Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Skelmersdale and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skelmersdale (Con)]

My Lords, before my noble friend answers, this has gone beyond a joke. My noble friend has given as many answers as she possibly can and, as a result, has been battered by yet further questions exemplifying the miscellaneous points which have been made. My noble friend has offered meetings with any and all noble Lords who want to pursue their points quietly so that they can pursue them again, if necessary, on Report. Surely, this is enough.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

No, my Lords; the problem with the noble Lord’s comment—I do not know whether he was here when we were discussing this earlier—is that we are dealing with what is essentially a skeleton Bill. We do not know how this scheme is going to work in any sort of detail. We have spent some time today and some time on Tuesday trying to tease out the detail. We do not blame the Minister; we entirely sympathise with her in the situation she is in, but she is trying to answer questions to which she cannot know the answer because, deeply foolishly, the Government have started a consultation exercise on all these questions so late that the results of the Government’s thinking, as affected by that consultation exercise, cannot be fed into today’s discussions in Committee.

The fault is with the Government’s timetabling. It is not the Minister’s fault—she is doing her best and we have every sympathy with her; none the less, the Government have put her in this position, trying to answer questions she cannot answer, because they have not banked their consultation exercise in appropriate time, but they expect this House to go ahead with scrutiny of major policy developments without the detail that should inform it.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Skelmersdale and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Tuesday 31st January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment moved by my noble friend. Throughout Committee and Report, the Minister has regularly made clear that he is concerned to make work pay and attractive, and to get behavioural change. I do not think that we on this side disagree with him at all on this. However, it subverts the value, virtue and continuity of behavioural change if sanctions that were applied before that behavioural change had taken place continue. Therefore, he is effectively defeating his own policy.

I was trying to think of an example. On page 33 of the Bill, proposed new Section 6J, “Higher-level sanctions”, which my noble friend referred to, says in subsection (2)(a) that a failure is sanctionable if a claimant,

“fails for no good reason to comply with a requirement imposed by the Secretary of State under a work preparation requirement to undertake a work placement of a prescribed description”.

A couple of weeks ago we had the story of a young woman, a graduate, who had been doing voluntary work in a local museum and was hoping that this would count as appropriate work experience to lead her to a job in that field. The work requirement placement that the local office came up with was that she should do a fortnight in Poundland, filling shelves, even though she had substantive previous retail experience; in other words, it was a very misguided imposition by the decision-makers in the local benefit office—from the outside, it looked as if she was much better off where she was. If she had refused that placement in Poundland, she would have fallen foul of 6J(2)(a) and she could have had three years’ worth of sanctions imposed on her, even if she had subsequently accepted a further placement, which would have been—in her view, and most people’s views—more realistic.

The Minister is stuck with the position that she would have been pulled out of something appropriate to do something less appropriate on the decision of a local decision-maker, and had she resisted that she could have been subjected to sanctions that would have continued for three years, even if she had made it clear that she was willing to accept further and more appropriate work placements that would help her with her career. It must be sensible for the Government to have a way back for people who have resisted—for good reason or bad—an original work placement offer but then go on to respect that imposition, whether appropriate or not. If there is no way back, how can the Minister expect people to respect that law?

[Lord Skelmersdale]

Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, could turn over to page 34 of the Bill. New Section 6J(7)(c) talks about,

“the termination or suspension of a reduction under this section”.

That sounds like exactly the sort of principle that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, has enunciated in moving this amendment. I that hope my noble friend will be able to confirm that.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Skelmersdale and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Monday 28th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Skelmersdale]

My Lords, I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, has called attention to Clause 113, because it is easy enough for some people not to understand the form that they are filling in, even sometimes in the presence of a member of the Minister’s department in the jobcentre. My real problem with this clause is that it talks about negligence. If you fill in a form in a slapdash manner, that is negligent. I would far prefer something like “knowingly”: in other words, designing to commit some sort of fraud. That would be a much happier arrangement.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I support my noble friend’s amendment. Following on from what the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, said, I would say that the test of fraud is normally—I think I saw a former Lord Chancellor who would know much better than I—associated with intent and ignorance of the law and is not a defence, but I think in this case it is because we are dealing with the interlocking of very vulnerable people and a new and very different system for people to understand.

There are three or four matters on which if I were asked now whether people needed to declare things, I could not guide them, and I like to think I have some nodding acquaintance with this Bill. For example, a lone parent has a boyfriend who works away. He stays with her overnight one or twice over the weekend. As a result, is she no longer a lone parent? Clearly it will not depend on their sleeping arrangements but on what contribution he makes to their financial arrangements. On a weekend basis, would that be sufficiently substantial to make her no longer a lone parent but part of a couple and therefore falsely declaring if she claims to be a lone parent? I am not clear what would happen in that situation under the Bill. Perfectly reasonably she might regard the fact that as she is getting universal credit she is not a lone parent and he is somebody who comes in as a boyfriend but not a partner.

With housing benefit, you could have a family with a student son who is living at home, going to the local university and working part-time. Should he be declared for housing benefit as a potential contributor to the rent so that non-dependent adult deductions come into play? I do not know. I think it would be quite difficult for that couple to assess.

