Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Campbell of Surbiton]

My Lords, I am happy to put my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. Losing 50 per cent of the support currently provided by the disability element of child tax credit will be extremely difficult for many families who face considerable extra costs as a result of having a disabled child who may not meet the severe disability threshold.

The severity of one’s disability should not be the overall defining factor for eligibility to this financial entitlement. The impairment severity is a highly unreliable measure for financial support needed by families to offset the extra costs of raising these children. All manner of disabled children face the extra costs associated with overcoming socioeconomic and environmental barriers. Medical textbook impairment measures are only part of the picture. For example, according to the textbooks, as a child I was considered to be at the most severe end of the scale—very severe. This is still the case today. A person with moderate autism or cystic fibrosis, however, is deemed much less severe. But if you ask my mother who, in my school class, needed financial support the greatest, she would say without a doubt, “Lorna, Mark and Peter”. All would be deemed to have moderate impairments today. We all came from similar economic backgrounds; working class and money was extremely tight. So why were their needs greater than mine?

My mother explains much better than me—as always. Lorna, because she had a hole in the heart and needed expensive extra warmth, good nutrition and babysitting, as both parents needed to work to survive and no family friend or family members felt confident enough to care for her. They were scared: she had a hole in the heart; she was going to die at any moment. Actually she was not, but that was the assumption. Mark, because he had moderate autism, whose particular behaviours could not be financially accommodated by his disabled mother, who herself needed support financially to raise his other two brothers as well. Finally, Peter, whose asthma meant several emergency admissions to hospital per month making it almost impossible for his single parent mother, with two other young siblings, financially to bear the cost of transportation to the hospital and childminders for the other siblings. None of these children is considered to be textbook severe, yet compared to my family their disability-related financial need was much greater.

I believe the Government’s obsession with aligning certain benefits to be really hazardous—unintentional, of course. Such assumptions are not based on practical evidence, as we realised when the Government attempted to align hospitals with residential care homes when looking for areas to cut the significant DLA budget. Please do not let us make the same mistake again.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has given reams of evidence from various notable NGOs and charities which I do not need to repeat. Before finishing, I did contact the eminent Dame Philippa Russell for advice as to what to highlight today. Noble Lords will know of Dame Philippa. She is famous for advising successive Governments for nearly 40 years on disabled children, and she ran the Council for Disabled Children for 30 of those years. She is currently the chair of the Prime Minister's Standing Commission on Carers. She said to me:

“I am very keen (with my two sector hat on) to stress the need to move away from this categorisation of people as having severe, moderate, low needs. None of those categories make sense without screeds of explanation that tax credit assessors simply will not have. They completely negate the idea of prevention and support”.

Let us listen to the experts and accept the amendment, which I feel makes sense.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, I spoke to a similar amendment to this in Grand Committee, but it was grouped with various other amendments and the debate was therefore not as clearly focused on disabled children as it might have been. In this amendment, the focus is simply on ensuring that disabled children do not receive less support in universal credit than they did under the benefit and tax credit system. The two noble Baronesses from whom we have just heard said it all and I shall not repeat what they said. However, it may be worth reinforcing how this works.

The disability elements of child tax credit will be replaced under universal credit with either a disability addition if the child is on the lower rate of the care component of DLA, or a higher addition if the child is in the middle or top rate of the care component. Children who are registered as blind will now qualify for the higher addition. The difference in rates is significant. As the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said, the lower addition will be worth about £27 instead of the current £54. We know that children will still receive DLA, even after other disabled people have transferred to the personal independence payment, and there are three rates of care component within DLA—lower, middle and higher. In the benefits system, the middle and higher rates usually go together, but under universal credit the middle rate will be aligned with the lower rate. This means, as we have heard, that children with significant impairments, such as those with Down’s syndrome or who are profoundly deaf and who now receive the middle rate, will in future be entitled to only the lower rate. Thus, their families will lose out.

The bar is set pretty high for children to qualify for the highest rate of the care component. They either have to be visually impaired or need not only frequent care or continual supervision by day but prolonged or repeated care during the night. This means that children who are, say, registered as blind will be entitled to £77 a week, while children with Down’s syndrome or who are profoundly deaf will receive about £26 a week.

The rationale for the change is, as we have heard, supposedly to align the rates of support for adults and children and to simplify the additions—as well as to target those in greatest need. However, the gateways for children and adults are so different that the alignment is not really relevant. As for targeting those in greatest need, it is a matter of judgment as to whether it is better to help a greater number of families with disabled children or to give fewer families greater help. What worries me most is that families with disabled children are disproportionately more likely to live in poverty, as many studies have demonstrated, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, said. Parents of disabled children are less likely to be in work, so the so-called tidying-up and aligning exercise is likely to push already poor families deeper into poverty.

I would very much welcome some help regarding the transitional arrangements, which I failed to grasp when my noble friend described them in Committee. Perhaps he can tell us about them in his reply. We are having to cope with a difficult question.