Pensions Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

1: Clause 2, page 2, line 7, at end insert—
“( ) Regulations may provide for circumstances in which a person may opt to have a year treated as a qualifying year if by aggregating income from two or more jobs, that person’s earnings are equal to or greater than the lower earnings level for that year.”

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

I am grateful for the tolerance of the House in allowing me to delay speaking for a moment or two while noble Lords are leaving the Chamber. They are clearly underwhelmed by the issue that we are about to debate.

I strongly welcome the new state pension. Pensions are attached to the waged labour market. Only one job in four created since 2008 is, according to the Work Foundation, permanent; 1 million or more are zero-hours contracts with no certainty of any work at all. Hundreds of thousands of others are short-hours contracts and, along with other non-standard employment patterns such as term-time working, job sharing and so on, comprise 40% of all jobs—I repeat, 40%—as employers seek to match a flexible and irregular labour force to flexible and irregular demand.

Part-time work and flexible work may suit, and does suit, many women, students or older people on a pension. Those jobs are in cleaning, catering, domiciliary care—involving 150,000 people—hotel and retail, and are usually paid at around minimum wage level. Very many of those people will not be building a state pension. Our pension structure, both state and private, has not yet caught up. It is 10 or 15 years behind as the plates shift in the labour market.

This amendment, which is permissive, seeks to put a pension floor under workers who may work in several mini-jobs and put in quite long hours—30 or so a week—but who cannot, under rules set out decades ago, build themselves a new state pension. If they are in one job with sufficient pay they will build a state pension, but if they are in several jobs with identical pay they do not. If your Lordships agree today we can begin to do something about it.

Under Governments of both parties we have sought to credit people into the national insurance system for a state pension where, for good reason, people are not in waged work. They include mothers of young children, disabled people and carers. Universal credit, which I strongly support, will credit another 0.8 million people into national insurance, I understand.

So where are we? From 2016 you will need 35 years’ worth of credits or payments into the national insurance system to get a full state pension. If you are unemployed and on JSA, and later on UC, you are credited in for free. If you have a child under 12, are a grandparent caring for a child whose mother works or are on disability benefits or carer’s allowance, you are rightly credited in for free. Your Lordships have over the years been at the forefront of pressing all Governments to bring such groups rightly into the national insurance system. If you earn above the lower earnings limit, or LEL, at £5,700 a year you come into the national insurance system for free. If you earn more than £7,500 in a single job you come into the NI system but pay. If, however, you work 30 hours a week and earn £11,000 a year but in several, splintered jobs, you cannot add the pay together to get above the LEL. Come retirement, you do not have a decent state pension.

Hence this amendment. It seeks an entirely permissive way in which to future-proof our state pension structure for those in the new flexible economy who work in and combine mini-jobs, by allowing them to combine the earnings from several jobs for a pension if that takes them over the LEL at £5,700. In the past, perhaps 50,000 people, mostly women, were affected, especially in rural areas, as they stitched together a patchwork of cleaning, fruit picking, bar work and so on, and they relied instead on their husband through the married women’s dependency pension. That pension, which would have protected her, is being abolished. She—or you, or we—is on her own and will not get any state pension from her patchwork of mini-jobs. From now on she gets nothing at all. The reason is that the labour market has changed dramatically in the past decade or so with the growth of zero-hours and short-hours contracts.

Short-hours contracts guarantee part-time work for three, 13 or maybe 23 hours. Zero-hours contracts, however, do not guarantee you any hours at all. You may in practice work 10, 15 or more hours fairly regularly. Equally you could find at the beginning of your shift, 10 minutes before you are due to start work, that there is no work for you: you get no pay and go home. I understand that every Domino’s Pizza worker is on a zero-hours contract—ZHCs—as are hundreds of thousands of staff in McDonald’s, Boots, Burger King, Subway, Wetherspoon and Sports Direct. They work in food joints, call centres, customer services and domiciliary care; they are cooks, cleaners, drivers and waiters; they are agency workers—almost all of whom are on zero-hours contracts. Most are on, or on around, minimum wage. Far from this being a shrinking sector of the market, the number of such contracts is increasing rapidly and very many of those workers will not be building a new state pension.

