Oral Answers to Questions
Stephen Crabb Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Guy Opperman
As the hon. Gentleman is aware, there is a managed migration pilot in Harrogate, where we are learning lessons, and I take on board the points he makes. That completes at the end of 2020 and, obviously, everyone not in the pilot stays on the legacy system as it currently runs.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
One important way for people on UC to build their financial resilience is through regular saving, although that can feel incredibly difficult for those on lower incomes. Does the Minister agree that the Government’s Help to Save scheme, which is precisely for people on tax credits and UC and which provides a 50% bonus on their savings, is a really important tool?
Social Security and Employment Support for Disabled People
Stephen Crabb Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Sarah Newton
I fear I will test your patience, of Mr Speaker, if I try to answer all of those questions at once, but I will do my best.
I welcome the hon. Lady’s tone and her welcome for the measures we announced in the written ministerial statement. Clearly we have been listening very hard to Members across this Chamber and, most importantly, to disabled people themselves about the changes they would like to see, and that is what has driven the changes we are going to be making. I absolutely want to confirm that throughout the process—in fact this is how we work now—we engage fully with disabled people, enabling them to help us develop the services which are for them.
The hon. Lady touched on a few points about people being repeatedly reassessed. I remind her that we brought in the severe conditions criteria so that people who have reached the highest level of support on PIP will not be routinely reassessed; we have introduced a 10-year light touch review so that many people with the sorts of conditions and illnesses the hon. Lady described will not be undergoing further reassessments. We also have a special process for people who are terminally ill. I undertook research in the summer—and I have been delighted to work with the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) on the work she has been doing—looking again at how the special rules for people at the end of life are working. We have worked very closely with the medical profession, which I think was not often aware of the special processes that could so easily be put in place to enable people to get benefits within days. I will shortly be announcing new guidance which is the fruition of the work we have been doing over the last few months.
I want to remind everyone that in the transition from DLA to PIP many more people with mental health conditions are now receiving support, particularly at the highest levels. Concerns have also been raised about work coaches and their ability to work with people with disabilities and health conditions, and I want to reassure the House that all of our work coaches are receiving extensive training and will continue to do so. Over 10,000 work coaches have already received training in mental health services, so I believe that that personal relationship that we want all people claiming benefits to have with their work coach is a possibility and is happening the length and breadth of the country.
We are looking at conditionality and have taken up the recommendations given to us. When people with severe disabilities and health conditions apply for UC there is no conditionality; that conditionality will be switched off, and then as the relationship develops with the work coach, if and when they are prepared to take those steps to work, they will be fully supported by their work coach and other resources that they have available.
As would be expected, we listened to and worked with a range of stakeholders before the announcement to develop the new service. I can absolutely commit to the House that the co-design will be ongoing and there will be plenty of opportunities for everyone in the House to be involved in how we take that forward. But the simple ideal behind it is to reduce the number of assessments people have to take and reduce the amount of information they have to give to the Department. We have all heard in our surgeries each week particularly in terms of people in receipt of both ESA and PIP that they can be asked to complete a whole number of forms where they give us the same information, and are going to assessments where they give the same information. The whole aim of this is to reduce that and to simplify it, so that people give us the information once and we are able to make the best decision we can right from the outset.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
It never made sense to me for us to pay different contractors who compete with each other to recruit competent staff to carry out assessments which make many disabled people feel they are involved in a duplicatory process, which adds to the stress. So may I strongly welcome today the decision to combine the ESA and PIP assessments? That will make the system more efficient and hopefully provide more dignity for disabled people.
Sarah Newton
I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. This builds on some of the work he started when he was in the Department. It is very much based on listening to people and their experience of the current benefit system. I could not agree more that we need to have a much more streamlined, simplified process under which people tell us the information once, we gather it once, and we are able to make the best possible accurate decisions the first time.
Oral Answers to Questions
Stephen Crabb Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend take the time to listen to the voices of those on the frontline—the work coaches in the jobcentres, who have experience of how this policy functions in practice, who know what works and what does not work, and whose views about universal credit are overwhelmingly more positive than those of the Opposition critics?
Ms McVey
My right hon. Friend is correct to point out these facts. When we visit jobcentres, work coaches say that this is the best system that they have ever had to help people into work. We know the validity in that statement because 1,000 more people have been getting into work each and every day since 2010. We have to ensure that the system works for claimants and taxpayers.
Pensions Auto-enrolment
Stephen Crabb Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan) on securing this debate and commend her for the brilliant way she outlined some of the issues we need to think about. I commend in particular her dissection of the challenges of self-employment and the options we have for creatively addressing the lack of provision by the self-employed for their retirement incomes.
