Welfare

Debate between Baroness Manzoor and Baroness Sherlock

Monday 21st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating that Statement and for advance sight of it, and I welcome unreservedly the Government’s dramatic change of heart on this matter. However, I would like to know how we got to this point. Last Thursday, at Questions, I asked the Minister specifically about the fact that the single biggest revenue raiser in the Budget Red Book was a £4.4 billion cut over five years in personal independence payments awarded to people who need aids and appliances to get dressed or manage their continence. The Minister defended it, claiming that those people did not in fact have extra costs and, anyway, it was not really a cut because the total cost of PIP was rising, even though 370,000 people would have lost up to £3,500 each per year as a result of the change. Of course, the total cost of any benefit is a combination of case load, value and running costs. If the total cost starts to rise but a Minister then decides to change the rules so that some people will not be eligible any more, thereby saving £1.2 billion a year on the anticipated bill, that is undeniably still a cut, not least for the 370,000 disabled people affected.

However, everything has changed since our debate last Thursday. What a difference a weekend makes. Since then, the boss of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, Iain Duncan Smith, has resigned as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, saying that repeated cuts to working-age benefits,

“just looks like we see this as a pot of money, that it doesn’t matter because they don't vote for us”.

I will not even start on what his junior Ministers said about him, or indeed about each other, with the notable exception of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, who has behaved with considerable propriety in this. The House should commend him for that. However, to offer him one small piece of advice, it might be wise to stay indoors during break time over the next week—just until the storm passes. I hope that he is having an entertaining time in the DWP at the moment, if not an easy one. Joking apart, caught in the middle of all this chaos are some confused and worried disabled people, in work and out of work, who depend on PIP, so I hope that we will be able to get some clear answers to questions today.

First, does the Minister now accept that it was wrong to propose taking £4.4 billion from disabled people to fund tax cuts that mostly benefit those on higher incomes and those with much greater wealth? Secondly, disabled people will be relieved to hear that the cut in PIP announced by the Government has been cancelled, but I think we all want to know where the money will come from to plug the £4 billion hole in the budget that it leaves. Can the Minister assure us that it will not be taken from anywhere else in the DWP budget? I am very glad to hear that it will not come from benefits, but will he assure us that it will not come from the department’s budget elsewhere—for example, from the Work Programme, or other important activities the department will undertake? Also, the Minister has been trailing for a long time a major White Paper on disability. Can he confirm that this Statement means that no changes to benefits payable to disabled people will be considered in that White Paper?

The Statement says that support for disabled people rose in the last Parliament. It does not say that spending on disabled people is falling in this Parliament. The IFS says that it has fallen by 3% in real terms, and House of Commons Library research shows that, taking all disability benefits into account, the fall is over 6%.

Disabled people have suffered greatly at the hands of this Government. They remain among the poorest and most disadvantaged people in the country. If the new Secretary of State is indeed a one-nation Conservative and committed to helping disabled people to thrive, should he not start by reconsidering the repeated cuts that his predecessor made to their benefits? Perhaps he could help those who have lost their Motability cars, those suffering because of the closure of the Independent Living Fund, the two-thirds of bedroom-tax victims who are disabled, or those who will get £30 a week less in ESA in future because of legislation that we recently passed. I welcome this change unreservedly, but until those questions are addressed, it is very hard indeed to believe that we really are all in it together.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, I wish the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions every success in his new role—I mean that sincerely—and I am sorry that the Government find themselves in a difficult place. In fairness, however, they have had significant notice that there was much wrong with the way the welfare reforms have been tackled and are to be implemented.

As the Minister knows, we on these Benches have seen the welfare reforms through the prism of work, so we opposed cuts to tax credits, cuts to universal credit, the removal of support for people with disabilities, and measures that increased child poverty. We on these Benches want to ensure that government policy enables a fairer and more compassionate society, where the weak and the vulnerable are protected and people are supported to work, and supported in work when their incomes are low.

The Government have led us to believe that the weak and the vulnerable are being supported, but the events of the weekend say that this is not only about ensuring adequate support for disabled people but has been—as Iain Duncan Smith’s letter says—about unnecessary cuts to hit a politically motivated target. If that is the case, I am sad to say that the Government may have lost their moral compass. Do the Government accept IDS’s criticism, and do they not therefore owe disabled people an apology for being used as pawns in a cynical political game? I am pleased to note that the reassessment for PIPs will now be kicked into the long grass, but that is not good enough. The entire PIP cuts plan should be stopped. Will the Minister confirm exactly what the intentions for changes to PIP are? Are they to be fully stopped, as the Minister indicated, or just paused for the next six months or so?

