Free School Lunches and Milk, and School and Early Years Finance (Amendments Relating to Universal Credit) (England) Regulations 2018

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2018 Lords Chamber

On the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, about trying to find an alternative to the cliff edge, he will know far better than me that it is extremely complicated to find a way of breaking a total cliff edge, but the system is set to be fairer than its predecessor.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

I do not think that the Minister has dealt with the absolutely crucial point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, because if we do not have a mechanism that assimilates and deals with passporting benefits, there may be other outstanding issues that will come along and prove to be not cliff edges but waterfalls—I like that description. Will the Minister commit to refer the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, to the Social Security Advisory Committee? That is the best vehicle for coming up with an evaluation of the work-disincentive effect that these waterfalls and cliff edges are guaranteed to introduce long-term and in perpetuity into universal credit, which is a bad thing for the Government’s own policy.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I am happy to relay those concerns and to take the matter away for further consideration.

Finally, I would like to highlight the five key improvements made by this Conservative-led Government for early years and child care. I give credit to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, as part of his party’s involvement in these important reforms, but I believe that it is incredibly important to put these into context. First, there is the 15 hours a week of free early education for disadvantaged two year-olds, which did not exist before 2010. Secondly, there is the universal 15 hours a week free childcare for three and four year-olds, now with the early years pupil premium. Thirdly, there are an additional 15 hours a week of childcare for working parents. Fourthly, through universal credit, up to 85% of childcare costs can be reimbursed, which is a higher percentage than was ever available under tax credits. Finally, nearly 1 million more families will gain support through tax-free childcare than through the existing voucher scheme.

I hope these five elements exemplify the efforts this Government have made to support vulnerable families. The continued provision of free school meals to children in households that might not be able to afford them remains of the utmost importance, and I would stress that—the utmost importance. Free school meals have always been provided to children who need them most, and we want to make sure that as many eligible children as possible continue to claim them.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, and I absolutely concur with the approach he has taken in directing the Government’s attention to the fact that the landscape constitutionally has changed across and throughout the United Kingdom. It affects not only devolution and some of the important policy areas he mentioned such as higher education, but all the decentralisation measures which both in principle and philosophically are probably right to contemplate. That is because if anything, the United Kingdom is an over-centralised state. We must be careful about “powerhouses”, private prisons and private schools, all of which individually and on a freestanding basis might make sense, but do not necessarily all fit together. The House should be mindful of that during the rest of this year, as we consider the content of the Queen’s Speech. The Government therefore have a responsibility to pay attention to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Murphy.

The Government should also make it clear that they will not totally ignore local authorities. Local government is part of the constitutional warp and weft of all parts of the United Kingdom, and there is a sense that things are being done over the heads of duly elected members of local authorities. We on these Benches pay a lot more than lip service to the crucial work that councillors do for their communities. I am therefore pleased to support the main contention set out in the noble Lord’s speech.

This Queen’s Speech has no real edge to it. I have been reading Queen’s Speeches for many years, and in my judgment this one is limited in scope and is a rehash of previous plans. I hope that the Minister, in her reply—it is a tough task to respond to a debate of this range and depth; I would not have her job but I am sure she will make a fine fist of it—will take note of the three powerful speeches made from our Front Bench. They were all, in their different ways about investment and pressures in the system—whether in the health service, the business world or our cultural and media spheres—and they were all mindful of the ever-present austerity as we go through the rest of this Parliament. A worry that we all share on these Benches is that people think the economy is better, the job has been done, the Chancellor is going to get his big prize of a balanced budget some time soon and everything is going to be fine. That is not the reality in the country, and the House needs to bear that in mind when it considers the detail of the legislative programme that has been laid before it.

Infrastructure will be a crucial issue for the country over the next couple of years. There may not be any primary legislation to deal with it, but we need to note that infrastructure is not just about roads and railways; it is also about broadband. I would like housing and the capital work necessary to deal with climate change issues to be adequately considered as part of the infrastructure plan. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has been listening intently to the debate until just now. We are lucky that the noble Lord is playing such a key role for the Government. I applaud that because he is an excellent person, and I hope the Government will take proper account of anything he says.

