Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, here we go again with another round of ideologically driven cuts to welfare. I say “ideologically driven” because we do not need all this austerity. This is not the moment to argue the point, but we do not. Even if we did, requiring the poor to bear the brunt of it reflects a highly retrograde sense of priorities. Be in no doubt: this Bill represents a clear government decision as to their priorities, which could have been otherwise. It is the brainchild of people who are on a mission to shrink the state. Welfare can disincentivise work and keep people in a state of dependency, and that is rightly being tackled, but overwhelmingly, welfare benefits are paid to people in need and are the product of a society which increased prosperity and increased state provision has made increasingly civilised. The Bill legislates for a raft of cuts to meet the Government’s target of cutting £12 billion from the welfare budget. That cannot but have a devastating impact on poor people who depend on benefits. We should remember that Tony Blair was reputed to have asked what you had to do to save £1 billion on welfare. He was told that 1 million people have to lose £1,000, so 12 million people will have to lose £1,000, which is an awful lot.
These cuts are likely to have a disproportionate impact on disabled people, which I begin by highlighting. Here I declare my interest as a vice-president of the RNIB. The Government have made a welcome commitment to protect DLA and its replacement, personal independence payment, from the proposed cuts. However, the Bill cuts a number of working-age benefits that disabled people are disproportionately likely to receive, such as ESA, JSA, housing benefit, tax credits and the new universal credit. Households with disabled members in receipt of DLA/PIP or who are in the ESA support group are exempt from the benefit cap. However, many disabled people do not fall into these categories. In particular, those in the ESA WRAG group would be subject to the cap, despite being found unfit for work and despite DWP research showing that only half of those in this group were also claiming DLA/PIP.
The Bill freezes a number of key benefits that many disabled people receive, such as JSA, housing benefit and universal credit. Those on DLA/PIP are exempted from the four-year freeze, but specific elements targeted at disabled people, such as the basic rate and work-related components of ESA, housing benefit and the limited-capability work component of universal credit, are frozen. These are clearly matters we will want to pursue in Committee. I merely flag them up. I do not propose to pursue the impact on disabled people further this evening because, along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Meacher and Lady Grey-Thompson, I am carrying out a review, supported by a number of disability charities, of the impact of the cuts in ESA for those in the WRAG group and it is best that I do not anticipate the review.
Instead, I want to talk about two issues in the context of the Bill: first, how claimants might get the support and advice they need to adjust to the changes; and, secondly, how to protect against the worst effects of sanctions hitting the most vulnerable. For the past three years, I have been chairing a commission on the future of advice on social welfare issues, which has highlighted these issues for me.
Starting with information and advice, every time we debate new measures on welfare in this House, we find that the complexity of the regulations and rules around things such as conditions of entitlement, contributory and non-contributory elements, time limits, disability benefits assessment descriptors and differential withdrawal tapers baffle even the most expert. How much more baffling must the system be to claimants who have to grapple with long and unclear forms, technical language and shifting entitlement rules? For those in insecure employment or in and out of low-paid work, just calculating income accurately can be a nightmare. Even when claimants get all their information right, the system is prone to error. DWP estimates that just as a result of simple administrative errors, claimants are underpaid by £1.4 billion and overpaid by £2.4 billion. Then there is the vast number of decisions that DWP gets wrong. The success rate on appeals runs at more than 56%, despite the introduction of mandatory reconsideration.
Universal credit claims to tackle, and eventually remove, many of the system’s complexities, but, as it proceeds laboriously through stage-by-stage implementation to absorb new rules and aggregate different benefit entitlements, new complexities emerge. For example, there is a misunderstanding of the rules or gateway conditions governing who is eligible to claim universal credit in the first place and whether tax rebates count as earnings under universal credit, and the regulations now differ significantly between digital trial areas and elsewhere. New residency rules and interaction with child benefit and child tax credits are a further source of confusion.
Universal credit implementation and the ongoing impact of the 2012 reforms affecting disabled people’s transition into either the new ESA or PIP regimes are generating additional pressures on advice agencies as more people seek support on how to claim, how changes to benefits calculations affect their household income and how to challenge decisions through the tortuous reconsideration and redress process. All but second-tier appellate tribunal issues have been taken out of the scope of legal aid and local government funding for welfare rights advice has also taken a massive hit. The availability and quality of advice has been adversely affected as demand has rocketed. More than one-third of the issues that present to the CAB network concern welfare benefits. Last year, there were around 1.8 million issues spread over nearly 650,000 clients, overtaking debt as the largest category of individuals that CABs deal with. Our commission argues that a new strategy for advice should be put in place on an invest-to-save basis and on the basis that early preventive rights-based advice, provided through CABs and other agencies, can save resources in other parts of our public sector welfare and support systems as well as in health and criminal justice.
