Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope and Lord German(13 years ago)
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Lord German
My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments in my name, Amendments 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 77, 96, 99, 101 and 106, and to whether Clause 47 should stand part of the Bill. It will not take a wizard to note that these recommendations are based on the report to this House of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Before I give a general perspective on why I have tabled these amendments and my response to individual amendments, I shall simply look at the rationale that runs through the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s reasoning for these recommendations.
The first thing it says—and I think we all agree with this—is that this is a detailed and complex piece of legislation and that it needs to make provision for as wide a range of personal circumstances as is practicable, but it has a perceived need for adaptability. That is fundamental. It comments that this is a significant revision of social security means-tested benefits since at least 1986. It also comments on the way in which there has to be an opportunity for subsequent amendment and for views on the way in which this is being implemented. Clearly, as we all know, this is a skeleton Bill, and the regulations put the flesh on the bones. That is why it is very important that we get the arrangements right, particularly bearing in mind those key principles that I have just outlined.
The Government have accepted some of the amendments, so I will not dwell on them. They have accepted Amendment 59. Amendment 63 proposes the removal of claimants subject to no work-related requirements. This was an issue that came up earlier this afternoon. This amendment removes the requirement from the affirmative procedure only for the first set of regulations and later puts it back into affirmative every time it occurs. I notice that the Government have not yet responded to this amendment, and I hope that they will deal later with the question of whether it should be affirmative throughout. It falls into the category where we may wish subsequent amendments to be dealt with by the affirmative process because they have such a substantial impact on the clients who fall under these no work-related requirements.
Similarly, there is the issue of hardship, and I have done the same thing there. I have taken that from being affirmative for the first occasion only, and in a later amendment I suggest that it should be wholly affirmative. Amendment 65 proposes that the basic conditions be subject to the affirmative procedure throughout. These basic conditions set out by Section 4 and the regulations beyond it specify certain circumstances in which a person has been treated as having accepted the claimant commitment. The basic conditions are laid out in Section 4(1). These are the bare bones of universal credit and should be subject to the affirmative procedure because they are part of the fundamental structure of the Bill. These basic conditions may well change. There will be a requirement for some flexibility, knowing how the system will pan out over time. As the people who are going to be affected by this will be the more vulnerable, it seems to me that we should have an affirmative resolution for those regulations throughout.
On Amendment 66, the Delegated Powers Committee—whose report I read very carefully—said that if the Government could convince it that the negative procedure would satisfy it, that would be sufficient. In their response, the Government said that they would seek to reassure the committee that the negative procedure would be sufficient. I wait to be convinced, as I suppose do many other noble Lords. I am grateful that the Government have changed from a negative to a first-time affirmative procedure, but the amendment questions whether that is significant. I believe that the powers are significant, and the Delegated Powers Committee worried about the restrictions put on claimants and about whether they would be suitable for differing personal circumstances. The Bill and the documents that we already have seem to allude to using these measures in a positive way—something that I support—suggesting that restrictions on types of work will allow claimants to look for work in sectors in which they are interested or for hours that are appropriate for them. Quite clearly, it is an area with significant and changeable circumstances. If it is the view that the negative procedure should be used for routine matters, then, when these policies proceed, there should be an affirmative process.
Amendment 68 relates to the claimants who are subject to no work-related requirements. The Government said that they would make that subject to the affirmative procedure for the first regulations. Once again, the Regulatory Reform Committee asked whether the Government would confirm that there would be only minor adjustments after that first set, and I think that we might be content with that.
With Amendment 69, it is exactly the same process. The Government have put in the affirmative procedure for the first time. If they can assure us that the regulations set out in the first instance are unlikely to change a great deal thereafter, I think that that will be satisfactory as well.
Amendments 70 and 99 would remove the words “Scottish Ministers”. That would not only create equality between the rest of the country and Scotland but ensure that, because Scotland would be doing these regulations by affirmative procedure, the rest of the country would be doing them that way as well. I did not understand why it was not.
Clause 47 provides that regulations under Sections 6 and 7 of the Jobseekers Act 1995 should require only the negative procedure. As of now, they have the affirmative procedure, and the regulations concern claimant conditionality and the requirements for claimants to be available for and actively seeking work on which their jobseeker’s allowance is dependent. The predecessor committee that looked at the matter in 1995 for the Jobseekers Bill considered the provisions concerning availability for work and actively seeking work to be of fundamental importance to the Bill and recommended that regulations about them should require the affirmative procedure whenever made. The DWP memorandum on this topic says:
“Regulations such as this are generally advantageous to JSA claimants. The Department has increasingly found that having to use the affirmative procedure makes implementing the changes more onerous than it needs to be”.
