Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate has made a very convincing, strong argument for retaining income and, as he pointed out, deprivation measures. We talk about income measures as shorthand but it is important to remember that the measures in the Child Poverty Act include a deprivation measure.

The 2012 consultation, to which the right reverend Prelate referred, said:

“There can be no doubt that income is a key part of our understanding of child poverty … Household income has a significant impact on childhood and life chances … The impact of growing up in a low income household can last a lifetime”.

That consultation was premised on income being one element of a multidimensional measure, and it made it clear that the Government are not playing a zero-sum game with child poverty measurement as between income and multidimensional indicators. It is not clear what has changed since then. Why have the Government changed their view on that? Do they no longer believe that income is important, despite the evidence, as the right reverend Prelate said, from their own life chances review, which made very clear the impact of low-income, low-material resources on life chances, and despite the advice that they received from their own Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission? Its response to the consultation was that any new multidimensional measure,

“should be supplementary to the existing framework”,

and it looked to the Government to make clear their commitment,

“to maintain the centrality of income in measuring poverty”.

More recently, it said that it is simply not credible to try to improve the life chances of poor children without acknowledging the importance of income on those life chances and that, without an assessment of income, any measure would be inadequate.

As the right reverend Prelate said, the response to the consultation was overwhelmingly in favour of maintaining measures of income and deprivation. That included a response from the Royal Statistical Society, the academic scientific community and civil society organisations. In Committee, my noble friend Lady Blackstone, who is not in her place today, asked what alternative scientific advice the Government had to, in a sense, overturn that overwhelming response, but I do not think that we heard an answer to that.

It may seem rather academic and people may ask: why are we talking about measures; what does this matter? Actually, it matters a lot, and it is quite significant that a petition has been presented. Over 50,000 people care enough about this, and one woman in the country collected these signatures because people do care. If there is no statutory obligation for income and deprivation measures, it looks as though the Government think it simply does not matter if people do not have a sufficient income to live on.

There is no mention of targets in the amendment, unlike the amendment that was put forward in Committee, acknowledging, as the right reverend Prelate said, that the Government are reluctant to sign up to targets. In Committee, all I heard in response to the arguments put was an argument against targets. I did not hear any convincing argument against low-income and deprivation measures. Therefore, I hope that the Minister will think again and respond positively to the right reverend Prelate’s amendment.

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, on this kind of issue I am usually very much on the side of those who are sorry for those who have problems. But I think a much stronger case would be made if the amendment could be rephrased so as to take into account the possibility that, at times, the family themselves ought to do more to create the income that they so desperately need. I have not come prepared with any evidence but, being involved in issues around child poverty, I hear a good deal to suggest that a number of families prefer to live on benefits rather than go to work. I do not blame them for doing that, but I think they should share their responsibility in providing that income which, indeed, is so essential.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I wonder whether my noble friend is aware that of the children in poverty who we are discussing at the moment, two-thirds have parents who are in work. The majority of the children we are discussing have parents who are in work.

Children: Sport

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, I shall take just one moment to draw attention to the importance that sport can have for disadvantaged children. I can probably do this best with a very small story. Once, I was sitting with a very wise and experience head teacher at a school near Eastbourne for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and I asked him, “How do you make contact with a new boy when he arrives?”. He said, “I sit him down in my study and I say ‘Tell me about yourself’, and the boy starts and tells me all the awful things he’s done and all the things he can’t do and how naughty he’s been, that he doesn’t have any hope and so on. This usually goes on for about half an hour, sometimes three-quarters of an hour. Eventually, when he dries up, I say, ‘Right. Now you’ve told me all the things you can’t do. Let’s talk about the things you can do’”.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, as my contribution is relatively brief, perhaps I may take half a minute to say how much I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, who, alas, is not in his place at the moment, on the importance of early years—the first two years of a child’s life—and the influence that that can have on the whole of the rest of the child’s life. It will also become apparent as I say my little piece that I closely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, who, alas, is also not in her place. These things will happen.