Cabinet Ministers appear to recognise that intermediaries and advice can play an important part in the welfare system. As part of universal credit delivery, local authorities are expected to play a key support role by arranging provision for face-to-face services for those claimants unable to manage their benefit claim electronically or for those with more complex and multiple needs. The universal credit local support services framework, agreed between DWP and the LGA, has followed from a number of pilots. The model is based on partnership working between DWP and jobcentres, local authorities and contracted providers, such as housing associations, including in the voluntary sector, and with money advice agencies as key delivery partners. There is also some specific outcome-based funding support from DWP to local authorities for the programme, which I hope will be protected from the Chancellor’s cuts. Overall, this initiative is very welcome, although the stress is on financial capability, that is to say budgeting on benefits-supported lower incomes, and on supplementing back-to-work support rather than welfare rights, income maximisation and related social need.
How much help is this programme really delivering? How many delivery partnership agreements have been signed? So far the Minister has announced only 11 local partnerships, the same partnerships that were piloting this approach before. If this is the scale of the scheme, then it hardly qualifies as universal support. The Bill should address whether the information and advice support services’ framework for welfare reform should be put on to a statutory and less discretionary footing or should at least form part of DWP’s statutory guidance, perhaps linked to the information and advice strategies that local authorities are having to prepare to meet their obligations under the Care Act 2014. This statutory guidance approach could also make it clear that expectations around delivery must be factored into local commissioning or grant-making arrangements that councils use to support their local advice sectors. The whole universal support process should be one of co-production between statutory agencies and the independent advice sector to underpin the proposed delivery partnership agreements.
The second issue is the growing concern about the use of sanctions in our benefits system. There are protections or safeguards in DWP guidance dating back to 2000 to prevent automatic sanctions applying to vulnerable claimants or to claimants with complex needs, based on social services data and mental health status and, if necessary, home visits. However, as legislation and regulations have become more complex while, at the same time, reinforcing conditionality and sanctions as approaches to encouraging work-seeking behaviours, this guidance is becoming increasingly outdated and weak. This is especially the case in respect of universal credit claims, new JSA claimants and clients of Work Programme providers. There is also often a lack of awareness of the safeguards among DWP and Work Programme provider staff. The Work and Pensions Select Committee report on sanctions after the Oakley review recommended that safeguards should be included in legislation. This Bill gives us the opportunity, and I shall be bringing forward amendments to bring that about.
Disabled People: Access to Work Fund
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Altmann
As I said, Access to Work is a demand-led scheme. Nobody has ever been turned away from it. The reforms to PIP are about taking money away, but not from those who need it. Therefore, the reforms will deliver a more dynamic benefit system whereby we can tailor support to meet people’s needs as they change over time, and Access to Work will be available to more people.
Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, as the Minister said, the Government aim to halve the disability employment gap so that hundreds of thousands more disabled people who can work, and want to be in work, find employment. This is an ambitious aim, and I wonder how far the Minister believes it will be assisted by capping the amount that an individual can receive from the Access to Work programme. A cap at one and a half times the mean average salary may sound generous, but it could limit the effectiveness of the scheme for those with the greatest obstacles to labour-market participation, such as deaf people who need the support of a sign-language interpreter. Will there be any flexibility in the administration of the cap to cater for cases such as these?
Baroness Altmann
I reassure the noble Lord that the cap for existing claimants will not be introduced until 2018, and we will work sensitively with all those affected to ensure a smooth transition from the support they currently get to an alternative form of support under the new arrangements. More than 35,000 people are currently in the Access to Work programme and 200 will be affected by the cap. As I said, nobody currently receiving more than the cap will lose any of their support until we have worked through the programme of transition over the next three years.
Housing Benefit (Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2014
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, I realise that time is at a premium so I shall be brief and say just a few words. I remember very clearly, as will other noble Lords, the words of Lord Newton of Braintree who, to the great sadness of all, is no longer with us. In his intervention on Report during debates on what is now the Welfare Reform Act, he warned his colleagues in the Government that this would not last five minutes. Once people started realising what was happening and getting on to their MPs in droves, the Government would be forced to scrap it. It has not worked out quite like that but the bedroom tax is visibly unravelling before one’s eyes. It is not saving any money or freeing up any accommodation. My advice to the Minister would be to recognise when he is beaten. He has not a friend in the House. When you are in a hole the only sensible advice is to stop digging. I advise the Minister to recognise realities and run up the white flag.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
My Lords, in her powerful speech, my noble friend Lady Sherlock has explained our opposition to this statutory instrument. It brings more people into the bedroom tax which should be abolished. She has had support from all around the House today. The tax is disastrous. A previous Tory Government introduced and repealed the poll tax in the same Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, this Government should have the courage and decency to do the same.