Finally, given that the Government consulted on these proposals and until last Friday were saying that they were about giving the right support to disabled people, what is the Government’s actual view on the use of aids and adaptations by disabled people? If they have changed their mind for political reasons, does that mean that the foundation for the Government’s original claims was false, and—as IDS says—just an excuse to cut money? I am concerned about how the Government have treated the consultation process. Should there not be a review into whether they have made misleading claims in order to justify the cut, while ignoring the outcome of the consultation process?

We all have a duty of care to protect the most vulnerable in our society, to preserve their dignity and to help them live full and independent lives. All Governments should take that responsibility very seriously. To that end, I am pleased to note that the Statement says that the Government have no plans to make any further cuts in welfare, but can the Minister confirm that this applies throughout this Parliament? I am also pleased that they are re-setting the conversation, which is vital. I hope that this new conversation about welfare, health and social care will benefit the majority.

Child Support (Deduction Orders and Fees) (Amendment and Modification) Regulations 2016

Debate between Baroness Manzoor and Baroness Sherlock

Monday 14th March 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, I have a couple of questions for the Minister. First, there is no mention of CSA arrears in the new compliance opportunity in these 2016 regulations. Will the Minister expand on how those cases will be dealt with? Secondly, what does the Government’s analysis show about subsequent child maintenance outcomes where cases involving children have closed, particularly as the Minister has mentioned that IT systems were providing much better outcomes?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her explanation of the draft order. I remind the Committee of my historic interest as a former non-executive member of the board of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, and my decidedly historic interest as a long-distant chief executive of the National Council for One Parent Families. I am going to raise points very similar to those raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, although, I fear, in rather less concise a manner, so the Minister is warned now.

As I understand it from what the Minister said, these regulations are aimed at non-resident parents in segment 5—people whose cases are facing closure on a legacy system but who are the subject of some CSA enforcement action. The idea is that they will get this compliance opportunity, or chance to show willing. These are people for whom, in the past, we have had to use enforcement, but they will now be able to show that they will do it. Their success in doing so will decide whether or not they end up on direct pay or on what is known as collect and pay under the CMS. I can see the Minister nodding, so I know that I have got that much right. I gather this came about because concerns were expressed about the Government’s original plans to move people on to direct pay; this is a way of testing it out. That seems a sensible idea and we have no objections in principle. However, I do have a number of questions.

The first is a really simple question. I found it impossible from the draft regulations or the memorandum to understand what regulation 2 does. It may be that the last paragraph of the Minister’s opening remarks told me that, but I wonder whether she could clarify it. The EM says of regulation 2 that,

“These provisions are likely to attract minimal public interest”.

That may well be because nobody, myself included, has the slightest idea what the regulations are doing, so it would be helpful if the Minister could clarify that. In particular, will the Minister set out for the record what powers the regulation will give the Government that they do not have now and in what circumstances they envisage using them? If the answer is in her last paragraph, she can point to that. Secondly, will the Minister confirm that all the cases covered by these regulations will still have statutory maintenance arrangements, not voluntary or family-based arrangements?

Next, I want to pick up the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, about arrears under the legacy system. I understand that there is going to be a cleansing process to make sure that any arrears liability that is transferred across to the CMS is solid and accurately recorded. The intention is to move the ongoing liability across first and then to cleanse the arrears; once they have been verified, the arrears will follow. However, the Minister mentioned that the Government have decided to delay the compliance opportunity until the end of the process rather than have it at the start. Therefore, I am worried about whether the Government have considered what will happen. Under the compliance opportunity, the non-resident parent who has previously shown him or herself not to be able to pay without enforcement action will be tested only on their ability and willingness to pay ongoing maintenance liability as determined by the CMS system. Therefore, they will not have been tested on their ability and willingness to pay arrears, which they may or may not be happy to do. Why did the Government make that decision in the light of that? Would it not have been better to leave it right until the end so that, by the time the compliance opportunity came along, the arrears would have gone across and it could then be applied to both? Can the Minister explain that some more?

Will the Minister tell the Committee whether any arrears still within the CSA which are awaiting transfer across at the end of the cleansing process will continue to be collected by the same enforcement method, whatever may be going on with the compliance opportunity? In other words, will that be enforced in the way that it was under the CSA?

