Local Authorities: Relationship Support Services
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Henley
My Lords, the noble Baroness has highlighted three different aspects of work we are doing in the Department for Work and Pensions, but the work goes across all parts of government. She is right to highlight the different sums of money involved in the three schemes. The one we are discussing today is a small-scale scheme designed to offer a degree of help to local authorities to access expertise and evidence in order to drive forward various local strategies. I hope that will feed into all the other programmes as well but, as I say, that particular programme is a small-scale one to help those 11 local authorities.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, we know that money, or lack of it, can be an important factor in parental conflict. Given the announcement made yesterday, about which we have just heard, that the Government’s aim is to reduce parental conflict in workless families, can the Minister tell us what assessment they have made of the impact of benefit cuts, including the ongoing freeze in benefits, on parental conflict in families who are already struggling, and will be struggling all the more with the impact of these cuts?
Lord Henley
My Lords, anyone who has been involved in family matters will know that money is one of the major causes of conflict in parental disputes, and that can be true at all levels of income. I do not accept that the changes and reforms we have made to the benefit system, which will continue to roll out this year, are making any difference in this respect.
GovCoin
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Henley
My Lords, I would not want to speak for the rest of government, although obviously I answer on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government on this occasion. Certainly, we want to look carefully at this particular trial. It was a very small trial, involving only some 20 to 30 people. It was more what I think is termed a proof of concept rather than a trial, but it produced encouraging results and we want to look at those in due course.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, concerns have been raised, including as I understand it by members of the Government Digital Service, that this technology could be used in future to monitor or even control how social security claimants spend their benefits. Could the Minister give a categorical assurance that this will not happen, in the interests of claimants’ privacy and freedom of choice?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I give the noble Baroness that categorical assurance. The Department for Work and Pensions has absolutely no access to any such claimant information and will have no access to it in any further trials we look at. We want to keep it like that. Obviously, information will be able to Disc—which is GovCoin, referred to in the Question—but that will be protected by data protection principles. I reiterate what I said to the noble Baroness: the department and the Government will have no access to that information.
Child Poverty Unit
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett
To ask Her Majesty’s Government why they have abolished the Child Poverty Unit which was sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Education and HM Treasury.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Henley) (Con)
My Lords, tackling child poverty and disadvantage is a priority for this Government, and we are convinced that there is a better approach than the one driven by the Child Poverty Act 2010 income-related targets. This is why we replaced them with statutory measures of parental worklessness and children’s educational attainment—the two areas that can make the biggest difference to children’s outcomes. We will build on these measures through our forthcoming Green Paper on social justice.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, that does not actually answer the Question. The abolition of the cross-departmental unit is widely seen as downgrading and weakening the government machinery dedicated to the eradication of child poverty. Could the Minister explain how the abolition of a cross-departmental unit co-sponsored by the Department for Education is consistent with the Government’s own analysis of the root causes of poverty as partly lying in children’s educational achievement? Surely their own approach, which rejects what they call a narrow income-based approach, strengthens rather than weakens the case for a cross-departmental unit.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I am terribly sorry to say this, but I think I did answer the Question directly. What was the purpose of the child poverty unit? Its purpose was to measure the income-related targets set up by the previous Government. Those targets were a waste of time and we got rid of them. We have now set up something better—the Social Mobility Commission secretariat, based in the Department for Education. As I said in my original Answer, the appropriate measure for these things should be parental worklessness—a responsibility of the Department for Work and Pensions—and children’s educational attainment, and those are the two that we will look at.
Universal Credit
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(7 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I too am grateful for this opportunity to mark the huge contribution made by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, to the design and implementation of universal credit. However, I doubt that the Minister will be surprised that my three minutes will not just be made up of warm words, because reports from the ground are not encouraging.
One of the biggest problems is the combined effect of a seven-day waiting period and monthly payments in arrears, which, after assessment, means that the first payment is not made for at least six weeks. This is causing considerable hardship and is leading to reliance on food banks. Monthly payments also create unnecessary difficulties for those—especially mothers—who just about get by when budgeting weekly or fortnightly. They are not essential to UC’s architecture and I urge the Government most strongly to look at them again.