You do, of course, need sanctions in social security to ensure, for example, that compliance with JSA work search is not voluntary. However, the bedroom tax—for the first time ever—falls on the innocent, disabled and vulnerable. They are punished when they have done no wrong: they simply occupy the house that the council allocated them. The Government have now said to them: move or pay. Most tenants can do neither. As my noble friend Lord Beecham said, tenants who want to move will be waiting three to four years. Arrears mount; single people or couples on the waiting list who want smaller accommodation will never get it; pensioners wanting to downsize cannot. As for overcrowding, outside London six times more families are underoccupying than overcrowding Just helping pensioners to move would sort it, with grace and consent. The bedroom tax destroys sound housing policy.
Will the Government, nonetheless, make their savings? No, because benefit cuts have been shunted on to tenants to become irrecoverable arrears. In Norwich, which has spent every penny of its DHPs, 60% of tenants affected by the bedroom tax are now in average arrears of £300 and mounting. Nationally, around two-thirds of affected tenants are in arrears. DHPs are utterly insufficient, short-term, and a postcode lottery, yet that is the policy on which the Minister, sadly, relies. Carers UK says that 75% of tenants trying to pay were cutting back on food, heating, medical supplies and mobility. The fragile economy of tenants collapses, as they turn to food banks, payday loans and loan sharks, with debts from which I doubt many will ever recover. The Government’s notional savings become tenants’ irreversible, irrevocable debts and, in the process, we destroy lives.
Fifteen per cent of affected tenants, nearly half of those in arrears, have already received eviction warning notices. What happens then? Do we evict tenants into the private sector—private landlords do not want them and it costs more—or into bed-and-breakfast accommodation which costs even more, or what? Should they be rough sleeping? What about children and disabled people? Through no fault of their own, there are people who cannot pay their rent because the Government have cut their benefit.
Instead, do we allow rent arrears to grow and in the process threaten the very viability of housing associations, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said? We have offered the Minister three possible strategies to help because every defence of the bedroom tax is false. The first option is that the bedroom tax should not apply to disabled people, as the Work and Pensions Committee said only yesterday. Two-thirds of affected tenants are disabled. One may ask why. Adaptions, at a cost of £6,500 a property, become wasted. As regards space, the CAB has said that for disabled people that extra room for carers or equipment is,
“a lifeline as vital as a guide dog or a wheelchair”.
Finally, disabled people need the support of neighbours, as my noble friend Lady Lister said. We talk about social or community care and at the same time the Government seek to pluck disabled people out of the very communities that provide that social care.
The second option is that it should apply only to those who refuse an acceptable alternative offer. Following the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, I should like to know what the position of the Lib Dems is. Will they continue to support the bedroom tax in Parliament while campaigning on the doorstep simultaneously for its repeal? The third option is that the Government could treat social tenants like private tenants and apply the bedroom tax only to new tenancies. Any of those options would help.
We will go further. The Labour Party is pledged to repeal the legislation. It is the most wretched piece of social security legislation that I have known in 25 years in this House. But by then, in the summer of 2015 after the election, we will have seen hundreds of thousands of social tenants—our fellow citizens, most of them disabled and many with children—punished for occupying a house that was allocated to them. They would have been doing no wrong but are unable to pay or to move. They may be deep in debt and fearing, or perhaps experiencing, the loss of their home. How can we do this to them? It is grotesque.
Disabled People: Independent Living Fund
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, for initiating this debate on replacement arrangements for the Independent Living Fund. Closure of the ILF potentially represents a crisis in funding to support the independent living of a significant group of some of the most severely disabled people in the United Kingdom.
The ILF is a national scheme providing financial support for almost 20,000 disabled people to live independently in the community rather than in residential care. It was originally set up in 1988 as a temporary measure to mitigate the impact of implementing new community care legislation and a review of social security benefits for disabled people which was being undertaken by the Government of that time.
However, the desire of disabled people to live more independently was vastly underestimated. Within its first year, the fund attracted 900 applications a month, later rising to more than 2,000. The fund proved very popular. It worked very well. It met a real need and, as a result, has survived to this day, supporting nearly 20,000 disabled people, many of whom have some of the most severe and complex needs.
In June 2010, the Government closed the fund to new applicants. In December 2012, they proposed to abolish it altogether. In November 2013, the Court of Appeal ruled against the Government’s decision to abolish the fund. However, on 6 March this year, as we have heard, the Minister for Disabled People announced his intention to close the fund anyway, on 30 June 2015.
The Government’s thinking is that the ILF should close and funding will be transferred to local authorities so that current claimants can be supported through the mainstream adult social care system. I recognise that the ILF is something of an anomaly, falling as it does on the DWP budget and sitting outside the mainstream system of social care funding. However, sometimes it is appropriate that the imperatives of bureaucratic tidiness should give way to the pragmatism of what works.
