Armed Forces: Transition to Civilian Life
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
To be asked not to frighten the Treasury is quite a challenge—I will think about that one for now. Of course, the Government recognise the unique commitment that service families make to our country and remain sympathetic to the circumstances of those who remarried and cohabited before 1 April. I understand my noble friend’s points, and I will do my best.
Lord Ramsbotham (CB) [V]
My Lords, can the Minister please tell the House whether the Department for Work and Pensions has carried out any assessment of the usefulness of Armed Forces employment to civilian employers?
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
An important point is that when people leave the Armed Forces, they have really good skills that are very attractive to employers in both the public and private sectors, and work is done to make sure that all opportunities are made available to those leaving the service.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, in speaking to my Amendment 52, I do so very much in context rather than proposing it. I thank the Minister, first, for seeing me before Christmas on this and other issues and, secondly, for his very welcome letter this morning. At the same time, I salute my noble friend Lord Best for his mastery and tireless pursuit of social housing issues.
I am very glad that this moratorium has been imposed and I sincerely hope that the Minister will encourage urgent consultation with organisations such as the almshouses and the YMCA, which he mentioned in his letter, and which I would have mentioned if the amendment had been going forward as normal. What was unfortunate about the way that the Bill was proposed was that it led to unintended consequences, which I think officials would do very well to consider in the consultation, in which they will hear from the YMCA, the almshouses and others about what would have been the effect if these proposals had been allowed to go forward.
Lord Young of Cookham
My Lords, from these Benches I join other noble Lords in commending the negotiating skills of the noble Lord, Lord Best. As a former Housing Minister, I know what a plausible advocate he can be on behalf of those in social housing. I also commend my noble friend the Minister for listening to the case made by both sides in this House a few weeks ago.
The only clarification I seek from my noble friend is in relation to Amendment 51, which says:
“Section 21 does not apply to social housing which meets the definition of supported housing”.
I wonder if my noble friend can confirm that it will be absolutely clear, if we go ahead with this amendment or something similar to it, exactly which housing schemes will benefit from the exemption and which will fall outside, and, related to that, how the good news he is about to announce will be communicated to those associations or organisations which run operations that will qualify under Amendment 51 and indeed some of the other related amendments.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
“Maternal nutrition: reporting obligationA1ZA Maternal nutrition and poverty: reporting obligation
(1) The Secretary of State must publish and lay before Parliament a report containing data on—
(a) maternal nutrition in workless households in England;(b) maternal nutrition in long-term workless households in England.(2) The report must set out how the Secretary of State has interpreted the following terms for the purposes of the report—
(a) maternal nutrition;(b) household;(c) worklessness;(d) long-term worklessness.(3) The data contained in the report, and the provision about how the terms used in it are to be interpreted, must, so far as practicable, be derived from any relevant official statistics.
(4) The first report must be published before the end of the financial year ending with 31 March 2017.
(5) Later reports must be published before the end of each subsequent financial year.
(6) In this section “official statistics” has the meaning given by section 6(1) of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.”
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 3 I shall speak also to Amendments 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, which are all to Clause 4 of the Bill. Indeed, they are all amendments in effect to the Child Poverty Act 2010. They represent a repetition of amendments that I tabled in Committee about the annual reporting on health and well-being and on children aged five, as opposed to at key stage 4. For very logical reasons, the Public Bill Office has put Amendment 3 before my old amendment, which is now Amendment 5, because maternal nutrition obviously comes before children who have already been born. Therefore, I shall speak first to Amendments 5 and 6 to amplify what I said in Committee, on which I had a discussion with the Minister before Christmas following the rather inconclusive conclusion to our debate that evening, following timing problems in the House. I particularly want to talk about the link between extreme poverty and mental health, particularly of children, which was highlighted in the previous amendment.
In any situation, it is grossly inefficient to tax people who cannot pay. Local government has been quite right to draw the Government’s attention to the inability of councils in England and Wales to collect the £1 billion in three years that they were instructed to start taxing in April 2013. Of course, as has been said many times during the passage of the Bill, there is a cumulative impact on the health and well-being of residents when the benefits provided by central government for survival are being reduced in value as the rents that they have to pay rise. Therefore, in fact, we are talking about the cumulative effects of a great number of issues that are not in themselves all the responsibility of the Department of Health, or, indeed, the Department for Communities and Local Government, which have to deal with the outcomes.
The economic and social costs of mental health provision, which is the subject of this amendment, have been calculated by the Centre for Mental Health, in which I declare an interest as a vice president, as being £105 billion in 2009-10, which is reckoned to be an underestimate. That is a huge amount of money and a great deal of that is caused by the conditions that we have been discussing in this Bill. It is of interest that Dr Angela Donkin, who is a deputy director at the Institute of Health Equity, has said that the national audit in 2010 found that 82% of homeless people had at least one physical health problem, and 72% had at least one mental health problem. So there is a huge cost to all this poverty.
Some 10.4% of those in fuel poverty, living therefore in extremely cold houses, showed higher levels of respiratory conditions, cardiovascular disease and poor mental health as the result of the conditions in which they lived. You then add food poverty, which has been mentioned—and, again, the lack of proteins, iron and the correct vitamins, minerals and fatty acids leave a higher susceptibility to illness and infection and heart and lung complications. It is said that preventing low birth weight should be an absolute must for all public health officials, but all their efforts will be hampered by inefficient incomes, which mean that people cannot buy what is required to produce that high birth weight. Finally, there are many mental disorders, particularly evident in women who, in addition to handling the family budget, suffer from maternal depression, which is bound to impact on the children and their social development.
As I mentioned before, we have a situation here where the Chancellor is apparently directing, without ever taking evidence from such as the Barrow Cadbury Trust, whose evidence was used by the Mayor of London to calculate the London living wage—and also, I fear, there is a lack of tie-up between the Treasury, the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions as well as the Department for Communities and Local Government. There is too much silo working. My amendments aim collectively to ensure that the collection of evidence by one ministry or another should be made available to all the others so that they have an aggregated picture on which to make their judgments.
Amendment 3 would introduce reporting on maternal nutrition—an addition to what I tabled in Committee. Also, it has been taken forward considerably since we debated it in December, particularly in a speech by the Prime Minister on 11 January, when he announced his life chances strategy. In addition to maternal nutrition, he also endorsed what was in my previous Amendment 4: the suggestion that reporting on children should not be left until key stage 4, at the end of schooling, but should be done at the age of five, because we would then have some chance of taking remedial action based on something that we had found early, thus increasing life chances. It is interesting that in his speech on 11 January, the Prime Minister said that,
“we must think much more radically about improving family life and the early years”.