I am particularly concerned about the implications for those granted refugee status, who are given only 28 days to move from asylum support to mainstream benefits. This is already a problem, with too many left destitute because 28 days simply is not long enough, and, by definition, it will not be enough time under UC. Welcome as the Home Office/DWP pilot is, it cannot solve that problem. A related problem is refugees and other vulnerable claimants who are unable to claim because they do not have any form of bank account, despite the assurance given in a recent Written Answer that this does not prevent a UC claim. Again, I urge Ministers to look into this.
Universal support delivered locally is supposed to be the answer to the more general problems created by monthly payments. However, I am told that it is functioning pretty minimally now. The evaluation of the trials found that the,
“most significant challenge in delivering personal budgeting support was that ... participants simply did not have enough money each month”.
Well, that challenge is going to get harder with the lower benefit cap, the two-child limit and the benefits freeze at a time of rising inflation.
Moreover, the universal credit that the Minister is bequeathing his successor is not the one that he championed through your Lordships’ House because of the cuts in work allowances, which we have already heard about and which bear the fingerprints of the Treasury. Even the Minister’s former boss, Iain Duncan Smith, has made a powerful case against this cut, pointing out that work allowances are a much more cost-effective mechanism for helping the just about managing than are personal tax allowances—a point also made by the right reverend Prelate. Of course, the Minister could not possibly comment but I hope that, once he has stepped down, he might feel freer to do so.
Nick Timmins described the Minister as,
“the last political figure to understand, in full technicolor, the gory details”,
of UC. The DWP has been very fortunate to have someone of his ability committed to it. I hope that those who follow will learn from his experience and will be willing to look again at the emerging problems. I am very encouraged that the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, made clear in his valuable maiden speech that he will be taking part in those debates—and I should mention that I have no prejudice against his Treasury background.
As for the noble Lord, Lord Freud, we may rarely have seen eye to eye in exchanges in this Chamber but I am grateful to him for his courtesy and openness outside it, and I wish him all the best for his well-deserved retirement.
Social Security: Claimants
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, in the light of the public debate around the film “I, Daniel Blake”, they plan to set up a review of the treatment of claimants in the social security system.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
We aim to keep all our policies under constant review to ensure that they continue to function effectively and fairly. The film is one person’s interpretation of the benefit system. I make it clear that our staff, who work incredibly hard day in and day out, are committed to supporting the most vulnerable and helping people who are able to find work to get a job.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I fear that Ministers have missed the point of this powerful and well-researched film, summed up in the final words of Daniel Blake’s demand for respectful treatment:
“I am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less”.
What will the Government now do to transform a culture of suspicion and sanctions, the costs of which are highlighted in today’s damning National Audit Office report, to a culture of citizenship for the sake of both claimants and staff?
Lord Freud
The staff of the DWP, who I think are effectively being attacked in that Question and by its implications, have really transformed the way that they approach this. With the work coach transformation they are tailoring requirements to the needs of individuals, following a thorough discussion with them on what their needs are in order to get them to play an economic part in this country.
Benefit Cap (Housing Benefit and Universal Credit) (Amendment) Regulations 2016
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, who is in practice my noble friend on these issues, for praying against the benefit cap regulations. The first-year review of the cap unsurprisingly found that caring responsibilities, especially for young children, represented one of the main barriers facing capped families looking for work. According to the equality analysis, 16% of existing capped households—more than 3,000—contain a child aged under one. Of these, more than 2,000 are headed by a lone parent and the great majority of those are women. Yet even under the current punitive regime this group is not expected to seek work when their youngest child is so young, so what is the justification for including them in the cap? Surely, on the logic of the High Court judgment that led to the welcome exclusion of carers in these regulations, as we have heard, those caring for infants should also be excluded. The equality analysis indicates that the number of households containing a child aged under one is now of course likely to increase. Can the Minister give an estimate of how great this increase is likely to be?
The new cap will affect a much wider group of families over a wider geographical area. In my own region of the east Midlands, the number of households affected is expected to increase from 800 to 5,000—a rise from 4% to 11% of those affected nationally. In order to avoid the risk of the arbitrary effects to which the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, referred, the IFS suggests:
“It would be sensible for the government to set out a clear vision of which families it thinks receive excessive amounts of benefits and why”.
I look forward to the Minister enlightening us.