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[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, first, I thank very much my noble friends Lady Drake and Lord Morris for their powerful and moving speeches. I thought that their contributions were extraordinarily impressive, and I am sure that they moved many people in this House.

I shall address first the comments of the noble Lord, Lord German, many of whose points were dealt with very effectively by my noble friend Lord Browne from the Front Bench. Basically, he ran two arguments. First, he said that most of the people concerned would be on UC, and he pressed the Minister instead on UC. Secondly, he commented on the problems for HMRC in combining possible jobs. On the first argument, on UC—and I am very much in favour of universal credit—we agree the statistics are that another 800,000 should come into the NI system as a result of crediting arrangements. That is great, but the point is that UC is income-based and that income is surprisingly low. No one has mentioned that today. For example, if you are a single person and you earn more than £4,000 a year in any job, well below the lower earnings limit, you are above the level for universal credit so you do not get credited in. If you are a married woman, your husband is in work and you have two children—I am aiming for a generic family, if you like—and if he is earning more than £12,000 a year, that family is not entitled to UC, apart from housing benefit. She may be earning £4,000 or £5,000, but that will not give her a credit through him. Those two groups of single people and married women, which my noble friend identified and I seek to identify, are both outside the reach of UC. What is worse—and neither the Minister nor the noble Lord, Lord German, mentioned this—is that it is happening at the same time as we are withdrawing the married woman’s dependency pension of 60% that she would have had as an alternative and could have relied on. That is what is new. If she cannot get into the pensions system through universal credit, she cannot get in at all, and that has been created and constructed by this Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Freud, said that he was confident of his figures of 50,000 people, but he was equally confident about two years ago when we were debating welfare reform and the figures then were 20,000 or 25,000. They have doubled exponentially in the past two years or so, and they may go on to grow equally geometrically, as opposed to arithmetically, over the next few years. He says that his statistics are broadly in line, but I do not know about that. His statistics are based on labour force statistics offered by the ONS, which the ONS now says are unreliable; that therefore means that his statisticss are unreliable. My statistics of 250,000 are the best that I can do with all the evidence there is, overlaying different subsets. I accept that, but I am as confident as I can be on the evidence that exists that at least 250,000 people and maybe more—it is an increasing problem—are outside the national insurance system and will not be credited in either through UC or any caring responsibilities.

The noble Lord quoted average income. An average income is pulled upwards by the proportion of people who work in IT, for example, which is highly paid, or in further education, where they are paid piecemeal. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development—which the Minister quoted several times, although he did not quote this—says that 40% of the 1 million people who are employed work below 16 hours per week. We know that the majority of those are on, or on around, the minimum wage: for example, in jobs in domiciliary care, hotels, waiting, driving or security. A mean average is no use in this, because the figures are skewed hugely upwards by people in IT, who may be very well paid—perhaps at £50 per hour—and come within zero-hour contracts. We need to see how many people are below the LEL in one job and work in a second job that is also below the LEL, which together would bring them into the NI system from which they are currently excluded. I repeat: that figure is likely to be 250,000—nearly every single person and most married women.

The Minister says that it would produce all sorts of perversities and paradoxes. There is no greater perversity than the situation in which, if you are unemployed and on JSA, you are credited in for free national insurance, but if you work 30 hours a week in two 15-hour jobs, earn £11,000 and pay tax, you cannot get into the NI system and get no state pension. Which of those is the perversity? Do not work and you are in for free; or work as best you can, by putting jobs together, and you are outside the system. Is that right or decent? It is not. I would like to test the opinion of the House.

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Moved by

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

2: Clause 2, page 2, line 13, at end insert—
“( ) A person is not entitled to bereavement support payment and is exempt from work conditionality as specified in section 30(1A), if he or she has reached pensionable age.”