At the same time, I hope the Government are realistic about what they can do. There are many examples of claims and counter-claims being made in press releases that the public do not actually believe any more. Government departments—or perhaps spads—always overclaim and underdeliver when it should be the other way around. I am sure that the Minister knows that, because she has a lot of experience in business. I hope she can help on that issue.

I want to say a word of support for the comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. We have often been in the same camp during many campaigns over the months and years. The right reverend Prelate was absolutely right to say that austerity is getting worse because of the reductions in the social security budget, which are creating adversity for many low-income families. As he rightly said, universal credit is being stripped out. I support everything he said, and I will work shoulder to shoulder with him to make sure that the Government take account of these issues.

A lot of statistics fly around, and people talk about a few billions here and a few billions there, but to reinforce the point made by the right reverend Prelate, as recently as this Monday the Office for National Statistics published some information about persistent poverty rates in the United Kingdom and the European Union. In 2014, 6.5% of the UK population was in persistent poverty, equivalent to approximately 3.9 million people. Colleagues will remember that persistent poverty is defined as experiencing relative low income in the current year and in at least two out of the three preceding years. That is a serious situation for a country such as ours. Interestingly, the ONS figures also point out that persistent poverty bears down unduly on women and single-person households. We do not do that well in comparison with our European sister countries on the issue of experiencing poverty at least once in the past three or four years. We have work to do.

Austerity is still with us. That will play into the Government’s life chances strategy, which the right reverend Prelate also mentioned. I am certainly prepared to work with this strategy. The troubled families issues are important and the strategy is effective, but mentoring and early years assistance cannot put food on the table and pay rent. If people in low-income households cannot put food on the table and pay rent, they are under stress, which causes heartache and marriage breakdown. I know that that is not in the Government’s long-term interests or plans.

Finally, the disability employment gap, which I think the right reverend Prelate also mentioned, is a key measure for the rest of the Parliament. I am sure that that view is shared across the House. It is a very ambitious target but no reference is made to it in the Queen’s Speech. There is the White Paper, expected later in the summer, which some of us will look at very carefully. Innovation and sensitivity will be required, and we will need to avoid the kind of mistakes we made in reassessing the PIP 50-metre test to 20 metres, for example. But even if the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions uses the time between now and the summer to come up with a plan to address that point, it cannot possibly be done without extra investment. We certainly wait with anticipation to see what he comes up with in the summer. I hope that that will lead to legislation—the “other measures” that the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, referred to.

The Speech is not mindful enough of the continuing pressure on low-income families and deprived and persistent poverty groups. In the coming weeks and months, the House would do well to recognise that in considering the detail of the Bills in the Queen’s Speech.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Hudnall, and I agree wholeheartedly with the majority of her speech, particularly her final point supporting the BBC. I am very pleased to take part in this debate. I am deeply relieved. The ministerial appointment that I was looking for most after the election was that of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, because without him universal credit would be in a much worse place than it is now. He still has a job on his hands, but I am really grateful for and encouraged by his return. I was even more encouraged—if I can put it that way—by the addition to the ministerial team of the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann. She must not give up her campaigning zeal in her Twitter feed. If any departmental official tries to turn the noble Baroness’s gas to a small peep—and knowing her as I do I know it would be a brave person who did that—they would doing the nation a great disservice. I hope she will continue to inform her followers as she has been doing over the past few years. She has an important role in pensions, and we look forward to working with her in future.

I want to lay down a couple of markers about things that I think are really important. The theme of the Queen’s Speech that came through to me was the desire of the new Government to develop a one-nation approach, and that is correct. It is certainly correct coming from a Scot who experienced the election. I have done 10 now, one way and another, and it was in many ways one of the hardest, and not for just the most obvious reason. I found the tenor of the background environment very difficult, and there are some problems there that the Government will need to deal with.

