Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Baroness Sherlock

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 53D and 54, which are tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lord McKenzie, and in support of the other amendments in this group. As we have heard, DWP currently expects lone parents and the main carer in a couple to be available for and seek work when their youngest child turns five. The noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, explained how quickly lone parents have found themselves moving up the scale in terms of conditionality. In 2009, under the previous Government, a single parent whose youngest child was aged 12 was moved over to JSA, but in 2012 they were required to be available for work when their youngest child was five. It is a very big step to move towards parents of pre-school children having to be available for work. It is not just that they will have to be available for work when their youngest child turns three. When the youngest turns two, they will be subject to work-focused interviews and work preparation requirements, and when their youngest is one, they will be subject to work-focused interview requirements. At one, a child is a baby.

If the Government are going to push mothers of very young children into work and work preparation, they need to be a lot more convincing about the availability and affordability of suitable childcare than they have been in this House in recent months, certainly when the House was discussing the Childcare Bill. There is no evidence that lone parents do not want to work. All the evidence shows that as their children get older, their employment rates rise significantly. I read again the impact assessment for this clause. To the question about why you would do this, the answer was that where there is conditionality, mothers are more likely to work; parents of young children are less likely to work; ergo, if you put conditionality in, they will be more likely to work. That presupposes it is always a good thing.

I want to explore that a little more, which is why I have put my name to the stand part debate on this clause. Amendment 53D would provide that work search and work availability requirements were limited to work that was in a location which is within a reasonable travelling distance of the claimant’s home. Amendment 54 would provide that parents or carers of children under five would not be sanctioned unless suitable and affordable childcare was available. At present, universal credit claimants can limit their job search activities to work that is a maximum of 90 minutes’ travel away. That is still three hours a day in total.

Advisers at jobcentres are under no legal obligation to consider caring responsibilities for young pre-school children when setting the geographic distance that a parent is expected to travel to work and in which to search for work and when considering whether sanctions should apply where a claimant has chosen to limit their work search to job vacancies nearer than that or has failed to apply for a job because of its distance. The matter is left to their discretion in individual cases. Over the years, I have repeatedly raised with Ministers concerns about the way that discretion is used by advisers with parents of children. All I ever get are bland assurances that each case is looked at individually, that there will be an individual claimant commitment and that every person’s circumstances are taken into account, but growing concerns are being expressed that advisers either do not understand or are disregarding the realities of life as the sole or main carer of young children.

At the moment, single parents are meant to be able to limit their working hours to the school day, but I have heard complaints that advisers have been telling parents to apply for jobs which start and finish at the same time as the school day. Parents have had gently to explain to the young person in the jobcentre that you cannot generally send a five year-old to walk to school on his own, even, perhaps especially, if he thinks he is more than capable of it. The logistics of life can be very complicated. Let us think about the logistics for a parent who has two children at different schools, or one at a pre-school or nursery and another at school. The parent has got to get them to and between the schools, go to work and come back and pick them up at the end of the day. These things seem obvious, but they tell us why we need statutory guidance for advisers, because I hear of so many cases where these things are ignored. I have been told of lone parents expected to look for jobs in London when they live in Brighton or vice versa.

The charity Gingerbread—and I declare an historic interest, as once upon a time I was the chief executive of the National Council for One Parent Families, which merged into what is now Gingerbread—says that it is excessively harsh to require parents of children who are too young to be in school to leave their children in childcare for up to three hours extra per day due to travel to and from work and it fails to take account of the welfare of children. Indeed it does. Young children get very tired, as well as the parents. School days are long. When you first go to school, it is a long day, and it is tiring. To be in childcare away from home for three hours outside of the school day is a lot. Kids need to relax sometimes. They do not need constantly to be in formal childcare settings.

There is also the question of the availability of childcare, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. The Government assure us that there is extra childcare for parents of under-fours. During the passage of the Childcare Bill, there were a lot of questions about whether there is enough funding available to provide for that. I gather that the Government have said that they have £365 million to fund 30 hours a week of childcare. We know, to our cost, that during the last election Labour committed to providing 25 hours of free childcare a week for the same age group in its manifesto, and the Conservative Party announced that that would cost £1.25 billion. If it would cost £1.25 billion to fund 25 hours a week, how can one possibly fund 30 hours a week on just £365 million? Therefore my question to the Minister is, is she confident that enough money is available to roll that out before these requirements are placed on any single parent?

Single parents also struggle to get advisers to agree what is reasonable. One single parent, who could not get the jobcentre to agree with her as to what was reasonable, said:

“I’ve been looking for work pretty much since he left me … but I find it hard to fit things into her pre-school hours. I looked into one job and the nursery couldn’t offer me the extra hours. If I had got the job it would have meant my child going to three different providers. How can you put your child through that? My child has been through so much turmoil already … it is not fair on her”.

