Welfare Reform Bill

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend makes an important point and is absolutely right. People are worried about what the Government’s proposed changes will do to the child care market as a whole. It could make some providers uneconomical. If a large number of people currently using child care for more than 16 hours a week are forced, as a result of these changes, to give up their jobs and to withdraw from their child care places, it would put a huge dampener on, and cloud over, the whole child care market in the way she is right to fear. We feel strongly about this matter—the Government simply have not come up with a policy—so I will seek, if I can, to divide the House on new clause 2.

The Government’s failure to produce a policy on child care before the Bill leaves the House is a particularly abject failure. Ministers have not been able to turn their claims into policies. However, although child care might be the most spectacular and significant hole in the Government’s policy, it certainly is not the only one. In this group of amendments, therefore, we have tabled two further new clauses to fill the policy holes on passported benefits, such as free school meals and free prescriptions.

At the moment, people on out-of-work benefits are passported to those additional benefits, but the out-of-work benefits will be abolished, so who will be entitled to free school meals in future? Again, that is not an obscure, but a basic question and the Government have again failed to give us an answer.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend is right to point out the importance of free school meals for many of our constituents whose children are sometimes in desperate need of the basic nutrition that they receive in schools. For the Government to have got to this stage in the Bill’s passage with no clarity about what triggers free school meals entitlement is confusing. Will they introduce a new means test? I am very glad that he has raised the matter.

[Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is absolutely right about the centrality of free school meals entitlement in the system. The Government have simply failed to work out who, under their proposals, will be entitled to free school meals. It is not that I am disagreeing with the Government’s policy: the problem is that they have no policy. We have no idea whom they believe should be entitled to free school meals. As far as we can tell, they have not got a clue, either.

As my hon. Friend points out, free school meals are an important part of the system. They can be worth more than £350 a year to a family with one child in a primary school and easily more than £1,000 a year to a family with three or more children at school. Clearly, that makes an enormous difference.

Families currently receive free school meals until they work for more than 16 hours, at which point they receive working tax credit so that they are not worse off as they move into additional hours of work. The universal credit White Paper suggested that the Government intend to remove entitlement to free school meals at a fixed income threshold. That may partially answer my hon. Friend’s question. However, if they do that, it creates precisely the sort of cliff edge that we were told the Bill would eradicate. I presume that that difficulty has prevented the Government from setting out their policy and is the reason for the Bill’s silence on the matter and the absence of notes on the regulations to explain the Government’s policy.

If a lone parent with three children lost entitlement to free school meals at some level of earnings—say, £150 a week or more—their net household income would fall unless they earned more than £4,000 extra a year. If the new system works like that, it will be a disaster. It is exactly the sort of disincentive that we have been told all along that universal credit is supposed to remove. If the Government introduced such a policy, universal credit would make the problem of work disincentives far worse than it is in the current system.

Our proposal in new clause 3 is that the value of free school meals should be paid through universal credit and then tapered away gradually as household income rises. I recognise that there is concern among many who follow these matters closely that that could mean that the cash is not used for school meals but other expenses. Given the pressure on household budgets, one can well understand how that might happen. I therefore suggest that the solution is for the cash to be paid on to an electronic card, which could be used only to purchase school meals. An arbitrary cut-off in income, whereby all support for free school meals was withdrawn, would be damaging.