Can the Minister say what “more onerous” means? Does it mean that you have to have open consultation, which seems to me important? The Government rejected the recommendation from the Delegated Powers Committee, saying that moving to the negative procedure was absolutely necessary. I think we would like to know a bit more about what was absolutely necessary.
With the introduction of universal credit, there are bound to be uncertainties that really should not be left to the negative procedure in this matter. Some changes are envisaged in the regulations using the negative procedure, meaning that the Secretary of State can restrict the conditions on a claimant so that they are searching for a job that they want or may not want or one that is near them or is paying well. The precedent set by the previous legislation in this area—in fact, all legislative matters in this area in the past—has required the affirmative procedure to be used for issues of this kind. I wonder whether the Minister can convince us that we need to move in a different direction.
The Government have accepted Amendments 77 and 96, while they have put down an amendment to the part of the Bill covered by Amendment 101, and they have also agreed to Amendment 106.
With a Bill of this magnitude, which has such importance for a great number of people, over the years to come we should be absolutely clear that we are going to have a fully transparent process to allow the debate to occur, not just this year or next year but for the length of time that this Bill survives before changes are made and whenever these matters become important to the public. We need to have that public debate, and I think that Parliament deserves the affirmative resolution in the areas that I have outlined.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope
My Lords, I find to my surprise that I have an amendment in the middle of this group, Amendment 71, which I am sure I conceived of in a reflective moment in my bath a long time ago. The amendment proposes a new clause entitled “Universal credit: requirement for simplicity”. It says:
“Nothing in the regulations giving effect to this Part shall introduce avoidable complexity to the claiming, calculation or payment of universal credit.”
I do not think that anyone in the Room is in favour of avoidable complexity. However, the point that I wanted to make, as we come to the end of the universal credit part of the Bill, was that, with a bit of determination, for the first time you can achieve simplicity. Even if unavoidable complexity were engrained in the legacy systems and the rest of it, perhaps it would be positive to have a statutory duty. There might be another Government in due course—you never know what might happen—and you could foresee circumstances in which there might be some back-sliding in terms of some of the gains that we have made with universal credit. If it is possible to do it—and I think that there have been signal successes in this direction, and they are demonstrated in the legislation that we have in front of us—maybe it would help to put in perpetuity for future Ministers a duty to avoid unnecessary complexity. It is something that could always be argued if future Governments came up with other unnecessarily complex systems. Perhaps I am talking to myself here, but the point is at least worth considering.
This is, rather obviously, a probing amendment, but I would like to hear the Minister’s thoughts: is it a completely daft idea, or might there be some merit in trying to get Ministers—the noble Lord’s heirs and successors—always to think carefully about unavoidable complexity in future iterations and reforms, particularly of the universal credit? It would be so easy to lose a lot of the advantages if we started making it—as we always have done, for the past 30 years—piecemeal and patchwork, with special pleading for special cases. We end up with incoherence, which is avoidable.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope and Lord German(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord German
If the noble Lord wants me to answer the question, I can answer it, and will answer it in this way; I believe that the three underpinning policies behind this section of this measure are correct, but in order to achieve those we have to answer some of the fundamental questions, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, raised earlier on today. I have also tried to seek answers to those questions, because I have not found them. That is what we are here to do, and that is what the Committee stage of a Bill is about, it seems to me, but I am new to this particular Parliament. In the one I have come from, that is what we would do: explore these issues.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope
My Lords, I am provoked into joining this discussion, which I was going to leave until the next group of amendments.
First, underoccupation is one of the most serious concerns in this Bill, and I think that those concerns are shared across the Committee. I do not think that it helps to start picking away at the positions of individual members of the Committee at this time. What I think we are trying to do is to make it clear to the Government that the current proposals are unacceptable. They are unacceptable to me for two reasons. One is process—and we touched on the discussion about transition. On 1 April 2013, between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the case load, which is arguably 67,000 working-age families, will be tipped into debt. It is a brick wall that they cannot avoid. It is very unusual for a social policy change of this magnitude not to have built in a transitional provision.
With a little bit of application and consideration, we might be able to address the issue of overoccupation, which it would be sensible to do in the long term. Speaking for myself, I think that Amendment 44 is close to doing that, although Amendment 40 is not far away. I got a very interesting note from Moat housing the other day, which suggested that:
“Two bedroom properties or below should never be regarded as ‘under-occupied’”.
It is as simple as that. That is another way of expressing it. I do not know what it would cost, but the Committee is right to explore some of these circumstances, which have ramifications for social landlords as well as everyone else. What worries me more than anything else is that on 1 April—that may be an appropriate date—in 2013, that change will be made, and people have very little protection or room for manoeuvre.