He called that a “life cycle approach”—one that takes people from their earliest years through schooling and through adolescent and adult life.
This strategy clearly points to the importance of early child development and getting children ready for school, thus endorsing the assessment currently done of every child by the age of two, which I mentioned in Committee. Without measuring a child’s progress at the age of five, the Government cannot know how successful or otherwise any remedial treatment initiated following the health visitor assessment at two has actually been in preparing children for school.
I also mentioned in Committee that the All-Party Group on Speech and Language Difficulties, which I co-chair, in a report on the links between disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs, found that children with a low IQ from advantaged families overtook children with a higher IQ from disadvantaged families by the age of five. That is a terrible factor to consider: that overtaking will happen unless remedial action is taken. Therefore, I strongly believe that tackling child poverty and improving children’s life chances—the right reverend Prelate has just spoken about this, and we have just voted on it—is a national endeavour and responsibility. My amendment is designed to present the Government with the opportunity, through the evidence produced every year, to learn about what is actually happening to our children, and then to enable all the departments involved, not just the Department for Work and Pensions, to use the information to improve life chances, and thus to invest the nation’s money in its future—our children—more wisely.
My other amendments—Amendments 7, 9, 10 and 12 to 14—are textual adjustments to reflect the content of Amendments 3 to 6. I beg to move.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, I strongly support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham. The main amendments in this group are of fundamental importance if the Government are to make a success of their own DWP policy. The Government want to focus upon the life chances of children rather than upon poverty alone—but I do not believe we should lose sight of the significance of poverty, particularly when the levels of poverty will worsen so severely in the coming years. I was relieved to hear the Minister assure the House that the Government will continue monitoring poverty as before, whatever becomes of the amendment on which the House has just voted when it gets to the other place.
Of course, there is a lot more to successful parenting and the life chances of children than income alone. As we all know, sufficient income is a necessary but certainly not a sufficient condition for a successful childhood. Parents’ mental and physical health and well-being are essential to successful parenting. If a mother is malnourished, she is most unlikely to provide for her child’s mental and physical needs. If she is depressed, she may not be able to look after her child at all until her mental health improves.
As my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham reminded us, the Prime Minister himself has highlighted the early years as one of four areas in which to anchor the Government's approach to life chances. The Government’s life chances strategy can, in my view, set a course for improving school readiness for the poorest and most disadvantaged children—but only, of course, if it is introduced across the country and is adequately funded. But only by monitoring progress in improving the health and well-being of children in workless households, particularly during the early years, is there any hope that policies will be developed and adjusted over time to ensure that they help rather than hinder the life chances of those children. Any Government will need to learn from their mistakes over time—and as we all know, Governments certainly make mistakes.
Lord Freud
As the noble Baroness knows, we have a lot of information about how pupils progress. The point is that it is necessary to have something that absorbs all that rather than having detailed measures at each point. The earlier processes have to be right to attain the achievements at the key target date. I have spoken in this House before about “targetitis”. If you give hospitals 220 different targets, for instance, which is what happened a decade ago, nobody knows what on earth they are looking at, whereas if you focus on the two things that really matter and not on the culmination of a lot of measures, you drive coherent behaviour through the targets that are set, and that is exactly what this strategy does.
I have already made the House aware that the measures that we have include key stages 1 and 2. Annual reporting at different stages of primary schooling already provides significant detail of the progress and attainment of disadvantaged pupils. Monitoring personal development in the way that the noble Lord suggests—
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, these reports include the Department for Education and the Department of Health, as well as the Department for Work and Pensions. Who is making these reports and to whom are they going?
Lord Freud
The whole point is that these reports are published. It is a forcing mechanism to make sure that the relevant Secretaries of State and the relevant departments of government work together to tackle the fundamentals that produce these outcomes.
Returning to the educational issue, if we made this change to the Bill, it would increase the burden on primary schools and send a signal to schools that Parliament does not trust them to carry out their core functions. That is why I cannot support this amendment.
Amendments 5 and 6 look to expand the reporting duty placed on the Secretary of State so that his annual report containing data on children living in workless households and long-term workless households in England must include data on the health and well-being of these children.
It goes without saying that the Government want the best for our children. We want all children to have the opportunity to have fulfilling lives and to realise their potential, and clearly their health and well-being is an integral part of that. However, we can achieve this aim, which is one that we all share, only by tackling the root causes of child poverty, and I will not parrot what I have already said on this point. Our evidence review shows clearly that worklessness and educational attainment are the two factors that have the biggest impact.
We recognise that, as the evidence review pointed out, child ill-health is also a driver of poverty. We are absolutely committed to reducing health inequalities in terms of access and outcomes, and we are working across government to ensure that ill health does not hold our children back from fulfilling their potential. The Government have already put in place a well-developed reporting framework—the public health outcomes framework—that supports health improvement and protection at all stages of life, especially in the early years. The framework includes a large number of indicators on children and young people’s health and, along with the NHS outcomes framework, sets a clear direction for children’s health that allows anyone to hold us to account.
We are committed to improving access to better services and to promoting early intervention to address children and young people’s mental health issues before they worsen. We are investing £1.4 billion in that over the next five years, and we have invested more than £120 million to introduce waiting time standards for mental health services—the first time that we have done that.
If we concentrate our actions and resources on the root causes of child poverty, such as worklessness and education, that will be the springboard from which everything else will follow. While the Government recognise the importance of tackling child ill-health, these amendments would ultimately distract the Government’s focus and finite resources from what is most important for our children’s future life chances. For these reasons, I cannot support the amendments of the noble Lord and the noble Baroness.
Amendment 7, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, would require separate reports for measures of worklessness and educational attainment. We are already committed to reporting on these measures and believe that it is sensible to deal with them together as they are jointly fundamental to improving life chances.
Amendments 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14 are consequential on Amendment 7 and therefore, in the Government’s view, unnecessary.
Once again, I thank noble Lords for their contributions but, on the basis of what I have said, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I am very grateful to all those who have contributed to this short debate. I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for summing up what people said.
I listened very carefully to what the Minister said, and I am grateful to him for repeating what he has said before about the Government’s concentration on worklessness and educational achievement as being the main causes. However, I do not think that they are unique causes. The health and well-being, not just of the children but also of the families, and particularly the mother, is something that is a huge cause of the subject that we are looking at, and it ought to be added to worklessness and educational attainment.
It is all very well saying that we are going to do a great deal and going to improve the child mental health treatment processes in the National Health Service, but that comes at an enormous cost. The National Health Service cannot afford to do all this at present; otherwise, it would already have done it. I am very concerned that health and well-being in particular are being excluded from the terms of the Bill. They ought to be before everyone who is considering the issues of which the Bill is made up, particularly tackling the problems of worklessness and educational attainment, both of which have mental health as one reason—not the only reason—that they are there.