It still beats me how, as the Government claim, it can be in the best interests of these children for them to be driven further into poverty in the name of some theoretical future life chances, especially when the earlier IFS evaluation showed that only a tiny fraction of those affected had moved into paid work. Its more recent analysis suggests that it is not likely to be that different now. Moreover, there is evidence to indicate that cutting benefits can be counterproductive because impoverishment reduces job-seeking capacities. If all one’s energy has to go into getting by, that does not leave much over for presenting oneself as a suitable job applicant to employers.
As I cited during the passage of the Bill, according to last year’s Supreme Court judgment the department is misinterpreting the best interests requirement when it argues on the basis of the theoretical best interests of the generality of children rather than the actual best interests of children whose parents’ income is driven below what Parliament has deemed necessary to meet their needs. I very much concur with what the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said about the basic principle of this cap, which I am opposed to.
Both the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have recently expressed deep concern about the impact of the reductions in the cap. This is also referred to in the report just published by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The fears of these UN committees are likely to be borne out given the recent warnings of, for example, the Chartered Institute of Housing. It is quite clear from the revised impact assessment that children are still disproportionately affected. In his Statement on the recent UNCRC concluding observations, the Minister for Vulnerable Children and Families called on government colleagues to reflect on the committee’s recommendations,
“for example, by reflecting the voice of the child fully in the design and implementation of policy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/10/16; col. 23WS.]
There is no evidence of the voice of the child here.
Despite being pressed a number of times during the passage of the Bill, there is also still no mention in the revised impact assessment of the application of the famous family test. The best that we got during the Bill was a letter from the Minister, which turned up in my junk email folder, assuring us:
“The Government has fully considered the family test criteria as an integral part of the policy development process”.
This is not how the DWP advises other government departments to present the outcome of the application of the family test. It simply is not good enough. Perhaps the Minister prefers not to spell out the impact on families of a policy that the impact assessment shows will disproportionately hit children and lone mothers.
Returning specifically to the impact on children’s rights, I draw attention here to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s note on priority issues for implementing the concluding observations of the UNCRC. It would,
“highlight, for an urgent response, the recommendation of the UN CRC for the UK to ‘[c]onduct a comprehensive assessment of the cumulative impact of the full range of social security and tax credit reforms introduced between 2010 and 2016 on children’, and to revise the reforms where necessary to ensure the best interests of the child are”—
I stress are—“a primary consideration”. I would welcome the Minister’s response.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, on the face of it withdrawing help from very poor people, which is the effect of lowering the overall benefit cap, seems extremely harsh. It has two justifications, as I understand it, in addition to the obvious aim of saving money and reducing the national deficit. First, it is hoped that it will fiercely encourage those affected to seek out a job, since that would exempt them from the constraints of the cap. Secondly, the effect of the cap reducing support in housing benefit could be to persuade landlords to reduce rents. It seems that neither of these hoped-for outcomes will be very successful.
On the jobs front, the previous imposition of a benefits cap seems to have pushed less than a quarter of those affected into a job, leaving the great majority to take the hit in a straightforward reduction of their standard of living. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, have spelled out the obstacles to the new measure getting people into work.
On the housing side, could the lowering of the cap achieve savings to the Government without hardship to those whose benefit is cut by coercing private landlords to trim their rents? Landlords who concentrate on tenants who need housing benefit would, it is argued, have to settle for a lower rent if tenants cannot pay, otherwise they would be faced with an empty property.
Of course I understand that the Department for Work and Pensions, propelled by the pressure of the Treasury, wants to reduce the housing benefit bill which, frustratingly, keeps rising as rents rise, but such is the scarcity of inexpensive homes to rent in London, and increasingly throughout the country, that private landlords do not cut rents when housing benefit tenants are given less to spend on rent. Instead, landlords simply stop letting their properties to people in receipt of housing benefit. More than three-quarters of private landlords will not consider housing anyone in receipt of HB, and those who are already letting to such tenants are increasingly unlikely to renew assured shorthold tenancies when they conclude after six months or a year.
The new cap is estimated by the Chartered Institute of Housing to hit 116,000 families containing 319,000 children. It comes on top of the local housing allowance caps and freezes, which are biting already. Although the impact of the new measure is greatest in London, despite the higher level of the cap there, all areas are affected. IFS figures show that families with three children face the most severe cuts. Half of them are facing a gap between their housing benefit and their rent of more than £100 per week. No private landlord is going to reduce rents by anything approaching that level.