The other very interesting suggestion that Moat housing made to me, which I had never heard before, was that a “soft start” could be adopted when people were demonstrating that they were taking steps to address the underoccupation that they were allegedly facing at the time. They could continue to get the full support until they had made the appropriate arrangements. It would probably take 18 months or two years to work out in the wash; that may be too tight a period—it might take longer than that to do safely. As a Committee, we are looking for a safe transition process and a way of limiting the brick wall of debt that 670,000 of our social tenants in the United Kingdom will face on 1 April 2013. That is a matter of concern across the Committee, which I think we should represent to the Government in a way that will occasion constructive change on Report.
Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2011
Debate between Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope and Lord German(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord German
I was very grateful that the Government did not put the override in place, because of course it should be up to occupational pension schemes to make up their own minds according to their rules. Clearly, if RPI were written into the contract that already existed, that would apply and the schemes would be able to stay with that. Most pension schemes will be able to make that choice, and I hope that there will be a debate among pension fund members about the way in which that might be put into place. It is also very important that pensioners with accrued benefits under RPI should have those benefits maintained and that, if the choice is made to change, CPI should occur only after the CPI regulation hits the deck.
Going slightly beyond this issue, I want look at the packages in the round and I also want to ask the Minister some questions. I am pleased that there was no override, and I wonder whether the Minister can confirm what I have just said regarding accruals for occupational pension schemes. Will the switch to CPI see the pressure on occupational pension funds reduced? I know that some figures have been produced regarding the reduction in pressure on some occupational pension funds. I should be grateful if the Minister could update us on the current thinking on that matter and on the current analysis of who is going to move and in which direction.
My final question relates to the much bigger world of the reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Hutton. What are the Government’s thoughts about the direction of travel of the matters that we are discussing today, and how will that impact on the public sector pension funds? Will the Government be responding to the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, and in what timescale? People will want to understand the Government’s direction of travel, both on the basic pension and on public service pensions, which I imagine are a cause of concern to many people at present.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope
My Lords, I should like to make a few comments at the end of what is always a very important annual occasion. There have been occasions in the past when colleagues in the House have not considered it appropriate to look at social security benefit uprating orders, but these orders are extremely important for the people whom they affect and it is right that we should spend time looking carefully at the provisions. I am not surprised that more colleagues do not participate in these debates, as they are extremely complicated, particularly this year when we are contemplating wholesale changes in the benefit system. It is particularly difficult to foresee the impact that some of these announced changes will bring in future.
It would be helpful to receive some reassurance from my noble friend on the Front Bench on a couple of points. I agree with the comments that have been made about the pension provision. That is one area where substantial progress has been made, for which I am very grateful.
I want to pick up an important point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, who is probably the only person in this Chamber who has been doing uprating orders for longer than I have—she advised me about them when I was elected to the other place in 1983, which was not yesterday. She has a huge amount of experience and knowledge and she will be a great asset to this House in considering these issues in the future. She raised the point about freezing child benefit until 2014. Of course, that is against the background of deficit reduction. I defer to no one on the necessity to attack the important financial circumstances that we all face, but how will that affect the child poverty strategy? In the legislation that we passed in the dying days of the previous Parliament, the Child Poverty Act 2010, we set out the requirement for a child poverty strategy. I anticipate that that will be unleashed on us quite soon. These changes will have a dramatic impact on the staging posts of 2015 and 2020 in the child poverty strategy.
Deficit reduction notwithstanding, I hope that the Government do not make these changes in a way that makes it impossible to get to a more comfortable place on child poverty by 2020. If that were the case, I would be very concerned. I think that redistribution is still necessary. The noble Baroness was absolutely right to say that this benefit was a tax allowance in the days before it was converted. It is extremely important that we keep the pressure up. People like me are uncomfortable about freezing child benefit. If the Government continue to freeze it, I shall be more than uncomfortable; I shall be very upset. A word of comfort about the fact that there is a child poverty strategy in gestation and about to be unleashed on us would send me home a happier bunny this evening.
We shall return to the CPI/RPI debate, and at great length. For me, there is some conflicting evidence. My noble friend dealt with the substitution effect. I think that he is right about substitution and I concede that he is right about geometry and not arithmetic. However, I do not necessarily concede that, therefore, CPI is an appropriate measure. I think that the IFS is on his side when it comes to substitution but, on whether this is an inflation experience that is adequate and appropriate for the client group, it is on a different side of the argument. The press release that I have in front of me, dated August 2010, suggests that it believes that,
“only 23 per cent of benefit claimants are unaffected by increases in mortgage interest payments and council tax”.