I acknowledge that the Government have said funding from the ILF will be transferred to local authorities and the devolved Administrations. However, this must be judged against the state of social care funding. Cuts to local authority budgets of more than 20% since 2010 have had a devastating impact on social care provision. The amount spent by councils on adult social care has fallen by £2.8 billion, or 20% between 2011 and 2014, and the Audit Commission’s Tough Times 2013 report, published at the end of last year, found that while reductions in adult care accounted for 14% of council cuts between 2010-11 and 2011-12, they will account for 52% in 2013-14.
Consequent pressures on local authority budgets have meant that thresholds for care have risen dramatically, meaning that fewer disabled people qualify for social care. Since 2008, 97,000 fewer disabled people aged 18 to 64 have received social care, and even those still eligible for care experience the rationing of support. In these circumstances, the Government’s assertion that the social care system will simply pick up where the ILF left off is unrealistic in the extreme. This is especially the case when it is realised that the £320 million that the ILF currently costs will not be ring-fenced when it is transferred to local authorities.
As the Government have stated their intention to set the new national eligibility threshold at a level equivalent to “substantial”, the more than 3,000 ILF claimants in group 1, a significant proportion of whom have low or moderate needs, will likely not receive any support to live independently once the fund closes. Without this support, ILF claimants will find it harder to live independently and risk being forced to live in residential care, breaching Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which sets out the equal right of all disabled people to choose to live in the community and government’s duty to take effective and appropriate measures to facilitate this right.
Like everybody else, I want to ask the Minister what replacement arrangements for the fund it is proposed will be put in place. With the closure of the ILF, I want also to ask whether the Government will commit to developing a strategy for local and central government to support disabled people to live as independently as possible. As part of such a strategy, will they make independent living a key outcome for delivering social care for disabled people?
The ILF system, however flawed, exists in recognition of the fact that people with high support needs are at particularly high risk of social exclusion. They face particular barriers to living independently in the community and their needs in this regard are not adequately addressed by mainstream provision. By taking away the support provided by the Independent Living Fund, the Government, whether intentionally or not, are sending a message that independent living for disabled people is not a priority for either local or national government. That is at the heart of the concerns that disabled people who receive support through the ILF are expressing.
Welfare: Cost of Family Breakdown
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Freud
If it is established that there are charts of that nature, I will instruct them to be taken down.
Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, would the Minister care to answer the other question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, about the rate of successful appeals against sanctions?
Lord Freud
My Lords, I will have to write to the noble Lord; I do not have that figure at my fingertips.
Employment
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, as my noble friend is fully aware, we are introducing a programme to blend the out-of-work benefits with the in-work tax credits. That is vital because it gets rid of that distinction and makes a smooth transition from being out of work to being in work. That is a vital reform which, as my noble friend knows, I am pursuing with all my energy.
Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
Is the noble Lord able to say when the Government expect unemployment to fall to the level of 7% and we can expect to see interest rates rising again?
Lord Freud
My Lords, that is, of course, a reference to the Bank of England’s target of 7%. Unemployment has been falling pretty dramatically: it fell 0.3 percentage points to 7.4% in the latest three-month period. It is not the job of a government Minister to predict when unemployment will hit any particular rate; all I can say is that these trends are immensely encouraging. We should all look for them to continue to improve and I have no doubt that they will.
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Baroness Campbell of Surbiton
My Lords, it is with great sorrow that I find myself here at ping pong, seeking to reinstate Section 3 of the Equality Act 2006. I really do not do this lightly. I know that a challenge to the Government at this stage should be made only when it is absolutely necessary and all other routes have been exhausted. I had hoped that the Government would listen to the many and exceptionally well considered arguments made by all but two noble Lords on Report. I expected something more than a blanket no. That is why, having explained my reasons to the Minister last week, I have retabled the amendments that were overturned in the other place.
We have yet to hear of a single example of how the commission’s capacity to act as the guardian of equality and human rights in Britain will be improved by repealing the general duty in Section 3, a duty which gives a holistic direction to the commission based on principles of dignity, respect and fairness, and takes it to, but not beyond, legal enforcement in helping society change for the better. The Equality and Human Rights Commission itself has said that it now has sufficient focus and, in the absence of robust reasons for removing it, Section 3 should remain.
I ask your Lordships to recall where the duty came from and to consider where its repeal may take us in the future. Twenty years ago today, Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a group of young men for no reason other than the colour of his skin. The Metropolitan Police made a catalogue of errors in the investigation into his murder. Our criminal justice system failed Stephen Lawrence, and it failed his family in their quest for justice. It is a sad truth that it took this tragedy to create a moment of enlightenment. The inquiry, led by Sir William Macpherson, identified that racial discrimination could not be seen as the lone action of a few bad apples. It was part of the institutional culture of the Metropolitan Police.