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I should like first to say a word about procedure. I am glad to see the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, in her place; that is helpful. This is a paving amendment that the Public Bill Office assures me is appropriate. Amendment 21 in this group—and only Amendment 21—is consequential on Amendment 2. Therefore, any vote on the first amendment is, in the words of the Companion, also a vote on its directly consequential amendment—although it does not, of course, determine any other amendments in the group. If it were not directly consequential there would be no point in a paving amendment. As I have carefully taken the clerk’s advice on this, I hope that the Minister and the House will agree with my statements. If the Minister does not agree that Amendment 21 is consequential, perhaps he could indicate so now because I would not wish to waste the House’s time.

[Lord Freud]

I am happy to accept it as consequential.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, as this allows us to have a substantive discussion on bereavement—which I know concerns many of your Lordships—in good time and not in the late hours this evening. I know that the Minister is sympathetic to the situation of distressed children and widowed parents. I hope that I can refer generally to widows, as there are three times as many women who are bereaved with children as men—and I know that the Minister means well by them. I hope that the House will agree that this is neither a party matter nor, as it is permissive, a cost matter, as the cost is almost too low to estimate.

This is a modest amendment that seeks to help widowed persons avoid additional pressure in the most stressful and distressing period of their lives. Three-fifths of bereaved parents are in work at the time of bereavement—virtually all fathers and around half or so of mothers. Most fathers with a terminally ill wife continue, or continued, to work. Most mothers, however, give up their jobs to care for their husband. Fathers would normally go back to work after a couple of weeks; indeed, they are often anxious to do so. Some mothers may feel able to do so as well, depending on the age of their children and the nature of their job. However, many widowed mothers were not in work, because they had younger children, or they had stopped working to become carers and—this is key—many mothers who were in work when their husband died drop out of work for some time while they support their children. If they return to work later, it may be to a different job, to one that is part-time or less demanding. Whereas work seems to be essential and continuous for fathers, it becomes secondary and broken for bereaved mothers.

The Government are reconstructing bereavement benefits, with more money paid as an up-front lump sum and less as a monthly payment—which, at £400 a month, will be paid only for 12 months and topped up by universal credit while the claimant is out of work. After 12 months, bereavement support payments stop and, if the parent does not return to work, she may draw her full income from UC. Being on UC normally entails work conditionality—entering or re-entering the labour market. The Minister has agreed—for which I am delighted—that for kinship carers, work conditionality associated with claiming UC should not apply for 12 months after they have taken on the care of children. But—and this is the point of my amendment—work conditionality for widowed parents, unlike for kinship carers, will kick in after six months, not 12 months, while they are still on bereavement benefit. That benefit runs for 12 months precisely because the Minister, in all decency—and I respect him for it—recognises that they need that support for 12 months. Surely work conditionality should be aligned with those 12 months.

The Minister said in Committee that he thought that six months’ relief from work conditionality while on bereavement allowance, if the claimant receives some UC top-up, was “generous”. I confess that that shocked me. It is generous only by comparison with the situation of someone who is not a bereaved spouse, and I think that that is not a proper comparison. If the mother has returned to work, or wants help to do so earlier than that—and some will—that is fine, but I do not think it right and decent to require her to attend work interviews and full work conditionality and job-hunting after six months, when she has grieving children who need her more than ever.

In Committee, the Minister justified this by saying that work conditionality after six months,

“is necessary to help them adjust and regain control of their lives”.—[Official Report, 15/1/14; col. GC 146.]

I was shocked by that as well. From my experience, the exact opposite is true. If work conditionality kicks in at six months while the woman is still on bereavement benefits and she is not ready for it, she loses what little control she has in handling her family life. Instead, that power is transferred to the DWP—perhaps to a 23 year-old young man in a local benefit office who, I expect, will be well intentioned until the pressure of targets bears down on him. He is probably a young man without children and without any experience of bereavement. It is assumed that he knows better than she does what is best for her and her children in their grief. I hope that he asks his own mother for advice, because he probably will not have a clue.

I do not think that that is acceptable. We are turning this young man at the age of 23 into her parent and treating her as the child, denying her, as a parent, the ability to look after her children in the way she believes is best. This is a sort of cruel-to-be-kind, tough-love philosophy towards a grieving widow and severely distressed children. Tough love is perhaps fine for youngsters who are on JSA and do not want to get up in the morning, but we are bullying into seeking work a widow with children who is still numb with grief and hugely distressed. We really cannot have that.

