we do not do that, we will be left behind. The institution, qua institution, will become more and more irrelevant to the needs, political and otherwise, of the day. I suggest starting some kind of interest group—it could be online, virtual, or anything we like—to bring together some of the collective massive talent we have, and try to encourage other Members who are perhaps less familiar with technology, and do not feel as comfortable with it, to engage in a conversation, so that we can all not only improve our own individual contributions to the work of this important institution, but produce a better result for the British public. That is an important priority for the Government.