Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Sixth sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Kate Green(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. It is also an enormous pleasure to serve on this Committee, to have heard contributions such as that made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston, who is departing from her current position on the Front Bench, and to hear the passion with which she gave voice to the beating heart of the Labour party and the outrage at how the Bill is being introduced and its extraordinary justification. If anyone ever questions where the Labour party’s heart is, they just need to hear her speech from before lunch.
I wish to speak to amendment 71. According to the Book of Ecclesiastes:
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Those words have survived for thousands of years, but could almost have been written yesterday by an author scratching his head over some of the perverse measures in the Bill. I suspect that historians will one day look back on these debates and cite the benefit cap as a classic example of an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in modern politics: a solution without a problem. After all, we have had a household benefit cap for more than two years.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend so early. She may be about to say this, in which case I apologise for stealing her moment. As she says, nothing is new under the sun. We had a benefit cap in the 1960s when it was called the wage stop rule. Women in particular campaigned to end it, which was to the benefit of poor children.
Emily Thornberry
And of course, as we will see, those who will be hit most adversely by the benefit cap are, yet again, women.
Ministers seem to be no closer to pinning down a convincing rationale for the policy today than they were four years ago when the Welfare Reform Act 2012 was debated. To the extent that there has been an underlying theme throughout this period, however, it has been the ever-slippery concept of fairness. As the Secretary of State put it when introducing the Welfare Reform Bill on Second Reading in March 2011:
“The principle is that people who are unemployed and on benefits should not be receiving more than average earnings. It is a matter of fairness, so that those who are working hard and paying their taxes do not feel that someone else will benefit more by not playing a full part in society.”—[Official Report, 9 March 2011; Vol. 524, c. 921-922.]
It is almost quaint, with more than four years’ worth of hindsight, to imagine Government policy being drawn up with such sensitivity to people’s feelings, but the Secretary of State’s words are revealing to the extent that they disclose that the closest thing there was to a principled reason for introducing the cap was the perception of the problem, rather than evidence of one.
As I said, that has come to be a tendency over the past few years. In fact, further evidence appeared just a few days ago when the House was asked to consider the Trade Union Bill, which seems to have been designed to allay tabloid hysteria more than to deal with a real problem. When the issue in question is out-of-work benefits, tabloid hysteria is in abundant supply. Goaded by Ministers, the entire debate has become hijacked by splashy headlines that generated heat rather than light. It is time that the plane of discussion was brought back down to earth.
I said that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to Tory welfare reform, but that is not strictly true, because lowering the cap requires an innovation that is a novel twist to the idea of fairness. The link between the household cap and estimated average earnings has been severed. That is quite a spanner in the works in terms of the Government’s efforts to prop up one of their primary justifications for the cap. The principle that working taxpayers, when they are fortunate enough not to have to claim benefits in order to survive, must be helped to feel positive about the way that the benefit system operates was always a dubious basis on which to make policy. The fact that that was supposed to have been achieved by setting the cap at the level of earnings makes clause 7(3) even more extraordinary.
Returning to the debates of the 2012 Act, the last Welfare Reform Bill, we might find the comments of the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) particularly instructive. He was the poor, unfortunate Minister saddled with the unenviable task of defending the cap and attempting to provide a coherent rationale for it. Fortunately for him, he did have a link with average earnings to fall back on. As he explained:
“Our policy approach, and the Government’s clear intent, is to have a cap that bears reference to average earnings. That is necessary for the credibility of our benefit system. It is the right place to set the cap.”––[Official Report, Welfare Reform Public Bill Committee, 17 May 2011; c. 952.]
He was either right then or he was wrong, but are we not being contradicted by the changes to the law that the Government are intending now? Evidently, the new generation of Ministers take a different view. While there may be many problems that can be laid at Ministers’ feet, a fall in average earnings over the past two years is not, probably, one of them. According to the much-quoted Office for National Statistics, since the level of the cap was first established at £26,000 a year, average earnings have risen, not by much—just 0.1%, in fact—but they have risen. If wages are going up, why is the cap coming down if it is supposed to be, in any way, linked to average earnings? It is a simple question and I am sure that there will be a simple answer.
It has therefore proved necessary for the Government to take a different tack in arguing the increasingly tenuous case for lowering the cap. The alternative explanation that Ministers have increasingly relied on is that the cap is a cost-saving measure on one hand, and that it provides an incentive for people to move into work on the other. We now do not have a link to average incomes; we have the cap as an incentive to get people into work and that it will be a cost-saving measure.