The gracious Speech looks forward to further development of the Government’s policy on education. During the past year, major changes have been made to education policy and much more emphasis has rightly been placed on the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy. Perhaps more importantly, a new and much more prescriptive national curriculum has now been introduced and will effectively be mandatory in all maintained schools. However, for all other subjects and for all extra-curricular activities in a school, it will be up to the school, its head and the governing body to decide the school’s priorities.

The Secretary of State, who I greatly admire, is rightly searching for greater rigour in teaching the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy. This makes absolute sense. I can also see that there is a case for a new and compulsory national curriculum but I fear that the Government’s proposals for it may give rise to some unintended and undesirable consequences. My first concern is that there is a real danger that in some schools the compulsory and more demanding new curriculum may crowd out other facets of education. My second is about the possible effect of a more demanding curriculum on the self-esteem and self-confidence of less academically talented children.

On the first point, each school’s resources are finite in terms of both finance and well qualified staff. Each maintained school has the same per capita payment for every pupil on its roll, plus a further payment for every child from a disadvantaged background. This additional payment has, I am happy to say, recently been raised from £400 to £600 a year. However, there is a real danger that schools will decide that they have no option but to spend what it takes to deliver the new national curriculum—and then, if there is not much left, that is just too bad. I am particularly concerned that this may happen in schools with a high proportion of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Inevitably, some of those children—perhaps many—will take far longer to learn the new compulsory national curriculum than children from more supportive families. I very much doubt whether the £600 bonus per child for disadvantaged children will be anything like enough to cover the extra cost of bringing children from a disadvantaged background up to speed on the proposed new academic curriculum, let alone leaving much over for all the other important subjects about which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, spoke: drama, sport, the PSHE curriculum, citizenship and personal and social skills.

My second concern relates to self-confidence. One of the most important roles of schooling, particularly in a society where so many families are dysfunctional, is to build each child’s sense of self-worth. In a report three years ago, Ofsted looked at two groups of schools that it had rated “outstanding” in spite of being located in very disadvantaged communities. Importantly, Ofsted, which was looking for what was common to all those schools, found that among them a brilliant headmaster was important, as were dedicated staff, but what particularly interested me was that in each of those schools, every child believed that they could succeed. Self-confidence is an essential building block for a child’s success, in school and in life. I fear that the national curriculum may be a disaster for some children, if it means that they have to be set academic hurdles at which they are not able to succeed.

Equal Marriage Consultation

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that a very significant element in marriage concerns children? Will she give an assurance that the position of adopted children in single-sex marriages will not be changed for either better or worse by a partnership entering into a civil marriage?

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

We have been clear that what we are bringing forward will focus on allowing same-sex couples to marry. That is the purpose of this legislation and where the change in legislation will occur. There will be no impact on any adoption laws whatever.

Unemployment: Young People

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, without just saying yes, I will give that commitment, I want to point out that despite a growing economy some real structural problems have existed in different regions over decades, and certainly over the past decade. There are no easy solutions, but I will follow up the request personally and look at some of these regional issues. We are spending a great deal of time worrying about this.

[Lord Northbourne]

Will the Minister indicate what proportion of the 1 million or so unemployed young people have families where neither the father nor the mother is in employment?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I have actually forgotten that particular number, though I did know it. I will commit to writing with the precise number, which has fallen out of my head. I am sorry.

Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I know that I have already spoken once but I want to ask a question now rather than jump up while the Minister is speaking, because I do not think that we have covered it so far. It is about free school meals. I believe it has been made clear that free school meals as an in-kind benefit will not be taken into account as a benefit received for the cap. However, the Government are currently consulting through the Social Security Advisory Committee about how such passported benefits should be treated with the universal credit. Has the Social Security Advisory Committee been advised about what would happen if it were to recommend that free school meals should become part of universal credit cash payment? Would that bit be treated as separate so that it is not taken as part of the cap, as it would be if it were still paid in kind, or would it be treated as income for the cap? That could be quite an issue in determining whether noble Lords want to support payment in kind or in cash. If the Minister will cover that in his response, I shall be very grateful.

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I shall not speak at any length because I was not able to be here for the previous day in Committee, but I am very concerned about the effect of the Government’s proposals on carers.