I am in something of a quandary. In many ways, I would like to test the opinion of the House on each of these three amendments, because I think that they are each important. However, if I may, I would like to withdraw Amendment 3 and not move 4 and test the opinion of the House on Amendments 5 and 6, which deal with health and well-being, which are, I think, the guts of all this issue.
Lord Ramsbotham
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
“( ) the progress of children living in England at age 5 in the following developmental areas—(i) cognitive;(ii) personal, social and emotional; and(iii) physical;( ) the progress of disadvantaged children living in England at age 5 in the following developmental areas—(i) cognitive;(ii) personal, social and emotional; and(iii) physical;”
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, in speaking to the two amendments in my name, I regret that I was unable to raise at Second Reading the issues that they contain. I also regret that, yet again, I find myself tabling amendments to legislation produced by one department in silo, which does not appear to have taken into account that achievement depends on co-ordination with the activities of several other departments. My amendments, and others in the next groups, are intended both to point out and, hopefully, to rectify what will no doubt be claimed as the unintended consequences of not appreciating the impact of factors for which the DWP is not responsible.
The Minister will no doubt remember a seminar during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 focusing on the Wednesbury principles. Afterwards, he told the House:
“The department strives to ensure that no decision is influenced by irrelevant factors and that decision-makers act in a rational and fair manner”.—[Official Report, 25/01/12; col. 1061.]
Parts of this Bill—and particularly the proposal to do away with the child poverty targets contained in the Child Poverty Act 2010, which Alan Milburn has forecast will be missed by a “country mile”—suggest that, rather than being influenced by irrelevant facts, decision-makers appear to have ignored extremely relevant facts related to the responsibilities of other departments. Rather than acting in a rational and fair manner, they have acted irrationally and unfairly by ignoring what they should have taken into account.
In moving Amendment 22, I must declare an interest as co-chair of the All-Party Group on Speech and Language Difficulties. In 2012, we published a report on the links between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs, which included an extremely alarming graph that showed that children with very low IQs from supportive families would overtake children with higher IQs from disadvantaged families at the age of five unless they were helped. One of our recommendations, discussed with both the Department of Health and the Department for Communities and Local Government, was that every child in the country should be assessed by a health visitor—trained or accompanied by a speech and language therapist—by the age of two so that remedial treatment could be initiated aimed at ensuring that every child could engage with education when starting school. We also recommended regular reassessments to measure both progress and change of circumstance. This should continue until school-leaving age for those with special educational needs, whose statutory education, health and care plans continue until age 21.
Assessment of a child’s progress at age five provides a critical measure of their cognitive, emotional, social and physical development. In this connection, I should declare two other relevant interests. I am president of the Institute of Food, Brain and Behaviour, which has reported frequently on the vital importance of correct nutrition for brain development, not least before birth, and chairman of the Criminal Justice and Acquired Brain Injury Interest Group, which has campaigned for better understanding of the impact on young people of neuro-disability, which covers a multitude of conditions, including the effects of head injuries. The earlier that you can identify problems, the more likely you are to be able to initiate remedial treatment aimed at ensuring that children achieve the best educational attainment they possibly can and so have the best chance of finding and keeping work, which will help them to break cycles of intergenerational poverty.
What worries me most about the dropping of the targets contained in the Child Poverty Act, inadequate though they are for obtaining a detailed picture of the actual material condition of those in poverty, is that, now, neither central nor local government are to be required to make strategies for reducing child poverty or preparing and publishing assessments of the needs of children living in poverty. Meaningful improvement can be based only on particularised fact, in which regard much of the official data on which judgments will be based are little better than generalised fudge because they hide so many pockets of problems. The same detailed facts are required not only by the DWP for benefit purposes and by the Prime Minister and Chancellor for strategic purposes but by the Department of Health, the Department of Education, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Communities and Local Government so that they can sing from the same hymn sheet when planning early years provision and the deployment of social and other remedial workers, to name but two responsibilities.
On Amendment 34, having already voiced my concern that the Bill is yet another example of a department legislating in silo, it appears to me that the Treasury and the DWP have not considered the impact on the mental and physical health of United Kingdom citizens when setting the level of statutory minimum incomes or the cost of treating consequent mental and physical ill-health in the NHS. Provision of the minimum income needed for healthy living is a means of preventing mental and physical ill-health and its cost. Currently, and even more so under the provisions of the Bill, too many parents are frustrated in their attempts to provide for their children by inadequate statutory minimum incomes. The difficulty in understanding the extent of this is exacerbated by the lack of up-to-date information, which Amendment 34 seeks to rectify. The amendment also seeks to open up a debate about the link between inadequate incomes, sanctions and the inevitable and unmanageable debt on the one hand and their impact on the mental and physical health of the poorest citizens on the other.
Ever since the national minimum wage was introduced, successive Governments appear to have ignored that the crucial income for health is the minimum wage after housing costs have been deducted. That amount is constantly being reduced by ever-increasing rents in the chaotic British housing market, the enforcement of debt collection—to which court costs and bailiffs have now been added—and the cost of council tax. According to the Office for National Statistics, 14.5 million people are now in absolute poverty after housing costs have been deducted. That is 4.1 million more than before their deduction. In other words, 4.1 billion additional people lack the ability to buy the food, fuel, clothes and other necessities that are essential for physical and mental health and well-being. That must surely concern a Government who pride themselves on their compassion.
The national minimum wage is based on the assumption that £6.70 an hour is paid for a 37.5-hour week. My amendment would also enable the Government to assess the impact of zero-hour contracts and part-time working on the health of employees working less than 37.5 hours a week. The Chancellor has now announced that the national minimum wage is to be replaced by a national living wage of £7.20 per hour from next April, rising to £9 per hour by 2020. In the absence of any known research into the minimum income needed for healthy living, he appears to be using the word “living” without substance. By contrast, I pay tribute to Reverend Paul Nicolson. I am most grateful to him and Taxpayers Against Poverty for telling me, among other useful information, that it was robust research for the Living Wage Foundation carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that led to the London living wage of £9.40 an hour and £8.25 per hour outside London, which 724 employers, up from 429 last year, are now paying. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has already announced:
“Paying the London living wage is not only morally right, but makes good business sense too”.
More than 2,200 employees working for companies with contracts from the Greater London Authority are now benefiting from the London living wage. In another report, published on 23 November, the Rowntree Foundation showed that 51% of those living below the absolute poverty line lived in households in which at least one adult was in work. My amendment is not so much about the actual amount but to point out that because the Government’s proposed national living wage is so inadequate, it will condemn too many households to absolute poverty, with the inevitable consequences for their mental and physical health.