So, in housing terms, the most likely impact of the new measure is the gradual elimination of privately rented accommodation for households which, for a host of reasons, are not in employment. Although tenants may try to make up the shortfall between their housing benefit and their rent by drawing on loans, help from friends and using up resources provided for food, heating et cetera, this is untenable for a sustained period. Debts and arrears are highly likely, and private landlords can see this coming. It is safer and more profitable to let to tenants who need no HB support.
What follows is likely to be an increase in homelessness. Housing associations and councils cannot take in all those rejected by the private rented sector. I know the Minister has done sterling work in extracting funding from the Treasury for discretionary housing payments to offset the impact of earlier benefit cuts. His efforts have reduced the deficit-cutting savings for the Government, but they are not a stable way to fend off homelessness in the face of continuing benefit cuts.
I will soon have the honour of piloting the Homelessness Reduction Bill through your Lordships’ House if and when it completes its stages in the other place. It will be a really helpful measure to prevent homelessness and provide more relief for those who face homelessness, and I am delighted that the Government are supporting it. However, this legislation, if it completes its stages in the other place and meets with approval in your Lordships’ House, cannot swiftly turn the tide and conjure up more rented homes within the reach of those who receive housing benefit. Market forces dictate that, if housing benefit does not cover the rent, private landlords will simply not let to these households.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, that additional support to help those hit by the latest cap get a job is definitely needed before inflicting upon them a very significant cut in their income. Locating and assisting those affected in the private rented sector may not be easy, but several thousand council and housing association tenants are also affected. Councils which focus on these tenants are to be commended. Housing associations trying to help tenants with skills training need to be informed by their local councils of which tenants will be affected by the new benefit cap. They can then target support with financial advice and training on those people. The National Housing Federation points out that not all councils are sharing these data with their local housing associations. Support from the Minister in making sure this data-sharing happens would be very valuable.
Universal Credit
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the combined impact, to date, of the payment of universal credit monthly in arrears and the seven-day waiting period before it can be claimed.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
I recognise the concern about impact, especially about arrears, as we discussed last week, but many claimants come to UC with final earnings to support them until their first payment and often find work quickly. Waiting days apply to those most likely to find work and various claimant support initiatives are available, including advances, dedicated work coaches and budgeting support. DWP is keeping a close eye on this area and hopes to publish data later this year.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, in the survey of council home providers to which my noble friend Lord McKenzie referred last week, 100% of respondents cited the six-week wait for the first UC payment as a key factor in rent arrears. It is also a factor in food bank referrals. Will the Minister now, as a first step, remove the seven-day waiting period, as called for by the National Federation of ALMOS and ARCH, bearing in mind that his department’s data show that lower-paid workers are more likely to be paid weekly and not have savings to fall back on?
Lord Freud
I am looking at this area. The figures have to be looked at very carefully to see what they are really showing us. We are looking at a group going to UC who are changing their circumstances. The difference between what happens to them as they go on to housing benefit compared with the legacy benefits is not as great as I initially thought. But I am taking this seriously and I will look at it personally with the department to ensure that we get the right answer.
Poverty
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for pursuing this important issue so single-mindedly, building on what he achieved with the Big Issue. Recently, in his Big Issue column, he distinguished between poverty advocates, of whom he was rather critical, and poverty dismantlers. I suspect that he would classify me as a poverty advocate, but I believe that this is a false dichotomy because most poverty advocates also want to dismantle poverty and agree on the need for upstream measures to prevent poverty in the first place. We also believe that we must do what we can to ameliorate poverty in the shorter term, to relieve human suffering, which is very real in this rich country of ours.
Of course, we all agree that we need to tackle the causes of poverty, but there is less agreement on what those causes are, and whether we should seek them primarily in individual agency and behaviour or in structural, societal, economic and political forces. For all their talk of tackling root causes, the Government, who emphasise individual behaviour, tend to conflate and confuse causes, consequences, symptoms and risk factors, and to ignore the distinction between underlying causes and proximate risk factors. So, for example, family breakdown, which the Government often cite as a cause, is a risk factor, but the extent to which it causes poverty varies between societies, reflecting, for instance, labour market, childcare and social security policies.