Kate Green
My hon. Friend is making a compelling case. May I ask her to comment on recent evidence that emerged over the summer, which showed that although some people did move into work—Tony Wilson, in his oral evidence, told us a little bit about that—those who did not probably could not? They were either the parents of very young children, were suffering from ill health or there was a disability in the household.
Emily Thornberry
Absolutely right. Indeed, some of the evidence that we heard was that those who did move into work were not in what would be called sustainable work. For example, a single mother of many children who perhaps had been moved into 16 hours a week of work to avoid the cap, would find it impossible to sustain that work during the school holidays when her four children were back at home and she did not have childcare.
People temporarily may have been able to move into work and back out again, but we can see the continued high level of spend on discretionary housing payments to support these people. That in itself is evidence that it is not sustainable to try to push people for whom it is not possible to find work into work. Indeed, the evidence shows—I am sorry to keep harping on about evidence, but I always thought that policy was based on it—that most people who were affected by the benefit cap are not even deemed fit for work.
I will just go back. Having abandoned the idea of linking the cap with earnings, the Ministers are now relying on it being a cost-saving measure and an incentive for people to move into work. Of course, neither of those arguments stack up. I will come back to that. There continues to be a bad smell of unfairness, which will not go away. Just two days ago, the Minister was trotting out the same old argument. She said:
“The cap is a simple matter of fairness”.––[Official Report, Welfare Reform and Work Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2015; c. 144.]
However, she left us guessing, as we still are, exactly what was meant and how this could be fair as the cap seems to have been set at an arbitrary level.
Amendment 71 would remove subsection (3) and maintain the link between the level of the cap and estimated average earnings. If we are to accept the argument of the previous Minister that this connection is necessary for the credibility of the cap—a tall order, frankly—I can see no good reason for removing this requirement from the legislation. If the very concept of the benefit cap is to inspire even a shred of public confidence, it is incumbent on Ministers to explain why they propose to hand themselves extraordinarily broad powers to lower the cap at any time for any reason.
Ministers are essentially asking us to trust them to make decisions on the basis of fairness. Frankly, given their track record and given what the Minister said before the luncheon Adjournment—that she did not want to continue throwing good money after bad—it would be fair, for some people at least, to be somewhat sceptical of their understanding of fairness. To trust them to make these decisions on the basis of fairness is a slippery concept if there ever was one. The definition of the word seems in any event to be the subject of regular revisions apparently based on nothing more than political whimsy and the need of George Osborne to continue to save money.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Fifth sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Kate Green(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Kate Green
Good morning, Mr Owen. It is nice to see you in the Chair and to return to the Committee for, I am afraid, my last appearance in what has been a very enjoyable Committee.
Amendment 77 would require the Secretary of State to include, in the reports that the Bill envisages, data on children living in low-income working households as part of the reporting on their life chances. We all know the damage that poverty does to children’s life chances and to their outcomes in the short and longer term. Poverty is correlated with poor health, poor educational outcomes and poor employment outcomes in adulthood. It is extremely damaging not only to the individuals who experience it, but to the whole country. The amendment is an important one in recognition of the high incidence of poverty in working households. Currently, the Bill only requires reporting on households that are out of work. Therefore, it is important to have a report on the impact that poverty could have on the life chances of children growing up in those working families.
The Government are fond of saying that work is the best route out of poverty. I absolutely agree that it should be, but while families in work do face a lower risk of poverty than those out of work, and the more work people can do and the more hours they can supply the lower the risk, two thirds of children growing up in poverty are in working households. The Government refuse to engage with that fact and the Bill, in failing to address it, continues that situation. Indeed, I would say that the Government are making the situation worse.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the measures we passed in the House on Tuesday on tax credits will take £3.4 billion annually from low-income families by 2020. Between those measures, the measures in the Bill and other measures in the summer Budget, we will see work incentives damaged. We have to be concerned, as a result, about the impact on in-work poverty. The changes that the House passed on Tuesday will come into force in April next year and will lower the level at which working tax credits start to be withdrawn from £6,420 to £3,850. They will also increase the taper rate at which tax credits are withdrawn from 41% to 48%, meaning that, for every £1 earned over the threshold, there will be a 48p reduction in the level of tax credit entitlement. As a consequence of those changes to working tax credit, the level at which child tax credit begins to be taken away is lowered from £16,105 to £12,125.
