Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Monday 21st December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 70 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton, I will speak in support of Amendment 71 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor.

We are supportive of the recognition by successive Governments of the need to invest intensively in co-ordinated support for families facing multiple challenges, many of whom are involved with a number of agencies. Labour began work in this area, and in 2012 the coalition Government launched the first phase of what they called the troubled families programme. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, was reported as saying that he would put “rocket boosters” under efforts to turn around the 120,000 troubled families in the wake of the riots of 2011. I declare an interest as one of the four members of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel set up by the Prime Minister in the wake of those riots.

My experience as a member of the panel really stays with me. The panel was unpersuaded that there was much overlap between the rioters and the surprisingly precise number of 120,000 families who were then the target of the troubled families programme. In a poll we conducted of 80 local authorities, only 5% felt that there was much overlap between the rioters and the troubled families. One of our concerns was how we should support the roughly 500,000 forgotten families, who would not be reached by the government programme because things were not bad enough. They were bumping along the bottom, not coping but not doing badly enough to get help.

Those families need our help. I have never felt that the challenges families face are just about money, although its absence can be and often is a significant or at least aggravating factor. I will be interested to see the evaluation of the various programmes local authorities set up under the banner and funding regime of troubled families. I welcome the proposal in Clause 3 to require the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to report annually to Parliament on the progress of families supported by the troubled families programme. Amendment 70 would require that report to include information,

“regarding the adequacy of resources given to local authorities to fund the support provided for troubled families”.

I find it hard to work out the detail from the published financial framework so I hope the Minister can help. Can she say for the record what the longer-term funding proposals are, now that the Autumn Statement is out? Councils are being asked to design their own programmes to work with an agreed number of families, using criteria set out by central government. I understand that the original troubled families programme offered £4,000 per family. The financial framework says there will be a £1,000 attachment fee when an authority first works with a family, then an extra £800 on a payment-by-results basis depending on certain outcomes. Satisfactory outcomes are either “continuous employment” or “significant and sustained progress” over the five-year period.

I have some questions for the Minister. First, what work have the Government done with local authorities to ensure that that is an appropriate amount to incentivise them to choose the right outcomes for each family, rather than the ones that are the easiest to evidence, to make sure that they get the money that they are going to depend on to be able to run the provision? Secondly, are the Government talking to local authorities to make sure that the reporting requirements are not so onerous that they drain valuable resources or create incentives to focus on more readily documentable activity or more easily evidenced outcomes?

On the reporting point, one local authority representative said in the evidence session on the Bill in another place that the troubled families programme is addressing behaviours built up over decades or even generations. It is not,

“a 12-month, quick-fix, dip-in dip-out programme”.—[Official Report, Commons, Welfare Reform and Work Bill Committee, 10/9/15; col. 17.]

How will the Government ensure that annual reports reflect the need for longer-term interventions?

Have the Government considered the extent to which other proposals in the Bill may obstruct the success of the troubled families programme and, if so, how they might mitigate that? The reduced benefit cap and the two-child limit are likely to force some families to move in pursuit of cheaper housing. One Member of Parliament reported that 1,000 families had already moved from her inner London borough to cheaper areas. But as the cap is reduced, they could end up moving again. Losing track of families who move has been a recognised problem for social services for years and it features quite often in serious case reviews, including some very well-known and damaging child protection cases.

Having to move is worrying because after families have been given support for the first time, when they move they can simply drop out of sight. They also lose access to community support services such as preschool activities, parenting classes, health visitors or support workers in mental health. I am particularly worried about children having to move schools—I will return to this on a later group—when a lot of work could have been done to get that child and school working together and keep them in school.

The family will also lose their troubled families support worker and that is a relationship based on trust, which can take a long time to establish. On the assumption that the worker will not move to the new boundary, how can the programme ensure that the work that has been invested in that relationship of trust is not lost? That relationship between the worker and the family is not the icing on the cake; it is the cake. Louise Casey, who runs this programme, has talked movingly about the missing ingredient in these settings often being love. This is based on relationships. My concern is that a significant investment in those families, both emotional and financial—as taxpayers’ money—will be thrown away if that relationship is broken. Can the Minister tell the Committee what arrangements have been made for transferring support for families if they end up moving across boundaries, especially as a result of the Government’s own policies? I beg to move.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 70 and 71. I do not want to repeat what has already been so well put by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, concerning Clause 3 and reporting obligations. I want briefly to summarise something that the Guardian found under a freedom of information request in November 2015. That request showed that in the 120 councils that responded, only 79,000 families were turned around through a family intervention, which is meant to be an integral part of the troubled families programme. The research also found that more than 8,000 families in more than 40 local authorities had not received any kind of family intervention but had instead been turned around solely on the basis of data-matching exercises. The research found that councils might, for example, trawl through employment, youth crime and truancy data to identify a family that would have been eligible for the programme and which, without receiving any help from the troubled families programme, fulfilled the criteria for being turned around because school attendance had improved or one of the parents had found a job.

My Amendment 71 is an attempt to prevent this. It asks that a report prepared under this section must include an assessment of,

“the types of interventions provided by local authorities in the previous financial year, and … the success or failure of the types of interventions provided by local authorities in the previous financial year”.

