Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

62CZA: Clause 134, page 105, line 11, at end insert—
“(3) Any such steps taken under subsection (2A) should be consistent with any advice relating to child poverty provided by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.”

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, we form a select few still in the Chamber. I remind noble Lords that the Child Poverty Act 2010, which established the Child Poverty Commission, was passed with cross-party support. We believe that there is now similar support for the proposal to expand its remit to deal with social mobility. We welcome that move. However, our Amendment 62F seeks to ensure that the commission has a duty, an obligation and a right to advise Ministers so that the fruits of its expertise, research, understanding and work are put at the heart of decision-making. This is not to replace the Government’s role in decision-making but to input at the appropriate level into the intelligence available to the Minister, as strategies to tackle child poverty are developed and implemented. Amendment 62CZA seeks to ensure that the child maintenance and enforcement policies similarly do not fly in the face of objective, evidence-based advice. The Child Poverty and Social Mobility Commission may be a very valuable think-tank, academic centre of excellence and great publishing venture but without this duty to advise it will not be guaranteed a voice in Whitehall.

We naturally warmly welcome the Government’s Amendment 62JA, which appears to meet our request in Amendment 62K, and which enables Ministers to provide the commission with any resources, including research, which Ministers think are required for it to carry out its functions. Perhaps the Minister will confirm that this will enable the commission to request research directly where it believes that there are important gaps in the data available to it. Will the Minister also outline what might happen if the commission believes that such research is necessary but the relevant Minister does not? While we are delighted that the Government have seen the need for such research, it would be useful if the Minister could also say when exactly he expects the new commission to be established, as we need its input. These amendments are needed to strengthen the role of the Child Poverty and Social Mobility Commission. Amendment 62F is central, not an add-on, to the work of the commission. It would restore the duty for the commission to give advice to Ministers on the preparation of their strategy. The DWP note states:

“The Government believes that policy development should be the responsibility of Ministers … and should not be delegated to arm’s length bodies. The Commission’s current advisory role inadvertently provides a route for Ministers to avoid accountability if the Strategy proves ineffective by shifting responsibility to the Commission”.

It goes on to state that the commission will henceforth only be able to give advice on technical issues around the measurement of poverty and social mobility.

We welcome the strengthened accountability whereby the annual report of the commission will report on progress towards the target. Far from being incompatible with the commission providing advice on the strategy, part of that advice comprises being able to input into Ministers’ thinking on matters beyond just technical issues around measurement. A serious commission with quality members and staff will be hard to establish if it is denied the existing duty of advising Ministers. What, after all, will be the point of it as opposed to having this work done by a university department? There is no chance that Ministers would simply delegate development of a strategy to an unelected commission. It is clearly Ministers on whom the ultimate duty to eradicate child poverty falls, and who will be answerable in this House and elsewhere for the success of that strategy. Placing on the commission the duty to give advice to the Government would strengthen its role and status, allowing it to provide the independent scrutiny, intellectual challenge and source of expertise that were envisaged in the original Child Poverty Act, which passed with cross-party support. I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendment of my noble friend Lady Hayter. However, her case was made on the assumption that the commission will have expertise. The original requirement that commissioners must have expertise relevant to the work of the commission has been taken out by this legislation. Apparently, the Government have argued that, because the commission will be a reviewing rather than an advisory body, the expertise requirement is no longer needed in the schedule. However, as End Child Poverty points out, this makes no sense. Reviewing requires just as much expertise as advising.

I should therefore be grateful if the Minister could give a rather better explanation as to why that provision has been taken out, because it is in danger of weakening the commission. I understand that the commissioners will be appointed through the non-departmental public body appointing process. Can the Minister explain how the process will work in this instance? What type of expertise do the Government believe is necessary for the commission, taken as a whole, to have? How will the NDPB appointment process ensure that the commission has such expertise? We are of course talking about expertise on both child poverty and social mobility. It is perhaps also worth considering not just traditional academic forms of expertise but the expertise born of experience.

