Claire Perry
Main Page: Claire Perry (Conservative - Devizes)Department Debates - View all Claire Perry's debates with the Home Office
(13 years ago)
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Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House regrets that the Government’s policies are hitting women and families hardest, including direct tax and benefit changes, cuts to childcare support and Sure Start which are making it harder for women to work, reductions in domestic and sexual violence specialist support, and their impact on the provision of social care; opposes plans that will make 300,000 women born between December 1953 and October 1954 wait an additional 18 months or longer to receive their state pension; calls on the Government to maintain the commitment given in the Coalition Agreement that the state pension age for women will not start to rise to 66 sooner than 2020; believes that promoting equality for women is vital to building a fairer society; and calls on the Government to commission independent, robust assessments of the impact of its policies on women and to prevent the implementation of policies that could widen inequality between women and men.
I got an e-mail from a woman called Michelle, who lives in my constituency. Michelle is a single mother with a toddler; she works part-time in a bank to support her family; and she studies part-time at the Open university, because she wants to get on and build a better future for herself and her child. Right now, she is very worried. Her train fares are going up and she is afraid that her course fees will go up, but the really big blow for her is that her child tax credit is being cut from 80% to 70%.
Michelle wrote:
“This is really devastating for me. My nursery fees are £530 a month, and my salary is £600 a month. This is an extra £50 each month out of my already very tight budget. This sadly is going to force me out of work and onto benefits, which I desperately don’t want to do. It is so unfair and I am very angry. I want David Cameron, George Osborne and the rest of the coalition to acknowledge this is happening to myself and thousands of other single parents, but that will never happen.”
It is because of Michelle and the stories that we have heard from so many women throughout the country that we have called this debate today. We are deeply worried about women who are struggling to work because of the changes that the Government have made; women who are finding it harder to make ends meet; women who are losing their own income and some of the independence that they value; women who are losing thousands of pounds of their pensions; and women such as Michelle who are finding it more difficult to work because of the sheer scale of the assault on families throughout the country—20% cuts to the Sure Start budget, cuts to child care tax credit and cuts to child tax credit.
The Government are taking more money from support for children than they are from the banks as part of their deficit reduction plan, and mothers throughout the country are taking the strain. Time and again, the Government hit women and families hardest, and I fear that for the first time in many generations equality and progress for women is being rolled back.
All Members know and will celebrate the major advances that we have seen in women’s equality over the past century. When we celebrated the centenary of international women’s day, I met a woman called Hetty Bower, who is already more than 100 years old and has received her telegram from the Queen. When Hetty was born, however, women did not have the vote, and when she had her first child there was no maternity care on the NHS—indeed, there was no NHS. She worked, but she certainly did not get maternity pay, family allowance or child benefit. By the time her daughter started work, it was still legal to pay women less than men to do the same job, and even when her granddaughter started work there was still little child care and little help for women wanting to work part-time or to care for their elderly parents.
When the Secretary of State and I were elected to Parliament, maternity leave was just 14 weeks, compared with 52 weeks today, and there were child care places for only one in eight children, rather than the one in four today. Of course, here in Westminster itself we had no nursery, but we still had a shooting range.
All the progress that we have seen for women over those years has been hard-won, and we should not take it for granted. From the suffragettes to the Dagenham strikers, women have campaigned and worked hard for those changes.
We know that there is still a long way to go, and if we look at the facts we find that, even some 40 years after passing the Equal Pay Act 1970, the pay gap remains at 15%. Women still make up only 12.5% of the boards of the UK’s top 100 companies. One in four women is a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime. Women here still represent only 22% of our Parliament. Some 30,000 women lose their jobs every year because of pregnancy. So yes, we have come a long way, but we have further to travel yet.
I think that the Minister for Women and Equalities and the Minister for Equalities support progress for women and agree that it should go further and faster. The trouble is that their Government are not delivering; instead, they are turning back the clock.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
Would the right hon. Lady like to take this opportunity officially to dissociate herself from her previous Government’s disastrous 10p tax policy, which did so much to hit the lowest paid, especially women across the country?
