Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

I shall speak to Amendment 55, which was so ably spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. Earlier today, many hours ago, my noble friend Lady Lister reminded the House that caring for people is part of how society works. Nowhere is that more true than those parents who are looking after a disabled child. So the proposed changes on conditionality for responsible carers, which would see carers with a child aged three or four being allocated to the work-related requirements group—requiring them to look for, and be available for, work—are of great concern.

Many parents and carers of disabled children aged three to four will be unable to fulfil these requirements because, as we have heard, there is a great lack of childcare for disabled children. Research shows that only 21% of local authorities say that there is sufficient childcare for disabled children in their area, a situation that is bound to get worse with the cuts to local authority funding. A recent Contact a Family survey showed that only 60% of parents with disabled children were able to fully access the current entitlement of 15 hours’ free childcare every week.

As we have heard, while carers of children in receipt of the higher-rate or middle-rate care component of DLA are exempted from these requirements, many children under five do not receive the benefit anyway because of the time taken to identify that child as disabled. Speak to any parent of a disabled child and they will tell you a long saga of how long it took to get a diagnosis, with administrative delays on top of that, so it often takes years to get that identification. Surely the carers of disabled children under five should be exempt from the additional conditionality unless appropriate childcare is available.

When this was debated in Committee in the Commons, the Minister agreed that appropriate childcare was critical—I emphasise again, childcare appropriate for children with disabilities—and I hope that the Minister today will be able to give an undertaking that the condition will not apply unless appropriate childcare is available.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to come back to some of the points that we raised in earlier discussions and support the amendments of my noble friends.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, was absolutely right when she made the point that we do no kindness to lone parents if they are bumping along at the very bottom; they want a job, a career and, in time, progression. That comes only if they have resilience in their individual jobs, if they stay in work and if they are able to make a commitment to their employer, which the employer recognises. However, with tax credits, we found that half of all lone parents had more than 12 changes of circumstances a year. As we did not have the real-time information that will underpin universal credit, the tax credit system never caught up and the computer would topple over.

Virtually all those changes of circumstances—more than 12 a year for more than 50% of lone parents—were based on childcare. For example, every half term and every holiday they had to have different childcare arrangements, but childminders want a particular pattern of work. The result was that we found that a lot of our efforts to get lone parents through the new deal into the labour market broke down over the issue of childcare. It could be affordable and it may even be available, but it may not be responsive to the needs of the parents and the child. All children are different. You cannot assume that because one child thrives at the age of two or three in a playgroup, another child will—they may not. Speaking from my experience with my own children, I know that it is not like that.

We found that what created resilience for lone parents to hang on in there in the labour market when their children were of pre-school age—this was the basis of the New Deal—was if they trusted their childcare and did not feel guilty about it. As one lone parent said to me, “I feel bad about leaving my child with strangers”. With a stranger, you cannot be sure that if the child starts running a temperature they will be taken to the GP, or whether they will be cuddled if they are fretting. Anyone who has been a mother will know that those sorts of things are part of the fabric of bringing up small children. The result was that the one childminder of choice who freed the lone parent from the guilt of working, and allowed them to respond to the problems of half terms, summer holidays and so on, was her own mother—the grandparent.

Certainly that was the case in my life, when it came to appropriate financial support arrangements and all the rest of it. That was the way that many of us in that generation were able to work while we had young children. Increasingly, however, we are pressing those same women—the grandparents—to stay in the labour market, because their pension age is being deferred later and later. We are therefore taking them out of the support network that alone permitted a generation of lone parents to go back into the labour market. I do not think that the Government have put together all the pieces that they need to in this jigsaw.

The Minister probably will not have the stats to hand, but perhaps she could write to us and tell us what the resilience of lone parents with small children is in holding on to work, particularly when they have been pressed into the labour market under the regime for children over the age of three and, increasingly, the age of two? There is no point in having a churning door: they are in work for six weeks until half term and then drop out; they then have to go through the whole jobcentre process, find another job for six weeks and then drop out again. What is their resilience and staying power? What is it that permits them to go to work and have confidence that their child is being well looked after in a way that they themselves would look after them? It usually means their own mother looking after the child, which makes them feel that they can progress in their job because they can stay in it.

I very much agree with almost every word that the right reverend Prelate said. I suspect that if you go into this too casually, focusing on trying to get the lone parent into the labour market without understanding the dynamics of childcare, guilt and resilience, all you are going to do is add to parental misery and not lift parents and children out of bumping along the bottom of the economic plateau.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

No, I am afraid I am not making that commitment. I am saying that there are further opportunities for discussion. I apologise for taking so long to explain and respond to these amendments.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

The noble Baroness mentioned earlier in her speech something that made me shudder: the very serious situation in which a lone parent voluntarily leaves her work and therefore has sanctions applied to her. That might make sense for a young single man with no other responsibilities who has not been engaged in work and so on, but not for a lone parent. When a lone parent says that she left her job because her child was X, Y and Z, how does the Minister expect a 22 year-old man in a jobcentre to know whether that did or did not require, and was appropriate for, a sanction? It seems to me that these are different planets. I am baffled that the noble Baroness thinks that such highly sensitive issues, with every child being different in their needs, can be judged by a box-ticking mentality in Jobcentre Plus.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I am sorry, but I will have to get back to the noble Baroness. I urge noble Lords—and noble Baronesses—to withdraw or not press their amendments.