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[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I must respond to the Minister’s reiteration of the Government's commitment to reducing child poverty. He will be aware that I shall therefore quote from the IFS study and its prediction that the number of children in poverty, having fallen to its lowest level for 25 years, will, under the coalition Government’s policies, rise to its highest level since 1999-2000 by 2020, at which time one quarter of all children will be poor. We of course look to the Government to prove the IFS wrong by making sure that that prediction does not come true.

I am interested that it is the move to get rid of quangos that has led to the desire to remove the word “advice”. I think that that is wrong. In addition to needing expertise, on which there is some agreement, the commission needs authority to be able to advise ministers. That is not policy-making; it is an input into policy. Describing its advice as being alongside other bodies devalues it, but the Minister has said that he wants this to be a more powerful commission. If that is the objective, clearly, we support it. We like the change of name and remit. I hope that he can hold to that in setting it up. I guess the great bribe to us this evening, having been told that it would be set up when the Bill was through, is for me to sit down as soon as possible and enable the Bill to be enacted so that the commission can be set up.

I hope, however, that even if the word “advice” will not be there, Ministers and future Ministers will take the output of the commission extremely seriously as they develop policy, not simply in the implementation of it. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 62CZA withdrawn.

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[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, does not Davos sound interesting? I gather that the Prime Minister is there as well as the noble Lord, Lord Layard, but that Mick Jagger decided not to turn up. The advantage in one sense of the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, is that we have had the privilege of hearing the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, who is second to none in his experience of working with substance abusers and those with mental health problems. It is good to have him here.

The subject of mental health is an important one and has featured a lot in our debates throughout the Bill—in discussions on where and whether conditionality is appropriately applied, in looking at the length of time for which contributory employment and support allowance should be available, and in assessing ways of dealing with the caseload for DLA and how best to introduce and assess the new PIP criteria. In all these we have been dealing with the consequences of the increasing mental problems that have been touched on. We know that the diagnosis of mental health problems has been rising. An NHS study in 2007 found that the prevalence of common psychiatric disorders severe enough to need treatment was between 6 and 9 per cent among people of working age. That means that we are talking about between one in 10 and one in 20 of our fellow citizens.

The consequences of that for the Bill and for the DWP are most obvious in the growth of the number of people eligible for DLA. Since 2002 the rise in the number of claims—which the Minister has frequently cited when making the case for reform of the benefit—has been almost entirely accounted for by those with either learning disabilities or mental health conditions. So, ensuring that employment and mental health treatment services are working closely together would have clear benefits not only—although most importantly—for claimants, but also for the department’s own efforts to reduce the number of people forced out of work through ill health. Equally vital will be an attempt to work with employers to help them better understand and equip themselves to be able to use the talents of those who, whether on an ongoing basis or for short periods, experience poor mental health.

I hope the Minister will outline in his response not only how employment-focused services, in particular for those on ESA, are working with mental health experts and ensuring that claimants receive the right treatment, but also what his department is doing to encourage employers to put the right support in place and to take a positive attitude towards workers with poor mental health. If he follows up on the excellent suggestion of a meeting, it would be particularly appropriate, along the lines set out by my noble friend Lord Winston, to include the Department of Health in it. Perhaps we will be able to encourage a bit of cross-Whitehall working on this issue.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who is in a better place, and the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, who moved the amendment, for all their work on mental health conditions. Last month I had a very good meeting with the noble Lord, Lord Layard, on these matters, so there is an active dialogue. I want to put this into some context. This is an area that I have taken an enormous interest in, and I think that we need to go much further. What we need to realise is that we are right at the beginning of the process of even thinking that for people with these kinds of illnesses, work is a solution and not a problem for them. It is early days in our understanding of what to do and how to do it, but in the years to come we will have a really good opportunity to try to lock some of this stuff down. It can be done from several directions, which I want to describe.