If an NRP passed the compliance test, it seems that they could opt to use direct pay to pay any arrears, as well as any CMS maintenance due. Is that correct? However, given that we do not know that they would be willing to pay CMS, would it not have made more sense, when the arrears do come across, for them simply to carry on with the same enforcement mechanism in the new system as was there in the old system? Since there are no fees for the parent with care for arrears collection anyway, that would not have had any implications for him or her.

On a separate point, will the Minister explain what enforcement methods will be used during the compliance opportunity for the bit that is being enforced alongside the voluntary partial payments? She mentioned using deduction from earnings orders, but there would be cases, such as self-employed non-resident parents, where a DEO was not appropriate. What other tools will be used for the enforcement part of that payment if a DEO is not appropriate? For example, will deduction orders or freezing orders or setting aside of disposition orders be available during the compliance period?

This is the first opportunity we have had to question the Minister about the progress of transition to the new system, so I would like to ask her some questions about how that is going. Can she tell the Committee how many cases have been closed in each segment so far? When does she expect to complete the bulk closure of segments 3 and 4? Can she tell us when the programme of closing all the CSA live cases is now expected to finish?

To come on to the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, about child maintenance outcomes, will the Minister tell us how many parents affected by CSA case closure have transferred to CMS or made a private family-based arrangement or made no arrangement? This is crucial information. We want to be sure not only that people have decided not to move across but that they have some maintenance being paid. The figures in the public domain suggest that, up until the end of December 2015, around a quarter of a million CSA cases had received final notice of the ending of their CSA case. However, figures between January 2015—when the case closure started—to August 2015 showed that during that time only 22,000 applications had been made to the CMS from cases affected by proactive case closure, plus another 6,800 from reactive closure. That means that only 28,800 CMS cases had been started from January to August, when around a quarter of a million had had notice of the ending of their CSA case. I hope very much that does not mean that hardly anybody is using the new service, but the noble Baroness will understand why we would like to know that.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Manzoor and Baroness Sherlock

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 40, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Drake, and to support the other amendments in this group in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth, to which I have added my name. I thank him for introducing this group of amendments with what we are coming to see as characteristic clarity and compassion.

I shall say a word first about the two-child policy, which I regard as a regressive piece of social policy. In Committee, we found it hard to get Ministers to put up any kind of cogent argument for the policy as a whole, so why is it being done? Whatever one may hear behind the scenes, this is not about the small number of unemployed parents with lots of children. They would already have been caught by the benefit cap, which we now know would hit a couple with two children living in a modest house in Leeds or Plymouth. This is about a family with three children who are working but struggling anyway. It is about all those who had children confident that they could provide for them until, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, something went wrong. Perhaps their spouse died, they got sick and could not work, a parent lost their job and so on. Those are all the things that the welfare state is meant to protect against. The nearest we got to a case was in the impact assessment, which states that it is about,

“ensuring those on benefits face the same financial choices around the number of children they can afford as those supporting themselves through work”.

So it is about choice, and my suggestion is that we should use that as a yardstick by which we test these amendments.

Let us take first disabled children. Parents may have felt that they could manage a third child, but then they find that the child is born, or becomes, severely disabled. The disabled child element of tax credits will still be paid, but it does not begin to cover the extra costs. The charity Contact a Family states that it costs three times as much to raise a disabled child as one who is not. It is also much harder for the parents of a disabled child to raise their income through working, because it is difficult to find suitable childcare and more expensive if you can. Did the parents really make a choice to be in that situation?

What about the situation, described so powerfully by the right reverend Prelate, where a family is happily married or settled and the very worst happens, in that one of the parents dies? He described clearly what would happen to that family. As well as the trauma, the finances are going to get worse, especially if the deceased parent had been the main earner. This is almost a classic example of a family that probably did not need benefits or tax credits before, but suddenly finds that it is catapulted into a position where it needs to rely on the welfare state. This is exactly the kind of thing that the welfare state is meant to protect families against. Where was the choice there?

The right reverend Prelate mentioned stepfamilies. Perhaps it is not so dramatic, but what if the relationship breaks up? If the children deserved support when they were living apart, why do they stop deserving it because they are living in the same house?

Then there are the people who literally did not make a choice at all—cases of domestic abuse. Sadly, a child may have been conceived under duress rather than as a clear choice. Abuse can include the refusal to allow a woman to use contraception. It can include pregnancy as the result of rape, which may never have been reported to the authorities because of fear of the partner. Moreover, the fear must be there that the two-child limit will make it harder for a parent to leave an abusive relationship. Too often, they end up fleeing in the clothes they are standing up in. They are homeless and they have to hide from the former spouse, which means moving to a new area, away from jobs, schools and families. It is tough enough anyway to rebuild a life without added financial pressures.