Although Labour welcomes the increase in the personal tax allowance and the introduction of the so-called national living wage, the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group has stated that any gains from those measures will not negate the impact of those tax credit cuts from April 2016. The IFS recently concluded that families will lose more than £1,000 a year on average from cuts to tax credits, while they will gain between £100 and £200 a year at most from the proposed national living wage. I recognise that some families will benefit from increased free childcare, but many still use informal care and many will still be left with a funding shortfall for childcare, even under the increased and more generous provisions in universal credit and in relation to older children.
The benefits freeze provisions in the Bill, and the provisions of the cap, will apply to both out-of-work and in-work benefits. We will expand on our concerns about those measures later, but we should be concerned about them given their impact on children growing up in working households. We are particularly worried about the freeze in housing benefit. Many working families rely on housing benefit, and the explosion in housing benefit in recent years is in no small measure due to the increased bill for those families. The way in which the Bill will create a disconnect between rents and housing benefit causes us real concern, especially in high-demand areas such as those represented by my hon. Friends the Members for Islington South and Finsbury and for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, where private rents have shown no sign of falling—rather the reverse, I expect. Our concern is shared widely outside the Committee, as we heard from our witnesses in the oral evidence sessions.
I am concerned, too, about the impact of the freeze and the benefits cap on children in working families. Child tax credit and especially child benefit are a platform that help to improve the gains from paid work. Both will be frozen for four years under the Bill. Working families with children will be hit hard, but the impact will be different for different kinds of households. In that respect, it is interesting to look at the recently published research of Donald Hirsch for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on minimum income standards. I recognise that that is not exactly the same as poverty, or child poverty, but the research gives some interesting and helpful information about how the measures in the Bill and in the summer Budget will impact on family households differently depending on size, structure and family make-up. The figures show that lone parents and large families will be the biggest losers.
A lone parent with one child, working full time on the minimum wage, was typically just short of the minimum income standard in 2010—that lone parent would have reached 97% of the objective minimum income standard through a combination of earnings, tax credits and benefits. By 2020 the shortfall will grow to between a quarter and a third—around 71%, according to the JRF research. That is for lone parents in full-time work, but many lone parents are forced to work part time because of difficulties in finding childcare, so they will benefit less from the planned rise in the national living wage as they will not be able to supply so many hours of work. The position of lone parents has also been worsened by the rising incidence of sanctions, and many families with young children have been hit as a result.
The picture for low-income working families is complex, hit by forces of opposing, but not necessarily oppositely and equally neutralising, effects. Such families require complex policy responses, but the Government’s measures in the Bill and the summer Budget are certainly not complex or subtle, and they do not even show awareness of how the problems compound one another. It is important that we focus on how the measures impact on low-income working families and the children in those families, since we share with the Government the ambition that work should be a route out of poverty for those families and that work should always pay. Today it does not.
Working families and children in those families are suffering hardship and will suffer more hardship. It is disgraceful that the Government have created such a situation. It is notable that some Government Members were deeply concerned about the matter on Tuesday, when we debated the tax credits measures. We cannot undo any of those measures today under the clause that we are debating, but we can shine a spotlight and require a proper report on the effect on working households. That is what amendment 77 seeks to achieve.
Amendment 78 would require the report to include data on the educational attainment of children not only at key stage 4, as currently proposed in the Bill, but at key stages 1, 2 and 3. I hope the Minister will be able to explain the Government’s rationale for looking only at key stage 4. That is when a child is aged 16, which is late in their development—am I right? No doubt someone will intervene to correct me if I am wrong. Perhaps not colleagues from the Scottish National party, because I appreciate that the situation is different in Scotland. The clause would not affect the constituents of the hon. Member for Livingston. In passing, I note that when we debated the Bill on Tuesday, I pointed out that it would present an interesting little case study on English votes for English laws. Here is an example before us.
It is late in a child’s development to look at indicators only at key stage 4. I hope the Minister will be able to explain the rationale for that approach. I had hoped there might be room for some cross-party consensus on the importance of child development at a much younger age.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
I suppose a cynic might say—I do not know whether this is right—that if there were to be a major change to child poverty, for instance that it got much worse, and we were to measure it by looking at educational attainment at key stage 4, it would give the Government many years’ grace while children adversely impacted by poverty were going through the system. We would not know how bad it was until they were 16, even if we were to assume that educational attainment at key stage 4 were sufficient to measure child poverty.