The problem is that, as we know, around a third of those going on to ESA have a primary diagnosis of a mental health condition, although dual diagnosis and co-morbidity is seen in many cases. Indeed, a lot of people have mental health problems because they are long-term unemployed or long-term inactive. They need the right interventions to help them back into work, and mental health services are absolutely vital in that area, along with employment training and support. It must be the role of GPs and health services to diagnose conditions and work out what, if any, specialist health support should be provided to each individual, and to make those referrals to specialist health services. They have the knowledge to make those complex judgments. It is not the role of non-medically qualified individuals in Jobcentre Plus to do that; it is simply not appropriate. They can do some things—they can signpost people to health support such as the IAPT programme; they can provide work support—but they do not have the training or the knowledge formally to refer individuals to specialist health support. Nor do I want to go down the road of mandation into treatment or of out-of-work obligations. That is not the right way to go. I think that noble Lords will immediately understand all the human rights issues around that.

I assure noble Lords that we have a significant number of safeguards in place to ensure that individuals who present with mental health conditions and who may need specialist health support are signposted to such support. If at work capability assessment stage an individual presents with unexpected findings or undiagnosed physical or mental health conditions that cause the healthcare professional concern, and they feel that their GP should be aware of it, that information goes to the GP within 24 hours of the assessment. Again, it reinforces the role of the GP.

I am not talking about passing the buck to the NHS, because we have an important role to play. We need to ensure that the incentives in the system are right so that we stop people falling out of work—mental health conditions come second behind musculoskeletal conditions in the list of reasons. These concerns led me to commission the sickness absence review led by Dame Carol Black and David Frost. That important review has done a lot of the analysis that I wanted, and one of its recommendations was an independent assessment service which offers a kind of second opinion and a much more coherent view on what a person can do in terms of the workplace and their illness. That is about catching people at the right time, and I want to be able to catch people right at the start. The review has made a very serious set of recommendations which, as we work through their implications, could become a valuable motor to our rethinking how we supply help and make the connections between health and work. That is one opportunity that we now have. We are taking our time to get our reaction out because we want to get it right and to sort this issue out in its context.

We are also working with work programme providers to help them support those of their participants who have a mental health condition in gaining employment. We have had a bit of a slow start, as I had to admit in this Chamber yesterday, with the flow of ESA, although there are good signs that it is beginning to pick up. We have established a relationship between the prime providers and the mental health specialists, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, who is one of the key people in working out the mental health interventions that help people on the road to work. He has started working that out precisely and I am looking to him to give me some of the answers. I should probably vote against him rather than him against me because he has the responsibility in that area.

Within Jobcentre Plus we have launched a new support for all advisers to ensure that they are better skilled in helping claimants to improve their health and well-being. Jobcentre Plus employs disability employment advisers who are able to help claimants with the most severe health problems and to refer them to specialist divisions, such as Work Choice. We employ mental health and well-being partnership managers to build practical links between the local mental health services and employment services. Outside of the employment support we provide, the department has been actively engaged with the Department of Health to ensure that employment support is an integral part of the IAPT programme. Similar work is ongoing with the devolved Administrations.

This is a serious amendment on a serious matter. It is a difficult matter and we are not going to sort it out with a little bit of legislation. I commit to continue giving the issue serious consideration and effort. We can make a big improvement to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and I commit to go on working in this area. I will have any meeting on this matter. My door is always open anyway but on this matter it is wide open. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

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Moved by

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

62M: After Clause 141, insert the following new Clause—
“Review into the impact of the calculation of universal credit
The Secretary of State shall conduct a review into the impact of the calculation of universal credit, to conclude one year after the coming into force of this provision, and shall publish a report on the review to both Houses of Parliament, on—(a) claimants’ ability to access childcare, and(b) the impact on work incentives for second earners.”

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, as has been repeated and endorsed many times, a main aim of universal credit is to make work pay. This amendment seeks to ensure that universal credit makes work pay for women and parents. At present, there are very real fears that, first, the cuts in support for childcare that the Government have introduced and, secondly, the impact on second earners of the way that universal credit has been designed will mean that universal credit leads to fewer women entering or remaining in the workplace. The amendment therefore asks for a review of the impact of universal credit on claimants in these two areas, to enable us to monitor the extent to which such fears are justified.