I want to spend my restricted time looking at how a one-nation approach can be applied to low-income families. It is true, and the noble Lord, Lord Freud, knows this, that active labour markets are the obvious first port of call for getting people off benefits and into work, but there are now many more working households in poverty. We must not forget that, and I fear that sometimes we do. I am looking the Minister straight in the eye when I say that the prospect of £12,000 million cuts annually over a two-year period when we still do not know the full cumulative effect of the cuts in the previous Parliament is deeply worrying.

In 2012, the Minister oversaw the Committee stage of the Welfare Reform Bill in a masterly way which improved the Bill, but it was not helped by financial privilege being thrown at us from the other place. I hope he will adopt that approach—as much as he can because I am not stupid and know that all this is Treasury-driven—in trying to explain in good time to Members from all sides of the House the options that are being canvassed and give us a chance to think about them, reflect and give him both publicly and privately our views about how they can be done. I think two years is impossible. Trying to do this by 2017 is just impossible. In a powerful speech, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, referred to the fact that there is a smaller pool of benefit recipients from which we are deriving this saving. It just is not safe. I promise the Minister that my colleagues and I will work with him as energetically as we are allowed. The leader of our group, my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness, was right to say that of course the Government have a manifesto commitment to make the saving, but they do not have any Salisbury protection for individual benefit cuts. So I say to the Minister that I will be looking to him to return to his positive and consultative approach to try to make the best of what I think will be a very bad job.

As I said earlier, I do not think that universal credit would have got past the first reset if the noble Lord had not been the Minister in charge, and I know that he is still engaged in it. People forget that the 2010 coalition settlement was based on the idea that universal credit would already be in place and helping low-income households at the margins of worklessness and benefit receipt. At the moment it is available to only 50,000 families; I know why that is, but too often we forget—certainly as far as I was concerned—that by 2015 the 2010 deal should have seen hundreds of thousands of families benefiting from universal credit, and they are not.

I urge the Minister to make as much progress as he can. People are losing confidence in this programme. The department has managed 30 significant policy changes over the past five years, with 18% less resource in the departmental expenditure limit. Most of that has worked, but universal credit is still at risk and, sadly, coming from Scotland, I know that people are beginning to lose confidence in it. We really need to concentrate on universal credit.

My final thought is that I look again to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, to work with the Treasury on this. I have just finished a fascinating session with Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles on the need for financial inclusion, and an element of that is necessary to deal with the digital divide in universal credit. Can the department please work with the Treasury in future to try to get financial inclusion more broadly based across the United Kingdom so we can ensure that people can get the full advantage of universal credit when it is rolled out across the country?

Social Justice Strategy

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. His speeches always repay careful study. He is an expert in the field of children and has made a valuable contribution to this debate. I absolutely agree with him about prevention and the importance of breaking the chain of disadvantage. I hope that the Minister will give that appropriate consideration when he reviews this important debate.

I am pleased that my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield has secured this slot. It is a bit of a graveyard slot in the parliamentary week but it means that at least we have the chance to make speeches lasting for more than four minutes. She also has huge experience in this area, and the House is indebted to her for raising this subject in the way she did. Of the many important points that she made, the most important for me was the appositeness of the timing. From a political calendar point of view, the next few months are going to be crucial not just for manifesto content, which all the parties are properly engaging in at the moment, but for the battle for public opinion, which is important. I will come back to that in a minute.

I am very pleased to welcome a new recruit to the parliamentary desperadoes who are obsessive about social security in the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely. I will sign him up as a member of this distinguished band and I look forward to his contribution. The church does absolutely excellent work in this House, dealing with what some people choose to call the “undeserving poor”. It is right and proper that it should, and it does it well. The House is indebted to it.

I should declare an interest: I am a non-executive, non-remunerated director of the Wise Group in Glasgow, which does welfare to work programmes. I derive a lot of my interest and knowledge in this subject from that work. I hope my English colleagues do not mind if I refer to the experience that we Scots have had in the recent past with the referendum. The social justice strategy has very important elements that are deployed by the Department for Work and Pensions and others which straddle the border.

