Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Main Page: Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Labour - Life peer)Local Government Finance Bill
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts“Council tax reduction schemes
(1) The Secretary of State shall make provision for an independent review of all council tax reduction schemes made under the provisions of this Act, to consider their effectiveness, efficiency, fairness and transparency and their impact on the localism agenda; and to make recommendations as to whether such schemes should be brought within universal credit.
(2) A review under subsection (1) shall take place within three years after this Act comes into effect.”
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I am grateful. This first amendment is a very modest and simple one. It simply asks for a review of the Bill within the next three years; that is all. I know that many around the House are worried about aspects of the Bill. We thank the Minister for the one-year transitional grant, as any additional money is welcome, but returning to councils just one-fifth of the council tax benefit cuts in a transitional one-year grant creates additional problems in itself. There are a lot of loose ends in the Bill, a lot of unknowns and a lot of concerns, which is why the amendment, which is a modest one, ask for a review of these proposals. If what the Bill proposes is sturdy and robust, a review will show it. If it is not and needs adjustment, a review will show it. If it needs more radical reforms such as moving into universal credit, a review will show it. The amendment seeks evidence, which is something that we should do, and I very much hope that it will attract the support of the entire House.
To remind ourselves, council tax benefit is being removed from our national social security system, when now it is fully funded to meet individual need wherever that person may live, to, in five months’ time, a rebate scheme with 10% less money in it, based on local discretion, with each local authority inventing its own local version. However, I fear that such local versions will depend not on a council’s unique insight into unique local need but on its prosperity, its reserves, its property values, its demography, its pensioner numbers, its benefit claimant numbers, its second homes and empty homes—everything and anything except the particular need of the particular individual who needs financial support, irrespective of where in the country she may live.
What are our concerns? We list them in the amendment. I suggest that they include effectiveness, efficiency, fairness and transparency, and I shall spend a moment on each. This cannot be an effective way to construct council tax support. It depends solely on the accidental variations between authorities—how many pensioners, how many second homes—but in no sense are those accidental connections associated with the amount of need of the council residents in its patch. In other words, this version of localism has nothing to do with local need and everything to do with local council finances.
Essentially, as we argued on Report, richer authorities are keeping the national scheme—essentially, the social security system—because they can afford to. Poorer authorities are not, because they cannot. In my view, the proposals are not effective because they do not, and many of our local authorities cannot afford to, meet local need—and that, of course, is the entire point of the council tax rebate in the first place. So I do not believe that they are effective.
Are they at least efficient? Do they represent value for money, the second test in our amendment? I think not. From the local authorities’ point of view, we risk poll tax mark two. Up to 2 million families may be paying for the first time towards their council tax. Set it too high—a 30% minimum, as is the case in several authorities in Norfolk—and families cannot pay. Set it too low, after the transitional grant at £1.50, and the council cannot collect. On the one hand, families cannot pay; on the other, councils cannot collect.
The Minister’s own transitional grant Statement sensibly accepted that:
“Councils will rightly want to avoid collecting small payments, and it may consequently be better value for money for councils to avoid designing schemes which seek to do so”.—[Official Report, 15/10/12; col. WS 164.]
Quite.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for trying to leap in ahead of him. He will have to be quicker getting to his feet and I will have to be slower getting to mine.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and the three other main contributors to this debate for tabling this amendment, which has been raised before and relates to the monitoring and evaluation of the reforms that we are talking about here—council tax support. However, the amendment would go wider than that, as the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord McKenzie, said, and seek formal review across all the welfare programmes.
This amendment seeks to require the Secretary of State to undertake a formal review of council tax support three years after its implementation, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, was considering whether it should be brought within universal credit. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, made it clear that he wants the provision to go much wider than that.
We have had several discussions on this issue during the passage of the Bill. I will say again what I have said before: namely, that in the first instance it is for councils to keep these schemes under review. The Bill requires each billing authority to do just that, each financial year, and to consider whether or not to revise or, indeed, replace its scheme, which a local authority is entitled to do. Local authorities are closest to their local communities and therefore are closest to those who need the council tax support. Therefore, they will be in the best position to decide how they set their council tax in future, bearing in mind the needs of their population.
I am not convinced that a major independent review as a set stage is required or, indeed, that it would be particularly helpful for local councils. Therefore, noble Lords will not be surprised when I say that I cannot accept the amendment. However, I recognise that it is right and proper for the Government to keep the framework in which councils operate under review. I can confirm that we will take steps to do this. We are already considering with local government what minimal data we will require from councils to enable us to keep this policy under review. I have no doubt at all that local councils will keep us informed of how it is progressing.
There were rather snide or slightly underappreciative comments about the transition scheme announced last week. As we discussed, the transition scheme has been set up to ease in these changes and to ensure that there are incentives and support for councils to help deliver the Government’s objectives.
Furthermore, as we have debated at each stage of the Bill’s passage, the Government do not believe that council tax support should be part of universal credit. Indeed, it was deliberately separated from it. Therefore, I cannot accept the requirement to consider the integration of council tax support with universal credit, nor am I in a position to accept on behalf of the Government a wide review across welfare provision.