That insight led to the sea-change in our approach to equality law and the structural support to promote and enforce it. The general duty embodies this shift in thinking. The role of the commission is not simply to seek compensation for those who experience discrimination. As Age UK has noted, it is to pursue cultural change to prevent such discrimination from occurring in the first place. This is not only about racial discrimination. It is about institutional discrimination and violations of human rights in all their guises and across society—for example, in parts of the NHS and our care system, as the EHRC demonstrated in its inquiry into older people’s treatment at home. It is also widespread in the criminal justice system and local authority practice, as the disability hate crime inquiry revealed. It is rife in the exploitation of migrant workers, exposed by the inquiry into the meat processing industry.
Ministers have argued that the general duty is symbolic and aspirational, as if this were enough to dismiss it out of hand. The general duty symbolises our commitment to preventing the kind of injustice faced by the Lawrence family, or the routine abuse of disabled young people in institutions because of indifference and cruelty. It aspires to a society founded on dignity, respect and equality—notoriously absent in these cases. However, contrary to what Ministers claim, the general duty is not, in fact, merely symbolic. Its repeal could have major implications for the commission’s role in monitoring equality and human rights. In the other place last week, the Minister told MPs:
“We are also changing the commission’s monitoring duty to ensure that it reports on its core functions, rather than on the state of society generally”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/4/13; col. 217.]
At present the commission is required to monitor Britain’s progress towards the aims of the general duty. In so doing it holds up a mirror to society, as it did in its seminal report, How fair is Britain?. As the Minister indicated, if the general duty is repealed, the monitoring duty will be fundamentally changed—it will be limited to holding up a mirror to itself and asking only, “How effective is the commission?”. This is why Amendment 35 relating to Section 3 and Amendment 36 relating to Section 12 of the Equality Act 2006 are inseparable and must be considered as one.
The Minister went on to say that changing the monitoring duty,
“will also enable the EHRC to gain the respect hon. Members want it to have as our equality body and national human rights institution”.—[Official Report, 16/4/13; Commons, col. 217.]
This suggests a dangerous misunderstanding by the Government of the requirements of European Union law and the United Nations standards on the status and mandate of national human rights institutions. The likely effect of these proposals would be to prevent the commission, and therefore the UK, from complying with the requirement for equality and human rights bodies independently to monitor the national situation.
This could have very serious consequences. In the light of the Government’s package of reforms the international accreditation committee for national human rights institutions has announced that it will re-examine the commission’s status next month. I do not need to spell out to my noble friends the impact on the UK’s moral authority abroad if, as a direct consequence of these reforms, the commission were to lose its present A-accredited status. Such a development would no doubt be seized on by countries such as Zimbabwe and Iran. At a time when the UK is seeking a seat on the Human Rights Council that is not a risk we should be taking. I am sure noble Lords would agree that we must practise what we preach and lead by example.
The commission’s role as an agent of change matters to millions of people in this country, whether they are an elderly person in hospital, a woman fleeing a violent partner or a black teenager and his friend waiting for a bus. In a civilised society such as ours people in these vulnerable situations should feel confident that our institutions will accord them dignified and fair treatment as equal citizens. Justice is poorly served if our commitment to equality and human rights extends only to offering compensation after an event. For many, it is simply too late.
Today, of all days, we should remember why we put these measures in place and not be so foolish as to believe that it could never happen again. That is why, for the second time, I feel we must send these urgent messages to the other place that the general duty and the duty to monitor its aims must be taken very seriously and must stay. I beg to move.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I was sorry not to be here for Report stage of the Bill but I have read the debate carefully. It left no room for doubt as to the strength of support right across your Lordships’ House for retaining Section 3. In addition to the powerful and principled advocacy of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and others, I attach particular importance to the comprehensive demolition of the Government’s case in legal terms by my noble and learned friend Lord Lloyd of Berwick.
Your Lordships will be pleased to hear that I do not propose to go over again all the substantive arguments again, which have been so comprehensively crawled over in Committee and on Report, about the value of duties that cannot be enforced in a court, for example, whether there is a place for the declaratory in legislation, the value of a unifying link between equality and other fundamental human rights—I was rather surprised that the Minister sought to deny that one in her wind-up—the fact that there is nothing in Section 3 that suggests or implies that the commission is to be solely or uniquely responsible for encouraging and supporting the goal of an equal society, the negative message sent by removing the general duty and so on. I think that these arguments have been comprehensively won.
Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness on this—the sanctions have not been well designed. We are redesigning the whole regime, as we did in the recent Act, to make sure that people understand what sanctions are about.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, can the Minister help me on one point? I have been listening very carefully to what he said. As I understand it, he is telling us that the claimants fell foul of the legislation in terms of what it was anticipated to mean by the department. However, we all know that the meaning of legislation cannot always be anticipated with certainty when it is contested; it often requires a court decision to clarify what the legislation means. I think that the Minister is telling us that the claimants fell foul of the legislation as the Government wanted it to be interpreted but not, in fact, as it was interpreted. We have to look at what the Court of Appeal held to know what the legislation meant, not what the Minister hoped it might mean.
Lord Freud
As noble Lords know, we are seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court to test that specific matter. I will shortly come on to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, about why we have fast-tracked this Bill. However, we have explored all the avenues and have not taken a decision to fast-track lightly. We have looked at other measures to prevent this course of action but none provides a sufficient guarantee. People have been concerned about the four-week period. We have also spent a significant period discussing, through the usual channels, agreement to expedite this legislation.
Let me make clear why the retrospective legislation is necessary. The Government respect the general principle that Parliament should not legislate to reverse the effects of court judgments on past cases unless the situation is exceptional. However, it is entirely proper to enact such legislation if there is a compelling reason to do so. Perhaps I may spell out the three reasons which make this an exceptional case. First, there is significant money involved—£130 million—in very difficult, austere times. Secondly, the money would go to a group of people who neither expect nor deserve to obtain a windfall payment. These claimants knew exactly what was required of them. They failed to participate without good cause and were rightly sanctioned. Thirdly, this case is most unusual in terms of social security legislation.
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, the amendments would remove the benefits paid on behalf of children from the scope of the Bill because that disproportionately hits children and families. That is why I have added my name to them. Where 30% of all households are affected by the Bill, nearly nine out of 10 families with children are affected, including 19 out of 20 lone-parent families.
In total, the Children’s Society has estimated that about 11.5 million children are affected by the Bill. As the right reverend Prelate explained, Amendments 14 and 19 would together remove child benefit and child tax credit from the scope of the Bill. That is made particularly necessary by the fact that child benefit has already been frozen for three years before the measures contained in the Bill take effect. That means that child benefit will increase by only 2% over the course of half a decade. Over the same period, prices as measured by CPI will have risen by more than 16%. I say that that justifies the removal of child benefit from the scope of the Bill but, in truth, it would be unjustifiable not to remove it.
These benefits are paid to working families from all walks of life, as well as non-working families. The Children’s Society’s benefits uprating cap impact calculator shows that a couple with two children with one earner working as a primary school teacher and earning £600 a week would lose £424 a year by 2015. A couple with three children and one earner, a corporal in the Army, say, earning £619 a week, would lose £552 a year by 2015, so we can see the impact of having extra children.
As we have heard, Amendment 17 would remove the 1% uprating cap from the lower child disability addition under universal credit. That is particularly justified by the fact that rates of support for children in that group are already intended to be halved under universal credit. At present, families with a disabled child for whom they are in receipt of some level of disability living allowance, may be entitled to receive support through the disability element of child tax credit, currently worth £57 a week. Under universal credit, that support is to be provided through disability additions within household benefit entitlements, but it is proposed to cut that support in half to just £28 a week. That change will affect all families with a disabled child unless the child is receiving the higher rate of care component of disability living allowance or is registered blind.
The review of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, Holes in the Safety Net, of the impact of universal credit on disabled people and their families surveyed 1,400 families with disabled children about changes to support under universal credit. The evidence received suggested that, for those likely to be affected by the cut, the impact could be disastrous. Two-thirds of those likely to be affected said that if they received £30 a week less in benefits for their disabled child, they would have to cut back on food. At this point, I cannot resist asking: if the Minister shares other noble Lords’ disappointment at the greater resort to food banks, what does that say about her view of the government policy that she is supposed to be defending, as it is government policy that is leading to people’s greater resort to food banks?
Returning to the review of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, more than half of those surveyed said that the changes would lead to them getting into debt, more than one in 10 that they might even need to move home. One parent told the inquiry:
“My child would have little quality of life and would lose much of the social interaction he needs. It would be like a prison sentence”.
Another simply expressed their desperation, saying:
“This would have such a huge impact on us I really don’t know what we would do”.
The Bill will further compound that cut. For a family with one disabled child, the impact of the change in uprating would be about £42 a year. It should be noted that that impact is on top of changes to the uprating of other benefits received by the family.
The Children’s Society estimates that the cost of uprating the lower child disability addition would be only £2.4 million in 2014-15 and £4.2 million in 2015-16. All this hardship for such a paltry saving. The disproportionate impact of the Bill on children cannot be overstated or justified. It is not the first time that austerity measures have had a disproportionate impact on children and families. In fact, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, told us, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found last year that, even with universal credit fully in place, taking together all the tax and benefit measures introduced or to be introduced between the beginning of 2011 and April 2014, families with children will lose a higher proportion of their income than either pensioner households or working-age households without children across the whole income distribution.