The referendum was a salutary experience for me. I have looked at social security issues for more than 30 years, man and boy, in this place and elsewhere. A message of alienation that I have never experienced before emanated from some significant parts of the hard-pressed households, particularly in communities in west central Scotland and Dundee. Some of that was politically excited and stimulated by some of the participants in that debate, but I do not want to get into that now. Significant numbers of people who do not vote at elections sent the institutions of both House of Parliament a message that they will vote for anything that will get some measure of hope into their lives, which is currently absent and to which general elections do not, as they see it, provide any answer. That is my anecdotal experience and it is difficult to prove. I was in south-east Scotland for most of the time and, as the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, knows, we are much more genteel folk in south-east Scotland than in the central belt. However, there is a significant change that I do not think is specific to west central Scotland. The same would have been the case in Liverpool, if an event of that kind had taken place in that context.

The political process has to understand that we need to deal with this alienation in a way that we have not done before. I have spent my time advocating better provision for social security by looking at rates, benefits and entitlements. The kind of work that my noble friend Lady Tyler is engaged in professionally concerns support, as well as the cash transfers that the social security system provides. I have now come to the conclusion that interventionist support at a public service level across the border in some of the ways that she very expertly described is now more important than it has ever been, partly because of austerity.

Some public services are now degraded to the point of danger. That is going to get worse. I heard someone on the “Today” programme saying that everybody knows that things are going to get worse, particularly for this cohort of the population of which I speak. If that is what we really believe, we really need to respond to that. That needs political leadership. It is a very hard thing to do: leading a country to a poorer place and expecting to get the credit at the ballot box is not a trick that has been successfully managed by anybody in political history, as far as I am aware. So there are real challenges of leadership that all the party leaders need to focus on in the coming election to deal with this.

The language that they use is important, too—a point I have made previously in this House. The tabloid press are not helpful in this regard. They have their own agenda and they poison and make much more difficult the public debate about some of these crucial issues of public priorities and expenditure. However, my view is that social protection benefits everyone. Social protection is every bit as important an expenditure priority as infrastructure. It is as important as HS2, housing and all the other things that provide physical benefits and facilities so that the Government may prosper.

The recession that we have been through would have been much, much worse without the tax credits that were introduced in a Budget in the early 2000s. People have managed to survive this recession in a way that they will not be able to in the next five years because it is planned to withdraw a lot of this support. I want to make the case for social investment and to encourage people to be brave enough to support a cohort of people who are suffering disadvantage and are very unpopular. We must make the case for those whom people call the “undeserving poor”. I do not believe that anyone can sensibly be described as that. Some families need support and people do not recognise just how many barriers they face to get to a fulfilling life.

The work that Louise Casey has been doing is exemplary; my noble friend Lady Tyler was right about that. I like her idea of a “troubled families” initiative, although I hate the term. We must find some way of describing these households that we are approaching. I have always been sceptical about the role of the state behind the front door of the family because that is the family’s business. However, I now think we need to be much more interventionist. If people said that they were willing to go down that route, there is an easy fix because the predetermining risk factors are staring us in the face. They include lack of educational qualifications, big families and, to a degree, ethnicity, which is difficult but it is there in the data. If someone has been workless for three or four years, fixing their CV will not do the job. There are multiple reasons behind these circumstances.

The work that Louise Casey is doing is not perfect yet. Trying to get the evaluating indicators of success on a payment by results basis has not been properly fine-tuned. The private sector and, indeed, the non-profit and charitable sectors do very valuable work, but how they get value for money and how they can work with payment by results contracts—because many of them need money upfront—still needs work. It all needs investment and it all needs to start really quite soon. I think we will find that, over the next five years, people will face much more financially difficult circumstances.

