Free School Lunches and Milk, and School and Early Years Finance (Amendments Relating to Universal Credit) (England) Regulations 2018

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Lord Bishop of Portsmouth

Tuesday 20th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth]

My Lords, it normally gives me great pleasure to speak in your Lordships’ house, but this evening I speak with some sorrow. I am hoping that the proposals made by the Government—involving, I am sure, the Treasury, the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions—are perhaps the result of the complexity of those interlocking interests and have inadvertently left what surely cannot be intended. The consequences of this policy run counter to everything that the Government have said about the principle of universal credit, which I and many others have supported. If the consequences are unintended then I shall be delighted and relieved to hear the Minister say so.

I have looked at these regulations and concluded that they drive a coach and horses at some speed through the defining principle of universal credit—a principle I wholeheartedly endorse—that work should pay. They create an arbitrary cliff edge at a low-income threshold, off which many risk falling. For working families just below the current threshold, this proposal would very clearly not make extra work pay. They would be better off not seeking more paid work and leaving their children on free school meals, unless their family income increased by some considerable margin. Those just above the threshold will be worse off under the regulations, facing school meal charges. They would be better off working less. That is at best an anomaly, but I am tempted to describe it as an absurdity.

I do not, however, see this as pointing to a flaw or a contradiction in policy design. Rather, it points to the real, pressing and increasingly difficult circumstances that, over the years, families will face. More often than not, this will affect people who are already in work who earn very little—people whose weekly budgets already have little or no slack.

Some Members of your Lordships’ House may recall that recently I chaired a briefing for Members of both Houses. A number of your Lordships may remember Clare, who spoke to us. Her oldest child currently receives free school meals. She and her husband do not want to live on benefits, credits or allowances; they want to get on and get up. Clare’s husband had been made redundant, and after 18 months volunteering in a local school he now works as a teaching assistant and earns £8,000. Clare had worked for 15 years as an NHS dental nurse, but her clinic closed. I quote Clare with her permission. She said:

“We both never, ever thought we would be in this situation. We feel terribly ashamed to have to rely on help”.


Clare is retraining as a solicitor. When she has done so, her husband will complete his own retraining as a teacher; both will incur significant debts. Hers will be £56,000. Clare told me that they have many working years ahead of them and look forward to a future in which taxes are spent helping the vulnerable in society. She feels blessed to live in a society that has a safety net in place for them and others facing short-term difficulties.

These regulations will not help Clare and those like her overcome these short-term challenges. They will add to them and hinder her from creating a long-term future for herself and her family, because Clare has no slack. She told us her family of four,

“survives on £10 a day for our food and petrol … with no luxuries”.

Clare does not understand how the figure of £7,400 has been arrived at. Nor does she understand how introducing an earnings threshold as low as that could possibly benefit people in her situation. I do not understand either. She knows her eight-year-old daughter will, for now, continue to receive free school meals, but what of her son, who starts school in September and other children of their ages? As she observes, initially it seems nobody will lose out, but in the long term more and more people—and more specifically, more and more children—will.

We are potentially creating anxiety, even despair, when we should offer hope and support. We are creating a cliff edge so that work does not pay. The job of this House is often to ask the Government to think again about what may be the unintended consequences of policy. The outcomes of this one are severe. I ask the Government to think again this evening, and I do so from the bottom of my heart.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, in his very moving opening speech, my noble friend Lord Bassam quoted lain Duncan Smith when he was Secretary of State, saying that universal credit would always make work pay and people would be better off for every hour they work. I want to focus specifically on the question of work incentives. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Patten, that I trade in facts, which I offer to the House for its consideration.

Iain Duncan Smith’s quote was not a throwaway comment. It was in the foreword to the White Paper which explained why the Government were planning to abolish all the main means-tested working-age benefits and replace them with universal credit. That process is now ongoing. It has had its challenges, as we all know. There have been problems with the system and computers, design and implementation challenges and severe delays. It has been subject to repeated budget cuts with the result that it has gone from being what was originally designed as a benefit to claimants to being a net saving to the Treasury. The whole point of this enormous exercise, which will eventually include some 7 million people, was that it would always “make work pay”. Even small amounts of work and every extra hour would pay. That quote was the aim of the system in a nutshell.

Yet this SI reintroduces the mother of all cliff edges into universal credit. At the moment, if parents work, there comes a point when they lose free school meals, but at that point they gain access to working tax credit, which is worth more. Under this system it would mean if a parent were offered a pay rise—like the mother of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam—or the chance of an extra hour a week working which would take their earnings over a cash limit of £7,400 a year, they would either have to turn that down or take it knowing their children would all lose free school meals.

The excellent briefing from the Children’s Society and the CPAG modelled the impact on a single parent in 2022 at the then-expected minimum wage raising two children in a rented house. She wants to raise her hours from 12 to 16 a week, exactly the kind of thing universal credit is meant to help. Her earnings would go up by £1,893 a year but she would end up £174 worse off by the time she had lost universal credit and free school meals. Other families would actually be better off by cutting their hours or taking a pay cut. This undoes all the progress made by tax credits and all the aims of universal credit of getting away from precisely those problems in the old-fashioned benefit system. Does the Minister acknowledge that there is a problem here?