On paying rent to tenants rather than landlords, does the Minister know what the estimated fraud is at present? A few years ago I set down a Question in the House and it emerged that payment to landlords was causing fraud of about £2 billion a year, mainly because they put in applications for addresses that did not exist. If that is the case it slightly affects the statistics, and it must mean that paying to tenants would probably be more efficient.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I hope I made clear my sympathy on the kinship carer point. I am looking at it in the round. On the lone parent point, I am afraid I am reduced to the underlying principle that there is a level of pay for people, which we have set at the equivalent of earnings of £35,000. Do not forget that, by definition, half the households in the country receive less than that amount because it is the median amount, and that is why we have fixed on that figure.

[Lord Northbourne]

I wonder whether the Minister can give some sort of comfort to those of us who feel, as the right reverend Prelate does, that raising children under five is a business very often for the mother or the father and that they are providing a much more important service to society and to the world, as well as to their child and themselves, if they concentrate on doing that instead of trying to do two things at once in order to keep up with the regulations in this proposed Bill?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I think I am reduced to making the mainstream point that the amount that such families can look to is the equivalent of what up to half the households in the country earn, which is £35,000.

Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

I have two points. First, do I understand that now, in contrast to the research done some months ago, a far lower proportion of those affected by the cap are in social housing? If so, where have they gone—the people who were in social housing a few months ago but who no longer are?

Going back to the original amendment that we are, in a way, discussing, my second, unconnected, question is that I have still not quite understood why it is inappropriate, when looking at the cap, to look at families with children separately from couples. We have the distinction between singles and couples. Surely, in any discussion of how a cap should operate, children are fundamental and families with children are fundamentally different from those who do not have children. Should that not somewhere come into the way in which the cap, and therefore this clause, are established?

[Lord Northbourne]

I support that view.

[Lord Freud]

As to the first question asked by the right reverend Prelate on where all the people in social housing have gone, the situation is, to be honest, probably nothing more than a result of greater depth of analysis. I do not think that there is any real movement there but, as we have homed in and obtained more information, that is our understanding.

On his second question, the interesting reality is that childless couples have higher earnings than couples with kids. Perversely, therefore, having a differentiation based on what actually happens would have the opposite effect to the one that I imagine the right reverend Prelate wants. That is the point. It is not a useful approach because it would do exactly the opposite.

Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Grand Committee

These are significant amendments. I do not think we are asking for much. Unless the Government are prepared to say that they are offering a really in-depth, face-to-face, money-upfront support system for those who fall foul of these new proposed monthly payments—I will listen with great interest to whether or not that is the case—we risk causing additional hardship to the financial limits that people are going to be faced with in future. I am delighted to support my noble friend of many years’ standing in the work that she has done. She is an academic, she is an expert—she knows what she is doing. She is right and I support her.

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I do not want to delay the Committee. I am sure there are many people in this room who have more experience of these issues than I do. However, during 16 years chairing the youth department of Toynbee Hall down in Tower Hamlets we came across quite a lot of problems with moneylenders in particular. I strongly support fortnightly payment. Monthly payment will give much more opportunity for unscrupulous traders to profit from budgeters who are perhaps not very experienced.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I have little to add to the rather remarkable contribution made by my noble friend Lady Lister, but I want to address a couple of points.

First, I was delighted to see the DWP research report, Perceptions of Welfare Reform and Universal Credit, and I commend the Minister and the department for taking this kind of research so seriously. The foreword to that report says:

“The Department for Work and Pensions … is committed to involving users throughout the development of Universal Credit, from setting out the criteria for a good experience to detailed design decisions. This user involvement helps ensure issues are known, understood and mitigated as the Universal Credit system is being built”.

I want to commend that. I thought it was a very good decision. However, it means that if you ask people and they give you answers, it really is wise to listen to them. Having sought the opinion of those who are going to be using the system, and having been told so clearly that only a small minority appreciated monthly payments as a route and the majority clearly felt it was a problem, is the Minister at all persuaded by that?

I have two other points to add. I am particularly concerned about the impact on those who are in that territory between work and out of work. The most compelling argument made today was the fact that if only half those people are paid monthly at the moment, the whole idea that moving to monthly payments mimics work simply falls flat. If people are currently paid weekly or fortnightly, they could be in the bizarre position of having their wages paid weekly or monthly and their universal credit paid monthly, which seems ridiculous. At the moment with tax credits people can opt to be paid weekly.