Therefore, the rest will be caught by the reduction. We cannot ignore that. I want to think about that more carefully and I shall study, with care, what my noble friend says about it, if not tonight then at another stage. I think that the jury is out. I think that he has won the argument about substitution but I do not think that that necessarily means that it is a safe measure in perpetuity. You only have to ask the Library not just about the short-term effects but also about the long-term effects to see that reductions in domestic household incomes are stark. Over a 20-year and a 30-year period, they are unconscionable. I hope that we in the coalition Government are not lashed to the mast on some of these things. If the CPI in the middle-to-longer term—five to 10 years—starts to pinch in a way that I think it may, I hope that we will be big enough to look again at whether it is an appropriate measure.
Employment and Support Allowance (Transitional Provisions, Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit) (Existing Awards) Regulations 2010
Debate between Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope and Lord German(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope
My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend. I declare an interest: as my colleagues may know, I am a non-executive, non-remunerated director of the Wise Group in Glasgow.
My noble friend Lady Thomas has an eagle eye for finding statutory instruments and Orders in Council which are of serious significance. Her experience in both the Merits Committee and now in the Delegated Powers Committee serves the House well and we are in her debt. These are important regulations. My spies, of whom there are many, tell me that, technically, they are legally ambiguous. If I did not know the noble Lords, Lord McKenzie and Lord Knight, as well as I do, I would think that this was a deliberate Labour spoiling tactic to leave a gremlin in the system to subvert the confidence of the incoming coalition Government. However, that is a quite unqualified and undignified accusation and I make it only in passing.
There are some technical ambiguities in the regulations. This serves to demonstrate how important it is to simplify some of these systems. If the professionals dealing with these regulations cannot make up their minds whether or not they are clear, I do not know who can.
I wish to make one or two brief points about the significance of the long-term implications of these regulations. I am an unqualified supporter of Professor Paul Gregg’s personalised conditionality concept. During the course of the Welfare Reform Bill last year, colleagues will have heard me expound this theory. Professor Gregg rightly captures the deal we will be offering people in future. Yes, there will be conditionality and people will have to be responsible for their actions, but the deal has another side to it: there will be a tailored, sensitive conditionality over which they will have a voice and which they will be able to help mould and shape for their own personal circumstances. That is the offer. The offer has two sides to it, both of which are important.
These orders should not to be considered in the context of the panic caused by the deficit-reduction problems that we face right now, because I hope that this system will sustain the support that we give to people in these circumstances not just for the three years of the next comprehensive spending period but for five, 10 or 15 years. If it works and can be made to work well and sensitively, it will serve us in the long term. Therefore, the regulations should not necessarily be shaded or influenced too much by the financial circumstances that immediately face us, although they are significant.
We need to be realistic about how many people we can expect to help in the short term. If we manage to get upwards of 1 million people back into remunerative work where they have some prospects of job retention and progression, it would be a marvellous success. If expectations are too high, particularly if they are driven by the perception of cuts and not of progressive policy changes, we will be in some trouble. We need to be realistic about what we can achieve. We shall get a better policy outcome in delivery if we do that.
We should work with the willing. Jobcentre Plus staff at the front line know this. I agree with my noble friend: everybody in Jobcentre Plus offices that I visit is in the front line. The only people in the back are the managers; perhaps we can get rid of some of them in order to support the front-line staff. The only people who are backstage are the big cheeses; it is the front-line people whom we are trying to support. We need to work with the willing. It is clear from my work in the Wise Group that there are people who are anxious and positively engaged in trying to get back to work. If you can have success with some of them early on, the word spreads and you get positive feedback. People then say, “Well, if it’s worked for my next-door neighbour, then I hope it can work for me”.
There is a spatial dimension to this problem. That is nothing new. Anybody who has studied these policies in the past understands that labour market conditions in Reading are different from those in Merthyr Tydfil or downtown Liverpool. When the policy is rolled out from October, and subsequently when it is rolled out nationally from February, that needs to be borne in mind. For the reasons that I gave earlier, conditionality must be sensitively applied in favour of the client as often as possible.
I am therefore confident that there can be a coherent policy. The direction of travel is absolutely right. Both Front Benches have made as much progress as they reasonably can. It is a very difficult area, and it is made more difficult by the financial circumstances, but it is the right thing to do. However, we need a coherent, long-term policy. We should think about a single working-age benefit. It is hard to get from where we are now to there; it will take time; but we should do nothing that gets in the way of that and makes it more difficult.