The DWP cannot claim that this information has not been readily available or that it has not been brought to the Government’s attention. In addition to the activities of the organisations with which I am associated, the link between debt and mental illness has been highlighted in a report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, confirmed in a peer-reviewed study by the University of Liverpool. The Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition has highlighted the link between poor maternal nutrition, low birth weight and developmental brain disorders in children. The Centre for Mental Health, as vice-president of which I must also declare an interest, has calculated that the economic and social costs of mental health problems in England were £105 billion in 2009-10, taking into account costs of health and social care, loss of output and human costs. Many now consider this to be an underestimate.
Those of us who voted in favour of the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady Meacher to the tax credits statutory instrument have been accused of acting unconstitutionally. My reason for doing so was to try to persuade the Chancellor to think again. I do not believe that anything in our current parliamentary process is as unsatisfactory, if not unconstitutional, as the Committee system in the other place, where Governments have a built-in majority of nine to seven, meaning that virtually no opposing amendment has a hope of being agreed. There have been numerous examples of admittedly imperfectly scrutinised legislation being sent to this House because the Committee, as composed in the other place, had neither time nor the necessary expertise to complete that process. Having read the Committee proceedings in the other place, I believe that to be true of the Bill.
In putting forward these two amendments, like my noble friend over tax credits, I ask the Minister to think again about this part of the Bill, and particularly the decision to scrap the strategic requirements in the Child Poverty Act 2010 and its proposed renaming. Life chances are being eroded by child poverty, which fact ought always to be in the forefront of government minds. In order to improve life chances, everything possible must be done to alleviate child poverty, and in order to achieve this essential, whichever Government are in power will need the information that my amendments seek to ensure is available on a regular basis.
Again, like the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, on an earlier amendment, and remembering the Minister’s willingness to discuss contentious issues in earlier Bills, I and, I am sure, other colleagues would be very happy to meet him to discuss this. I beg to move.
Lord Freud
As noble Lords will be aware, the Government’s emphasis is to put authority into the hands of local authorities, which is what devolution is about. Therefore they cannot have devolution on the one hand and then send a whole series of specific requirements down on the other.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this group of amendments. I also thank the Minister for his response. However, it contained one of the most disappointing sentences that I have ever heard from a Dispatch Box, when he said that he was not sure whether the Government could do more than they are doing. The Government could do a great deal more than they are doing and more than they have indicated they are willing to do tonight.
Lord Freud
I thank the noble Lord very much, but I do not want to let the noble Lord leave the Chamber tonight so disappointed. When I said the word “do” I meant that our approach to what we are trying to do would not change. That does not mean that we are satisfied with our level of energy and input. I want to make that clear so that the noble Lord does not think that I was making a complacent remark when I was talking about our approach.
Lord Ramsbotham
I am grateful to the noble Lord for that explanation. He knows perfectly well that on previous occasions he has earned the respect of the House by the way he has responded to questions and has been willing to take part. If I have another disappointment, it is that he has not responded to my suggestion that we should meet and have a discussion about all these issues. I do not feel that I have had an answer, particularly to the problem of mental health which was raised in Amendment 34.
I have always been worried about strategy as far as its production in Whitehall is concerned. I was once berated by a senior civil servant in the Home Office, who said to me, “I wish you’d stop talking about strategy. We don’t need strategy—all we need is strategic direction”. I said to her, “What do you mean?”, to which she replied, “Top down, of course”. I said, “Well, that’s where you’re absolutely up the creek. Just because somebody says something from the top does not make it a strategy”. A strategy is something which unites everyone in the delivery of something, which includes all the ministries that have been mentioned tonight. For example, when it is mentioned that the Department of Health knows about mental health or the Department for Education knows about attainment at key stages 1, 2, 3 and 4, why not get together and have an information-gathering strategy at which each of the ministries is required to produce what is required to have an overall strategy which feeds all the government departments that need to draw on that to process legislation.
I very much hope that we will be able to talk through this. I have listened to what has been said from the Floor of the House throughout today’s proceedings and there is a great deal of expertise that could help the department to produce better legislation, which is surely what we are all about. While I am happy to withdraw the amendment at this stage, I promise the Minister that we will return to it on Report and possibly at Third Reading.
Unemployment: Young People
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, on obtaining this debate and on his masterly survey of the current situation. I hope that he will forgive me if, before focusing on combating unemployment among youth in contact with the criminal justice system, I take noble Lords on an indirect approach to my conclusion about the context in which online strategies can be employed, inspired by two sentences in the UK Commissioner for Employment and Skills, Valerie Todd’s, foreword to her report, The Youth Employment Challenge, published in July last year:
“Lack of experience combined with a lack of social contacts in a labour market which still relies heavily on informal methods of recruitment makes it increasingly difficult for young people to get a foot on the ladder”.
Secondly,
“Commissioners are committed to encouraging and incentivising UK employers to embed a culture of developing and recruiting young people into routine business practice. It is in all our interests to rise to this challenge”.
I am one of those who believe that the only raw material that every nation has in common is its people. Woe betide it if it does not do everything that it can to identify, nurture and develop the talents of its people—all its people. If it does not do that, it has only itself to blame if it fails.
I declare another interest in youth development as a past member of the City and Guilds strategy board at the time of what I regard as one of the most disastrous political decisions ever made. It was the refusal by the then Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Ruth Kelly, to accept the recommendations about raising the status of vocational education made by Mike Tomlinson in 2004. It has resulted in far too many young people being forced to go down academic routes to which they are entirely unsuited rather than having an early introduction to vocational courses and so suitable placements in the labour market.
The lack of vocational training has had another unfortunate result. At a time when the country is crying out for growth, employers are complaining bitterly about the skills shortage that is preventing them from being able to expand and develop their businesses. This is coupled with attitudes to work in general, which include a refusal to consider menial jobs because they are what some term “immigrant work” and an inability to turn up on time.
These attitudes would have come as no surprise to Glubb Pasha, whom noble Lords will remember as the commander of the Arab Legion until 1956. He wrote a monograph about empires which, he said, lasted for 250 years or 10 generations. The British Empire, according to him, lasted from 1700 to 1950. In characterising their rise and fall, he catalogued the drive and ambition of their early generations, followed by the high but turning point marked by universal access to higher education, followed by decline, encouraged by lethargy and lack of ambition, marked by people thinking that their education entitled them to a living.
That may or may not be true, but what is undoubtedly true is the confused state of our world, which is in the midst of an information technology revolution that nobody knows how to control, and whose impact on government, economies and how people live is imperfectly understood. This confusion includes the changing role of people, as labour-saving devices take over, making it difficult to determine how many people are needed and in what jobs to make the world go round and what skills they need in order to earn a living wage.