We have heard a lot this afternoon about the measurement of child poverty, but the IFS estimate of a growth in the number of children living in poverty of 400,000 between 2011 and 2015 and 800,000 by 2020, has been referred to more than once. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, said that we cannot set too much store by such predictions because we do not know what direction government policy may take. All I know is that the last time I heard, the Government intended to take a further £10 billion out of welfare. The Bill can only serve to increase the level of child poverty. Indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, acknowledged, it will add 200,000 to the number of children in poverty; 100,000 of them will be in working households.
Children do not have a vote. If they did, it is impossible to believe that they would be voting for the Bill as it stands.
Baroness Grey-Thompson
My Lords, my name is also attached to all three amendments in this group. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds for explaining the amendments.
First, I will cover Amendments 14 and 19 together. Households with children are much more likely to be affected by the Bill than households without children. Many families with children will be affected even when someone is working full time. A single person or couple with children obviously have much greater costs than those without dependent children. For this period of their life, the income they need to meet the basic living costs of their household is clearly greater. That means that the amount someone can be earning and still need extra financial support from benefits and tax credits stretches much higher up the income scale than for those without children.
The level of childcare costs and of rents—especially in the private rented sector— combined with the lack of a living wage means that people who can only find work at or near the minimum wage cannot escape from needing that extra financial support, for however much time they work. If they work more hours, they need more help with childcare. Many are already struggling to manage.
For example in a local paper in the north-east of England, where I live, Pauline Chambers, chief executive of Sedgefield and District citizens advice bureau in County Durham, said that the team had encountered levels of hardship not seen for 21 years. Telephone inquiries have increased by 100 per cent in the last two months, with many people struggling to pay for basic food and utilities. That view is repeated up and down the country. Julia Cornelius, manager of Luton CAB was quoted in a different paper. She said:
“Every day we see people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads or put food on the table as wage squeezes, price rises and benefit cuts wreak havoc on household budgets”.
Those in work and on benefits gain little from their earnings increasing. A single person earning £250 a week who receives a £2.50 rise in their earnings will keep about £1.70 of the increase after deductions for tax and national insurance. If they have children, and so need to rely on benefits and tax credits, they will reduce as their income rises, so they will be left with a net gain of 10p from a rise in earnings of £2.50.
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I am very surprised to see the need for this amendment. Usually, when benefit changes are introduced, it is standard practice not to take them away from those who are currently in receipt of them. If the Government go ahead with the provisions in the way that is currently envisaged, it is clear that they will effectively be depriving people of a benefit which they currently enjoy, because what is a Motability car if not a benefit? It is every bit as valuable as a cash benefit and I find it difficult to imagine that the Government seriously intend to strip people of benefits which they currently enjoy.
I am very sorry that I missed the first couple of minutes of the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I do not know whether he referred to the numbers but he cited the figures given by the noble Lord, Lord Freud: that in a steady state the number of disabled people with mobility difficulties in receipt of personal independence payment will reduce from about 1,000,000 to 600,000. I am given to understand that of those, it is estimated that 27% might have a Motability car. I believe this equates to about 200 Motability cars per constituency. That is a large number of people who are likely to be beating a path to their MP’s surgery with a very real grievance. I hope that the Government will take that into their calculations when considering whether to press ahead with this provision.
I remember several occasions when Lord Newton, who is sadly no longer with us, would taunt the Government when we came to debate provisions of this sort—the bedroom tax was an example and others could be thought of—with the fact that changes of this character would not survive five minutes once they had been introduced and aggrieved constituents were beating a path to their MP’s surgery. That is the situation which the Government are facing with this provision, if they press ahead with it.
I cannot believe that the Government seriously intend to proceed with a measure which will take Motability cars out of the hands of disabled people who currently rely on them for their mobility and without which they will effectively be rendered prisoners in their own house. I will be interested to see what the sense of this Committee is as we listen to the debate but I would be very surprised if there was not widespread sympathy for this amendment right across the House. I beg the Government to take this one seriously and to make a constructive response to the very full case set out by my noble friend Lord Alton and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I also support the intention behind the amendment. I declare an interest as a vice-patron of Motability, while two members of my extended family—though not my immediate family—enjoy the use of Motability cars.
A number of us at first welcomed and were appreciative of the amount of consultation that the department engaged in concerning the new regulations for PIP, only to learn that, at the very last moment and without consultation, the Government had made two amendments, one of which was to withdraw the magic words “safely”, “reliably” and so on, while the other allegedly clarified what was meant by “virtually unable to walk” by confining it, as of right, to a territory of 20 metres, as opposed to the original territory of 20 to 50 metres that had informed previous decisions.