Everyone knows that in the next 12 months interest rates will increase. Household debt is a dramatically difficult problem for many lower-income households. We may not be talking about big numbers—maybe 10% or 15% of the case load. Maybe the income decile distribution catches it or maybe it does not. I should not like to put a figure on how many families we are talking about. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, chairs StepChange, which produced a very good report in the past few days about the extent of debt. I am studying it and I hope that colleagues in the House who are interested will read it because it repays careful study. Debt in individual households is ignored by the current social security system. For my money, it is necessary to become engaged with some of these families who are facing all sorts of difficulties, tease out their exact levels of debt and start helping them to deal with it. Until the last couple of years, the government service on financial inclusion went through a phase of quite high activity with a task force, but I have seen nothing much since. I have just joined a financial inclusion commission which is doing some work looking at this issue. I think that the Government have lost the thread of the importance of getting proper money advice across to people. The credit union money has been put in and that is welcomed, but it is not enough. We need to think more about that kind of thing.

Finally, I notice that at the end of the Social Justice Outcomes Framework we talk about social investment. I do not think that the potential for that has been realised. I do not know whether that is partly because of the commercial and economic environment that we are in, with there being not an awful lot of money to invest. There is a huge amount of potential in all sorts of areas—not just in connection with ex-offenders, which I know is the area that people have been working on most directly and most immediately. A huge amount could be done to promote social investment, getting the not-for-profit and charitable sector engaged. There is an enormous amount of work to do.

Debates such as this one are very important, but I think that we have to be honest with one another about how difficult things are going to be. Only if we acknowledge how hard some of these families’ circumstances are will we have any chance at all of having a public debate and getting more public support for a cost-benefit analysis of the preventive expenditure that we heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, as well as getting young people properly upskilled so that they can become productive, wealth-creating individuals. My pension depends on wealth creation from some of the youngsters who are currently NEETs. That is not a comfortable position for a man of my age to be in. Therefore, I think that we all have to work hard and try to get something done.

Again, I am very grateful to my noble friend for giving us the opportunity to discuss this important subject this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

I think that I must continue. These are the only ways in which we can break that dreadful cycle of generational unemployment and/or family breakdown to which many noble Lords have referred. That is why this Government have the biggest programme of educational reform for 70 years in train, and substantial welfare reforms under way.

Over the course of this Parliament my department has brought in a substantial number of reforms to support better educational outcomes for all children, but particularly for the most disadvantaged. We have introduced the pupil premium to ensure that the most disadvantaged children realise their potential. Funding for this will reach £2.5 billion in the coming year: £1,300 for primary pupils, £935 for secondary, and £1,900 for looked-after children. More children from deprived backgrounds than ever before will benefit from free childcare at the same time as we strengthen the quality of early years education. From this September, every pupil in reception, year 1 and year 2 will receive free school meals, which will make a huge difference to ensuring that every child, regardless of family circumstances, is ready to learn.

Noble Lords will know how passionate I am about the academy and free schools programme. We have created more than 1,000 new sponsored academies, turning around schools that had previously been failing for years and which often serve the most deprived communities. We have approved 363 new free schools, including 39 alternative provision schools, 22 special schools, 56 university technical colleges and 46 studio schools. When open, those will provide 250,000 new places in total, the vast majority of which are in places of need. Some 25% of open free schools have been judged outstanding, making them our top performing group of non-selective schools.

We are also reforming the curriculum and exams, both academic and vocational. Increasingly schools are doing more EBacc subjects, giving pupils, particularly those from deprived backgrounds, the essential cultural capital they need, given that they do not get it at home. We have dramatically overhauled vocational qualifications and substantially expanded and improved apprenticeships. We are reforming teacher training with far more of it conducted in school. We have introduced bursaryships into teacher recruitment, and have introduced phonics into primary schools. We are also investing in the school estate and are arresting the sharp decline in our relative educational performance that took place in the first decade of this century.

