Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Touhig]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Drake has made some very powerful points this afternoon, which the Government need to take on board or we will get into a mess when this is finally introduced. They should be indebted, too, to the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale. His point is that there is an implication that the person who makes this sort of mistake has been deliberately negligent. That would mark people out as trying to defraud the system. It puts them in the wrong to start with, when these things can happen by accident.

Noble Lords will forgive me if I remind them of a point I made in one of our earlier debates. When I sat in the other place, I had a constituent who came to see me because she had been overpaid a certain benefit, and the department was pursuing her strongly for repayment. When we got the papers, we discovered what had happened. There were some boxes she had to tick. One of the boxes asked, “Have you received income support?”. She ticked “Yes”. However, she had stopped receiving it about six months before, and so beneath her tick, she wrote, “But this stopped”, and she wrote in the date on which it stopped. When we got to the bottom of this we found that when the form was sent in to the department, its computer could not scan in anything that was not in the box, so it continued to overpay her. She was in a terrible state. A large amount of money was involved, and there was a huge problem as a result. It will go wrong.

Noble Lords will forgive me if I repeat something that I mentioned in the Chamber a little while ago. In the case of universal credit, a lot will depend on a new IT system. Every major IT system that the Government have introduced in recent years has gone wrong. I know, because I sat on the Public Accounts Committee in the other place for a number of years and we had to look at some of these issues as a result of inquiries to the National Audit Office.

My noble friend Lady Drake also made the point, as others have, about people filling in these forms online. Thirty per cent of the poorest families in this country have no access to a computer. It has been possible to claim jobseeker’s allowance online for 20 months. The take-up is 17 per cent. The idea that we are going to get to 80 per cent of people claiming benefits online will cause a huge problem for the system.

My noble friend Lady Hollis has just made the point that a lot of the good things that this Bill will seek to introduce will be damaged because of the kind of approach that this particular clause takes. The Government should really think again and take note of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake.

[Baroness Meacher]

My Lords, I, too, support the excellent contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Drake. I am sure that we all understand that if someone really has filled in a form negligently and as a result has received extra pay, that needs to be dealt with. My problem is how on earth you word such a clause. There are people who clearly are incapacitated and so cannot work things out—they cannot read adequately or have had to have some help from somebody else who does not quite understand their situation. You can imagine all sorts of situations in which things would go wrong, certainly when it comes to people with severe learning difficulties, major mental health problems and so on. Unless the official dealing with these things really understands the individual and how they might have come to make these errors, it seems to me that the most appalling injustices will result, which I am sure the Minister would not be happy about at all. Will he think about the wording of Clause 113 and try to generate wording that distinguishes between people who have in some way been negligent or perhaps on the edge of fraud but you cannot quite prove it? One can imagine a lot of people who might fall within that clause but who perhaps belong in a clause that relates to fraud. They are quite different from a large number of people who are struggling, whether with literacy or other problems. I am sure the Minister would wish to make that distinction clear and fair. It was helpful to have this amendment, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I do not want to add much to what has been so well said already in support of the amendment. On the other hand, we have been talking about other Bills while discussing this one, and I note that some of the information that we have from, say, Citizens Advice, indicates that it gets a lot of applications from individuals who have no idea of their entitlement and need assistance with that. If people do not know what they are entitled to, it is easy for them to make mistakes in claiming. That may very well have happened in the cases that have been cited this afternoon.

Moreover, it does not say in the Bill exactly what the prescribed amount of penalty will be, so apparently in addition to giving back the overpayment a penalty would be involved. That would mean that somebody who is already very vulnerable and who has no money could be in difficulty on paying both the penalty and the overpayment. I suggest that the Minister looks at this part of the Bill as it could do with a bit of rewriting in line with what a number of Peers have had to say this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

Let us not bargain. It is not a bad suggestion. One of the things we want to do—

[Baroness Meacher]

The Minister said that if something is complex, you will not have negligence. Does he accept that what is complicated for one person might be not complicated for another? Certainly what is perfectly straightforward for somebody of average intelligence, for example, might be incredibly complex and difficult to follow for somebody with an IQ well below average. Is there any intention to check that sort of thing out? I know there is a later amendment on this, but it is relevant to this discussion.

[Lord Freud]

It is very relevant. One of the things that we are going to be monitoring as we look at the system is clusters of mistakes because, by definition, the system is not working properly where we are in that position. We will need to work this system in carefully. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, who is right on a lot of things, gives a warning, which is right. We cannot use this in an arbitrary way. We must have something, just as the NHS, HMRC and the train companies—I suppose everyone has boilingly paid the extra train ticket surcharge when they were on the wrong train—have systems to encourage people to comply with particular rules. It is particularly necessary where you have a system that is not even a free good. You are giving money out, so you have a positive incentive to shade a few inaccuracies without being fraudulent. We just want to keep people straight.