Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Grand Committee

I will add that our approach as we test and examine how best to do this will not stop in October 2013. In this area there is a constantly changing and improving evidence base and I foresee constant evolution to improve the position. There will not be a sudden point where we freeze what we are doing. I imagine that it will evolve indefinitely. However, I am clear that the Bill needs to provide us with the powers to apply conditionality to in-work claimants. I hope that I have spelt out in as compelling a way as I can why we need to do that in this system. We recognise that we need to tread carefully in this new area. I hope that I have reassured noble Lords that this is exactly what we are doing. I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, perhaps I could say a word. I am sorry to intervene. However, having been to the briefing yesterday and having heard the Minister respond to the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, I cannot in all conscience let this go without pushing it further. I am particularly concerned by the position of parents with teenage children. I understand what the Minister has done. After removing the barrier and artificial threshold between “in work” and “out of work”, he has been forced to compensate by reintroducing a form of conditionality for people who previously did not have it. I understand why he chose to do that. However, the big problem is the way in which it has been set. I read the notes, listened to him and went to the briefing. My understanding from what he said—I hope that he will correct me if I am wrong—is that the default setting for a parent whose child has reached their 13th birthday is that they will work full-time. That means 35 hours a week in addition to travel time. If that is standard travel time, it is up to 90 minutes each way—another three hours a day, 15 hours a week, on top. That will be 50 hours a week. If they are in the kind of job that has a one-hour lunch break, that will be an 11-hour day. Therefore, the parent will be expected to leave home at 8 am and not return until 7 pm.

I invite noble Lords to imagine for a moment that they have a teenager who has just turned 13. I have asked people I know who have or have had 13 year-olds whether they would leave them alone in the house for that period. When they had picked themselves up laughing from the floor, they said: “No—have you met my teenager?”. The general conclusion was that they would not. I asked whether they would be able to get childcare. They said: “What kind of childcare would I get for a 13 year-old?”. They said, first, that it is very hard to find; secondly, that it is quite expensive; and thirdly, that it is very hard to persuade a 13 year-old to take it. My question is: do we think that that is a reasonable requirement as a default setting before we get into exceptional circumstances? I think that it is simply wrong and I would be very grateful if the Minister would either correct me or tell me that he thinks it is a good default setting.

My second question is: even assuming a lone parent or couple in this situation could find appropriate childcare, could they afford it? If they were working full-time on minimum hours, they would still have to pay a portion of that childcare, and that plus other costs could negate the gains from work. Will the Minister explain how that would be taken into account?

I have two final questions. When I worked with lone parents, I often found someone doing a 25-hour job who was underemployed for her qualifications but who had found an employer who would not sack her if she took a day off because her kids went sick. She was willing to stick it out when she could probably have earned a bit more but would have ended up being in and out of employment. Having found a job that was safe and reliable and which she had had for a few years, she was not willing to risk it by moving to slightly better paid but more insecure employment.

If she had a 25-hour job in that circumstance, and the assumption was that she had to find another 10 hours, she would then have the three choices the noble Lord set out. She could go and find another 10 hours on top of that, which would mean finding 10 hours to fit around the 25 she already has, and adding in another set of travel times to all those different bits of hours, assuming this would even work out. She would have to assume also that that job would remain stable.

When I asked the question in the briefing—and I am probably not meant to refer to this, so forgive me if I have the protocol wrong—my understanding from those who support the Minister was that in practice she would have a conversation with a friendly adviser, and they would say, “No, we totally understand, don’t worry”. But every time I asked, in a theoretical sense, the question, “What would happen in this circumstance?”, the answer was, “It depends”.

The assumption is that she will sit down with an adviser who will say, “Don’t worry, we understand all of that. We understand that you have a difficult teenager. We understand that they have GCSEs coming up and you’re worried they will drop out of school. We understand you’re worried that he is going to get into trouble. We understand that you’ve got a daughter who has an eating disorder and you want to make sure she eats”. That is a huge risk to take.

The final point is a more general one. Can the noble Lord tell me whether he has had discussions with other government departments about the public policy implications of encouraging the nation’s 13 year-olds to be latch-key children?