Yvette Cooper
I think that it was right to change the policy on the 10p tax rate, which did cause problems for a lot of women—the hon. Lady is right. However, often the very same women for whom we had to make changes to ensure that they got help because they were being affected by the 10p tax rate are now being affected by what her Government are doing to change the pension age and equalise pensions so quickly. The 10p tax rate did affect women, but not on the scale under this Government of hitting them with more than £10,000 of losses. Yes, she is right to point out the problems with the 10p rate, but she also needs to point out to her Government the serious damage that they are doing not only to women approaching pension age but to many other women across the board.
Mrs May
It is not the case that there is a simple link between the acceleration of women’s pension age and the expenditure on the triple lock. What is happening with pensions is more complex. Two things are happening in relation to the state pension age. The first is the overall acceleration for men and women, raising the age of state pension entitlement. That will bring in significant sums of money and is a reflection not only of Government finance issues but of increased longevity. When the state pension was first introduced, people lived for a very short period, comparatively speaking—a matter of two to five years—beyond their retirement. Today, people live for a significant length of time beyond their retirement. The Government therefore need to raise the state pension age, as has been recognised by previous Governments—the initial decisions to accelerate the rise and raise the state pension age were taken by previous Governments. We have had to take these difficult decisions. As I said, however, although women will experience the rise more quickly than previously planned, they will still draw the pension for an average of 23 years.
Claire Perry
I am sure that my right hon. Friend is aware of this point, but in the proposals for 2016 and thereafter will we not be addressing the long-standing problem of women who have taken career breaks being ineligible for a state pension, which is a travesty that we should have sorted out before? Under the proposals we will bring forward, there will be much more parity in that area.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend makes an important point that I was about to deal with. In the longer term, we want to take reforms even further. The state pension Green Paper proposed a single-tier state pension combining the state pension and the state second pension to provide an estimated £140 per week, which would be of particular benefit to women who have had to take time out of the labour market because of their caring responsibilities. The coalition Government are not just talking about this—we have actually made proposals to help women in this regard.
On health, we are pursuing policies that give real help to women. We have stuck to our promise to increase health spending in real terms; we are sticking to our coalition agreement commitment to increase the number of health visitors by 4,200 by 2015; and we are making available £400 million over the next four years to support breaks for all those hard-working carers, many of whom are women.
I have made it absolutely clear, as has my hon. Friend the Minister for Equalities, that tackling violence against women and girls is one of my top priorities, which is why in March we published an action plan to tackle the problem; it is why we have provided more than £28 million of stable Home Office funding until 2015 for local specialist services; it is why we have provided £900,000 until 2015 to support national helplines; and it is why for the first time we have put funding for rape crisis centres on a stable footing. We will provide more than £10 million over three years to support their work, and we will open new centres where there are gaps in provision. This should not be a party political issue. It is about helping the 1 million women who suffer domestic abuse each year; the 300,000 women who are sexually assaulted; and the 60,000 women who are raped. As the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford said, one in four women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, and that will often be accompanied by years of psychological abuse. That is why the Government take violence against women and girls so seriously.
We will only change damaging behaviour, however, after we have changed the underlying attitudes that cause that behaviour. Those attitudes are fundamentally affected by the culture and society in which children grow up. We share the concern of many parents that children are now being exposed to sexualised images and an increasingly sexualised culture from an early age, which is why we commissioned Reg Bailey, the chief executive of the Mothers’ Union, to lead an independent review of the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. He has listened to parents’ concerns about explicit music videos, outdoor adverts and the increasing amount of sexual content in family programming on television.
Reg Bailey’s recommendations call on businesses and broadcasters to play their part, and they include putting age restrictions on music videos, covering up explicit images on the front pages of magazines and newspapers and restricting outdoor adverts near schools, nurseries and playgrounds. He also recommends that retailers sign up to a code of practice that checks and challenges the design, display and marketing of clothes, products and services for children. There has been a great deal of goodwill from the broadcast, retail and advertising industries throughout this review. They know that family-friendly practices make good business sense, and the Government will now look to work with business to implement the review’s proposals.