It is not often in this place that we get to debate policies we can genuinely describe as having been well executed and successful, and it is even rarer that we do so about a policy that both the Labour party and the Conservative party can claim credit for, having initiated and overseen it—the policy has been around since at least 2008, when it was first implemented. I would go further and describe auto-enrolment as transformational. It has profoundly positive effects for our society, and it was achieved with remarkably little opposition from employers or employees. We have seen a collaborative approach involving Government agencies, business, the Pensions Regulator and others. The strong sense that auto-enrolment is the responsible and right thing to do in the face of the overarching challenge of declining employer-provided pensions is one of the great strengths underpinning its success.
Auto-enrolment’s success has received remarkably little attention in the mainstream press compared with the coverage of the various strikes and protests in recent years in response to the changes we have tried to introduce to make public sector pensions more sustainable. The successes of auto-enrolment have, by and large, passed under the radars of those not immediately affected by it, but as I said, it ultimately benefits the whole of society. I will highlight a couple of points that I would like the Minister to touch on. My hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham covered the self-employed far better than I would, so I will not cover it.
Behind the success of auto-enrolment is a great recognition of people’s central behavioural trait of spending far too little time thinking about their retirement income and even less time taking positive decisions to make provision for it. By coming up with a system that automatically enrols people and puts the onus on the employee actively to opt out, we successfully increased the number of people benefiting from pensions. The system relies on inertia—passive decision making by millions of people. However, we have introduced other pension changes that will require those very same people, when they reach retirement age, to take a close interest in a complex menu of retirement options, and the last thing that we need them to be at that point in their lives is passive decision makers. That is a concern. We do not want people to take decisions that ruin the retirement income they spent decades building up.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)
My right hon. Friend makes a crystal clear point about the tipping point that we will all reach at a certain stage of our lives. Does he agree that a pensions dashboard that provides greater transparency and access, and a mid-life MOT whenever we judge our mid-life is—between our 45th birthday and our 50th birthday is the optimum time for that reassessment to take place—will address the point he rightly makes?
Stephen Crabb
I agree with everything my hon. Friend says. Pension freedoms are great, but we want people to be well informed and educated about the consequences of the choices that will be available to them, particularly when it comes to drawing down large cash lump sums from their retirement pots.
Low opt-out rates are part of the success story of auto-enrolment, but let us not be complacent about them. So far, contribution rates have been very low. Those rates will go up this April and again in April 2019. Despite all the positive effects of increasing the minimum wage and raising the personal allowance threshold for income tax, there will be people on lower incomes who feel a financial pinch in their take-home pay, and opt-out rates may increase as a result. I encourage the Minister to monitor what goes on in response to the increase in contribution rates and to be ready to reinforce the strong positive messaging about the importance of employers and employees sticking with their pension arrangements so that they do not see that increase as a reason to get energised and look at actively opting out of the system.
My hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham mentioned young people. I strongly welcome the Government’s indication that they will look to lower the minimum age threshold to 18, but why 18? If 16 and 17-year-olds are working and earning £10,000 or more, why should they not also be captured by auto-enrolment and benefit from it? No 16, 17 or 18-year-old should leave school without basic education in what auto-enrolment is all about and without being equipped to make good decisions.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
As an ex-careers adviser, I certainly share those concerns. Education is vital. The right hon. Gentleman talks about a tipping point. If education were given at an earlier stage, people would make more effective and informed decisions at that tipping point, which is a key transition. Too many people see a pension as an unaffordable luxury. Education would help.
Stephen Crabb
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely important point very well.
Let me make one further point before I conclude and allow other hon. Members to speak. My hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham appeared to indicate that she supports rates increasing above those that have been set out for April 2019. I absolutely agree: both employees and employers will need to make even greater contributions. It is easy to talk about that in this place, but it is much more difficult to get it across to the businesses and individuals affected, so I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that. He is a brilliant Pensions Minister. I heard him speak in another part of the Palace earlier, and he has an incredibly strong grasp of the detail, which is exactly what we need from Ministers as we get to grips with the challenges of auto-enrolment.
Universal Credit Roll-out
Stephen Crabb Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
The Secretary of State is being very generous with his time. Did not the shadow Secretary of State rather give the game away when she denied any link at all between universal credit and the increase in employment levels? Since 2010, the Labour party has set its face against welfare reform. In 2010, Labour Members ran to the barricades to defend an outdated system that trapped people in poverty and worklessness for years.
Oral Answers to Questions
Stephen Crabb Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Gauke
The hon. Gentleman says that work does not pay. Let us be clear: universal credit always means that it is worth working an extra hour and worth taking a pay rise. It is always worth working more under universal credit, which was not the case with the legacy benefits. That is why the evidence is suggesting that people do work more and do work more hours than they do under the legacy systems.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the reasons why more people have gone out to work this morning than ever before in our nation’s history is that we as a Government have not ducked the challenge of welfare reform, we do not let people languish for years on out-of-work benefits, and universal credit is an essential part of the welfare reform programme?
Mr Gauke
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It has been the consistent policy of this Government—including under my predecessors, such as my right hon. Friend—to ensure that we have a welfare system that puts work at the heart of it. That is one of the reasons why we have record levels of employment, as he so rightly says.