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[Lord Wigley]

Perhaps I may add briefly that I identify totally with the rural dimension that the noble Baroness has just described. A bus twice a day would be a luxury in many villages in rural Powys and other parts of rural Wales. If a person has been lucky enough to have a job and a lift to work from a colleague, but the job comes to an end and they have no independent transport of their own and are required to go some distance to fulfil their obligations under the Act, that would be totally unreasonable. I would be glad to know what guidance the Minister will give to people who are trying to implement the Act on how to deal with circumstances such as those.

[Baroness Sherlock]

Perhaps I may ask one question. The noble Lord will be aware of this issue. We have heard about it from many claimants and I am sure that other noble Lords have had similar experiences to mine. At least one organisation that works with lone parents has complained to me about cases where lone parents have been sanctioned for failing to take jobs. They were confident of the veracity of the accounts they had been given, and it was clear that the claimant could not possibly have made it to the job and taken their children to childcare. There did not seem to be any malice involved, but the adviser did not understand what was involved in trying to get two or more children to different kinds of childcare in very tight timescales, in a context where being a few minutes late can mean either that you are fined by a nursery or that your child’s place is given to somebody else. How will the Minister protect claimants in that situation? Will he make sure that the guidance is sufficiently clear?

I am concerned because, as I understand it from our briefings, decisions like that can be challenged and referred to another adviser, but the only independent recourse a claimant has if the decision goes against them is to refuse to take the job, be sanctioned and then go to a tribunal to challenge it. This is not efficient. I quite see that it is not the Minister’s intention, but how can he reassure us and those claimants that they will not be in that position?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I start by expressing a degree of envy at the ability of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, to commandeer a ministerial car in the past. In these straitened times I am reduced to a bicycle. However, in case noble Lords are anxious, I can confirm that the Ortleib pannier manages to contain a ministerial Box—and I have two panniers.

Turning to the amendments, as noble Lords know, we recently announced that jobseekers will be expected to look for suitable work within a 90-minute commute from their home. This is the default position in jobseeker’s allowance at the moment. The intention is to ensure that claimants search in a sufficiently wide geographic area while keeping the requirements reasonable. The old position was that JSA claimants could restrict travel time to 60 minutes, but only for the first 13 weeks and only if they had a reasonable prospect of work. Otherwise, the 90 minutes of travel time did apply. Therefore, this is not a huge change, although I understand the challenge that the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, has given me when she said that the existing system could operate a little better. I accept that challenge. Our briefing note on the work search and availability requirements for universal credit explained that this would continue to be the normal position for claimants. However, we also explained that limitations will be applied to the work that a claimant has to look for to take into account any relevant circumstances, particularly childcare. For example, we are clear that a claimant who is the lead carer for a child under 13 need only look for work that will fit around school hours. This would include any necessary travel time.

A claimant with young children may be asked to take a job 90 minutes away, but only if the job had working hours that allowed the claimant to get the children to and from school and still get to work on time. Similarly, if a commute of any time up to 90 minutes is too far given caring responsibilities or health issues—for instance, the need to stay close to a child with ill health—we would be able to take that into account. Picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, about the widening of the job goal, that is not intended to refer to a geographic or time widening, but refers to the type of work and remuneration. The travel time remains at 90 minutes.

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[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

I have just a query for the Minister. What he is saying is wise. He understands that we fully support both the principle of UC and the continuum between not being in work and being in work. There is no dispute between us. However, I worry about the huge area of responsibility and effectively discretion that will fall on first level Jobcentre Plus staff. As my noble friend said, no one doubts their goodwill or that they will do the best they can. However, given the centralisation of Jobcentre Plus offices, the fact that staff are often young and that the office may be in a town or city with a substantial choice of jobs compared to rural areas, from my experience they will often have very little understanding of the difficulties experienced in a rural village where the only jobs may be part-time cleaning, childminding if you are lucky, picking mushrooms or cleaning caravans. Those are the options, and none of them would fulfil the work conditionality without serious travel that would impede people’s capacity to look after their children and meet school hours.

I say to the Minister, in capital letters, that so much of the effective delivery of what we all want will rest on the shoulders of junior staff: AOs, with luck supervised by an experienced EO, working in local offices and living some 40 or 60 miles away from the circumstances of an individual in a rural village of which they will have no knowledge. I do not know how far the Minister can go in giving assurances. Of course he will want the best possible training, but I am worried about this. Perhaps the answer will involve intensifying supervision and scrutiny by more experienced senior officers at the review level—the EO level—to make it more possible, so that this does not migrate upwards into the tribunal system that my noble friend identified. We have picked up this problem in the past, and it will become more acute as more people are brought into the conditionality realm. So much will hang on the experience of the staff handling their applications.