The Government, rightly and sensibly, moved on the first of these amendments and reinstated the test for the higher-rate DLA mobility component by introducing the key words “reliably”, “regularly”, “accessible” and so on, but failed to move on the second on the issue of 20 to 50 metres, assuring us that it made no difference in practice. When they were pressed on the statistics, however, the “no difference in practice” turned out to be a very real difference. Although the noble Lord, Lord Freud, suggested that of the 1 million, 600,000 would retain it and 400,000 would lose it, that was not the complete figure because 200,000 people who are currently on the lower-rate mobility allowance—needing psychological supervision and so on—would move up into the higher group, so there was a net loss of 400,000 but a gross loss of 600,000 people in higher-rate DLA who would now lose it, although to some extent that would be compensated for by the further 200,000 coming in from the lower group. Still, the gross figure is something like 600,000.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I am delighted to acknowledge that I am drawing on the Oxford Economics report that came out in December 2010, which is full of very valuable figures on this. We know from that report that about 28% of people on higher-rate DLA turn that mobility component into a Motability car. There are currently around 543,000 people driving a Motability car on the basis of three-year leases, and around 185,000 new cars are bought each year by Motability. It is the largest purchaser of new cars in the country, accounting for about 10% of them. This will have serious ramifications for jobs and the car industry, which Motability does so much to support.
However, I am not even going to argue about that. I am arguing on behalf of what Motability does for people’s independence. I remember being struck many years ago, back in the late 1990s when I first met the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, by what she said about the Independent Living Foundation. She said, and for me this was a mind-changing moment, that the ILF, which gave people what we now call personal budgets—generous, or at least adequately generous, sums of money to enable them to employ their own carers and so on—put that disabled person at the centre of the care system, not as a recipient at the end of that system, so that people could determine what time they went to bed and so on. The same is true of a Motability car; it puts the person who is enabled to drive it at the centre of their mobility, not dependent on the charity, good will, altruism, convenience and so on of other people. Of those people who have a Motability car, something like 76% of them drive it themselves, so it becomes their means of movement. The result of that is that it frees not only them to be mobile but their informal carer as well, because without that transport they are totally dependent on someone else to take them to places where they need to go. As one person quoted in the Oxford Economics study said, if they are housebound—that is, without that car—it makes their informal carers housebound too. Removing the car locks two parties into immobility.
The report goes on to show us how effective the Motability car has been in enlarging the horizons of people’s lives. It shows that, for example, most of the recipients had cars in the past that they could no longer use by virtue of their arthritis or their heart problems. Whereas before their disability two-thirds of the recipients of cars were in work, subsequently only 16% were able to hold down paid employment. The Motability car helped 12,500 of them get a job and 56,000 to keep their job. It was crucial for those who needed specially adapted cars that they could not provide for themselves or for people in rural areas, such as my county of Norfolk where, frankly, public transport is non-existent and a complete myth. That car took some of them—16%—to work; it took younger ones into education and training, allowing them, in due course, to get work; it took them to their medical appointments, the shops, their children’s schools and to see their families. It allowed them, as one of them said, to access life. This is what the Government are apparently proposing to take away.
We all accept that people’s disability needs can diminish over time, or may increase over time, but for the most part, those who have reached the threshold of higher-rate DLA continue to have very real and substantial mobility problems wherever that line is to be drawn, whether at 20 metres or 50 metres. Therefore, like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I urge the Government before Report to hold discussions with the noble Lords, Lord Sterling and Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and come up with a way forward on this. We have to have a transitional period—a period of grace—on this, either to the end of the lease or for a two-year period, whichever comes last, which would, at the very least, allow adequate time for the appeals procedure to go through without people losing a car in the mean time and then having to go through the routine that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, described to regain it.
We had a similar discussion with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, about adapted houses. At one stage, if people were underoccupying a house that had had £20,000 spent on adapting it, they were to move from there, go somewhere smaller and have all the adaptation put in again, but good sense prevailed. The Minister agreed that where such money had been invested it was wise for those people to be allowed to stay. That argument makes sense for the home, and it makes sense for the agency of mobility which is the Motability car. That transitional period of grace, whether it is to the end of the lease or for a two-year period, whichever comes last, would prevent the awful situation of cars being taken back in and piled up in scrapyards because nobody would want that supply of used cars on the market when there will not be the purchasing power to buy them. We would not see Ford and the rest of them finding that they suddenly had closed order books, and we would not see people losing their cars, appealing, regaining them and having to go through all the trauma of these arrangements.
At the very least, there is a huge moral, legal, practical and economic obligation on the Government to provide a way forward to allow that transitional period—that period of grace—to allow those who feel that they should keep their car to appeal and, I hope, to retain it and to allow those whom it is deemed must lose their car time to adapt. Without it, I warn the Minister that she has seen nothing yet.