Kate Green
That is a very depressing thought, but quite possibly a fair one. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s response. I do not think it is right in any circumstances to wait to measure the impact on children until they are 16. We know that the early years are a crucial developmental period. Action for Children, in written evidence, told us that
“the rapid brain development in the first two years of a child’s life provides the foundations for their future health and wellbeing”
and their development. Development in the early years is strongly associated with positive outcomes in later life.
Development in cognitive ability in the early years is highly predictive of subsequent achievement, with a strong relationship to educational success at school and income at age 30. By school age there are already wide variations in children’s abilities, which widen throughout childhood. The gap in attainment between the poorest children and children from better-off households, already large at age five, grows particularly quickly during the primary school years.
That points to the importance of measuring at key stages 1 and 2. Children from low-income backgrounds achieve poorer development by age five than their more affluent peers. The latest statistics from the Department for Education show that less than half— 45%—of pupils eligible for free school meals achieve a good level of development. Those children are falling behind before they start school, and the position worsens after they start school.
Closing the ability gap at age five enables children to do better later on in school. Those who arrive in the bottom range of ability tend to stay there. More than half—55%— of children in the bottom 20% of attainment at age seven, key stage 1, are still there at age 16, key stage 4. By measuring, reporting and taking action at key stage 1 would be able to tell a much better story when reporting at key stage 4, instead of waiting for the disasters to pile up.
Emily Thornberry
I am listening with care to my hon. Friend’s important speech about this vital subject. She has just touched upon the impact of cold homes on children’s respiratory health. Is it her experience that people come to her surgery who live not only in cold homes, but in damp ones? Damp homes have an effect on the incidence of children’s asthma and a number of skin conditions, particularly when children’s clothes are rotten because they are put in storage against a damp wall, carpets rot, there is insufficient air going through a property and there is overcrowding.
Kate Green
That is absolutely right. Many constituents come to my surgery particularly distressed by damp in their homes. For many parents, it is the visible manifestation of their fears for their children’s health when they live in inadequate housing. In my experience, landlords are often very reluctant—in fact, extremely hostile—to do anything about problems reported to them by low-income families.
Emily Thornberry
Is it my hon. Friend’s experience that landlords—including social landlords—will go in, wash the walls that are black and tell the family that they do not have their windows open sufficiently, and when the blackness comes back the family are told that it is somehow or other their fault? Does she have the same experience as me with house-proud women coming to her surgery, saying, “I wash the walls down once a month and the blackness still comes back. I keep the windows open as they tell me to, but we are so overcrowded that this is the reason for the dampness”?
Kate Green
I share exactly the experience in my Manchester constituency that my hon. Friend experiences in her inner London constituency. She, like me, may have parents coming to her saying that they have been told by their landlords that they should not hang up damp washing, but they do not have gardens, so where are they meant to put it to dry? They cannot afford to run tumble driers because the electricity bills would simply be beyond their reach. The cocktail of problems that mothers in poor housing have to cope with on behalf of their families is really quite distressing. I am sure that hon. Members all around the Committee will have had similar cases in their surgeries. There is a real concern about housing quality and its impact on child heath.
Inadequate incomes also compound food poverty, meaning that low-income groups consume less protein, iron, fresh fruits and vegetables, vitamin C, fish, oily fish and folate. Women who are seeking to conceive and pregnant women worry about what will happen to their unborn babies and children as they grow up. Inadequate diets are extremely concerning when we look at children’s health and wellbeing, and are a significant consequence of low household income.
Emily Thornberry
I speak from my own experience when I lived in the east end on the Lansbury estate. The local shops did not have fresh fruit and vegetables because, largely, the people living in the area were poor and could not afford to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, so the shops did not stock them. In the end, the local authority subsidised the shops to produce fresh fruit and vegetables, but they sat on the shelves and rotted.
Kate Green
What is very interesting, as well as distressing, about what my hon. Friend said is that, when we have data, we can begin to think about solutions. We can see that the problem is a lack of access to fruit and vegetables and, perhaps, a lack of confidence among parents about how to cook or use them. Perhaps there is a lack of income or good-quality transport to go to buy better-quality food.