[Baroness Sherlock]

Perhaps I may clarify something. I may have misheard the noble Lord and I apologise for delaying the Committee. Did he say in his response that there might be circumstances in which somebody would not be better off, but that they should take a job anyway? I see that he did. I will quote from the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. In his introduction to the Green Paper he referred to people of working age and stated:

“We will help them to find work and make sure work pays when they do. They in return will be expected to seek work and take work when it is available”.

Was that not the contract he laid before the British people? What the Minister said appears to contradict it.

[Lord Freud]

I will pick up on that last point from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. There may be special circumstances. There are no blanket absolutes about taking a job.

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Those are the fundamental issues. Saying that that will be covered in guidance is insufficient. I am sure that my noble friend Lady Hayter will not mind me saying that the drafting of the amendment may not be perfect, but we are in Committee. We can concentrate on the perfect drafting of the perfect amendment later. The amendment says to the Government: “If you want to take a powerful range of discretions to apply an in-work conditionality system that on your own admission is not yet defined and refined, in the interface between conditionality being imposed on carers—particularly women—you must take into account the issue of the relationship of trust of the parent leaving the child; how you protect the care of the child against some inefficient application of discretion, because that will occur; and the compatibility of the conditionality guidance with the reality of the childcare system. That is the fundamental issue that needs to be addressed in the Bill.

[Baroness Sherlock]

I rise hesitantly, as the Minister got rather cross last time I got up, but I am brave. I was taking advice from more experienced colleagues to find out whether it was in order for me to speak to an amendment whose mover had not moved it. I hope that it is. I refer to Amendment 51F, which would require of the Secretary of State, in making decisions about prescribing certain actions, that:

“The matters prescribed under subsection (2) shall include the well-being of any child whose life or care may be affected by the requirements of this section”.

I wanted to address that and to pick up some of the comments made by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. One thing that has always worried me on policy dealing with families and children is how difficult it is in government, when different departments have responsibility for different set of policies, to ensure that they take account of each other's policy objectives. There has always been a danger—I understand it completely—that when one is considering childcare primarily from the point of view of how one enables parents to work, one misses some of the unintended consequences of that policy on, for example, the well-being of children, their development and the next generation.

If the Minister does not like how any of the amendments are worded, he can advise me. He is far more experienced and knows a great deal more about how the DWP operates than I will ever know. Could he advise the Committee on how we might be reassured about a decision that will be taken perhaps by a young adviser or Jobcentre Plus employee who will rightly focus on how to get a person into work? How could that person be required to take account of the impact on the child?

My final point is that ultimately this will play to the Minister's benefit. Some years ago I visited the United States to look at welfare to work programmes there. As the Minister will know, the regime there is somewhat harsher even than the regime envisaged by him. It was interesting to meet the people organising the programmes. The single biggest barrier to getting people into those programmes was the lack of confidence of parents in the quality of substitute care. There is a huge amount of research into the effect of that on children. Will the Minister consider that reassuring parents on this might be in his interests, as well as to the advantage of the children?

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I will say a brief word to defend myself against this onslaught. I do not think that there is a lot between us. I do not disagree with a word spoken by either of the two noble Baronesses about what our objectives should be. I hope that I indicated that. I simply do not think—this is my attempt to curry favour with the Minister—that the amendment achieves the objective in a satisfactory way. Can we be friends again?

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[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

It is very interesting that the noble Lord should say that, because it was exactly the advice I had from civil servants at the time. None the less, it did not stop us introducing NI credits for grandparents who did more than 20 hours’ care a week for their daughter, releasing her to work. If you can do it for national insurance and pensions, you can certainly do it for childcare, and it would be much easier to do it with conditionality.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, perhaps I could suggest to the Minister that Jobcentre Plus could encourage the grandparent to train as a childminder. The daughter could then claim help through universal credit to pay the grandparent for childcare. You could simply cycle the money round that way—it might be a better way to do it.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am really grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, for her imaginative way of manipulating the system. I am sure that it is something we should look at very closely. No, come on; I will look at this. This is very difficult so I am not promising anything, but I will look at it.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

It is already the case that grandparents can mind a grandchild if they are a registered childminder, with the childcare taking place in their own home, and look after at least one other child. That is already done.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I am aware that irony plays rather poorly in Hansard. Just to clarify for the record, I am not actually recommending this scheme to the Government. I simply want to raise the fact that one has to be careful not to build perverse incentives into the system and overformalise relationships that might otherwise find a way of working out on their own.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response, and the speakers who contributed to the debate. I especially thank the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, who is not in his place at the moment. Perhaps other noble Lords could pass on to him that he would never incur my wrath—the Minister’s, yes, but never mine.