As well as helping women in this country, we are doing more than ever before to help women overseas. We are putting women at the heart of our international development policies, because in development there are few better options than investing in women. In Ivory Coast, for example, an increase of just $10 in women’s income achieves the same nutritional and health outcomes for children as an increase of $110 in men’s income. On international women’s day, the Department for International Development published its new strategic vision for girls and women. It sets out that, by 2015, our international development work will have saved the lives of at least 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth and 250,000 newborn babies; will have allowed at least 10 million women to access modern methods of family planning; will have supported more than 9 million children in primary education, of whom at least half will be girls, and 700,000 girls in secondary education; and will have helped 2.3 million women to access jobs and 18 million women to access financial services.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
May I start by saying what a pleasure it is to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth)? He demonstrates, as in so many cases, that often there is a lot more that joins us than divides us in this House. He spoke about his constituency, and defended it, with great passion—and I have heard almost every Member of this House do the same thing in terms of their own constituencies. The hon. Gentleman might also be interested to know that we share more than that. My family hails from 19 Narborough road south, my nephew is studying at De Montfort university, and I remember many a trip to Leicester market to buy vegetables—from Gary Lineker’s parents—and eat Eric’s ice creams. I therefore suspect that the hon. Gentleman and I will have a lot to talk about in the Members bars over the years to come.
I was enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech—until the point where it got rather political. We Government Members were sitting on our hands in order not to contravene the policy of not intervening on maiden speeches. But when I heard him say that his former employer was the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), all became clear, and I understood why he could not help himself. However, it is an absolute pleasure to follow the hon. Gentleman.
I want to ask the question: why are we here today? It seems from what we have heard from Labour Members that we are here to listen to a bandwagon. All we have heard from them so far is a desperate and disparate series of criticisms of individual policies, in an attempt to create a fictional narrative about this Government targeting women and those who need help most in society. It is a fictional construct that I reject entirely, as I think every Government Member does.
There is also a flagrant disregard for the mistakes and missteps that the Labour Government made in 13 years. We heard a tiny apology from the shadow Home Secretary for the 10p tax rate fiasco, which caused so many people on low incomes, particularly women, such incredible hardship.
Claire Perry
It was a disaster, and was recognised as such. However, we have not heard much about the hollowing out over the previous 13 years of the health visitor profession. The health visitor is often the only point of contact that a young mother, particularly one from a disadvantaged community, will have with the medical profession. Health visitors are the most trusted people involved with pregnant women’s and young children’s lives, yet that profession was hollowed out and almost entirely disregarded. Indeed, its professional status was completely downgraded by Labour.
We have not heard anything about the complex, byzantine welfare system that was built up over 13 years—a welfare system that now costs every family in this country £3,000 a year. Yet in my constituency, it appears to trap people on welfare—particularly single mothers who would love to get back into the work force—and trap them in poverty.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady not accept that it was in fact Labour’s policies that got 350,000 single parents back into employment? Yes, before that we had a very bad record compared with other European countries—I fully endorse that point—but it was Labour’s polices that made inroads into that.
Claire Perry
I agree with the hon. Lady, who I know has campaigned on this issue for years, that some progress was made, but it was not enough. The welfare system is incredibly complicated and provides huge disincentives to work. Yes, women were helped back into the work force, and the hon. Lady and I both completely support that. However, we hear time and again about women who do not know if it is even worth their while to work—who cannot work out, given the complexities of part-time and voluntary working, whether they should even look for child care for their daughter or son in order to go to work. It is simply an expensive mess that has not helped the women and men across this country in the way that it should.
Helen Goodman
Will the hon. Lady temper her rhetoric just a tiny bit and recall that every person who goes to a jobcentre gets a “better off in work” calculation to inform them by how much they will be better off, and what their other entitlements are?