I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely on his excellent maiden speech and thank him for all the work he does in support of social justice, but particularly in the field of education, with academies and in general, and I wish him well in his new position as chair of the National Society. The church’s contribution to education in this country is long-standing, very substantial and highly impactful, as it is of course in its work on poverty in general.

So far as welfare is concerned, at the beginning of this Parliament it was clear that a new approach to supporting the most disadvantaged individuals in society was needed. Too many people spent their lives moving between different support mechanisms, never receiving the support to make a long-standing difference to their life. Too many people were faced with multiple barriers to improving; for example, poor education and lack of skills, drug or alcohol addiction, a criminal record, lack of stable family support, no stable home, problem debt and health problems. Those problems do not exist independently of each other. They can interact, and together create a vicious cycle which is hard to break out of. The piecemeal approach of the past did not effectively tackle the multiple problems people face, so this Government wanted to look for new ways to tackle these issues. We wanted to deliver real and sustained change.

First, we recognised that this was not something that could be solved by central government alone—the old top-down approach had not worked. We needed to involve local authorities, the voluntary sector and business; in other words, we needed a community-based approach. We needed to ensure that we got value for money—we knew that large sums had been wasted in this area in the past. We had to build an evidence base of which interventions work, solutions had to be on a payment-by-results basis, and we had to measure the progress we made against key indicators.

Most importantly, our reforms needed to achieve a long-lasting recovery rather than management of entrenched problems. That meant looking for and treating the cause of the problems rather than the symptoms. It also means intervening early in people’s lives to prevent problems in the first place. For example, we can work with a drug user to help them tackle their addiction. However, to turn their life around we need to ensure that they have stable housing and the skills to find employment, and we need to tackle other underlying health problems. Without that rounded support it is unlikely that an individual will be able to make a long-standing change to their life. We are delivering the strategy through growing the social investment market, using payment-by-results models and collaborating with local authorities, the voluntary sector and employers. These are not easy problems to tackle and there is no quick fix; making our vision a reality will take time. However, we have made great progress towards our goals. Our first progress report was published in April 2013. This autumn we will publish the second social justice progress report, giving details of how we are implementing the strategy and our achievements so far. This November also sees our third annual social justice conference. This brings together delegates from government, the private sector, the voluntary sector and most importantly the people whose lives we are transforming to work together to deliver social justice.

I will give a few examples of the progress we have made across the social justice strategy. The family environment is the foundation of a child’s life and we are committed to supporting safe and loving family relationships. Relationship support policy is being brought under one department, with DWP investing £30 million to successfully deliver marriage preparation, couple counselling and relationship education. However, when relationships break down, we are trying to minimise the negative impacts on children by promoting more collaboration. The child maintenance system has been reformed to encourage separated couples to agree their own arrangements and reduce disputes.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

In relation to child maintenance, has the Minister seen that the first results of the applications that have come in since charging began earlier this year indicate a drop of 38% in parents pursuing formal applications? The Government thought that it would be 12%. Is that not something of deep concern as it will exacerbate child poverty?

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend makes a particular point on a particular statistic. I shall take it away and write to him.

With the new Children and Families Act we are introducing a requirement to consider mediation before taking action through the courts. There is also better access to information for couples through the Sorting out Separation online service. Care leavers are at an increased risk of falling into a cycle of disadvantage, given the lack of support as they move into adulthood. JCP can now identify care leavers in the benefit system and offer more tailored support through earlier referral to the Work Programme. Following the launch of the first ever cross-government care leaver strategy in 2013, a further One Year On report will be published on 29 October and will set out how each department has met its milestones and what more will be done to continue the push for better services for care leavers. As part of care leavers week later this month, Ministers and care leavers will be undertaking exchange visits. These types of activities help to bring the voice of the people closer to policy-making. That is so important, as my noble friend Lady Tyler has said.

Earlier this year, it was my privilege to lead the Children and Families Bill, now an Act, through this House, a key plank of which was the new “staying put” duty on local authorities. It will mean that young people in foster placements can continue to live with their former foster carers beyond the age of 18, when that is what they both want to do, providing them with the opportunity to experience the stability and security of family life enjoyed by their peers.