The one thing that we have to take account of when we use words like “trust” and “availability” is that the debate is taking place within a much broader overall government policy. We have already mentioned in Committee that unemployment is at a 17-year high. There are already cuts to childcare. It is estimated that 32,000 people have already given up work because of the reduction in childcare allowance—at a cost of £50 million to the Exchequer, I gather, so the Treasury will not be very happy about that. Of course, it demonstrates yet again that if affordable childcare is not available, people do not go to work—fairly obvious, but there you are.

Unfortunately the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, is not in her place. I was a little worried after what the noble Earl said about being an untrained play-scheme worker that maybe we were all untrained carers today for her daughter. At least with her mother here, I assume the child was in safe hands. As a grandparent, I very much appreciate the comments made about the contribution of grandparents. I am in the other position: with very new grandchildren, all the grandparents line up and vie to look after them. I am assured that this soon gets a bit too much and problems set in. Short-term care is much more easily set up than long-term grandparenting, unless the sort of help that my noble friend Lady Hollis mentioned is available.

I will make a couple of comments. First, I thank the Minister very much not only for saying that he will look very carefully at the suggestions made by my noble friend Lady Hollis but for the commitments he gave about including current protections. However, he did not answer one of my comments about whether they will apply to couples. He mentioned lone parents but not couples.

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[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I very much welcome the positive response of the Minister and the fact that he has clearly been talking with kinship carers and thinking about how to address the issues raised by the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lady Drake.

I just press him on his final point about doing this on a case-by-case basis. One of the recurrent themes of our discussions is the extension of discretion. I understand the value of discretion, but as the noble Lord himself has acknowledged, it does not provide the clarity of treatment that something in legislation would do. I get the sense that there may be something in future in regulations. I cannot speak on behalf of my noble friend but it would be valuable if there could be a firm commitment before the Bill leaves this House, even if it is not in the Bill, that it will be in regulation. I will not say all that I was going to say because the noble Lord clearly does not need convincing of the importance of this issue. It is one that I have become aware of only fairly recently, partly at the all-Peers meeting where a member of a kinship carers’ association spoke to us. I was very struck by their case in the way that the Minister has clearly been.

I also want to mention, if only to get it on the record, that I was at a conference at the Law Society at the weekend on economic and social human rights. A presentation was made there by the Poverty Truth Commission from Scotland. Some of its members are people with experience of poverty, some of whom are kinship carers. I was struck that it said one of the key issues was kinship care. I will not quote as much as I was going to, but the commission states:

“Kinship carers have been supporting each other and struggling for recognition and justice for many years”.

Recognition is very important for people living in poverty. This is something I have become aware of through my work on the Commission on Poverty, Participation and Power, which also involved people with experience of poverty. The kind of amendment that my noble friend proposes would have both symbolic and practical significance. It would provide that recognition that simply saying, “We will look at it on a case-by-case basis”, would not do. Having said that, for once I can hear the ministerial nuances and I know when to say thank you very much.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I have two brief points to make. I was delighted to hear the warmth of the Minister’s response. If he is thinking about this area, perhaps I could punt two thoughts at him. First, I can see that he will be concerned that there may be a range of other circumstances that may appear similar on the face of it, where there is a disruption to the circumstance of an older child, perhaps moving house, and therefore there might be some wish to have that taken into account; for example, a family break-up where the children are suddenly moving to a different house and although the children are of school age, the disruption to the household might make the parent feel that they should stay at home; or the formation of a step-family where there is some significant upheaval in the household which might put a parent who might normally want to go out to work in that situation. If the Minister is thinking, perhaps he can think about those issues as well.

The reason he might want to think that this is a different case is that the grandparents or the other kinship carers have a choice: they do not have to take these children on.

The danger must be that they have to do so unless they have absolute assurances. That is the distinction, which is why I think there is a particularly compelling case for a legislative requirement.