In this paving amendment and the consequential amendment attached to it I am not arguing that a widow’s benefit should be increased, although personally I would support that. The amendment is not about more money; it is about allowing widows to decide what is best for them and their family in the immediate aftermath of bereavement. For me, the immediate aftermath is the first year during which all the anniversaries occur—Christmas, his birthday and the anniversary of his death. I know, as do many of your Lordships, that that first year is the hardest.

I ask your Lordships to put themselves in the widow’s place. Her husband’s death may have been sudden, due to an accident at work or in the car, and she is still traumatised by the shock, or he may have died after an illness such as a stroke or cancer and she is exhausted through caring for him. She is wiped out and her mental and physical health is pretty fragile. It is just at this time when, although she is exhausted herself, her children are distraught and most need her. Children I know who have experienced the death of a parent have regressed into bed-wetting, nightmares, broken sleep and school phobia. They have lots of mysterious tummy aches and frequent headaches, and they display challenging and clearly needy behaviour. Irrationally, they suffer anguish that in some way they were responsible for their father’s death. They feel guilty that they had never told the lost parent how much they loved him and are fearful that they may lose their mother as well.

Older children worry about their mother’s safety if she is late back, or they fear they may lose their home. They are profoundly upset a second time over at their mother’s grief. Stoically they try not to weep, as that makes it harder for her to cope. “He is not here to hug me”, said one young girl. They dream of him and experience severe depression. Children need their surviving parent to be physically available for them. They need the trust that exists between a child and his mother to discuss their father’s death. Emotional availability follows from that. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord German, quoted very movingly from research into the effect of bereavement on children’s later lives, from delinquency to poor mental health and suicide risk, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, mentioned cases of multiple deaths.

Every family is different, as is the work status of any bereaved parent, but this amendment, at no cost, permits the bereaved parent to decide what is appropriate for her and her family. We know that currently, bereaved parents do not take all the time off that they could from work. They do not exploit the system; they do not abuse it; they do not milk it. They want to work when they feel fit enough and their children are steady enough, but only they know that, not the DWP or the local benefit office. That is the point of having 12 months of bereavement payments. Insisting on work interviews and work conditionality at six months, or even leaving it to the discretion of 23 year-olds in local offices, adds stress to the suffering of the parent and distress to the pain of the child. We really should not do that.

The amendment would give widowed parents a breathing space from work conditionality alongside a bereavement payment while they rebuild their fractured lives. This House has always looked out for widows and children and I hope that it will do so again today. I beg to move.

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I stress that we have no intention of requiring bereaved parents with childcare responsibilities to take jobs that do not take into account their children’s needs. This engagement is intended to be supportive—for example, supporting with confidence-building or training where a bereaved parent is entering the labour market for the first time or changing career path. Claimants’ individual circumstances are always considered before conditionality is applied and the current legislation allows for some to continue without any conditionality. A move to a fixed, 12-month conditionality exemption, as the noble Baroness’s amendment suggests, assumes that bereaved parents do not want the state to offer support in this period. This is wrong—

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, the noble Lord has misrepresented both my amendment and my speech. I said that many parents would welcome it, but that the decision on at which point within that 12 months they returned to the labour market lay with them, not with the local benefit office.

[Lord Freud]

The point I am trying to make is that it is far better to recognise that individual responses to grief vary. As a number of noble Lords have said, grief often does not manifest in behavioural and emotional challenges until months or even years down the line, as a child matures. That is why, under universal credit, advisers have the flexibility to personalise requirements at any point, responding as circumstances arise. Where parents are facing difficulties with school, childcare arrangements or other extenuating circumstances, advisers can limit or even lift requirements.