However, the noble Baroness is right to remind us of the importance of monitoring and evaluating policy. The Government do that, particularly where there are major policy changes. The Government will continue to keep this policy under review and make adjustments as they see fit to ensure their objectives are delivered. That seems to me the proper way of doing it. It is far too long to sit and wait for a review in two or three years’ time if something needs to be amended or changed. The Government need to be advised of what is happening and amend something where they can if that is necessary. I assure the House that that is what will happen and that the measure will be kept under permanent review. Therefore, I hope that the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I thank very much other noble Lords who have spoken—the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Best, my noble friend Lord McKenzie, and of course the Minister for her reply. However, points came up in the argument that I did not feel the Minister addressed. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who was absolutely spot-on, made the point that because this issue interlocks with welfare reform, it needs a broader approach than the Minister seemed to suggest in her reply. My friend the noble Lord, Lord Best, says he is worried that one possible outcome could be chaos or, equally, we could find that the variations that come our way are acceptable and appropriate, but he remains worried about the implications of this change for the poorest people in our community. As in the Welfare Reform Act, when he successfully persuaded the Minister and the whole House that we needed to monitor the legislation in an independent way, the House backed him, agreed with him and supported his amendment.
We need to know the effects on local authorities, on some of the poorest people in our communities, on work incentives, and on the Conservative Government’s flagship welfare reform—universal credit, which I support. We have to have such a review. The Minister said that individual councils would be keeping the schemes under review; of course they will. This is no substitute for an individual and independent review across the whole field of welfare reform—in so far as this is a part of welfare reform—and council tax benefit. We need that review, otherwise the reviews that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has agreed to will be incomplete and partial, and no one will be able to put the pieces of the jigsaw together. As I have said, they affect some of the most vulnerable people in our society—disabled people, families with children in poverty, carers and some of the most fragile and frail.
It is because the amendment is very modest and because this is the only way that we are going to get coherent government policy to ensure, as I and everyone else wish to, that support for welfare reform is effective, especially for those who need it above all, that having failed to persuade the noble Baroness of the desirability of the amendment, I hope perhaps we can persuade the House.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I take pleasure in supporting the amendment so ably moved by my noble friend. In Committee, we asked for guidance as to who were vulnerable and what council tax benefit protection for them was appropriate. The Minister replied, correctly of course, that although there was a power under the Act for the Secretary of State to issue guidance to that effect, he did not propose to do so.
In the past week, we have had the welcome news of the £100 million transitional grant for those on benefit but, as my noble friend emphasised, it lasts for one year only. While reducing the cuts for many vulnerable people for one year, it creates the poll tax mark 2 problem of trying to collect small sums from 2 million people. The following year, vulnerable people will again be fully exposed to the cuts. This is simply not fair to local authorities or to the vulnerable people living in them, who may be facing three different schemes in each of three years—full protection this year, up to 8.5% next year, and the full cut the year after. The Government’s transitional grant reflects the fact that they now see just what localism can mean in practice, and they do not like what they see.
I am glad of the real decency that the Minister has shown, and we expect nothing less of her, but vulnerable people will still have to deal with the fallout when the transitional grant has expired unless, as the amendment argues, funding is provided on a sustainable basis. Let me take Norfolk as an example. I declare an interest as Deputy Lieutenant and a former city councillor and county councillor. There are seven district councils and these are their proposals so far: Norwich is struggling to retain the existing national default scheme and is making cuts to do so, and there is therefore no minimum contribution for people on benefit. Great Yarmouth is proposing a minimum contribution from benefit claimants of 20%. King’s Lynn proposes a figure of 25%. Breckland, Broadland and North Norfolk propose a straight 30%, even though North Norfolk and Broadland have high numbers of second homes, which one would have thought would have given them some head space to protect people against the cuts. South Norfolk proposes to compress bands down to band D and then drop below D to bands C, B and A, and then levy 20%. That means a 28% minimum contribution for benefit claimants in band A properties and potentially up to 60% for the high bands. I am very happy to share my workings with anyone who queries that.
Therefore, there are five schemes among seven neighbouring authorities in one county with different minimum payments for vulnerable people on benefit ranging from 0% to potentially 60%, to say nothing about different rules for savings, income, backdating and the second adult rebate. It is quite likely that many of these councils will take up the transitional grant—I hope that they do—but in the year after that they will be back up there with these awful cuts.
Yet we are still told, although less stridently, that this is all about appropriate local decision-making—for example, that local authorities are uniquely placed to decide that they should permit backdating, because presumably the individual local authority knows its patch and has a high proportion of people with fallible memories and slow response times, so it keeps backdating, while a neighbouring authority is scrapping backdating because it is confident that its residents are much sharper than those of the authority next door and will be quick to claim. For one to have backdating and the other not on some reading of the mentality of the residents is presumably an unusual assessment of local need. Or it may be that one authority knows that its residents need savings of up to £6,000 in total because its unique insight into local need tells it that its residents will not face divorce or disability, which makes such savings necessary, while the authority next door is less sanguine about its capacity to foretell the future needs of its residents, so it allows them £16,000 in savings. Do your Lordships really believe that all this is about unique local insight into unique local needs in the name of unique localism?