It is not fair. That is why we need the clarity that childcare must be suitable as well as available.

These amendments in my name and that of my noble friend Lord McKenzie are designed so that the detail can be provided in regulation, but it must be on a statutory basis. Will the Minister therefore agree that regulations will make clear that parents will not be sanctioned when no suitable childcare is available, and that parents have a statutory right to have their responsibilities for children properly taken into account by jobcentre advisers when considering the distance a parent of preschool-age children should be expected to travel in search of work? It is important that that is specified, either in the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, has indicated, or at the very least in regulations.

My final question to the Minister is: what is the Government’s thinking about balancing the importance of parents working with the needs of children? Mothers do jobs as well; raising children is work and is arguably even more important than whatever job the parent gets paid to do. If the conditionality works, why not require parents with babies to go out to work? That might sound ridiculous, but I went to visit welfare to work programmes in the United States a few years ago. I visited what I regard as very good programmes and other programmes, in one state, where the parents of children that had turned three months old were expected to put them, if necessary, into unregulated day care and go out to spend 40 hours a week either in work or simply in work-preparation activity. Therefore there are precedents elsewhere.

I consider that at some point we have a responsibility for the children. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham mentioned in a debate on an earlier amendment the importance of cognitive development in young children. We see differences opening up very early on between children in poor families and in other families. It is important in this that we get the balance right between the interests of children and the economic activities of the parents.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 55 seeks to ensure that the work-related requirements or benefit conditions under universal credit will not apply to the carers of disabled children aged three and four unless appropriate childcare for these children can be secured. I recognise that several noble Lords have already referred to these conditions.

Many carers of disabled children aged three or four will not be subject to benefit conditionality anyway. Responsible carers who receive the carer element will fall into the “no conditionality” group in universal credit, which of course I applaud. This means that parents of children who receive the middle or highest rate of disability living allowance will be in the “no work-related requirements group” and will therefore not be subject to the conditionality this clause introduces.

Government will therefore probably feel that there is not a problem, but in fact there are two reasons why there is a problem. One is that several thousand families with disabled children under five which receive DLA will not be exempt from the conditionality requirements due to difficulties in identification of need during the early years and administrative delays in processing claims which are wide-scale and well known. In addition, I understand that the majority of families of children under five do not have access to DLA at all. More than three times the number of children aged five to 11 receive DLA as children aged nought to five. A large number of disabled young children under five do not receive DLA but then their families go on to claim it when they are older.

The other concern is that, with the move from DLA to PIP, fewer children will be eligible for the benefit, and these numbers will grow. To date, the introduction of PIP has not achieved the Government’s required drop in the number of eligible children to achieve the required savings, therefore the eligibility criteria will, I understand, be tightened. All this will mean that more families with disabled children will be subject to benefit conditionality and the sanctions associated with it. Amendment 55 would go some way to ameliorate the consequences of the PIP change by broadening the exemption from the conditionality requirements to include children in receipt of a statement of special educational needs and its replacement, the new education, health and care plan, which is designed to run from birth for those who need it. Under the amendment, the exemption could also include those with “child in need” status, as defined by the Equality Act.

The availability of suitable childcare for disabled children is also a serious problem, as others have already mentioned. Of course, the Government’s increase in the number of hours of free childcare from 15 to 30 is incredibly welcome, but I hope that the Minister agrees that the legislation needs to make it absolutely clear that if suitable childcare is not available then the conditionality requirements simply must not be applied.

With regard to the parliamentary inquiry into childcare for disabled children, two-fifths of respondents with three and four year-olds said that they were not able to access even the 15-hour entitlement. I repeat: two-fifths of respondents. What will be the proportion of those unable to access 30 hours of childcare? I understand that the shortage in childcare provision is backed up by the Government’s own findings. Perhaps the Minister would like to confirm that.

My concern is that the situation could well deteriorate due to the financial squeeze on local authorities. To make childcare work for parents of disabled children, there must be sufficient financial support for local authorities to develop an adequate workforce and general support for these facilities. I realise that the issue of appropriate childcare for this group was raised during debate in your Lordships’ House on the Childcare Bill, and I would appreciate an update from the Minister on developments since then. Does the Minister agree that it cannot be acceptable to sanction carers of disabled children, generally parents, who choose to care for their disabled child at home—for the most disabled children, this may be the only feasible option—rather than work, or indeed who feel obliged to do so due to the lack of adequate childcare?

I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Pitkeathley, Lady Hollins and Lady Manzoor, for adding their names to this amendment and I am grateful for the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor. I appreciate that the Minister is under great pressure to achieve all the cuts envisaged in the Bill, but I hope that he can recognise the absolute reasonableness of this amendment.