Claire Perry
I would be interested to know whether the hon. Lady has actually gone through a “better off” job calculation, as I have. It is one of the most complicated, ridiculous pieces of analysis I have ever seen. In many cases, the jobcentre advisers simply say, “We actually don’t know.” It can take 45 minutes to make a “better off” calculation, and if someone’s circumstances change by one or two hours a week, they have to go back to the starting point. If the hon. Lady is suggesting that the “better off in work” calculation is something to be proud of after 13 years in government, may I suggest that she fundamentally misunderstands what we need to do to get men and women back into work? In fact, the work that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is doing will massively reform the system.
George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the adoption of the universal credit and its 65% taper means that people can now be absolutely certain that they will be better off in taking on more work, particularly on the other side of the current 16-hour barrier, beyond which so many benefits drop away?
Claire Perry
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. As a mother of young children, I cannot emphasise enough how difficult it can often be for women to take those steps—to think about child care for their family if they are not sure that it makes sense financially. As he says, there will be far more certainty under the system that we are proposing.
We are here today, therefore, because of a mass outbreak of bandwagonism on the Labour Benches. We are also here because of a heavy dose of hypocrisy. As I think most Labour Members acknowledge, the Labour Government would have had to make £7 of spending cuts for every £8 of cuts that we are making this year. Are they telling us that they would somehow have ring-fenced those spending reductions, or made them in a different way?
Claire Perry
If they are, we are all ears. [Interruption.] Tell us! The only thing we have heard is that they would restore child benefit for families with a median income of £75,000 a year. I do not think that that is fair or progressive; nor do hard-pressed working women and women on benefits in my constituency. They think it is outrageous—and that is the only Opposition policy we have heard today that would deviate from what the present Government are doing.
I shall give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin), and then to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds).
Harriett Baldwin
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I was going to make exactly that point: we have heard today that for someone like me who is making £65,000 a year, it is Labour party policy to restore my child benefit after 2013.
Claire Perry
My hon. Friend is right. Moreover, despite the state of the public finances—for every £4 we spend, £1 is borrowed—Labour would like to borrow that money from other countries in order to restore my hon. Friend’s child benefit, thereby putting that debt round the necks of all of our children and grandchildren. How can that be a rational policy? It is sheer, rank hypocrisy—and on that point I will happily give way to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East.
Emma Reynolds
I thank the hon. Lady for such a kind introduction. The Government plan to fund the deficit reduction through a proportion of 20% tax rises and 80% spending cuts, whereas our plans are for 60% to come from tax rises and 40% from spending cuts. Does she accept that because women earn less and own less, the spending cuts being introduced by her Government hit women much harder than ours would have done?
Claire Perry
It would be helpful if we understood a little more about what the hon. Lady’s spending reductions would be. Only the shadow Chancellor and the shadow Chancellor’s wife think that Labour’s economic policies are correct. Everyone else, including the International Monetary Fund, the CBI and the OECD, thinks that what the Government are doing is the way to restore the health and credibility of the British economy.
Claire Perry
I wish to make a little more progress, and then I will be happy to give way.
We are hearing a lot of hypocrisy about spending cuts and about pension ages. Let us not forget that the Labour party commissioned the Turner review, which recommended a rise in the state pension age for men and women, and pointed out that the disproportionate longevity figures for men and women meant that the age for women had to rise more quickly. We must ask whether there is an alternative proposal. Does something need to happen about state pensions? We would love to hear Labour’s plans, but we never do.
The Labour party also missed more than 50% of its own equality targets. We know that the Labour party loves targets, but we do not hear very much about the fact that it missed 50% of its targets in this important area. We have also not heard much from Labour Members about Sure Start. I love Sure Start, and I am incredibly proud of the three Sure Start centres in my constituency. They are doing incredibly good work, particularly in places such as Tidworth, an area to which dozens of soldiers and soldiers’ wives come. The centre provides a real lifeline there. We have just opened the Sure Start centre in Pewsey, and thanks to the financial management skills of Wiltshire council it will remain open and funded.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Can the hon. Lady, or any of her colleagues who wish to contribute, tell us why previous Conservative Governments never introduced anything like Sure Start? Sure Start is an amazing achievement of the Labour Government, and she should bear that in mind.