Alternatively, let us take income. Every scheme that I have seen regards disabled people as vulnerable, but some include DLA as income and others do not. As DLA—if you take the middle-rate care and higher-rate mobility components—can be nearly £100, if it is counted as income that household will make a significant contribution to council tax benefit and to council tax; if it is not so counted, it will probably be exempt. Therefore, there could be two blind people in identical circumstances but one would be made deliberately poorer than the other because, unluckily, he lives in the “wrong” authority and the value of his DLA awarded nationally is cut by local discretion. Is that what we intended when we awarded DLA? What is the point of a national benefit funded by taxpayers if it is vulnerable to local cuts made by local councillors? That is what is going to happen.
All my life I have fought for and believed in local government. Assessing and meeting housing need, for example, is a proper duty of local authorities and a proper subject for local discretion. However, what is not a proper local decision is for local authorities to determine what income vulnerable people should receive. That is and should continue to be a matter of individual entitlement, national criteria and common responsibility and not a matter for local discretion and local handouts.
Disabled people and their carers are scattered across the country. Although they may happen to live in a particular locality, their disability is in no sense local. Therefore, their income support—and council tax benefit is part of their income support—should not be a local responsibility and it is not up to the locality to meet it. Whether there are 2,000 disabled people in Merthyr Tydfil or 200 in west Oxfordshire, they are the responsibility of us all.
I do not believe for a moment that local councillors want to treat disabled people unfairly or more harshly than their next-door neighbours. They do not want to add more financial distress to the lone parent with a five year-old child, desperately searching for work. They do not want to undermine the support that a carer seeks to give to an elderly parent. However, as my noble friend has argued, without sustainable funding for their vulnerable residents, that is what they are going to be doing in 18 months’ time.
The Government have given themselves and local councils a breathing space of a year. They and we should use that year to come up with fairer, better and stable arrangements for meeting the financial need of the most vulnerable people in our society. I support the amendment.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
My Lords, I will intervene very briefly. We have heard two very powerful speeches from my noble friends in support of this amendment. The more I have listened to the debate during the passage of this Bill, the more I have come to the conclusion that all the talk about protecting vulnerable groups is simply a fig leaf. The Government say that they want to protect vulnerable groups but they do nothing to ensure that local authorities do so. Indeed, there is not even any mention of vulnerable groups in the eligibility criteria for the transitional funding. They know full well, while also saying that local authorities should have regard to work incentives, that they are putting local authorities between a rock and hard place.
My own authority, Nottingham, is not going to protect vulnerable groups because it is going to spread the pain out among all working-age people. My noble friend Lord McKenzie has suggested that this is probably what many authorities are going to do. The Government can then turn around and blame the local authorities by saying that it is the local authorities that are refusing to protect vulnerable groups, having set up a scheme but not having given them enough money to ensure that they protect vulnerable groups. It really is not on. What are the Government going to do to monitor the impact of the new scheme on local groups? If this monitoring produces the evidence that vulnerable groups are not being protected, what action will the Government take? Ultimately the buck should stop with the Government, not with the local authorities, in terms of ensuring that vulnerable groups are protected.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
The noble Baroness says that she already has the guidance. The guidance spells out the equality duties and so on under legislation. However, it does not actually cover some groups of people; for example, carers are not part of the groups covered under the legislation. Nor does the guidance easily translate the vocabulary of rights and discrimination, which is what the Equality Act is about, into the need for financial support. If the Minister proposes to reissue that document, could she add an addendum on the implications of that document on this piece of legislation?
Baroness Hanham
The document makes it quite clear that councils have a responsibility, if nothing else, under the Equality Act to ensure that they treat everyone fairly. I think that would take account of what the noble Baroness has said.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I support my noble friend. He is absolutely right. When we raised the issue of whether changes in the scheme following the transitional grant would require going out to consultation, the Minister seemed to indicate that they would not. Some of us were worried about judicial review. Since then, she has written a letter to my noble friend Lord McKenzie in which she says that individual councils must take their own legal advice on the matter. That suggests to me that the department is no longer as clear as it at first was that local authorities might not be exposed to judicial review if they were substantially to change their scheme from, say, a 30% minimum down to virtually nil or 5% as a result of the transitional grant without going out to further consultation. Given that, I hope that, as a result of the move that the noble Baroness has herself made between the earlier stages of Committee and Report and her subsequent correspondence, she will give some consideration to how best she can meet my noble friend’s concerns.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, in responding to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, I have always made it clear that local authorities are, or have been, out to consultation. I think that those consultations are due to close very shortly and may in many cases already have closed. There is no requirement on the Government, and we are not going to make any regulations, on consultation. I have made it clear, and I do so again now, that if a local authority thinks that the changes that it is going to make as a result of the transitional grant are so significant that it changes its scheme so much, then it must decide whether it thinks that it needs, for its own protection, to go out to further consultation. It will seek its own advice about that. I cannot answer the noble Baroness any more clearly than I already have.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I am just wondering whether the noble Baroness can give an example of what would constitute a significant change triggering possibly going out to consultation.