Earlier this week we debated how important it is to have local strategies in relation to children’s poverty and life chances. What we have just heard from my hon. Friend shows how useful those local strategies can be in looking at the data, identifying the problems and creating solutions to address them. In relation to child health and its connection to poverty, having a national report and, indeed, the lower-level local strategies and reports, would be extremely helpful to improving children’s health outcomes.
Children born into poverty suffer an increased risk of mortality in the first year of their lives and in adulthood. They are more likely to be born early and small, with low birth weight, and they face more health problems in later life. Preventing low birth weight should be an absolute priority for public health officials, but efforts to achieve that will be hampered if parents have insufficient income.
If children’s life chances are to be fully considered, it should be recognised that life chances begin in the womb, even before birth.
Kate Green
And certainly not as late as 16, as my hon. Friend suggests.
There is a real correlation between poverty—particularly household debt—and the likelihood of mental disorders, including sleep deprivation, depression and anxiety, among new mothers. The effects of poverty are particularly evident among women. Indeed, I have often said that poverty is a gender issue—that women face much of the pain and hold much of the responsibility for coping with poverty in low-income households. Debt and lack of access to income are therefore particularly damaging for a mother’s health.
That means that women are often the shock absorbers of family poverty, reducing their own consumption to ensure that other family members, and particularly their children, are provided for. Even so, it is not in a child’s interests to have a mother whose health is compromised. Naturally, a mother’s instinct will be to put her child first, but the child obviously also has an interest in having a healthy mother. Household incomes are therefore important in the round.
Maternal depression as a result of poverty is itself a significant risk factor in poorer social and emotional development in children. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to start primary school with lower personal, social and emotional development, and they are at significantly increased risk of developing conduct disorders, all of which can lead to difficulties with educational attainment, relationships and mental health throughout their lives.
There has not been much research into the impacts of adding or removing money, but, overall, the correlation between economic pressures and health is a serious concern. Children in low-income families miss out on a whole range of the conditions needed for a good-quality childhood, good psychological and physical wellbeing, and good opportunities and life chances in later life.
Amendment 80 is important in focusing action on the consequences and causes of poverty in terms of health. Monitoring and reporting will also enable the Government to make the most of the substantial investment they make in the nation’s health. It will enable us to make a more effective assessment of the impact of health spending on child development and the impact of parental awareness and education—for example, in relation to diet, breastfeeding or smoking cessation—on children’s health. It will also give us an opportunity to look at and focus local health and wellbeing strategies in the interests of improving child health. That would not cost any money, but it would lead to much clearer accountability. I commend amendment 80 to the Committee.
The other amendments are consequential on the substantive amendments in the group, so I will not speak to them. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to address the Committee on these really important amendments. We all know that the poorest children suffer the worst outcomes, and reporting on their poverty and the individual outcomes they experience is therefore the right way to get a rounded picture of child poverty and life chances, as well as of the causes and consequences involved. It will also help us to take action to introduce the strategies to address the disadvantage that poor children face.
Kate Green
Amendment 9 would leave the child poverty targets and measures, currently provided in the Child Poverty Act 2010, unchanged.
With your permission, Mr Owen, I will also speak to amendment 97 on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar who is engaged in a debate on the steel industry in the Chamber.
With the exception of Government Members, the importance of targets and measures of income poverty to internationally agreed definitions is unquestioned. Targets, measuring and reporting on them drive action, show progress and enable comparisons to be made: comparisons of trend data over time and other similar economies with similar demographic make-up. The importance of income poverty in that context, as we heard earlier, is linked to a range of poorer outcomes, in education, health and wider societal costs.
As I have said, there is widespread international acceptance that income is key. The Government in their own evidence review last year showed that the most important factor for children’s outcomes was lack of income. That is not just income among families where no one is in work but insufficient income from earnings, too.
Other indicators are important. It is important and right to track educational, health and child wellbeing outcomes, but those are not the same as tracking poverty, as we can see clearly from the written evidence submitted by the End Child Poverty campaign.
In 2013, the Government carried out a wide consultation on whether the income poverty measurement and target regime provided for by the 2010 Act was flawed and should be replaced. Of the many responses received by the Government to that consultation, the overwhelming majority—97%—of the responses said that the measures and the targets were fine and needed no alteration.
If ever evidence of a Government who really do not care about evidence and analysis is needed, it can be found in the proposals in clause 6. One cannot help but feel that it is not evidence but fear that motivates the Government: fear that failure to meet targets, or demonstrate progress towards them, would at the very least embarrass the Government and might even raise concern in the minds of Ministers that there could be a legal threat.
