Social Security (Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance) (Waiting Days) Amendment Regulations 2014

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Grand Committee

The SSAC concluded that, on the basis of the evidence to date, it was sceptical that the case had been made. I cannot speak for the committee, but despite the further evidence supplied as a result of its helpful report, I also remain sceptical.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Kirkwood for giving us a chance to talk about these regulations, and I really do not think he needs any lessons from my seminar about how to do these things. He is an old hand at regulations of all kinds, particularly DWP ones. I fear that I shall echo much of what he and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, have said, although I do have a few further points to add.

As we have heard, the main recommendation from the SSAC is that a robust analysis of the costs and benefits should be undertaken and published before the regulations are proceeded with and ESA claimants should be taken out of the new rule. I echo the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, first by pointing out that although the Government say that they have complied with the first recommendation, it is not what any of us would call robust. Their main contention is that the numbers adversely affected by this change are comparatively small, although they do admit that it is not possible to establish the numbers or levels of hardship for specific vulnerable groups—for example, those who are homeless or have mental health problems. I shall come back to that in a moment. They also admit that there will be financial difficulties for these groups. As we know, if 82% of JSA claimants and 74% of ESA claimants are not on HB and 50% of JSA claimants are paid monthly, this still leaves a large number of claimants who are receiving housing benefit, possibly passported from JSA, and who are not paid monthly. These people are often on low incomes, paid weekly and have no savings. For them an increase in waiting days will make a significant difference with knock-on effects elsewhere in the welfare system, and I do not think we hear nearly enough about knock-on effects.

I am particularly concerned about those on ESA, even though this will only be 40% of ESA claimants. The Government’s reason for not excluding them from this change in the waiting days is that they say there is no evidence that those on ESA are at a greater risk of financial hardship than those on JSA and they do not want to encourage claimants to try to move from JSA to ESA. This surely will impact disproportionately on many disabled people, who are less likely to be claiming ESA through having left work and thus will not have a final salary to fall back on. In any case, disabled people take longer to secure work and move off ESA. They are also likely to be on fixed budgets and have few savings, so for them this change simply means a loss of benefit. Their only comfort is that we are told they can apply for this short-term benefit advance. However, I am absolutely horrified by the Government’s statement that disabled people could use their disability living allowance, if they receive it, during a temporary disruption to other income. This tightens the screws still further on disabled people and should not have been put forward. DLA or PIP is designed to help living with a disability, not day-to-day living expenses.

Here I want to mention another reason the department ought to be very careful before implementing this particular policy as it applies to ESA claimants. It was on the news at lunchtime that there is evidence that the DWP has carried out 60 reviews into suicides linked to benefit cuts in the past three years. This very serious matter has been uncovered by John Pring of the Disability News Service and I think we ought to hear more about this in the coming weeks. As for this amazing statement in the original impact assessment that changing from three to seven waiting days will not impact on local authorities or charities, I want to reiterate what the noble Baroness said about food banks. I suppose the Government tick a box without really thinking about it when they say that this will not impact on charities, because nothing could be further from the truth. Of course more people will turn to charities such as the Salvation Army.

Altogether I find the Government’s rationale for this change pretty thin. They say that they want to encourage claimants to look harder for work but claimants have to do this anyway. They do not appear to know how this change will work with UC or how it will impact on housing benefit. We are told that the savings generated by this change will be ploughed back into labour market measures to improve the English language skills of claimants. That is one thing I very much approve of. My noble friend said that I never say anything nice to him on these sorts of occasions. Well, here is one tiny crumb of comfort. If the money is spent improving free English language teaching, I shall be very pleased. The other thing it is supposed to do is to provide more resources to support lone parents to return to employment. I echo the point made by the noble Baroness that we would like to hear more detail about these measures.

It may be very tempting for the Government to say that their aim with this policy is further to weaken the culture of dependency because that is a popular message—we have to be honest about that. However, they must make sure that in so doing they do not cause considerable hardship to many thousands of people, with knock-on effects they have not even tried to factor in. The party opposite flirted with this policy some years ago but changed its mind and did not implement it in the end. I hope that the same will be true of this policy.