Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2015
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I suppose that I should declare an interest as a recipient of one of the pension benefits that the Minister has just announced. I should get that on the record. When he read out the increases, I was reminded that I was the 75p Pensions Minister. He took me back down memory lane as he spoke.
Lord Rooker
I remember it well, too.
I want to raise a very narrow point on this order. Article 10 under Part 2 concerns the rates of the personal independence payment. Within the PIP is the mobility component, which enables people to access the mobility scheme for the lease of vehicles. I was in the Commons in the 1970s when the scheme replaced the old invalid trike, so I am well aware of the positive change. I make no comment on the scheme, save to say that it has given safe access to mobility for many thousands—indeed, millions—over the years, and I hope that it will for years to come. Given that it is public money that we are dealing with, I want to call now for a full inquiry in the next Parliament by the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee and the Work and Pensions Select Committee into the finances of the scheme and particularly the banker-sized salaries paid to certain individuals.
The DWP is paying the Motability charity around £20 million per annum. The charity receives about £7 million in lease levy from the vehicles used. It has a total income of about £30 million. The £20 million from the DWP is paid to a company in respect of advance payments and adaptations. The charity itself—I will come to another one in a moment—is dependent on the money in this order. The chief executive of the charity, which is over 60% dependent on public funds—the money paid from the DWP—was paid £160,000-plus in 2013.
However, the main vehicle scheme is operated by Motability Operations Group plc, a company owned by four banks—Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and RBS. It operates as a contractor to, and is overseen by, the charity. This point is crucial because it is the link with the money in this order. The revenue of the operations company is broadly £4 billion: £2 billion from operating leases and £2 billion from the sale of vehicles at the end of the three-year lease. Six hundred cars a day are placed on the second-hand car market, and I am aware that one in my family was once such a car.
The company, Motability Operations Group, claims, on page 4 of its report, that it gets no money from the Government, but the £2 billion for leases is in fact the DWP payment—now, the PIP—paid to over half a million people. Because the people receiving the PIP have agreed to assign the DWP allowance to the scheme, it is paid directly to the operations company and it is clearly government funding. I call that public money.
House of Lords: Working Practices
Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Rooker
Only after the event, and that is the difficulty. The argument for taking Statements in Grand Committee is powerfully made. Five minutes were taken up by one person when there are only 20 minutes for questions because there is no mechanism for getting some order into the system. If there was, I would not say anything, but going into Grand Committee is important.
I want to raise an issue which I know from some of the speeches is controversial. By the way, I agree with everything that has been said, but the role of the chair, particularly at Question Time, is not an unimportant matter. Between 2005 and 2007, the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, was the Leader of the House and I was the Deputy Leader, I had responsibility for Question Time. I have kept all the daily papers from that time. I have got them in a box, and I know exactly who got called, when they were called, and their party, for every Question Time for those two years. I can produce the figures. They were difficult to do, but nevertheless I kept all the papers because I just walked out of here and chucked them into a box.
Lord Rooker
No, no. There was almost a competition between us. My noble friend Lady Amos would say, “I once got 36 supplementary questions through. How many did you get today?”. I usually managed 24 or 25 supplementaries in half an hour, which is pretty good going when you think about what happened during the Statement today. I want to repeat a point I made last October in the debate on the Queen’s Speech. There is a serious problem in that with the expertise in this House and the range of Questions that can come up on a daily basis—we are not constrained like the other place—I think that there are hundreds of Members of this House who are reluctant to try to ask a supplementary question. That is because the method of doing so is to enter a bear pit.
I have no experience of it. In fact, last week I stood up for the first time ever and asked a supplementary question at Question Time. I had never done it before, and it was an easy one because no one else stood up. However, it can be a bear pit and many people just will not do it. But if you were to ask them whether they had something to say, they would reply, “Yes. I had a good point to make but I wasn’t prepared to join in. If I could have been called, I would take my luck with everyone else”. I know that this is a tricky one because, in a way, it would give the chair the authority of the Leader. It is important because I do not think there is another legislature anywhere in the world where the Executive decides who is asking the questions that scrutinise the Ministers. That is intrinsically wrong for a start. It has got to be a bad principle in terms of democracy. The Government decide which Member can ask the Government a question. I know it is done fairly because for two years I supervised it myself, but it looks wrong. The Lord Speaker could do it in terms of the blocks as people stand. My noble friend Lady Jones is not here, although I am pleased to see my noble friend Lord Grocott in his place.
When I referred to this last October, I said that I had not done any research on it, but I did say that we keep hearing from the same noble Lords at Question Time. After that, someone did some work on the figures, and we had them today. Over a whole Session, half of the supplementary questions—over 1,500 of them—were asked by 8 per cent of Peers, which is 57 Peers. The same people asked all those questions because they are prepared to bully and shout and intimidate others into sitting down. That cannot be conducive to proper scrutiny at Question Time. A few people dominate, and we know who they are because we see them all the while—the same 57 people ask half the supplementaries. So I appreciate the fact that that research was carried out.