It has become fashionable to reject the idea that lack of money causes poverty. Of course, it is not an underlying cause. It does not explain why someone has an inadequate income. Nevertheless, money matters. With regard to child poverty, a Joseph Rowntree Foundation evidence review concluded:
“There is strong evidence that households’ financial resources are important for children’s outcomes, and that this relationship”,
is causal, and that even small income changes can have a large cumulative impact over a range of domains affecting children’s well-being and development, including education, which has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords.
Another JRF evidence review challenges the Government’s contention that addiction and debt are significant causes of poverty. It found that,
“the problem of addiction, while severe for those affected, is not common among those that are in poverty—only a small fraction are affected. … Overall … general patterns of drug use and alcohol consumption exhibit little correlation with poverty or social class”.
While there is more of a problem at the extremes, the evidence suggests that disadvantage and exclusion precede severe addiction problems.
Similarly, with regard to debt, the review found that persistently low income and,
“structural features—in particular insecure and low-paid jobs alongside low benefit levels—are important factors leading to indebtedness”.
It also challenges the assumption underlying much policy that so-called welfare dependency is a key causal driver.
An ethnographic study of a food bank that I helped to launch recently puts flesh on these abstract arguments. The author, Kayleigh Garthwaite, observed that,
“for most of the people I met, the reasons that kept them returning to the foodbank were long-term, embedded structural factors such as low income, insecure work or problems in accessing or sustaining their social security benefits”.
And she witnessed the shame and humiliation that they felt at having to go to a food bank to meet their most basic needs.
In emphasising structural causes, I am not denying the agency of people living in poverty, as exemplified by the hard work involved in getting by and/or trying to get out of poverty. I second what the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said about listening to people in poverty and acknowledging the expertise born of experience. However, an acclaimed cross-national analysis of the causes of poverty by the American sociologist David Brady concluded that, ultimately, poverty is the result of political choices. To quote his final words:
“As long as debates about poverty are more about the poor than about the state and society, poverty will continue to haunt the economic progress of affluent Western democracies”.
So, in taking note of the case for tackling the causes of poverty, we need to look not to the actions of the poor and the powerless—and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby talked about the importance of power—but to the actions of the powerful. Here I welcome very much what the new Prime Minister said yesterday on the doorstep of No. 10.
Poverty Programmes: Audit
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Freud
My Lords, that question goes along exactly the lines that we are going along in trying to transform the welfare system. We aim to create programmes that promote independence among people and the centrepiece of that is universal credit. Within universal credit we have developed what we call a test and learn approach, which monitors the behavioural responses very closely.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister referred to work as the best route out of poverty. Can he explain how salami-slicing financial support for low-income workers, including in the flagship universal credit scheme, is contributing to reducing poverty through paid work, noting that the welcome increase in the minimum wage will not and cannot compensate for such cuts?
Lord Freud
The design of universal credit, which the noble Baroness is looking at, is very different from existing legacy benefits. It incorporates real incentives to work more and we are already seeing people who are on universal credit looking to work more, looking to do more hours and looking to earn more in a way that they were not on legacy benefits. At the same time as we have those reductions to which she referred, we are moving the basic national living wage up and increasing childcare very substantially in order to go to a low-welfare, low-tax environment.
Welfare
Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Freud
We were told by Paul Gray, who did a study of this, that there was something going wrong with the way that the aids and appliances element was adding up. There were eight different categories and the points were tiered up. He thought that that was not going right and that a large number of people were getting PIP purely on this one category—that the figures were adding up in an odd way. That is what the consultation was about: it was driven by the need to make sure that it worked. When it got wrapped up into a debate on savings, that was not the driving force and it became something that was not acceptable to Conservatives in the Commons. It was decided, therefore, that we would not go ahead with it. That is the honest and full answer.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s Statement. When he said that there would be no further social security cuts looking ahead, does that mean that there will be no further cuts for the lifetime of this Parliament, as was asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor? Having paid tribute to his former boss, could the Minister say whether he agrees with him that the reduction in the welfare cap following the election was arbitrary and that therefore he—Mr Iain Duncan Smith—no longer could support it?
Lord Freud
The Statement said—and I think I need to stay very close to the Statement—that there will not be any further welfare savings. That is the Statement and I will leave it at that. What happened with the review of the level of the cap was that it came down post-election. However, that was not arbitrary: it reflected the level of welfare payments in those categories and was fixed at that level with a projection that ran the same way. If that sounds complicated, it is because it is quite complicated.