My noble friend spoke about providers. I think that some providers believe that the quality of the medical personnel who do the medical examinations which inform this process could be better. The decision-makers who take forward that work—it is crucial work for the individuals that it affects—need to have some responsibility for making sure that the quality of the medical reports is consistently good. If it is not, there needs to be something in the system that gives them the ability to say to Atos or their line managers, “I’m really not comfortable with the medical evidence that I am getting that informs my decisions”. That is an important piece of the business model that needs in the implementation to be carefully considered. I know that my noble friend is aware of it and I am confident that he is on the case. I hope that he will do everything that he can to make sure that those decision-makers get the best information so that they can make the best decisions possible.
The explanations given to people on incapacity benefit when they are first contacted, and subsequently when the policy is rolled out after February, need to be clear. I hope that the quality of the offer that is being made—I hope that it is an offer because as I said it is personalised and conditional—will be explained to them. The responsibilities that they have are different. Some of them fall foul of those responsibilities because they do not know what they are. In the past, that has been because some of the letters and communication strategies that have been used have been opaque. If you are confronting this situation for the first time and are in a vulnerable household, the last thing you need is ambiguity about what you are facing. We need to be crystal clear about what we now require—because “require” is the only verb that can be used in this new situation.
Also, from a provider point of view, there is a lot of concern about people who leave the system. There are people who should not have been in the system in the first place, but an estimated 30 per cent will exit the system. American experience suggests that a lot of those people become destitute, and that is not in anyone’s interests. In America you can move to the next-door state and start again. You cannot do that in the United Kingdom so we need some follow-through to make sure that people are not being dumped. The object of this policy is not to dump people: it is to apply it to people who are properly eligible. If my noble friend could give me some assurances about that I would be grateful.
This is not just about people getting people into sustainable jobs. I am pleased that we are talking about what I would consider to be sustainable jobs and not just jobs for 13 weeks, which was never sustainable under the old system. We are making progress in that direction, but we need to talk about job retention and advancement as well. We must not lose sight of that. We need to be able to say to people that, even if they are getting ready for work and nearer the labour market, this is all about giving them work experience from which they can benefit. Therefore, as my American colleagues all say, they start with any job, move to a better job and then on to a career. They are being offered an ABC system. That is part of the offer. If we can do that, and it is possible with the proper back-up, support and implementation of the policy, then this is a win-win situation for everyone.
I am certain that my noble friend on the Front Bench is having all sorts of frayed conversations with the Treasury. I would like to strengthen his arm—his hand, rather, because strengthening your arm is to do with drinking. To strengthen the hand is a Quaker concept which I understand is more beneficial to everybody. I hope that he will hold out. If this policy is to work, there will be a degree of invest to save across the broader policy front. If he does not win support from his colleagues in that direction, even if the policy is absolutely 100 per cent, with the best will in the world, he may still fail because we cannot do this if there is absolutely no money to give people the opportunity to train themselves off benefit and into work, which is the idea behind the policy.
Lord German
My Lords, I also rise to support my noble friends in welcoming the intention and general thrust of these regulations and changes. Supporting incapacity benefit claimants into work and making sure that people are on the right benefit with the right level of support is obviously the correct thing to do. There is no doubt either about the significance of these regulations. About 1.5 million people in our country will be affected and some of them are the most vulnerable in our society. The issues that I want to comment on, therefore, are not about the principle but about the process of migration—“it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”.
There are two outcomes that I am sure my noble friend the Minister will wish to avoid—the unexpected and the unintended. The unexpected might be failure somewhere in the process of change—perhaps a blockage in the appeals process or a group of vulnerable people who are marginalised by the whole process. Since it is unexpected, all you can do is ensure that the system is as robust as possible and that everything is in place before it migrates and is therefore able to withstand the shocks. The unintended consequences, however, can be guarded against more easily. For that we look to the reports of the Merits Committee and the Social Security Advisory Committee. They have produced a clear, evidence-based set of reports, which should help to steer the Government through the maze that is the migration process.
As I know from the dates given on the SSAC report and the Government response, it appears that the response is from the previous Government. I therefore offer a brief analogy to my noble friend the Minister, based on my experience. I took over a ministerial portfolio in Wales; one month beforehand, the previous Minister from another party in a coalition had thrown the switch on a new computerised payment system for farmers. The system was intended to surpass anything else in the past; it was all-singing and all-dancing, and introduced a new payment structure. Needless to say, it went terribly wrong in year one but was corrected and became an exemplar system in year two. I shouldered a large part of the anguish of the claimants while my predecessor escaped without a scratch. I hope that our noble friend will benefit in coming out of this without a scratch.