Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Claims and Payments) Regulations 2013

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I will follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds in his point about going online. First, I want to say, as others have said, that I very much support universal credit and I am watching with wry horror now the number of people being taken to court for failure to pay the £2 or £2.50 owed on their council tax bills by virtue of the localised council tax system. One wishes that some other parts of the Government had listened to some of the debates that we had in Grand Committee on that subject.

Like others, I am concerned about where some of the cuts are going to fall. In particular, I remain worried by the disincentives to second earners, usually women, in couples whom we want to encourage to go back into the labour market. We increasingly make it less financially worth while that they should do so. I think that is very foolish indeed.

However, my biggest concern has been not just the payment problems, which my noble friends Lady Lister and Lord McKenzie have mentioned, but the assessment issues associated with them. Perhaps I may remind the noble Lord that, as far as I am aware, most of the pathway schemes and experiments so far have been with younger people in urban areas. They are more likely to be IT-literate and more likely to have access to IT facilities. I am chair of a housing association that runs across a rural county. A substantial proportion of my older tenants have no access to WPs. Of those who do, only 14%, when I had my last tenants’ conference, actually used them for financial matters, such as the handling of bank accounts and so on. In order for those other tenants to be able to claim universal credit, they have somehow to access a WP. I have four centres across the county of Norfolk—in King’s Lynn, Norwich, Dereham and Great Yarmouth, and possibly North Walsham, but we will see—in which we will set up local offices. There will be terminals and there will be people to guide people through their applications. That is fine, except that people may have to go on something like a 15-mile bus ride to make their application. Because it is a paperless system, they will not be able to correct any mistakes online. They will not be able to answer any queries about the information. They will not be able to follow it up because they will be back home.

I tried to see whether there was any way I could bring IT facilities to people in that situation. I considered, for example, whether I could provide terminals in people’s homes inexpensively, possibly through a leasing system. Yes, I could, except that those same tenants cannot afford to pay the broadband or dial-up charges. So I cannot put them online in their homes. I then thought about whether I could in some way get them smartphones to give them some online access. No, they cannot afford the charges of smartphones. So they cannot afford to go online. Indeed, in some parts of Norfolk you cannot even get access to broadband, but that is another matter. We have only 90% coverage, so sod the 10%. No doubt they will get their money somehow. None the less, in large parts of Norfolk, there will be a large number of people who have no access to terminals in their home or to a smartphone, who have no computer skills, who have to go into a local centre, and who, if any mistake is made, will have no ability to correct it.

You may think that assessment will be only once a year or once every six months and therefore this is a minor problem compared with the payment issues. I hope that is right, but one of the crucial reasons why the old CSA computer toppled over, which was at the core of the failure of the CSA to deliver the service it should have delivered, was that half of all lone parents had more than 12 changes of circumstances in a year. They were largely associated with changes in childcare at each holiday period because it did not fit the school’s working time or the mother’s work patterns. You can get real-time information from an employer about income, but you cannot get real-time information in the same way for ever-changing childcare bills. That means that that lone parent or that couple will have to reassess, reclaim and adjust their UC online as it is going to be paperless. Will the Minister tell me how I should respond to this? I have hundreds of tenants who at the moment have no IT skills, no access to gaining them, although I am trying to do crash courses where people are willing to take them, no terminals at home, no ability to afford dial up if it were to exist and no access to phones. How are they going to input the information they need to input to get the money they are entitled to? I would be glad of some help on this point.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

I shall make a short contribution to this important debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for introducing it. Using a Motion of Regret is clunky, but this is important. I shall start with a question about parliamentary process. Things have changed since the old days. In my experience of parliamentary change of this kind, Bills were much less far reaching and were implemented over a much shorter timescale. After the six-month period of purdah, Ministers could always explain the unfolding of the regulations that flowed from the primary Act. We are getting to a stage where we are paying more attention to guidance rather than to statutory instruments. Statutory instruments are becoming almost as skeletal as the primary legislation. Therefore, how are parliamentarians able to keep up with what is going on, particularly when this is at least a five-year implementation phase? I think it would be a good trick if the Government could achieve it in a five-year period.

In parenthesis, I want to strengthen the Minister’s hand. Speaking for myself, I am much more interested in getting this universal credit reform right than I am in sticking to any timetable, political or otherwise. I have next to no interest in what will happen in May 2015 compared with this important legislation. It is transformational architecture, but because it is transformational, it is difficult to deliver for reasons that we have heard.

It is not just that it is taking five years to do. It is now intimately engaged with other government departments. HMRC is the prime one, but not the only one. There is also DCLG—is it DCLG or DCLM?

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

DCLG.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

Thank you. I am Scottish. Luckily it does not apply to me.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

You are lucky.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

I know.

We have a lot of extra heavy lifting to do to try to make sense of what is going on. If that was not enough, we have for the first time a completely transformational application of ICT technology in digital delivery. All that means that this has to be done slowly and sensitively. I would like to think that the kind of flexibility that the Minister showed in the seminal Committee stage of the 2012 Act is still available to us because if he is not sensitive to the sort of things that are being raised he risks prejudicing public perception of what he is trying to do, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said.

I am absolutely certain that the vast majority of people who will need to take advantage of universal credit in future are literate and have internet access. We know from government research that the penetration of digital technology is increasing and will continue to do so. It is the two lowest deciles of income distribution in terms of household income that I continue to lose sleep about—people who earn less than £10,000 a year. We have been hearing about some of these acute problems and they are just as acute as they were in 2012. I understand that we have to hasten slowly to get this right, but we have to find a better way of informing Parliament about what is going on. I think the next set of detailed guidance that we can expect—my spies tell me and my spies are everywhere—will be in the late summer of 2014 and the next substantial rollout might not be until the spring of 2015. How are we, as parliamentarians, to keep up with what is actually going on? Reading the newspapers is not always helpful because, although they can highlight some of the problems, they do not tell the whole story.

I make a plea to the Minister. Can he think about ways of dealing with this other than Motions of Regret? It is a game we can all play, and we could do it every month if we had to, but I think there is a more grown-up way of accepting that, for the next two years and, indeed, for the rest of this Parliament, there will be periods when the Government could find a parliamentary opportunity for us to have a sensible discussion, be given reassurances and ask these detailed questions which are so important, not just to us, but to the people outside.

I agree with everything that has been said about the monthly payment, particularly by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. That is probably my biggest worry. I know that she has more expertise than I about the split payments, but I listened carefully to what she had to say and I think that her questions deserve answers. The additional problem of behavioural change, on top of everything else, is something that is too dangerous, and I wish we were not doing it at all. Maybe we could do it in future, when this gets straightened out, but it is too risky to do it in this way.

My final point before I sit down, because it is late, is that the SSAC has done a very good job. I still remember the long look I got down the ministerial nose when I suggested this at the beginning. This was my idea, because I thought it would help. Luckily, the Minister eventually took my advice. The SSAC has done a remarkable job and I hope that the Minister will continue to involve it. Although it does not have any statutory control over guidance, if we get to the position where guidance is needed, such as in the definition of what is vulnerable, and we cannot get that clear with the stakeholders that the SSAC knows and works with so well, then we will be lost when this gets implemented. I hope that the Minister will give us an assurance that the SSAC will have a key and continuing role in this evaluation and monitoring process. Otherwise, it will be more difficult to achieve successfully.