Children and Families Bill

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendment is about the impact of the bedroom tax on children. I refer noble Lords to my housing association interests recorded in the register.

This simple amendment would allow local authorities to put the welfare of the child first when assessing the appropriate occupancy level in a home. Many aspects of the bedroom tax are unfair and unjust, and we have raised them repeatedly in this House. This amendment picks on one simple theme which has quite rightly dominated our consideration of the Bill so far: that the interests and the welfare of the child should always come first. This issue has united us around the Chamber, and I hope that noble Lords will support the continuation of this principle, reflected in this amendment.

We already know that the bedroom tax hits families hard. The chief executive of the National Housing Federation has described the policy as,

“an unfair, ill-planned disaster that is hurting our poorest families”.

It has resulted in an estimated 150,000 families with children being hit so far, forced out of their homes or pushed deeper into poverty and debt. We know from consistent research that children who are forced to move home, away from settled communities and their schooling, suffer health problems and have poorer educational outcomes. Meanwhile, families who stay put suffer an average loss of income of £14 a week, with much higher losses for many, impacting on their ability to feed and clothe their children.

The bedroom tax also has a disproportionate impact on disabled adults and children. Housing association studies have shown that a significant proportion of those affected are either disabled themselves or care for someone who is disabled. Many of them live in homes with adaptations, making it difficult and expensive to move. Others use their spare room for bulky medical equipment or facilities for visiting carers.

There are other adverse welfare implications of the bedroom tax. Recently, there was publicity for the very sad case of the Hollow family, whose 11 year-old son, Caleb, died in a car crash. After a year, the family were told that they had to move to a smaller property, causing added distress to Caleb’s siblings, who were still grieving for their lost brother and who now face the further disruption of a house move or a slide into poverty.

There is also the ongoing issue of the impact on foster carers. When we debated it in Committee, we welcomed the Government’s concession to allow one additional room in their home as long as they had registered as a foster carer or fostered a child within the previous 12 months. However, the reforms still apply to foster carers who have two or three bedrooms for fostered children. Foster carers could be deterred from providing foster care for more than one child at a time, so that more children would be more likely to be separated from their siblings. Given that there is already a shortage of foster carers in the UK, these reforms are likely to mean fewer new recruits coming forward and children’s well-being suffering as a result.

The application of these policies has seen local authorities and housing associations being put in an impossible position, trying to minimise the impact of badly designed policies on local people. As we know, there is often a mismatch in accommodation so that there are simply not enough smaller units even if tenants wish to move.

Meanwhile, under this Government, housing completions are at their lowest peacetime level since the 1920s. Local authorities find themselves trapped trying to implement an unworkable policy with little flexibility. Quite often, their only solution for tenants who are unable to downsize is to move them into the private rented sector, with all the additional housing benefit costs and the poorer standards that this entails.

The Government’s main response so far to the increasing number of tales of poverty and distress has been to set up the discretionary fund to support the most vulnerable families. However, alarmingly, the Local Government Association has reported a dramatic increase in the number of people requesting emergency financial help, with 81% of councils experiencing a sharp increase in the number of applications to the discretionary housing payments scheme, most of which are being made to stop people losing their homes. This demand is so great that councils report it is outstripping the money made available by the DWP, forcing them to make cuts to services in other areas. Anyway, these funds are, by their very nature, temporary, require regular reapplications and provide no ongoing stability for the families concerned. The Government have also issued guidance to local authorities on the application of the rules concerning children’s disability but again they have no obligation in law and the Minister will know that children’s charities remain concerned about the provisions and continue to challenge them.

We believe that our amendment gives local authorities the flexibility they need, based on their local knowledge and their local circumstances, to operate the bedroom tax rules to put the welfare and the interests of the child first. We believe that this would be welcomed by all those trying to implement this unwieldy and unjust policy. It would allow them to make an informed judgment of the options available to individual families in their local area to avoid some of the perverse outcomes that arise from the rules and to guarantee that the interests of the child are safeguarded. We believe that this is a simple but important amendment, in keeping with the spirit of the remainder of the Bill, and I urge noble Lords to support it.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords I support Amendment 57BC, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to which I have added my name. She eloquently set out the case for the amendment and I will not repeat her comprehensive and cogent arguments. I have no doubt that the Government will regard the amendment as too wide-ranging. It provides for a determination setting aside the bedroom tax, potentially for a very large number of families. For a considerable number of families a move into new and smaller accommodation will be contrary to the interests and the welfare of the child. At the lower level of harms—if one can call them lower level—a house move may involve the children having to change school at the same time as they move home. Other children will move away from a grandparent or somebody else who looks after them when their parents are working. These sorts of changes could have very serious consequences for very sensitive children—not necessarily just disabled ones. At its most serious, a move may deprive a family of the basic space they need in order to continue managing a severely disabled child, or indeed an adult, in the family and therefore keeping the family intact. I want to focus on this to avoid duplication.

We know that families with a disabled child have been disproportionately disadvantaged by the bedroom tax, although the Government accept and have made changes to ensure that a disabled child should at least have a room of their own. That was certainly progress. The Minister always tells us that the discretionary housing payment is the answer to all possible problems. It will no doubt help many families with a short-term problem, if they are able to move into smaller accommodation—that is a big if—without serious consequences for a child or for the family as a whole, but where there is a short delay before the move can take place. I guess that would work pretty well. I accept that discretionary housing payments can be a helpful safety net for some people in the short term. That is how I think I see it working.