This is of course simplistic, but it provides a backdrop to the circumstances of the group of people to whose needs I wish to draw attention. It includes the appalling lack of education and job skills in young offenders, which is an indictment of our educational system. I admit that I cringe whenever I hear political parties talking competitively about their “virtual” employment schemes—virtual because they do not in fact offer either real employment or the prospects of such—or putting people back to work, when they know, and I know, that the work that they are promising simply is not there. There is a clear disconnect between the number of jobs available, the skills needed to perform them and the skills base of the potential workforce. I fear that until and unless that fact is recognised and appropriate remedial action taken, the situation can only get worse.
I once had a conversation with the head of education and skills at a young offender institution, who told me that her first task was to motivate young people to want to learn. She also wished that she had vocational training classrooms so that she could motivate them to want to work. She welcomed the aptitude tests introduced by the previous Government under its new deal, because they gave such a clear indication of individual talent and potential, but she could not exploit that knowledge because of the lack of facilities to enable young people to develop their skills.
In parallel, I have also come to the conclusion that the inability of young people to communicate verbally is the scourge of the 21st century. However able they are at digital communication, they cannot communicate either with each other or with their teachers. That is largely due to the absence of what used to be regarded as normal aspects of family life such as eating meals together. The chaotic and dysfunctional lifestyles they live are, almost from birth, dominated by the television screen, computer games and social media.
I accept that that this could be seen as helping them to prepare for life in today and tomorrow’s world by familiarising them with the tools of emerging society. However, there is what is termed a digital divide between those who have access to and can use online tools and the social media, and those who have not and/or cannot. That is why, when considering youth employment, it is important to strike a balance between reliance on these tools, and on the social contacts and informal methods of recruitment that are deemed by employers to be such an essential part of the process of getting on the employment ladder. That leads me to hope that the Government will not put all their youth employment-finding eggs in one digital basket.
That is the end of my indirect approach to the subject of this debate; I will now concentrate on my direct approach. The noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, has already mentioned Plotr, the Government initiative launched by the Prime Minister last year to help young people to plot their careers online. Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society, said recently that Plotr had the broad aim of,
“inspiring young people and connecting them to all the opportunities available to them to make the most of their lives”.
That is very worthy and praiseworthy for the digital haves, who have access to online tools and social media, but not so good for the have-nots, who include the 8,862 between the ages of 15 and 20 held in young offender institutions, who face the double whammy of also being denied access to the work experience and social contact that is deemed so essential by employers.
The Justice Secretary, launching his rehabilitation revolution, announced his determination to reduce reoffending, to achieve which a home, a job and a stable relationship are said to be the three most important contributory factors. I expect that the Minister, in her summing up, will commend the use of online tools and the social media to combat youth unemployment, with all the advantages trumpeted by Nick Hurd. However, I hope that she will also encourage the Justice Secretary to ensure that young offenders, for whom everything possible must be done to deter them from a life of crime, are given access to the online and social media tools, if not individually because of security reasons, then at least in learning and skills departments in establishments.
Youth Unemployment
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on obtaining this important debate and for the way in which he introduced it, which reflects entirely the motivation and determination he showed when he was a Minister in the education department.
While echoing many of the things that have been said around the House, I want to think outside the box. I do so because what has been said recently, particularly in connection with the riots, has stimulated three questions which have been in my mind for a long time. They are unconnected, but one was particularly stimulated by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham in our recent debate on the report on the riots. I have long believed that the only raw material that every nation has in common is its people, and woe betide it if it does not do everything it can to identify, nurture and develop the talents of all its people, because unless it does so, it has only itself to blame if it fails. That is a burden on all of us, not just our educators.
The second question refers to a visit that I paid to the Indian Army in 1973, including the state of Orissa in East India. That evening, we had an audience with the very impressive governor of the province. I said to her that I had noticed, driving around Orissa, that I had not seen a single agricultural machine, all I had seen were people with hoes and spades. She said: “You tell me which is best. Is it best to have machines producing more than you can use; or is it better to have everyone in employment?”. It is a question I have never been able to answer.
The third question refers to when I was commanding Belfast between 1978 and 1980. During that time, I used to see a great deal of a very interesting politician called Paddy Devlin, one of the founders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, who was imprisoned in the 1950s as a member of the IRA but was a very distinguished Minister of Health in the short-lived power-sharing executive in 1974. During that time, there was a proposal that a car factory should be developed by a firm called DeLorean on the interface between the Catholic and Protestant areas, employing people from both sides, but the Catholics did not have a tradition of working with metals in that sort of industry. The Government established an employment centre in Turf Lodge, in the heartland of Catholic west Belfast, to start training people to get jobs in the DeLorean factory. That was objected to by the IRA, who sent in the 10 year-olds to try to burn it. They failed, so the 14 year-olds were put in. They did not do it, but the 16 year-olds made a much better job of it, which left a derelict site which I then took over as a base.
During that time, I had a long talk with Paddy about unemployment in the area, because I was concerned that there was nothing for people other than that. He explained to me that one reason why the IRA burned the DeLorean training centre was because it did not want people to be employed. He said that a man wants to earn enough money to feed, clothe and house his family, to have a holiday and, occasionally, to change the wallpaper. If society produces that, he will support it. If society does not, he will not. If there was therefore a possibility of that happening and driving people away from the IRA, it wished to bring them back in. At the same time, Paddy asked me if I knew how many unemployed there were in that part of west Belfast. I said that I did not but that I would try to find out, so for July 1979 we counted all the men of employable age and what they did during that time. We found that the unemployment rate was about 80%. I mentioned this to Paddy and he said, “I would not have been surprised if it was 90%”.
To echo very much what the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said, it is therefore terribly important that instead of taking figures which represent an average over a whole area, we should identify hotspots. This brings me to there having been some figures in the report on the riots which struck me as being very important. They were perceptions: the 83% who felt that youth unemployment was a problem in their area and the 71% who felt that there were insufficient opportunities for young people. Only 22% felt that public services were doing enough.
In that climate, we then find talk of youth contracts, payment by results, career support guarantees, youth job promises and apprenticeship programmes but I am bound to ask: for what? Are the jobs actually there which can be operated by the young people to whom we are promising all these guarantees, supports, results and so on? Have we ever analysed exactly what the situation really is in terms of the availability of jobs? We live in an era when, as one found in Orissa, machines are taking over from men and labour-saving is the phrase, so where are these jobs? I ask that because it is hugely important that the Government should establish precisely what the job situation is going to be before making all these promises. There is nothing worse than to make promises that are totally incapable of being kept, particularly to the young. With the disillusioned young, they will lose not only this generation but other generations for the future.