Claire Perry
One might just take the hon. Lady’s intervention back a little. Sure Start was invented in the United States in the early 1990s, where it was targeted, as she knows, at the children who needed it most, and it was a great success. If I had been in Parliament when Sure Start was introduced I would have supported it in its early incarnation. It is a very sound idea, but of course it had to grow from something that was very useful when targeted to something that became a universal political point.
Let us hear what happened. In 2010 the National Audit Office found that
“there was no reduction in inequality between child development achieved in the 30% most disadvantaged communities and in the rest of England, against a target to reduce the gap by four percentage points”.
We must remind ourselves that Sure Start was introduced to intervene in the lives of the most vulnerable and needy children and families, and that that target was completely missed. Did any discussion take place about how to target Sure Start better? Was there any acknowledgement that one of the huge issues related to the lack of trust going out and reaching in to the most disadvantaged communities? We know that more than half of the Sure Start centres were failing to reach out to vulnerable families. What should people do in those circumstances? Should they think about how to change that, or should they keep spending and criticise a Government who want to target the money better? The 4,700 extra health visitors jobs—almost 5,000 of them, which will largely be filled by women—represent the way to get from the Sure Start centre out into the community and really help the most disadvantaged children, who absolutely need that intervention. That is what we are planning to do, but we hear no support for it. Again, that is because of the rank hypocrisy that we are hearing from Labour Members today.
The other thing we are hearing today is that the Government have no policies in the area of equality. This is a House of very intelligent people—I keep saying that so it has to be true. There are Members in all parts of the House who work on a cross-party basis on unbelievably important issues, be it child protection or trying to stop the pernicious influence of pornography on the lives of our families. We should be working together on how to make Sure Start centres more effective —on what we can actually do to make a difference—instead of getting involved in this bandwagonism. I find it incredibly demeaning for the House to be participating in that.
We are dealing here with unbelievable hypocrisy, given that it is coming from a party that maxed out on the nation’s credit card. Its approach means that we are spending 39 times the annual operating budget of Sure Start on servicing Labour’s debts. That is the legacy that we are having to deal with. Do we hear any innovative or sensible suggestions about how to deal with it? No, we do not.
We have a benefits system has been created to trap many women in the sorts of poverty from which we would all want them to get out. We know that the benefits system is costing everyone £3,000 a year, but do we get any positive recognition and support for our welfare reform policies and the universal credit that we are proposing? I do not think so. Let us put aside this bandwagonism and hypocrisy, and let us talk about what this coalition Government are actually doing.
First—this is obviously the elephant in the room—the Government are taking action to pay off the previous Government’s crippling debts, which did not pop up overnight as a result of the credit crunch. The Labour Government spent more than they took in taxes every year from 2002, wishfully thinking that post-endogenous growth theory—I went to Nailsea comprehensive school and do not have a clue what that means—would somehow bring us out of the mess. Well, guess what: it does not. A Government have to live within their means if they are not to burden our children with debts, as the profligacy of the Labour Government did. This Government will live within their means. We are making the spending reductions that the Labour party left us with in a way that focuses the scarce resources on those who need them most.
We are facing a public sector pay freeze, and that is tough. Some 35% of the employment based in my constituency is in the public sector, so Members should not think that I do not get a lot of letters about that. However, I also hear from the women, many of whom work part time, who are grateful to be excluded from the pay freeze because they are low earners. They recognise that in these scarce times things have to change, but they think that it is important that the pay freeze excluded the lowest paid, and so do I. The Government have also taken 880,000 people out of taxation completely and definitively with a one-off move—it was not the fiasco of the 10p tax rate—and that benefits lower-income women and families in this country hugely.