I trust the Minister will not try and tell us that a review costs £1.4 billion—the figure he quoted on 17 January for a review of the introduction of PIP, admittedly with some trialling, which he told us was happening anyway,. He has of course yet to answer my subsequent query on how this figure was reached, but I urge him not to repeat it today. He also told us on 29 November that the Government were investing £2 billion to cover all the costs of implementing and operating universal credit, which is why the figure of over half that for an independent review of a different aspect of the Bill is a little hard to comprehend.

Nevertheless, we welcome the Government’s support for the principle of reviews. In the case of child maintenance, according to the letter distributed to Peers mid-morning today, the Government’s amendment to review the impact of all their child maintenance reforms 30 months after the introduction of charging to ensure that the reforms have driven the behavioural change anticipated shows a welcome willingness on the part of the Government to test the evidence to see whether they achieved their aims. This amendment seeks no less. It is to enable the Government to set out the evidence for their various changes and assess the impact on the families concerned.

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[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I have to admit that this amendment is not as expensive as the £1.4 billion PIP one, because the noble Baroness is looking to do the research afterwards rather than stopping it all and doing the research first, which would have delayed it. The reason why the PIP amendment was so expensive was the one-year delay, meaning that all those savings would not have accrued.

The intention behind this amendment is to allow discussion of the impact of the universal credit on both the accessibility of childcare and work incentives for potential second earners. Working families will be able to receive support in respect of 70 per cent of monthly childcare costs up to £760 for one child or £1,300 for two or more children. These amounts are equivalent to the current arrangements in tax credits.

We understand that childcare plays a crucial part in parents’ work decisions and are determined to help those moving into the workplace, which is why we found the extra £300 million to help people below the 16-hour limit of tax credits. The childcare market is very varied and does not always effectively meet the needs of working parents. We are introducing flexibility into the system, such as through introducing monthly limits based on actual paid costs, so that it supports the childcare market better. Local authorities in England and Wales have the duty to secure as far as reasonably practicable sufficient childcare for working parents. The Department for Education is currently consulting on whether a local annual report would be a more effective and meaningful way of enabling parents to hold their local authority to account.

Let me move now to the concerns over the work incentives for potential second earners. My views on this are on the record. The costs are high. If couples who were both in work were entitled to an additional disregard of, say, £700 a year, the cost would be £240 million. If the disregard were £1,000, the cost would be £350 million. Those are the sums and we simply do not have them at this stage. Universal credit should mean that most families in which one parent works full-time for 35 hours a week for the minimum wage will not live in poverty.

The amendment asks us to confirm in legislation that we will undertake a formal review of both these areas. However, my real response is that these are just two particular areas. We will monitor the effect of universal credit right across aspect after aspect of its impacts. I have also included powers in the Bill to pilot different policy approaches. We will do that by having affirmative regulations to approve particular pilots. Any substantive changes following a pilot will also require regulations and be subject to the usual SSAC, so there are a lot of protections here.

It will not be a question of doing a review of something such as the second-earner incentive. I want to see a pilot in which we can pinpoint the value of moving it around. That is a far more useful way of finding out such things. What is the effect of the taper? What is the effect of the second-earner disregard? What is the effect of moving them around? We need to know all these things in a much more coherent way than we would from carrying out a review. We will have econometric analysis of a kind that leaves anything that we have seen in the past in the dust. Therefore, this requirement for a review and a report on specific impacts just creates unnecessary bureaucracy. That is not the way I want to do it.

To summarise, I hope it is clear that we are aware of these two issues, which are very important and interesting. I will continue to give them the attention that they deserve, and I therefore urge the noble Baroness to withdraw this amendment.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

Having had the promise of the intention to give these issues the importance that they deserve, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 62M withdrawn.