Let me give another example that we discussed at considerable length and about which the Minister was rightly sympathetic—kinship carers. Conventionally, kinship carers are entitled to claim for child credit and so on if they have the equivalent of the child benefit book, which normally takes about eight weeks to come across. In future, given that child benefit will not necessarily be a separate benefit entitlement, if there is a rotating relationship in which the child goes back to its birth parents for a few weeks and then, because the father or the mother may be an addict of some degree, goes back to the grandparents, at what point and for how long a period of continuous care are the kinship carers entitled to claim the child elements in universal credit? I do not know.

In those three cases—and I could elaborate another six on disability benefits that are becoming clear to us—I would not be able to advise somebody on what they should declare on their forms as being relevant for the consideration of UC. It would be natural for them in those quite complicated situations not to declare things that appear to work against them. They would not be doing it with an intent to deceive. They may think it is a perfectly proper statement of their position as they see it, yet under this clause they could be caught for negligence and fined. That is completely unreasonable.

The one piece of advice I would give the Minister is that whatever he does, whether he claims that this is needed as a reserve power or not, he should not touch it for at least three years until after the Bill has come into practical effect because of the bedding-down issues that it will have. The Minister has to make only one mistake, such as his department suing somebody for penalties for negligence when the department was wrong—and there will inevitably be departmental error; there always is when you introduce new systems—and the whole of the good will behind this Bill will disappear overnight.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Skelmersdale and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Monday 21st November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

Would the noble Lord approve of a lifestyle change that forced someone out of a council house, whatever the level of rent, into much more expensive private sector accommodation because they had been made homeless? Is that a lifestyle change that the noble Lord would approve of?

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

Perhaps I may add to my noble friend’s comments. Would the noble Lord care to compare apples with apples rather than apples with oranges—in other words, not compare the situation of a single man earning the average of £25,000 with the situation of a family who would also be entitled, for example, to child tax credits? If the noble Lord is going to make comparisons, he must in all integrity compare like with like.

[Lord Skelmersdale]

If there is a family where the sole income comes from either the man or the woman, then the situation is as I have described it. If, however, someone is working full time and someone is working part time, then the situation is clearly different, which is what I suspect the noble Baroness means.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

The noble Lord is incorrect. He is failing to recognise that a man in work with a family at that income level will be entitled to tax credits that go into his net income. He is failing to take into account the additional benefits that come from the state over and beyond wages for someone in full-time work. He must compare like with like in all integrity.

[Lord Skelmersdale]

In that case, it would be useful for my noble friend Lord Freud to tell us how many families with an income of £25,900 a year are on benefit of any sort. I cannot imagine that he will be able to do so off the cuff but—

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Skelmersdale and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Monday 14th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, in the wording in proposed new subsection (2), all that comes close is in the regulations referring to capital being deemed to be income and income being deemed to be capital. Here we have something that has to be treated as being done is though it would have been done had it not been for the fact that it was not done. As a basis of legislation in future, I wonder whether the Minister would welcome such an approach from the Opposition.

[Lord Skelmersdale]

My Lords, the members of the opposition party have been waxing lyrical in this particular case. With all the experience of his advisers behind him, can my noble friend say whether such an accident—and an accident it most certainly is—ever occurred during the course of the last Labour Government?

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Skelmersdale and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Skelmersdale]

No, my Lords. The reason I added my last sentence and prevented the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, from rising to interrupt me was for the simple reason that the claimant may well need guidance and help in order to get the extra hours or money that he requires. Therefore, I am asking the Minister to what extent this is going to be driven by the claimant, or by the job provider, education or Jobcentre Plus. I said that I hoped it would be claimant-driven, and nothing else.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I wonder whether I could add to the burden of questions that the Minister will be facing. This will appear somewhat on the tangent but, in my view, it is not, as it feeds into a lot of our other discussions and is related to work conditionality. At the moment, as I understand it, a lone parent is regarded as being in full-time work for the purposes of conditionality or eligibility for tax credits if she is working 16 hours a week, and is then topped up. With a child under, I think, 12—although coming down to 10, seven et cetera—that 16 hours kicks in at an earlier stage. As far as I am aware—and I stand to be corrected on this—there is no point at which the lone parent is expected to increase her hours beyond that as the child gets older. With a couple, the main claimant, as we know, may claim on behalf of both. I have no objections at all in principle with expecting either claimant in a couple relationship to be available for work; and, in certain circumstances, both.

What concerns me, and what I would like to ask the Minister about, is the impression that the support papers that I have read so far seem to give: that when a child is 12, whether you are a lone parent or in a relationship as a couple, all such people must work a full-time job, which is now defined as 35 hours a week. If I understand it correctly, it could mean that a lone parent with a 13 year-old could be expected to move from working for 16 hours to 35 instead, as part of work conditionality; and a couple—a husband and wife, or two partners—with children of 13 and 15 might each be expected to work 35 hours a week. If I have understood the proposals correctly, then I would like to come back on that because I find it antithetical to everything we know about the need for children to have support. I have no problem at all with couples and the second partner, or a lone parent, being asked to find work within school hours. However, if the Minister is saying that at the age of 12, both partners in a couple, as well as a lone parent, are expected to be in what we would traditionally regard as full-time work of 35 hours-plus, then this is certainly something that we would like to revisit. I would be grateful if the Minister could help us to be sure that we have the facts right, as this is part of a wider debate on conditionality.