I recognise that the application of that flexibility depends on the ability of those advisers. While I feel that our advisers are able, it is important to ensure that they have the best guidance and training to deal with such difficult cases. That is why we are currently working with experts in the field including the Childhood Bereavement Network, the Children’s Society, Cruse Bereavement Care, WAY and Gingerbread, to ensure that guidance and learning clearly articulate how advisers can identify and support parents in these circumstances, including the particular circumstances in which it would be inappropriate to apply conditionality. Our advisory services are also being repositioned as a profession with a clear career path, accredited learning and ongoing professional development. The learning programme will ensure that advisers have up-to-date skills to deal with any claimant interaction and support them in making relevant and appropriate decisions on an individual basis.

That is the standing position. I now move to the more specific response that I wish to make following our discussions in Grand Committee, particularly in answer to the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I recognise that there are circumstances in which children could be in considerable distress and in which it is clear that conditionality should not be applied and flexibility is essential. I do not, however, see such cases as being limited to bereavement. There may be other circumstances in which children need additional care—for instance, where a family is fleeing domestic violence.

I assure the noble Baroness that we are not looking for a measure to define “distress”. Indeed, we need to establish exactly what the expression means; we are using it as a shorthand and there may be a much better way of capturing the concept, which is one of the things that a review should do. We are looking to identify specific circumstances in which we could expect a child to be distressed, and in which they will therefore have additional needs that need to be recognised. Claimants would need to demonstrate only the circumstances they are in, not the fact of distress, which is, as the noble Baroness has pointed out, extraordinarily difficult to establish.

I therefore want to conduct a review as quickly possible, in order to embed any new rules in the regime before we take new claims to universal credit from families. That is why I propose to undertake the review myself. I would like, in practice, to conclude that review by June or so. I will report back to the House following that. I am not quite sure of what form that will take but we will find the right form nearer the time.

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I think I have covered the areas raised by my noble friend Lord German. On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, clearly I am able to commit to this review on the basis that the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, does not go through. I would not be in a position to commit to a review with a changed context because if there is an ad hoc change to a significant proportion of those in the scope, I will have to work out again exactly how to scope any proposal that I have.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I am sorry, but why? The noble Lord has already made the judgment on kinship parents. This is a permissive amendment, which he can draw on if needed. If he does not need it because of his review he does not need to deploy it. It is there as a safety net, so why is he asking the House to make it an either/or judgment?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, this is not a permissive amendment. It makes a change to the conditionality regime for one element. If I need to look at how I do a review, I would have to look again at the specific context of doing this review.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I am sorry; I crave the indulgence of the House. Let me read the substance of Amendment 21:

“The Secretary of State may by regulation and within the overall budget for bereavement support payment exempt any widowed parent from work conditionality while in receipt of said payment”.

The Secretary of State “may” do that by regulation. As I said, the amendment is permissive. I am sorry that the noble Lord did not, perhaps, fully appreciate that.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, let me make my point here. I will have to look again. As noble Lords know, a “may” in this context is a very substantial “may”. I will have to look again at the context in which I would want to do something such as this. I may very well want to do it, but I cannot make a commitment to have both at this stage. On that basis, I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I am still slightly baffled by the less than satisfactory response of the Minister. Let me first thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, the noble Lord, Lord Rix, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield and my noble friend Lady Sherlock for their very powerful and moving speeches on something that really matters: trying to protect and support widowed parents for the first 12 months of their bereavement. I welcome the Minister’s offer of a review on distress. However, what he has suggested is so wide that I rather doubt—although I would be pleased to be proven wrong—that he will be able to turn this into effective policy.