I declare an interest as having been involved in advising Ministers on the design of tax credits, as noble Lords will know. I can understand the desire of the centre to want to simplify this. I really understand why having everybody on monthly payments would be an awful lot easier for the process, as well as the design problems in terms of processing capacity of having people opt into a variety of options. However, this feels so important that if the noble Lord is so committed—and I know he is—to the aims of universal credit in supporting people in work and to getting the architecture right, it would seem that this is a fairly fundamental piece of the architecture, and we get it wrong at our peril.

I have one final point. I spent some years working with single parents. Most of them had come out of relationships or marriages. One of the things that they always said they liked about being single—there were many things they did not like that were very hard—was that they could control the money. I heard many of them describe the struggles that they had had to protect the money coming into the household and to have it spent on the children. They described a whole range of situations that I am not in any way suggesting are typical, but they are none the less not invisible or irrelevant either. Some said that they quite often had a situation where their partners would periodically go out on a binge and spend the money. There were people who had quite a bit of money who would say: “I fed the children on child benefit till they got back”.

One thing about credits being paid directly to them and coming in weekly was that at least they knew there was another payment coming along soon. If in this situation one partner spends the money unwisely, it is an awful long wait until the next payment comes in. Would the Minister consider that alongside some of the later issues we are going to discuss about the Social Fund and single payments being made only to one partner or to a joint account? This is an area of which the Minister would be well advised to take careful consideration.

Women: Assistance in Pregnancy

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

Is the noble Lord aware that there is a large and growing body of research which shows that the quality of parenting and parental care during the weeks before birth and the months after birth is absolutely crucial to the way in which the child’s brain develops? Surely any kind of penny-pinching at that stage of the child’s development is a false economy.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we have to look at a holistic system of support for people who are the most disadvantaged in this country. Having bits and pieces of things that do not work is the wrong way to go. This was an example of support that was directed at the wrong point in maternity. If you want to really help in terms of what women eat, it is better to do it in the first trimester, not in the last. The structure of what we are doing with the universal credit involves a system that puts in coherent support for the most disadvantaged right the way through and, by definition, will catch people at the beginning of pregnancy, not at the end.

Poverty

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I apologise to the House and to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for being a little late at the beginning of this debate, having missed the ending of the previous one. In compensation for that, I shall not speak for very long, which may be of some comfort to the House.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for raising this issue but, unfortunately, I cannot agree with him about the Child Poverty Act, on which we both worked so hard in the previous Session of Parliament. I am afraid that I consider it to be a bad Act and I ask whether the Government will either repeal or amend it. I ask that not because I am in any way opposed to resolving the problems of child poverty or promoting the well-being of children but because that is not what the Act does with any degree of effectiveness.

First, the Child Poverty Act is about family income rather than child poverty. Secondly, it is about inequality rather than poverty. I think that we should decide whether in that legislation we are talking about inequality or poverty, as they may or may not both be evils. Poverty is certainly an evil and I think that there are circumstances in which inequality may be an evil. Thirdly, I do not think that we shall really ever achieve an answer to the problem of child poverty until we effectively take parents into partnership with us. It is not an issue on which parents have the right to do as much they would like, and then the state has to step in and do all the rest. Somehow we seem to have failed to engage the less committed parents in our society. We have failed to help them to understand the obligations of parenthood and to co-operate in looking after their children. The noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, who is no longer in his place, and others have mentioned that the most disadvantaged and the poorest children come from broken and chaotic households.

I mention in passing that a number of noble Lords— including the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh—brought before the House some very interesting statistics, implying that they are perhaps causal, one for the other. One has to be extremely careful about using that argument. Perhaps the House would forgive me if I mention a birthday card I received on my last birthday. It said, “Birthdays are good for you: the more you have, the longer you live”. That is a perfectly convincing fact. We should be looking at child poverty, at the impact on children and on children’s well-being and saying to ourselves, “Can we evolve a better society and a better form of legislation through which to commit ourselves to improving the lot of children in the context of poverty?”.