We have heard a lot from Labour Members about child tax credits—I am confused, because I thought that the Government were raising child tax credits in absolute terms and ahead of indexation for the most disadvantaged families, who need them the most. I believe that that benefits 4 million of this country’s poorest families. We are examining Sure Start centres, ring-fencing the funding and investing in 5,000 additional health visitors, who can stop Sure Start centres being a nice thing thrown on the wall and make them work.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
Can the hon. Lady tell me which Sure Start centres have their finances ring-fenced?
Claire Perry
As the hon. Lady knows, it is for the local authority to decide what it does. I do not know what her local authority is doing, but in Wiltshire not one Sure Start centre is closing and funding is being maintained completely. I might submit that political machinations further down the system are leading to these changes, but the funding and the additional investment is certainly there. If her local Sure Start centres would like to operate better and have some additional health visitor investment, that money is also there.
We have also heard about a Government who are protecting NHS spending. We know that in general women consume more NHS resources, and that money is being protected. International development spending, which I particularly support and about which we heard so eloquently from those on both sides of the House during the international women’s day debate, is also being ring-fenced. It is my belief that investing in schools for women in Pakistan is a sensible thing to do locally and it will increase overall economic security and prosperity. Having a women-focused aid policy, as we have, is the right thing to do.
We have heard about the universal credit, which will bring 1 million people, including 350,000 children, out of poverty. We have also heard about the sustainable funding for the rape crisis centres. I have been involved in some of the discussions that have taken place on rape, sentencing and tariffs and the policy person from the head of the UK rape crisis centres says, “This is the first time we have had sustainable funding for our centres for as long as we can remember, and we absolutely support this.”
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend welcome the fact that over the next three years nearly £250,000 will be put into developing a rape crisis centre in Exeter, serving the women of Devon, who have been disgracefully under-resourced over the past 10 years?
Claire Perry
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Of course, under the previous Government nine out of 10 local authorities did not have a rape crisis centre. At a time of significant fiscal constraint, we are managing to find new money to invest in that incredibly important area and I thank her for her intervention.
Finally, as regards an area on which many of us in this House have campaigned together, the Government are taking active steps to deal with the oncoming tide of sexualisation and the commercialisation of childhood, whether by getting retailers to act in a responsible way or by getting internet service companies to consider a system that allows us not to have pornography piped into our homes and makes getting it a choice. Work is happening under this Government that I applaud.
This is a bit of a depressing debate to be involved in. Many Members share many of the same aspirations and campaign on important issues, but all we have is the bandwagonism and hypocrisy of the Labour party. What I have enjoyed most in this debate has been listening to Ministers who have told how we are focusing scarce money on those who need it now while taking steps so that the profligacy of the previous Labour Government does not leave our children and our grandchildren with debts to pay off.
Barbara Keeley
No, I do not accept that. The turmoil that has been caused by the unnecessary top-down reorganisation, as well as the £3 billion cost of that reorganisation, is not helping.
Finally, and close to home in my constituency, Royal Bolton hospital is losing 60 posts, including 32 nurses, with 92 jobs going next year and 95 the year after. At Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh hospital, 533 jobs are going—a 13% reduction. These are the jobs and careers of my constituents, and women’s jobs are disproportionately affected because all those organisations employ significantly more women than men.
In recent months, there has been quite a focus on women’s jobs that are being lost, but the cuts also mean the loss of services that women use more than men. Women, as we know, are more likely to use libraries and health services and they need support from social care for family members and themselves as carers. Women will carry a disproportionate burden of the spending cuts that are affecting social care services as 58% of carers are women, and of those carers who combine caring with part-time work, 89% are women.
Next week is carers’ week, which has great support across the House, and the theme will be the true face of carers. Carers are being asked to talk about the reality of their lives as carers—how hard they can find it to be a carer and what could really make a difference to their lives. A report by the Care and Support Alliance in March showed that levels of unmet need were increasing even before the cuts to local council budgets. That is a great cause for concern. In the alliance’s survey of 1,000 people, nearly seven out of 10 respondents felt that they needed more support, more than two in 10 said that services had been cut back even though needs might have been increasing, and more than two in 10 said that the person cared for needed support but was not receiving any services.