Welfare Reform Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
“Guidelines to be followed by officials of jobcentres and local authorities when imposing sanctions, penalties or overpayments
(1) The Secretary of State shall issue guidelines applying to claimants which must, when imposing sanctions or penalties, be followed by officials of jobcentres and local authorities.
(2) When drafting the guidelines referred to in subsection (1) the Secretary of State will have regard to guidelines issued by the Sentencing Council covering the determination of fines.
(3) Officials of jobcentres and local authorities shall take into account all the relevant factors and circumstances of welfare claimants before deciding to impose any sanction or any penalty and before deciding to recover any overpayment.
(4) It shall be the duty of the decision makers in jobcentres or local authorities to give reasons for any decision in any case where any sanction or penalty is imposed upon a welfare claimant and where any decision is made that an overpayment is recoverable.”
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, Amendment 62A is in many ways complementary to Amendment 62ZC, which we have just debated.
The purpose of the amendment is to try to ensure that the standard of evidence required of officials in local authorities or jobcentres when imposing civil penalties and recovering overpayments should be the same as that required in the courts when imposing fines and enforcing debts. I set out at length my reasoning for the amendment to the Grand Committee and I do not propose to repeat that now.
In Grand Committee I was grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who helpfully suggested that, as tabled, the amendment was too prescriptive. The Minister, while agreeing that it was right and proper that decision-makers gave full consideration to all the relevant facts provided by a claimant, who should also have the right of appeal, suggested that adequate protections were already in place. However, he also agreed to meet those who had drafted the amendment to go through the issues in detail. That meeting has taken place, for which all who attended—I hope that I am speaking for the noble Lords, Lord McKenzie of Luton and Lord Kirkwood, as well as myself—were extremely grateful.
Before that meeting I tabled the amendment in its current form. It proposes that, to better ensure the original intention, the guidelines recently published by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, should be followed. At the conclusion of the meeting the Minister said that he wanted to work with those attending the meeting, whom he recognised as being concerned about vulnerable people, to get the guidance right and compliant with the Wednesbury principles on reasonableness.
The Minister also said that he would look again at the current guidance with the reworded amendment and see whether adjustment was appropriate, not least because of the similarity with the decision-making required, on the one hand, of the courts when imposing fines and enforcing debts, and, on the other, by officials in local authorities and jobcentres in raising civil penalties and recovering overpayments. I hope that the consistency resulting from what I propose will encourage the Minister to accept at least the spirit of the amendment. I note with interest what he said about the code of practice. I am sure that that is the way in which the guidance should be got to officials. I would welcome his reassurance that the guidelines about which this amendment speaks have been included in the working of that code of practice. I look forward to his response. I beg to move.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord McKenzie, I also thank the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for that meeting. I know that he found it of considerable interest and use. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, of course knows rather a lot about penalties, sanctions and their fairness. His amendment seeks to ensure that the appropriate guidelines and procedures are in place when a jobcentre or local authority imposes sanctions, fines or penalties on claimants, and particularly that, when officials impose such penalties, they give clear reasons for doing so.
Clarity about circumstances in which a penalty, sanction or overpayment can be recovered is vital if administrative justice is to be realised but also to enable claimants to have confidence in the system. It obviously also makes the job of officials considerably easier when there is a clear set of steps to follow and a clear description of the circumstances in which they should consider possible hardship to a claimant. It is also essential that the reasons for any sanction or repayment are set out, preferably in writing, so that the claimant, any adviser or a reviewer can understand the grounds on which the decision was taken. We look forward to the Minister giving us assurances that a set of guidelines, safeguards and relevant procedures will be in place so as to meet the aspirations set out in the amendment.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister not just for those remarks but also for the seminar which he mentioned, where I know that his willingness to listen and what he said was hugely appreciated by the stakeholders. I am very glad that he mentioned the future collaboration because I know that it will also be appreciated by them. What this exercise has shown—the Grand Committee, the seminar and now today—is that it is essential to maintain a dialogue between the stakeholders on the ground and the people responsible to make certain that, if anything is going wrong or there are ideas for making improvements, that should be fed in to the people responsible rather than having to go through a tortuous process.
I am very grateful to the Minister for all that. Out of this exercise, the code of practice that goes down to the officials can only be the better. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Welfare Reform Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
I too apologise for not being here at the start. I just ask the Minister to reflect on the words of my company sergeant-major when the Army moved from weekly pay packets to bank accounts. He said, “Thems that pays by the week lives by the week, but if you pay them by the month they will still live by the week”.
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, I have a couple of brief points to add. One is addressed to the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton. Perhaps he would like to reflect on the fact that what the Minister is doing in this Bill is taking two completely separate systems of support, one for those in work and one for those out of work, and creating a single seamless new product. However, for that to work, it must meet the needs of both sets of people. I think that was the point that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, was making just now—that the Minister may want to effect a culture change for those who are in work, or whom he would like to be in work, but universal credit is also available to support many people who are not required to work, who may never be required to work and who may never be capable of working. Why should they be forced to go through a culture change to no end? Is there really a strong case and can the Minister explain it to us?
Secondly, I want to pick up on the very good point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester that it takes a lot of time, energy and skill to manage on a very small amount of money. It also takes a lot of intelligence and aptitude to be able to budget well on that. Perhaps the Minister could reflect on what may seem to be simply a matter of timing. If one has plenty of money it is much easier; it is also easier if one has a pot of working capital, so if something goes wrong one month the consequences are simply that you dip into your savings. I spent some years working with single parents and most of them had almost no cushion at all, so if they got it wrong they had nothing to fall back on. For many poor people, their friends are also poor, their families are poor; they do not have the kind of networks where you simply go and borrow from somebody else or you to go the bank and ask it to lend the money, because it will not. The consequences for those families of getting that budgeting wrong can be very severe. Given what is happening in other areas to the Social Fund and the other kinds of support, we really do not want to be driving people into the arms of moneylenders.
Finally, within that group there are some people who, because of their particular circumstances, have very strong reasons why they need to be paid regularly. It is a point I made in Committee but I think it bears repeating here. I have worked with families where, for example, the husband had a problem with drugs or alcohol and went off on a bender and spent the week’s wages; the mother would have to find a way of feeding the children until the next benefit cheque arrived. If that happens in one week, it is difficult; if it is happening in two weeks, it is difficult; but as the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, will appreciate, if it is not a matter of “life after next Tuesday” but “life for the three weeks that follow next Tuesday until the end of the month”, how does she manage?