I give one tiny example, which I was thinking of as the Minister spoke. He was going to extend this to the distress of cohabiting parents when one of them dies. It is not too far fetched to suggest to the House a situation where a woman was with the father of her child or children in a cohabiting relationship but they then separated. She then had a period of perhaps five or seven years with someone else, to whom the children really connected and related. Then she moved on to a new boyfriend—a new stepfather—for perhaps the past year. Could the Minister tell me which of those three would have to die—forgive the language—for her to be entitled to bereavement benefit under the proposal of distress? Is it the recent stepfather, over whom the children are not especially distressed but the mother is highly distressed; the long-term stepfather, who has helped to bring them up, to whom the children were committed and over whom they are distressed while she is less so; or their natural father, who is giving them financial support and they see regularly? Which is it? I suspect one cannot do what the Minister seeks to do.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for making the point for me. If we do these things piecemeal, we will not get the right answer. That is why my response to what the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said to me in Grand Committee was to think that we need to look at this comprehensively. We need to get this issue right across the piece and understand how to incorporate it as a whole into our conditionality regime. That is the response that I am looking to do, not to sort it out on the Floor of the House where we simply do not have enough information to do it properly at this stage.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I make two points. First, we are not seeking to sort it out on the Floor of the House. I am seeking the consent of the House, if it is so minded to give it, to a permissive amendment, which does not commit the Government to anything they subsequently decide is inappropriate in the light of further research. The second point is that the Minister’s definition of distress is so wide that I genuinely believe, from my limited experience in Parliament, that he will find it very difficult indeed to turn it into deliverable policy. I am sure he is as aware as I am that it will end up depending on the discretion—he made this point himself—of local people in local benefits offices, such as the 23 year-old who will be interviewing the widowed parent. Is she numb? If so, does that mean she is coping or not caring sufficiently? Alternatively, is she voluble? Does that mean she is coping or not caring? He will have to peer into her soul and we should not go there.

The Minister says that he wants to help widowed parents to adjust, to,

“regain control of their lives”,

with tailored solutions. He is saying that the local benefits office, the 23 year-old, will decide. The 23-year old will turn her into his dependant, reliant on his judgment as to what she should do and what is best for her family. That is inappropriate and improper. You are making the adult back into a child and adding to her stress and distress. The Minister should not be going down that path. He will not be able to do it by clear policy; he will depend on discretion. Neither of those routes is satisfactory for a small and coherent group that we can easily define—that is, widowed parents with children following a bereavement.

The Minister is opposing a permissive amendment dealing with a small, specific group, which he can respond to exactly as he has already helped—and I am glad of it—kinship carers. He has allowed kinship carers 12 months off on work conditionality; he can do the same thing for this very specific group and make their work conditionality freedom align with the 12 months in which they are receiving bereavement benefit. After all, that is precisely why they have bereavement benefit in the first place. If they have it because they need support following their bereavement, at the same time they need the freedom from the additional pressure that the Minister’s work conditionality will ensure.

The Minister said that it was not quite either/or, but suggested that—

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I just want to make the point that if you pick out particular groups and have legislation just for them, you end up with the kind of carbuncled benefit system that we are trying to escape from. I am determined to try to build a system that is coherent across the piece, and I want to look at all the situations to make sure that they are consistent.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I understand the Minister’s support for grand schemes. We will see whether the grand scheme of universal credit, which I support, will deliver what he hopes that it does—and I hope it does. But here we are dealing with a situation in which we have kinship carers and widowed parents, and we may be talking subsequently about women experiencing distress in domestic abuse situations, and the Minister is trying to make something coherent. He is trying to fit them into one common mould, but he does not have to. He may come up with appropriate and different solutions for different groups because, as he himself said in his reply, every family is different and may need different help. This amendment would allow him to do precisely that.

The amendment does not cut across any review in any way, any more than his 12-month provision for kinship carers does. It seeks only to protect a small, identifiable and precise group from additional pressures of work conditionality at no cost at all and at a time when they and their children are most deeply distressed. I do not think that they should be put on the back burner for a review that may or may not deliver what I hope the House will think is the right path to take. If the review goes ahead and the Minister does not need the amendment, as it is permissive, he does not need to draw on it. If his review falters, which I think it will because he is asking too much of it, the amendment would give protection to some of the most vulnerable people in our country at the time of their deepest grief.

It is very simple. The amendment is permissive but says that we recognise the situation of widows and widowed parents and will give them, under the new system, one year of bereavement benefits and payments. This amendment asks for that one year, which we recognise is the period of most grief and distress, and that we should also not apply the pressure of work conditionality. This House has always looked out for widows and children, and I am asking the House to do it again today. The amendment is permissive and cost-free, and the Minister can build on it if he wishes to do the review. It is just a small safety net of help for grieving children and their grieving parent. I beg your Lordships to protect them tonight. I wish to test the opinion of the House.