Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Pinnock

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pinnock]

My Lords, I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, has said about council tax exemption. The point she made was absolutely right. I would like to add that the report The Wolf at the Door, again by the Children’s Society, showed just how quickly care leavers could get into financial difficulties, and often the trigger is the council tax that they are required to pay. One young person quoted by the Children’s Society said:

“I kept on being charged for council tax”—

I guess we all feel like that—

“I couldn’t pay it. I was just falling further and further behind … I tried telling them that I couldn’t pay that per month, they weren’t having none of it … and then I ended up just leaving it. Even though I didn’t have any money, they weren’t willing to do anything”.

Care leavers need a better package of financial support so that they do not get into the situation where they fail to pay their council tax, and then obviously there are legal consequences from that. The point that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, made was right, but on behalf of myself and my noble friend Lady Bakewell I would like to add that we should not leave this to the discretion of local authorities. Given the circumstances at their end, it is much less likely that that would be implemented. We would like to see a requirement on local authorities to do what a good corporate parent would do, which is to ensure that a young person’s council tax is paid up to the age of 25.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, I will speak briefly. Amendment 27 seems to underpin the other amendments with regard to protection against poverty and destitution. This is pivotal to the life chances of this particularly vulnerable group of young people. The Government’s own Care Leavers Strategy points out that when you do not have a supportive family to fall back on, particularly when having to meet the challenge of independent living at a much younger age than your peers, having access to timely financial help is crucial. Care leavers have told us that they often find it difficult to navigate services and work out what financial support they are entitled to, and we have heard how sometimes the financial support is not very much. I am not going to restate the case—and anyway the Minister may well have been briefed on this.

Amendment 48, which refers to income support and working tax credit, will be overtaken by events with the introduction of universal credit. For example, with regard to sanctions, the Children’s Society has suggested that under universal credit this group should be made subject to the work preparation requirement under Section 21 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012. That seems very reasonable to me.

The Minister himself referred earlier to one or two local authorities that provide exemption from council tax, when he was giving an example of how local authorities can support care leavers. I can only reiterate what has been said: this is so important that it cannot be left to the vagaries of local authority discretion. It has to be looked at again.

I hope that the Minister will be able to take away these practical suggestions for how local authorities and central government can support local authorities in their corporate parenting responsibilities. I realise that they sit in other government departments, so what would be helpful would be to have a commitment from the Minister today to take away these ideas and discuss them with his colleagues in the relevant departments, so that he can come back on Report. Possibly he could even hold informal discussions before then so that we might be able to make some progress on this set of eminently sensible suggestions.