The question the Minister has to answer is not whether he would like to do this; I have no doubt that he would. Rather, it is: is the price that will be paid by some of the poorest people really worth the culture change he wants to achieve?
Welfare Reform Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
“Means inquiry before sanctions, penalties and recovery of overpayments are imposed
(1) In respect of the imposition of an overpayment or sanction under the Jobseekers Act 1995 or any other provision or in the case of a penalty imposed under section 115C of the Social Security Administration Act 1992, the Secretary of State shall consider—
(a) evidence of the physical condition of the claimant and his or her state of health;(b) evidence of the psychological state of health of the claimant;(c) evidence relating to the means and income of the claimant;(d) evidence relating to the accommodation occupied by the claimant and the effect that the imposition of a sanction or penalty may have on the right to occupy such accommodation;(e) the family circumstances of the claimant and the impact that it may have on other family members and dependants;(f) evidence of the impact that a sanction or penalty may have on the ability of the claimant to fulfil obligations to third parties including those relating to the fulfilment of benefit entitlement conditions,before deciding whether to impose a sanction or penalty and shall only do so where, having considered all the relevant circumstances, it is reasonable to do so.(2) Regarding evidence as to means the Secretary of State must consider—
(a) the income of the claimant;(b) the capital of the claimant;(c) the expenditure of the claimant.(3) In order to facilitate the enquiry into the matters set out in subsection (1), the Secretary of State or authority may—
(a) arrange for a medical examination of the claimant;(b) obtain information from any agency holding relevant information on the income and resources of the claimant;(c) receive evidence from any other person or persons with a knowledge of the circumstances of the claimant.(4) A person who is subject to a penalty may appeal to a tribunal (lower tier) against the imposition of such a penalty.”
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, in many respects this amendment, which stems from the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust and 16 other organisations and groups, including Mind, Save the Children and the Church of England bishops, is complementary to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, and the subsequent debate that we have just had. Its purpose is to propose that the duty on officials responsible for making decisions on sanctions or penalties against benefit claimants, or the enforcement of overpayment recovery, takes into account the facts and circumstances of the claimants in each case, and that that duty should be in the Bill. My list of what that evidence-gathering might include may seem long, but the facts and circumstances are as many and varied as the lives of the claimants themselves.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I was not quite certain what we were going to end up with after all that. I was very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for pre-empting me in suggesting that others should come to that meeting, not just those who put their names to the amendment but also those who have spoken, because I suspect that there is quite a lot to be done. I think that it might be sensible also to include some of the groups that approached me in the formulation of the amendment to hear from them on the ground as they have a great deal to contribute. I found it encouraging that the Minister agreed that this was an issue that really has to be tackled so we all start from a common ground.
As always, I am grateful for the wisdom of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. I absolutely accept what he says and indeed, I have looked at this process in Grand Committee as being a way of refining what we were saying. It was getting something done that needs refining, which I saw as the purpose of the Grand Committee. I entirely take the Minister’s idea that we take this on with a seminar. It is too important an issue not to be explored in detail. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, has introduced the issue of localism, and so on, so there are other issues, as well as the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill on the impact on legal aid and access to justice, which should all be taken into account. On that basis, and in thanking everyone who has taken part, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Welfare Reform Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
“Benefits payments to prisoners
(1) Regulations shall provide that a person undergoing imprisonment or detention in legal custody who, at the time that imprisonment or custody commences, is in receipt of any of the qualifying benefits, shall be assessed, during his time in imprisonment or custody, for eligibility for those benefits at the time of his release from imprisonment or custody.
(2) For the purposes of this section, the qualifying benefits are—
(a) universal credit;(b) jobseeker’s allowance;(c) employment and support allowance;(d) income support;(e) personal independence payment, to the extent provided for in regulations made under section 84; and(f) any other benefits provided for in regulations made under this section.(3) Regulations made under this section shall provide that the assessment required under subsection (1) shall commence as soon as a person is received into imprisonment or custody.
(4) Regulations shall in particular provide that a person appointed by the Secretary of State shall record, at the time a person is received into imprisonment or custody, details of any qualifying benefits which are in payment at that time, together with any personal information needed to establish the person’s identity, including but not limited to their national insurance number.
(5) An assessment of eligibility under subsection (1) shall be completed in such time as to ensure that the person assessed receives payment of any benefits for which he is assessed as being eligible no later than one week after his release from imprisonment or custody.
(6) Regulations under this section shall be made by the Secretary of State and shall be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure.”
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, this amendment has its genesis as long ago as 1996. As Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, I found that, at the end of their sentence, prisoners were released with a discharge grant of £46 or, if they had no address to go to, £92. The numbers claiming £92 went down when home detention curfew or tagging was introduced because, in order to qualify, they had to give an address. They were then required to go to their local jobcentre and sign on for whatever benefits they were entitled to, so having to live on their discharge grant until those came through, which could take up to three weeks and sometimes longer. I ask Members of the Grand Committee how they would cope if they were a single parent with dependent children having to live on £46 for three weeks, probably having lost their accommodation thanks to the rule brought in by Mr Peter Lilley in 1995 whereby council accommodation would be forfeited after 13 weeks of absence and their possessions removed. That is not to excuse those who break the law, but it offers an explanation for the appalling high reoffending rate among recently released offenders.
When I was Chief Inspector of Prisons, and on several occasions since then, including in your Lordships’ House, I have asked why benefit claims could not be processed while someone is in prison so that on release they do not receive a grant but the first of future regular payments. As very many prisoners are receiving some form of benefit before they go into prison, it should not be beyond the wit of man to suspend those payments during the period of imprisonment and resume them on release. However, every sort of reason has been put forward about why that is impossible, which I put down to lack of will power: the prisons from which they are released may not be in the same geographical area where they live and, therefore, not in the area where their nearest jobcentre is; there are no Jobcentre Plus employees in prisons who could process the claims; or the prison into which they were received and which suspended their payment may not be the same one from which they are released. I think all this is baloney and that the Government, by not grasping the nettle, are contributing to the reoffending rate.
My amendment is designed to put an end to that nonsense by regulating that individual benefit claims are processed during a person’s imprisonment so that the discharge grant becomes a thing of the past, except for those who do not qualify for benefit. There are other spin-offs to this process that can only help the conduct of imprisonment, because an individual’s national insurance number is a unique identification weapon armed with which there is no reason why one cannot pass information regarding individual claims around the system. Unique national insurance numbers, without which benefit claims cannot be made, will also help to prevent identity fraud, because pretending to be someone else will deny provision.
