Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Newton of Braintree Excerpts

Thursday 6th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Wigley]

Yes. That was a point I made on our previous day in Committee: there will be an attack on labour mobility. That clearly is not the Government’s intention, as their hope is that mobility can be encouraged. However, the interplay of housing benefit can have a direct bearing on that, and may undermine some of the objectives that they quite rightly have in mind. Practical questions like this have to come together with the safety net of social security provision provided by the state.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I shall chip in briefly. First, I apologise that I was a little late and did not hear all the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. My lateness has something to do with the fact that I am myself a little bit disabled—in fact, I should probably declare an interest in the matter. That leads me to say that I hope it may be understood if occasionally I seek to intervene from a sedentary position in order to avoid the considerable effort of standing up.

I do not intend to follow the noble Baronesses—not because I do not have sympathy with what they are saying, but because I suspect that we shall have considerable opportunities to return to this matter in a more specific way later in the Bill. I do not agree with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, about the Prime Minister—I had better make that clear, just to show that I am occasionally a loyalist—and I do not go along with her remarks about the Administration in which I was Secretary of State for Social Security. The notion that I was trying to encourage people on to invalidity benefit in order to massage the figures does not correspond with my recollection—or, I suspect, with that of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. However, on the more positive side, I agree with the point about carers in general, which we need to bear in mind throughout these proceedings—although I would have taken it to be embraced by the second half of the noble Lord’s amendment.

As for the amendment itself, I rather doubt that it is going anywhere, because there seems to be a division even on the opposition Front Bench about what its terms should be. It was being rewritten as we went along. It may be that the Minister will feel that its wording is not perfect. I hope that we will not be told that it is not necessary because that is what the Government are going to do anyway. If that is the case, they might as well please us by writing something in that says what they are trying to do.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

Just as a correction, there is no division on the opposition Front Bench. That is absurd. This is an addendum to a very well thought out amendment.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I rest my case.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

So do I.

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[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I do not know whether the Minister had intended to finish, but can I back up what my noble friend Lord Wigley said? I find his support in no way embarrassing, by the way. It is indicative of the fact that Members here, and outside, did not seem to be aware of the implications in relation to the separate matters affecting Scotland or of the consultation that has taken place. Reading the debate in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, it seems that Members of the Scottish Parliament were also not happy about the way in which consultation was taking place. Voluntary bodies did not seem to feel that some of the differences that affect Scotland—and no doubt that applies to Wales as well—were being taken account of. Therefore, would it not be better to have a specific duty for Ministers to consult? After all, this Government will not be there for ever. Maybe they might like to put some responsibility on to the next Labour Government to make sure that this consultation is undertaken. It would seem to me that the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, has a very good suggestion. If the Minister is keen to do it anyway, why would it create any problems if it was specifically included?

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

Having been restrained by my noble friend Lord Kirkwood from what would have been some inflammatory remarks at an earlier stage, can I ask two questions at this stage before my noble friend sits down? First, if we are to go down this path, can we also have an obligation imposed on the devolved Administrations to consult on legislation they pass that has a significant knock-on effect in England, of which we have just heard another example in the housing field? Secondly, and quite separately, could he say a word about Northern Ireland, which to my recollection did not accept UK legislation but passed the same thing through its own procedures? Is that going to be the future situation as well?

[Lord Freud]

Yes, my Lords. In Northern Ireland they have a system of what they call parity. In practice they pick up Great British legislation.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

It is not an exempted issue but they do the same thing.

[Lord Freud]

They do the same thing. It is a different arrangement. I have gone to Northern Ireland particularly on this matter. I am anyway, as you might imagine, not in a position to offer duties of this or that either way. However, I would not want to go back and try to do it under any kind of pressure because we are talking about the implementation of a very complex set of changes. Having a bureaucratic to-and-fro process is exactly the wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is the way that we are doing it, which is in intense dialogue and working it through. If noble Lords are interested in practical implementation of complicated transformative changes to our social welfare, they should allow us to do it this way because that is the best way that it will be achieved to time, to budget and to the betterment of the people in all the countries that we are talking about. I beg the noble Lords to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords, there seems to be some encouragement from the other side.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

It was not intended to be.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

If the noble Lord, Lord Newton, had waited a minute, I was going to say there seems to be encouragement for me to withdraw this amendment, and I certainly intend to do so. I have great respect, particularly for the noble Lord, Lord Newton, who was a distinguished Secretary of State and who I remember with great affection from when we were both in the other place together. I also have a lot of respect for the noble Lord, Lord Freud, who I have got to know and have heard speak on this issue regularly in the House, if not in Committee. I accept his assurances with no reservations whatever on that.