Social justice is underpinned by work. This is the best route out of poverty. Work increases self-esteem; introduces routine into what can be chaotic lives; the individual becomes a valued member of society rather than sitting on the fringe, and they are a role model for their children. Work can replace the vicious cycle of disadvantage with a virtuous one. DWP’s innovation fund is working with 14,200 young people who are already or are at risk of becoming NEETs to improve their lifetime employment prospects. Each month’s labour market statistics bring new records. Employment is at a record high, with 30.8 million people in work. Unemployment fell by more than 500,000 on the year, the largest annual fall on record. The unemployment rate is at its lowest since 2008. Long-term unemployment, for those out of work for more than 12 months, is down 194,000 on the year, and 77,000 since 2010. The number of workless households is down over 400,000 since 2010 and that rate is now the lowest on record. In the past, the welfare system has been a barrier to people moving into work. Universal credit will restore the incentive to make the step into work, and to progress once there. It will remove the gap between out-of-work and in-work support. The Work Programme is providing specialist support for those furthest away from the labour market. So far, it has helped 330,000 people into sustained employment.

The Government are also providing support to make a sustained change to the lives of the most disadvantaged adults. Transforming Rehabilitation is changing the way the Government are working with offenders. Every offender released from custody will receive supervision and rehabilitation in the community. We are working in prisons to improve the prospects for offenders when they leave prison. Prisoners receive training aligned with employers’ needs, and advice from National Careers Service advisers. My noble friend Lady Tyler raised the question of a breathing space for those in debt. We support the principle of ensuring that people who fall into difficulties are given time to get back on their feet. The FCA has stringent rules about forbearance and how people in financial difficulties are treated. We have taken firm action to tackle those lenders who are exploiting those in difficulty. In April this year, the FCA took over responsibility for regulating all consumer credit firms, including payday lenders. It has demonstrated that it will take tough action, with Wonga recently being made to write off more than £200 million worth of unaffordable debts.

To deliver long-lasting outcomes for disadvantaged people, we need to engage locally with the people best placed to deliver real change. This is why we introduced social impact bonds, with the UK being a world leader in this area. In 2010, there was just one social impact bond, now there are 17. My noble friend Lord Kirkwood talked about social investment, which has grown over recent years. The social investment market was worth £200 million in 2012. Big Society Capital was also launched in 2012 with £600 million of funding to be both an investor in and a champion of the social investment market. We also established the Centre for Social Impact Bonds within the Cabinet Office in 2012 to encourage innovation in public service delivery, grow the social investment market and build an evidence base of what works.

Government will continue to work with localities to identify gaps in the national welfare system and reduce or remove duplication or fragmentation. Government will work with local enterprise partnerships to support their plans to strengthen their local economy by developing a response to the question of how integrating local services across geographical areas can provide value for money and improve outcomes for claimant groups.

Good evidence and data are essential to tackling social problems. The Centre of Excellence for Information Sharing, an innovative collaboration between central and local government, has been set up to break down the practical barriers to information sharing and is working across a number of areas, including troubled families, welfare reform and justice, to achieve practical, on-the-ground solutions to break down information sharing barriers.

My noble friend Lady Tyler has raised some very important points today about listening to the voices of people with multiple needs and making local areas accountable for delivering effective, joined-up services. She also suggests building on the troubled families model with a troubled individuals programme and working with the voluntary sector. We will consider these points carefully. I will take this opportunity to say a little about the Troubled Families programme, which is an example of where the partnership between central and local government is helping to turn around the lives of 120,000 families with severe problems and multiple needs, thereby reducing the cost to the taxpayer. Working with local authorities, we are now helping 110,000 of the most troubled families in England. Of these, nearly 53,000 have had their lives turned around thanks to the intensive and practical approach. In August, we announced an expansion of the programme to an additional 400,000 families. The Department for Work and Pensions will double the number of specialist employment advisers—