Emily Thornberry
To be fair—I do wish us to be fair to the Government—those who still believe that they are compassionate Conservatives might find it difficult if measures show that they are failing.
Kate Green
That is a very charitable interpretation from my hon. Friend, but she is a charitable lady, so we should not be surprised by her generosity of spirit in Committee today.
I have spent many years looking at this territory and I know that legal challenges have been mounted in the past. I believe firmly that a challenge would not be viable against a well-intentioned, well-meaning Government who had taken purposeful action to address child poverty even if, due to external circumstances, they were not ultimately able to meet the targets they had set, especially if they were ambitious targets in the time hoped.
What we actually have is a Government who are not bothering to try to meet the targets. In the last Parliament, child poverty fell in the first two years of the coalition Government up to 2011-12. That was the result of measures introduced by Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the previous Labour Government, that had not yet been affected by the measures that the coalition Government set about introducing. Since 2011-12, while the coalition Government and the present Government have been in charge of family income strategy, child poverty has flatlined. There has been no progress at all and no strategy to improve the position of those poor families.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Kate Green(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Kate Green
I beg to move amendment 2, in clause 1, page 1, line 6, at end insert—
“(1A) In this report the Secretary of State must also set out the progress that has been made toward halving the disability employment gap.”
To require the report on progress towards full employment to also report on progress towards the Government’s stated aim to halve the disability employment gap.
The amendment is in my name and in that of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham. In it, we make the case for a requirement to report on disability employment. I believe all hon. and right hon. Members share our concern about the substantial gap in employment rate between disabled and non-disabled people. Despite efforts over many years and some progress, the gap still stands at an unacceptable 30%. That has to be a worry for everybody.
It is, however, quite unclear from the Bill how Ministers intend to narrow the disability employment gap, how doing so will contribute to the overall full employment target that we have discussed, and what timescale they have in mind for reducing that gap. We warmly welcome the ambition of, as I understand it, halving the disability employment gap, but our amendment is designed to explore the fact that that is an ambitious target, unsupported by either targets or plans.
Not only does the employment gap between disabled people and the rest of the working age population stand at an alarmingly high 30%—only around 48% of disabled people are in work—but different groups within that very low level of employment experience different employment outcomes. The employment rate for people with learning disabilities, for example, is a shockingly low 8%. For people with autism, I believe it is around 15%, and for people with mental health difficulties it is relatively high. Around one in four people in the workplace will experience a mental health problem at some point in their working life, but despite the prevalence of mental health problems, employers remain suspicious, and they are often reluctant to employ people with mental health problems. As I often say, however, in reality they probably already do, but they just do not know it. We think the Government’s aim of halving the disability employment gap is ambitious, but we think it is right. We support that aim, and we want to discuss with the Minister this afternoon the steps she can take to ensure that it is achieved.
Emily Thornberry
I have been listening with great interest to what my hon. Friend has been saying, but I might have missed something. When did the Government make that promise to halve unemployment among people with disabilities?
Kate Green
I cannot recall exactly, but perhaps the Minister will be able to enlighten us. She may even wish to intervene on me to do so. I believe that that aim was announced very recently. My impression is that that has happened since the general election, and possibly over the summer. Perhaps her officials will be able to advise her if she, like me, cannot recall the exact date.
We agree that it is important to have that ambition for the level of employment among disabled people. It is important for our economy. We are massively wasting the talents and contribution of many disabled people. In written evidence from Leonard Cheshire, the Committee was informed that the achievement of the Government’s ambition could make an immense contribution to the economy of between £13 billion and £68 billion a year. That, by any measure, is a substantial difference. Of course, it would also make a tremendous difference to disabled individuals, many of whom would love to be working but cannot obtain the work they would like. For a whole range of reasons, they experience significant barriers to labour market participation. It is, of course, absolutely right that we should work systematically through dismantling those barriers. In my opinion, disabled people should have the right to work. They should have the right to good work, and to the dignity of good work, which I think all of us in the House value. I commend Ministers on their ambition, but we will want to test them on the substance that sits behind it.
As I said, many disabled people who would like to work are not working, although they certainly have no lack of ambition to work. Indeed, their ambition to work is substantially higher than among non-disabled people who are not working. For example, among those with qualifications at level 3, 14% of disabled people who are not working would like to be working, compared with 6% of non-disabled people. That shows in just one set of statistics—many more could be pulled out—that disabled people are keen to work where that can be made possible.