I agree wholeheartedly with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Newton. To take one random example, if there had been greater consultation by the Scottish Executive with the United Kingdom Government on free personal care, some of the problems that arose would have been obviated. However, I am genuinely concerned—and this is no criticism of the Minister—with something that applies across the board, even more in the House of Lords than in the House of Commons, because in the House of Commons there are MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who get up regularly to raise these issues. I get the impression sometimes that the House of Lords is very Anglo-centred, very south of England-centred, sometimes very London-centred, sometimes very north London-Camden-Islington-centred. It is useful from time to time to remind people who find it easy to come in here on the tube day by day and go home at night, and who live that kind of life, that there are some of us on the periphery who have a different kind of life with a different set of regimes. Legislation passed by this United Kingdom Parliament affects the whole of the United Kingdom, and sometimes some people need reminding. I withdraw the amendment.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Colwyn)]

My Lords, I wonder if we could hear from the noble Lord, Lord Newton, who is feeling invisible and has asked to speak from a sitting position.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I have said that I will stand up if I can, but it is easier for me to sit down. I wanted everyone else to speak first in order not to frighten the Government Whip, but we are one short of a full house and I want to make it clear that this is indeed a full house, as it were, regarding worries about this issue. I had some rather less coherent concerns when I first read that this was to be excluded. Maybe the Minister has some wonderful answers that I cannot predict; I am just glad that I am not in his position. I think that we have had a devastating critique of this proposal, and I will take some persuading that it makes any sense. I chair a mental health trust and should declare that interest. I have some affinity with the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, over her concerns on that front, but that is not what I want to spend my time on, nor do I want to repeat points. I have some questions, though.

If this is to be based on the allocation of a capped sum to every local authority, someone is going to have to devise a formula for the division of that sum. I look to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, because of his local authority experience, and there are other noble Lords with similar experiences. Devising a formula for allocations between local authorities is the nearest thing to a magic art that anyone has ever devised. I once had ministerial responsibility for one aspect of it, and the fact is that I understood what my officials were telling me about this formula only for three minutes after they had explained it to me. In any event, there were said to be only two people in the country who actually understood it. Are we going to have to have another of those formulae, and what will that cost?

We are being told, if I hear the noble Baroness aright and the Minister does not have an answer, that every local authority in the country is going to have to invent its own social security system. That is what we are talking about. Unless they get together in Essex or wherever it may be, then Braintree will have its own social security system, as will Chelmsford and Norwich. How much is that going to cost? “Is it sane?”, I ask, and hope for an answer. We are also told that in a world in which the existence of separate tapers has been one of the problems, and the aim is to get a consistent single-taper approach, we are now leaving a second alongside the main one. I can hardly believe my ears.

There is a practical question relating to the allocations point. Someone referred to factory closures. I had a lot of them in Braintree in the early 1980s. Courtaulds was one of the biggest local employers in the textile industry. It did me a lot of political damage but, leaving that aside, obviously it sent up the number of people on benefits, including whatever council tax benefit was in those days. The same thing will probably happen up in Fylde due to British Aerospace’s intention to close its factories. However, there may be places where great new factories are being built. Is this going to bring windfall benefits? If there is a factory closure, everyone else in the area on council tax benefit has to have their benefit cut to pay for the new arrivals on to the benefit. If a factory opens or Tesco takes on 400 people, either the council or every council tax benefit beneficiary gets a bonus. These questions need thinking through and need answers.

Lastly, there is the question of appeals. If I hear the noble Baroness right, they are going to remain national. Who do the complainants go to? Is it the social security chapter of the Tribunals Service, which I know something about? If so, the judges of the Tribunals Service will need to be tutored on and informed about hundreds of different benefit systems and they will not be able to deploy their tribunal judiciary in the way they would at the moment. You will not be able to send someone who knows about Suffolk—you will not even be able to send someone who knows about Ipswich—to Norwich, let alone to somewhere distant or to London. At the moment, the aim is to deploy these judges with efficiency, bearing in mind that we are talking about the national systems that they know. Have these questions been addressed in the department? Have they been answered? Can the Minister answer them today? I live in hope.

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[Lord Freud]

The impact assessment that I am talking about is the one on universal credit and how it will respond to the exclusion of council tax. We will not have an impact assessment from DCLG available for some time. I do not know when we will have that impact assessment, but I will write to the DCLG and find out.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

That means that this impact assessment will not be an impact assessment of the effect of these proposals on poor people.

[Lord Freud]

Without being overdrawn on the impact—

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I am not going to press my noble friend further, but that is what it means.

[Lord Freud]

I think noble Lords will be somewhat relieved at the approach and will get quite a lot of information from the impact assessment on universal credit on its own. If it comes out soon, as I expect, there will be an opportunity to debate it again, perhaps around Clause 11, or possibly Clause 8, when we can look at the taper, so there will be a chance reasonably soon to look at the implications again.