I hope that the Minister will feel that this amendment would enable an improved assessment of the interventions provided by local authorities and will accept it because without this kind of data, we are not going to get underneath exactly which services local authorities are providing. I believe that the Government believe they must have an evidence-based approach, and this amendment will enable them to do so.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, I want to make a short intervention in support of the two excellent speeches that have been made in introducing Amendments 70 and 71. I agree with everything that has been said, and I think we need another name for this programme as “troubled families” is a terrible name for it. I do not know whether we should have a competition for it—it might be too late. However, those families are certainly more troubled for being called troubled, so we need to think carefully about this. I hope that these suggested annual reports will not just be analytical and statistical but will come up with some policy advice and dynamics about change, to make these programmes better for the future.

I have had a bit of experience of working with a troubled families programme indirectly as a non-executive director of the Wise Group in Glasgow. It had a pay-as-you-go performance contract in the north-east of England, which was very interesting. I am in favour of the multiagency approach, but it is still in its early days and needs to be developed. I hope that these annual reports will look at a snapshot year by year and look across the different experiences and the different programmes mounted by the different local authorities to try and get best practice established and shared. That would be really useful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 72 and 92 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, which I support. As I said at Second Reading, although we on these Benches agree on the need for a cap, we do not see the logic in reducing it to £23,000 a year for households in Greater London and to £20,000 for those in the rest of the country. Nor do we see the logic behind breaking the link between average earnings and the cap, as has already been said. I agree with the Child Poverty Action Group, which states that:

“The reduction in the level of the benefit cap severs the link with median earnings, and instead is based on an arbitrary figure, leaving it unclear what the fairness test is now”.

The Government’s rationale is that the benefit cap will deliver strong work incentives. However, the real concern here is that the requirement to find housing at an affordable level may force families away from areas where there are high levels of work opportunities, such as in London, to places of high unemployment. This would undermine the ultimate aim of getting people off benefits.

Although the Government demonstrate that the existing benefit cap successfully strengthens work incentives, as evidenced by the greater proportion of those capped moving into employment as compared to those under the cap, in-depth interviews conducted by DWP itself in 2014 show that many households responded to the cap by,

“being willing to accept low-skilled, low-paid jobs, rather than pursuing further qualifications which they hoped would help them get a better job in the future”.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, has already said, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which undertook a peer review of the DWP research, concluded that its analysis told us:

“that the large majority of affected claimants responded neither by moving into work nor by moving house”.

Forfeiting further education and training for low-skilled, low-paid jobs limits an individual’s long-term human capital and earning prospects, which lowers potential tax revenues paid to the Government and, on an aggregated level, hinders economic productivity and potential output.

Long-term reductions in welfare spending will be realised only by increasing people’s income through employment and by reducing their outgoings, primarily through improving access to affordable housing. I urge the Minister to maintain the benefit cap as currently set.

At Second Reading, I asked whether the Government intended to undertake a distribution analysis of the levels of housing benefit that the average person hit by the benefit cap would receive and where they might be able to secure suitable housing. I wonder whether the Minister is in a position to answer this question more fully on this occasion. Will he also say what impact the further lowering of the benefit cap will have on single parents and how the rights of children will be protected? This has been very clearly highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. Gingerbread quite rightly is concerned. Lowering the benefit cap will continue disproportionately to affect single parents, of which as many as 70%—I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, quoted 69%—will have a child under the age of five. That cannot be acceptable.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 94—I emphasise that it is a probing amendment. I do so in the hope that we can highlight the need for a comprehensive and regular review of the impact of the totality of the benefit cuts on specific groups—who are the most vulnerable—applied during the past few years, including those in the Welfare Reform Act 2012, in more recent legislation and in this Bill. The amendment requires that in carrying out a review of the benefit cap, the Secretary of State must include an assessment of the impact of the benefit cap on disabled people, their families and carers. I for one have not fully grasped the full impact of the multitude of cuts. At the very least, I believe that the Government have a moral obligation to understand the implications of their policies for the most vulnerable citizens in this country and to make public that information. That is what this amendment is about.

The benefit cap applies even to benefits designed to compensate for the extra costs of disability or caring for disabled people, including ESA WRAG, incapacity benefit, severe disablement allowance and carer’s allowance. We know that one-third of disabled people—fully 3.7 million—live below the poverty line already. The benefit cap combined with the freezes and cuts to employment and support allowance for those in the WRAG group will see disabled people’s incomes reduced significantly again. This significant reduction is from a level which is already below the poverty line.

The Government argue that the new lower, tiered cap has been designed to strengthen the work incentives for those on benefits. When I met the Minister from the other place, he said, “The whole point of this is to encourage people to work for more hours”. I find that so cynical, when most of these people simply cannot work more hours for a range of reasons. However, as we have argued previously in Committee, the Government have provided no evidence to back up the claim that cutting benefits that disabled people receive will incentivise them to work. As I have already indicated, the Government’s reference to an OECD study failed to point out that the study did not even refer to disability throughout, and rightly so—of course, people who are disabled are in an entirely different position from those who are healthy and able bodied. We have evidence that reducing disabled people’s incomes will make it harder and not easier for them to move into work.

In addition, the impact assessment provides no detail on the impact of lowering the cap on disabled people who are in receipt of DLA/PIP—those who are severely disabled and cannot do much about their situation. This amendment has no financial consequences. I hope that the Minister will take this matter away with a view to bringing back a government amendment on Report.

I support Amendment 93 tabled in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. The case for the amendment has been eloquently spelt out and, fortunately, I do not need to add to that. I hope that the Minister will assure the Committee that this crucial issue will be dealt with on Report.