On the subject of rape more generally, I hope that the Minister is now able to explain how the proposed exemption for women who have been raped will work. I hope that he can address the questions I asked in Committee. Will the exemption apply only when a woman has made a complaint to the police, or when someone has been charged or convicted? If not, will she have to give evidence to the DWP, to whom and what kind of evidence, and can the Minister assure us that this process will remain confidential?

We come now to the subject of my Amendment 40, which would exempt children who enter a household as the result of adoption, kinship care or private fostering. I hope very much that the Minister can accept this amendment, as the arguments are completely compelling. Children raised by kinship carers are typically unable to live with their parents because of parental abuse or neglect, perhaps due to alcohol or drug problems, or because the parents are in prison or indeed have died. A grandparent, and sometimes an aunt or a sibling, will then step in and take the children in, often in a case of emergency. There is clear evidence that children in kinship care settings do better than those in unrelated care, even though they have often had similarly adverse experiences in early life.

But kinship carers pay a huge price for their kindness. They face significant additional costs when their family size increases, and sometimes it can double in size overnight. A Family Rights Group survey found that almost half of kinship carers had to give up work permanently to take on the children, thus pushing them into reliance on benefits. The state should not be putting financial barriers in the way of families willing to take on often vulnerable children. It also makes no financial sense. The average child tax credit claimed by families with three or more children is £3,670 a year; it costs £40,000 a year to keep one child in foster care.

A similar argument applies to adoption, particularly of sibling groups. It is the Government’s policy, and I welcome it, to increase the number of children being placed for adoption and to remove any unnecessary barriers to the speed of the process, but this measure will directly undermine that policy objective. Adoptive parents often already have a child or children, so there is a clear disincentive to adopt if it would mean that they would not get payments for each child, and a particular disincentive to adopt sibling groups. There is already a shortage of parents who are willing to take on sibling groups, and this will only make that situation worse. If it delays adoptions, that becomes a vicious cycle. Children grow older and it is harder to place them, and therefore it is even less likely that they will be adopted at all. The only alternative is to break up sibling groups, which damages the children because that is often the only remaining bond they have. I hope that the Minister will consider this carefully.

If we judge the Government by their own yardstick, have they passed or have they failed? Have the families we have described today, who are covered in the amendments tabled by the right reverend Prelate and myself, been reckless in having children or taking on additional children without understanding the consequences? I do not think they have. Even if we accept the premise behind the two-child policy—and I confess that I do not—the Government’s own rationale simply does not work. These amendments make absolute sense both financially and in terms of the Government’s policies, and above all they are right for the people affected.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches have added our name to Amendments 36 to 38. We also support Amendment 40. The amendment is similar to the one that we put down in Committee when it was debated at great length. Noble Lords will be pleased to know that I do not intend to rehearse that contribution again today. Excellent reasons have already been given by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, as to why exceptions should be made to the two-child limit on receipt of tax credits and the child element of universal credit.

I want to pose a few questions. For those who did not sit through Committee stage, I will read out the exemptions we seek. Under Amendment 38, we seek an exemption if,

“the claimant responsible for children in the household is a single claimant as a result of being bereaved of their partner”—

I ask the Government, where is the choice in that?—

“the claimant has fled their previous partner as a result of domestic abuse”—

where is the choice in that?—

“the child or qualifying young person has a disability”—

where is the choice in that?—

“the child or qualifying young person is in the household as a result of a kinship care arrangement, private fostering arrangement, or adoption”—

where is the choice in that?—

“or … the claimant was previously entitled to an award for the child or qualifying young person and has re-partnered creating a household with more than two children”.

Of course, there is a little bit of choice in that. It is love, which we can believe in or not, but sometimes we do not choose who we want to partner.

Effectively, these circumstances are beyond the control of the claimants. This amendment attempts to demonstrate that the first responsibility is to the child. It must be so, otherwise what kind of society are we really creating? I was, and I remain, particularly concerned that, despite the Government’s laudable commitment to exclude women who have had a child as a result of rape from the two-child limit policy, the Minister did not explain to my satisfaction how this exemption would operate. I will not go into that debate again. It is such a sensitive area. Perhaps he will explain today. Should this amendment be voted on, we on these Benches will wholeheartedly support it.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Manzoor and Baroness Sherlock

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[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?

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Manzoor and Baroness Sherlock

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.