Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Newton of Braintree and Lord Colwyn

Thursday 6th October 2011 Grand Committee

[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.