My amendment specifically mentions those who were in receipt of benefits at the time of their reception into custody, but I shall amend it at a later stage to include the assessment of all people inside and the initial assessment of those whose entitlement is discovered only when they are in custody. What I am proposing is in fact in line with something that has already been set in train regarding the work programme. The Deputy Prime Minister announced on 16 August that the Government intended to mandate prison leavers to the programme immediately on release from prison, with national implementation for jobseeker’s allowance claimants from March 2012, and to work with the Ministry of Justice on a pilot integration of reoffending outcomes into work programmes.
To enable that to happen, Jobcentre Plus advisers will process jobseeker’s allowance claims in prison—although for some extraordinary reason it is said that discussions with claimants will be voluntary and not mandatory. They will then make a record of all prison leavers that will be retained for 13 weeks from the date on which they leave custody. If a claim for jobseeker’s allowance is made during that time, the prison leaver will be referred to the work programme at the point of claim. To a layman, this all seems convoluted and bureaucratic. If the Department for Work and Pensions really is fully committed to supporting the rehabilitation of offenders, why can officials not sit down with those from the Ministry of Justice and work out a system that applies to every single prison leaver, not just those who are in the market for the work programme or jobseeker’s allowance?
The reason for proposed subsection (3) in my amendment is that, all too often, resettlement essentials in prison are left until the very end of a sentence, in which case it may be too late to process benefit claims. However, if processing is started immediately so that a prisoner’s status on release is well known in advance, that will be avoided. This applies to the work programme as much as to the universal benefit. Of course there will be problems with those serving short sentences but, as I have suggested, suspension and resumption rather than initiation may well be the required process.
Bearing in mind the unnecessary reoffending and misery that present procedures have caused for too long, I have corresponded with both the Ministry of Justice and the Minister over this amendment, being amazed that successive Governments should not have done something to rectify this over the years—particularly this Government, in view of what they currently have in hand at both the MoJ and the DWP. I am very grateful to the Minister for his response to my letters but, with respect, I suggest that in drafting his answer his officials may not have made the connections that I have tried to describe. I therefore ask him to reconsider his written refusal to support my amendment, dated 26 October, and meet me to discuss further action before Report. I beg to move.
Baroness Meacher
My Lords, I have not prepared any comments on this amendment, but it seems to me to be of enormous importance. I cannot imagine that the Minister would not wish to support it.
One very obvious proposal would be for every prison to work out the release rate of their prisoners and to determine how many hours per week of a Jobcentre Plus person they need in the prison to process all these prisoners in order that they are paid their full benefit entitlement before, I suggest, they go out of the door or within the first week.
It is a fact that a very large number of prisoners reoffend within that very early period following release, which seems almost inevitable. What else are these people supposed to do? I therefore hope that the Minister will indeed meet my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham to consider how to do it. It has surely to be done; it is a matter of how best to do it—whether to have people in the prison doing this work to overcome the problems of people moving from one area to another and even while they are in prison. I can see that that is a problem for individual jobcentres, but, one way or another, I hope that this can be resolved.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has made a very powerful case, particularly for those serving short sentences. One can be reasonably confident that the benefit entitlement with which they enter prison will remain the same when they leave it. Could the Minister help me by fleshing out his thoughts a little further on a situation in which you cannot know in the same way, under universal credit, whether someone leaving prison is going into the household of a former partner with children or whether that household has broken up while he has been in prison? What question marks will there be? It was much easier to arrange when we were dealing with a single benefit, such as jobseeker’s allowance, which was not particularly related to the network of other benefits that a household might receive. It would clearly work for those serving short sentences or for somebody who was single throughout their sentence and expected to come out single. Could the Minister help us on how he would handle a situation in which a person was going back into a household with children, where there might be rent to be paid from his universal credit entitlement? He might go back expecting that payment to be made to him. Perhaps the Minister could help us on that.
Lord Ramsbotham
Thank you very much. I am glad that the noble Baroness raised that point. It reinforces something that many of us have been saying for a long time: the prison system of this country is not organised to help itself. The trouble is that prisoners are scattered all over the country by an incoherent national population management structure, as opposed to—as recommended by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, after the Strangeways riots in 1990—prisons being grouped into what he called community clusters or regional clusters so that nobody ever left their region. Therefore, all the resources of the region could be applied to the rehabilitation of their own offenders. It will be very difficult for the Ministry of Justice to resolve the questions that noble Lords have asked under the present distributed system. If prisons were regionalised and the prison authorities properly hooked into all the authorities in the region, it would be much easier to liaise with the regional authorities responsible for finding out that sort of detail. That should of course be part of the whole rehabilitation process anyway. The questions that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, posed are absolutely ones that should be referred to the Ministry of Justice. We should ask, “How will you ensure that these are answered, because they must be?”.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, my role in this Grand Committee has been very much in the light of that line from Milton:
“They also serve who only stand and wait”.
The occasions on which I have spoken have been unexpected to the Committee and have surprised even me. I am indebted to my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for having moved his amendment. He will not remember, but in my last month as a Member of Parliament, I had just such a case. It was the first time that I had ever had one. A man had been in prison for drug-related offences and had just come out. At my surgery, he described to me the nature of the problem with which he was then confronted. I cannot remember whether we spoke on the telephone or face-to-face, but I recall saying to the noble Lord—of course I knew his background—that we had known each other a long time and even played cricket together, sometimes on the same side and sometimes against each other. I laid out the case and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said in despair, “You are describing what happens so often, so often, so often”. I am only sorry that by virtue of leaving the House of Commons at that moment, I never heard how the story ended. I speak now because it is quite clear not only from today but from my earlier experience that there is a real problem that we must deal with.
Lord Freud
My Lords, there are two things here: budgeting advances and a process of how we move people on to the system that we are looking at. I cannot set that out in detail, but we will be doing so in regulations as we elaborate that system.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply and I also thank those who have contributed to the debate. I have to admit that I am encouraged. However, there is a “but”, and my “buts” are always about the maintenance of momentum. The noble Lord mentioned those on the work programme, but what about those who are not and what about those who are falling between the cracks? When we meet, I should like to explore the question of all the people whom one finds in prison, such as the one that the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, quoted, who fall through the cracks and do not get picked up.
I take issue with the business of leaving things until late. The Prison Service is notoriously bad at leaving things until they are late, and it is the same with housing and debt management. The sooner you can start work on it, the better. It will not be expensive because it can be done by the people in prison, provided that they are brought into the process. It should not be left.
I am very grateful for the Minister’s offer of a meeting. I look forward to it because there is obviously more to discuss, and indeed I shall have one or two examples of that in my Amendment 107, which we shall come to later. That amendment is connected with what happens to people when they come out of prison. In the mean time, in the spirit of the Minister’s reply, and with my thanks for its comprehensive nature, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.