That is not surprising, given that councils have been cutting their eligibility criteria for social care for some time, increasing charges for services and removing caps on charges. I am proud of the fact that, despite the swingeing 27% cuts to council budgets at Labour-run Salford city council, it has managed to retain eligibility criteria for social care at a level to help people with moderate needs as well as those with substantial or critical needs. Salford is now one of only 15% of councils that provide that level of care. That is in great contrast to councils such as coalition-run Birmingham city council, which recently tried to set its eligibility criteria to a new level of “personal critical”. More than 10,000 people would have seen their care packages downgraded and more than 4,000 people would have had no care services or support whatever.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) reported the distress of constituents who came to him for assistance: people who were extremely vulnerable themselves or caring for someone who was elderly, ill or disabled. Women carers were disproportionately included. The Care and Support Alliance survey revealed that changes to services that happened even before the cuts had led to
“a negative impact to the person with care and support needs.”
The report quotes one female carer talking about the impact on her life. She said:
“I am unable to go out with my husband because one of us needs to remain at home with my mother. Unable to go out with my sister (also disabled) because if I go out she needs to stay home to support my husband in caring for our mother. Unable to visit friends, have a weekend away or take a holiday. Feel abandoned by the state—Carer’s Allowance withdrawn when I reached 60 last year, Carer’s grant reduced by Local Authority from £400 pa to £100 pa this year, top-up fees now payable for the 3 hour respite per week, no extra help available.”
Of course, such extra stresses also put further pressure on the health of many women who care. Another female carer is quoted in the Care and Support Alliance report as saying:
“I care for two and I am disabled myself. Although they have increased the care for my father, he still needs extra care from me. I get no help with my husband, who is also becoming more demanding and no help for myself. So my life gets harder and harder and my health is deteriorating as a consequence.”
Women who are carers are also worried about the Government’s plans to cut £1 billion from disability living allowance over five years by reducing the number of people who are eligible. Tightening the eligibility criteria for DLA will mean that many carers will not be eligible for carer’s allowance, which will be available only for those who look after someone who is in receipt of the middle or higher level of DLA. As three quarters of the recipients of carer’s allowance are women, that is yet another area in which women will bear the brunt of the cuts.
Carers UK has estimated that seven out of 10 women will be carers in their lifetime. We know that social care services for older people are underfunded and that the number of over-80s is increasing, so the pressure on family carers, who are mainly women, is bound to increase. Once again, women will be disproportionately affected.
Women are more reliant on the services that the public sector provides and therefore stand to lose more from cuts to services and from the loss of jobs that I have talked about. That affects my constituents and women who are carers. I have campaigned since I have been in the House to improve services and support for carers, six out 10 of whom are women. More could always be done, but Labour gave primary care trusts extra budgets to fund respite care, introduced the carers grant and provided £770 million in new funding for disabled children.
Claire Perry
Let me pay tribute to the hon. Lady’s work in this area, which many of us recognise. Surely she will welcome the £800 million commitment that the Government announced last year to provide really important respite care for parents with disabled children.
Barbara Keeley
Of course, every move to provide extra respite care to help carers is beneficial, and all those moves were started by the previous Government in support of the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign. As I said earlier, there has been very little mention of the fact that the swingeing cuts to council budgets cancel out everything else being done. Perhaps that is not the case in places such as Wiltshire, but it certainly is the case in the north of England.
Finally, let me mention some things that were going to happen but will not now happen.
Barbara Keeley
I am just about to finish.
The Government have abolished the measures in the Personal Care at Home Act 2010, which would have helped 400,000 of the people in the greatest need, and they have cut the budgets to local councils, as I have mentioned, which will potentially have a great impact. Those changes come at a time when we know that more services are needed given the horrendous cases we have heard about in recent months. It is time to develop unanimity across the House. I know that many hon. Members on the Government side are concerned about social care, but the impact of the changes that I have mentioned will cause a loss of quality of life for carers, as I have outlined.