Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

I support these amendments. I too am most grateful to the Prime Minister for his recent announcements on maternal depression during and after pregnancy. I attended the launch last year of the Maternal Mental Health Alliance report on maternal depression and other mental ill-health issues. It found that the nation loses about £1 billion a year through maternal perinatal mental ill health. The main cost is incurred because the relationship between mother and child is impoverished by the mother’s mental ill health. I therefore strongly support the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

I too support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, particularly Amendment 4. I tabled an amendment in Committee on reporting on attainment at key stage 1. I felt that was imperative, because that is the age at which early measurement of children, when they are going to school, can take place. I do not want to say any more now, because we had a very full debate in Committee; I just want to lend my support to these amendments. As an ex-health visitor—that was many years ago, I hasten to add—I recognise the importance of the health and well-being of both mothers and children. Measuring those factors in children at the age of five is imperative, rather than leaving the measurement of educational attainment, as the Bill now does, until the age of 16. We on these Benches therefore support the amendment.

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendments 5 and 6. I remind noble Lords that the terms of reference of the health and well-being boards, established through the Health and Social Care Act 2012, require them to report on local efforts in reducing health inequalities and improving the well-being of their population, so it should not be too difficult to find a way to report on health and well-being, as suggested by my noble friend. On Amendment 3, the evidence is enormous that the nutritional status of women both before and during pregnancy can have an important influence on foetal, infant and maternal health outcomes. I remind noble Lords of the enormous parliamentary and public interest in the manifesto The 1001 Critical Days and the work that goes on in thinking about the first two years from conception to age two, and how nutrition is such a key part of improving the life chances of children and young people.

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[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, I get what the Minister is trying to say but unless there is a comparator at key stage 1, by key stage 4 it will be too late—the children will be 16 years old. If the Government really are to assess the development of children from the ages of five to 16, there is a need for that assessment to start at key stage 1. If there is an issue, they can be given support much sooner so that they have much better outcomes at 16. That will not happen if we do not have information from key stage 1.

[Lord Freud]

As the noble Baroness knows, we have a lot of information about how pupils progress. The point is that it is necessary to have something that absorbs all that rather than having detailed measures at each point. The earlier processes have to be right to attain the achievements at the key target date. I have spoken in this House before about “targetitis”. If you give hospitals 220 different targets, for instance, which is what happened a decade ago, nobody knows what on earth they are looking at, whereas if you focus on the two things that really matter and not on the culmination of a lot of measures, you drive coherent behaviour through the targets that are set, and that is exactly what this strategy does.

I have already made the House aware that the measures that we have include key stages 1 and 2. Annual reporting at different stages of primary schooling already provides significant detail of the progress and attainment of disadvantaged pupils. Monitoring personal development in the way that the noble Lord suggests—

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[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment of my noble friend Lady Lister, which was supported so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. I will be puzzled if the Government propose to resist the thrust of this amendment. The Government know perfectly well that, although the incidence or percentage of poverty among workless families is high, and higher than that among working families because the number of working families is so much greater than the number of workless families, as has been mentioned already, two-thirds of children who are in poverty live in a family where an adult is in work. Part of that might be that the parent, if a lone parent, has restricted hours, but we know that, with insecure contracts and the minimum wage and so on, the key lever to get that family out of poverty is not just to get the single adult into work but, where there are two adults, to get the second adult into work as well. We know that that is a function of the age of the youngest child and the size of the family. Child poverty might well be for a temporary period until the second earner—let us say, for this purpose, the mother—is able to go back into the labour market along with her husband or partner in order to amplify the family income. The need to support those children may be a temporary issue.

Given that the Minister today has put so much weight on the strain being carried by the new minimum wage and given that he will want to know, as we will all want to know, the interaction of that with the benefit bill, and the extent to which, therefore, that helps to address the levers of child poverty, above all of which is getting the second earner into part-time work, I do not understand why he would not want to track the information that my noble friend has called for. We all support the Government’s move to increase the national minimum wage. If he is right, this hopefully will have repercussions that we would all accept and support for the benefits system. But do we need to do more than that? We do not know. It may be about the size of sibling groups or the need for a second earner. We need to know what levers to pull. Unless the Government track that information, we will not know. I am sure that the Minister does want to know, so I hope that he will think very carefully about this amendment.

[Baroness Manzoor]

We totally support this amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I also totally agree with my noble friend Lord Kirkwood, who has amply identified the arguments as to why it should be supported. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, rightly said that we need levers. If we do not have such levers, how are we to address the issues about people who work, those who are not in work and in-work benefits? We will talk about the universal work allowances and the implications and ramifications of that. I hope that the Minister is listening very carefully. If the amendment is called to a vote, we on these Benches will support it.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Lister for tabling this amendment and for introducing it so well. In Committee, she made a very compelling case and I share her view that the Minister’s response was more than usually unpersuasive. In fact, she may have identified the reason for that and may be on to something. It is not as though we lack evidence. We have heard that two-thirds of children in poor households have a parent in work. I think we all accept that the risk of poverty is lower in families where parents are working and that the risk rises as the hours worked do not. But that does not change the fact that today large numbers of children are in poverty even though their parents are in work.

My noble friend Lady Lister and I clearly had the same weekend reading. How sad am I? I, too, dug out the State of the Nation 2015 report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission and the original evidence command paper from 2014. The commission put it really clearly. It states that,

“today 1.5 million children are in poverty because their working parents do not earn enough to secure a basic standard of living and the risk of absolute poverty for working families after housing costs has increased over the last decade”.

We clearly have a problem. In their command paper, from which my noble friend Lady Lister quoted, the Government analysed what drove how long a child stayed in poverty. They state:

“The main factor is lack of sufficient income from parental employment … this is not just about worklessness, but also about working insufficient hours and/or low pay”.

They did not mention something which was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood—namely, that another crucial determinant is the nature and level of in-work benefits and the way in which they apply. But the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission did raise that. In its 2015 report, it commented:

“Many families will find it very difficult to increase their earnings enough to make good the cuts in state support even if they benefit from the welcome introduction of the National Living Wage … we recommend that the Government should, as the public finances improve, revitalise employment incentives in Universal Credit”.

However, as we know, things are going in the opposite direction. The Government have done real damage to work incentives—the very thing that UC was designed to tackle—by cutting work allowances. In this Bill, they are cutting the value of the main in-work benefits through the benefits freeze. They are abolishing the family premium in universal credit for all families and significantly cutting child tax credit for families with more than two children, both of which will hit working families with kids. On Saturday, the Times reported that cost-cutting means that 240,000 families will be denied the free childcare promised to them in the Conservative manifesto.

In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, argued strongly against targets on relative poverty because he believes that they drive government decisions on allocation of resources and he does not like the way they do it. He got his way on that, if not on measurement. But the information should at least be recorded. The risk of failing to measure and to discuss the trends in in-work poverty is that the Government will not do anything about it because it somehow legitimises the idea that poverty is not about money but about worklessness, as though, by definition, children with working parents could not be poor. If we do not focus on that, it could distort policy-making too.

If the Government are focused only on worklessness, they could end up pursuing policies that just move children from being poor in households where they see their parents a lot to being poor in households where they do not see their parents very often because they are out working unsocial hours in order to be able to make ends meet. With all the consequent damage to family life that that does, that is not the answer. I live in hope that the Minister will accept this amendment, having been persuaded by the brilliant arguments of my noble friend Lady Lister, but just in case, unaccountably, he is not going to do that, will he tell the House one very specific thing? Does he accept that it is possible to be poor if your parents are in work and you are a kid? If so, what are the Government going to do about it?