However, we have many significant concerns about how the Government are approaching the delivery and achievement of their ambition. We have concerns that Government policies are playing out in a way that is not helping at all. For example, the Work programme has failed to deliver specialist employment support that meets the particular circumstances and needs of disabled people. Today it delivers employment outcomes—jobs, in other words—for only about one in 10 of those on the Work programme and on employment and support allowance. That is not good enough. At that rate of progress, it will take us a very long time to achieve Ministers’ ambition of halving the disability employment gap.
Many disabled people are not even receiving the support that they need while on ESA to take the steps that they need to enter or to facilitate their entry into the workplace. Later in our debates, the Committee can look forward to extensive discussions of the Government’s proposals on those in the work-related activity group. We know that the Government are making a case to cut the benefits of people in that group, which my colleagues and I will firmly oppose. We do not believe that taking money away from disabled people is the way to facilitate their return to work. We also know that the Government have made a broad-brush case that it will be part of a process of offering additional employment-related support to disabled people in the WRAG, but we have heard no details at all yet about what that additional support will look like.
If we cannot debate that at this point in the Committee’s deliberations, I give notice to the Minister that we will be very keen to have a full discussion of what is intended and what is in Ministers’ minds in relation to that additional support when we debate the relevant provisions in the Bill, which are very worrying with regard to the work-related activity group. They worry me, but they are causing huge anxiety to many of the 500,000 or so people in the work-related activity group.
Kate Green
I understand, Mr Streeter; you are quite correct.
It is important that the Government come forward with a report on how things are progressing and on what measures we can have to understand the nature of the progress, but I think Parliament would also welcome a report that described the steps the Government were taking, the different labour market approaches that were being used and how each of those was more or less effective for people with different health conditions or disabled people with different impairments. I am particularly interested in any report that might be prepared that properly analyses the use of self-employment for disabled people. We heard some interesting and, I think, ambivalent views from our witnesses last week, who said that it could be good and give disabled people more freedom, autonomy and choice, but that it could also be quite isolating, which would be a concern.
We heard a great deal about employer engagement. Public reporting might be one way to enthuse employers and drive up employer engagement, because it would be very much in the public domain and visible, and that would facilitate public debate.
I hope that the Minister welcomes amendment 2. I understand that, if she feels unable to accept it in full today, she may wish to reflect on it and come back with some of her own suggestions. I am open to hearing from her, but we must all agree that a focus on this issue is really important to every single one of us, and that a proper statutory report of progress would be extremely helpful in achieving the ambition that Ministers have.
Emily Thornberry
It has come to my attention that the first time we were aware that the Conservatives said that they wanted to halve the disability employment gap was in a brochure snappily entitled “Strong Leadership. A Clear Economic Plan. A Brighter, More Secure Future.” On page 17 of this book of fiction, there is the title “Jobs for all”, and following that, it is stated:
“We will fight for equal opportunity”,
and that
“the jobless rate for this group”—
people with disabilities—
“remains too high and, as part of our objective to achieve full employment, we will aim to halve the disability employment gap: we will transform policy, practice and public attitudes, so that hundreds of thousands more disabled people who can and want to be in work find employment.”
What is interesting is the context within which the Government made that promise—that solemn vow—to the country about what they would provide. They said that they would provide full employment and, if I can repeat it for emphasis,
“as part of our objective to achieve full employment, we will aim to halve the disability employment gap”.
If the Government have decided to put into legislation the solemn vow to have full employment—clause 1 states that they are going to report to Parliament to tell us how well they are doing on that—it makes complete sense, as part of that, for them to have an obligation to tell us how they are doing with halving the disability employment gap.
That is the only point I wanted to make.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Third sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Kate Green(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Kate Green
Q 157 And that, of course, will be exacerbated for those families by the child tax credit measures.
May I ask one final question on this point? What might be the impact on personal household housing debts? Will we see households going into debt to meet their rent as a result of the freeze and the cap?
David Orr: We already know that there are some households who have had to do that. I was in Cornwall yesterday, which is an area that has been particularly badly hit by the bedroom tax because there are very few alternative places with smaller accommodation for people to move to. We know that some people there have really struggled to pay the rent and some of them have gone into debt to pay the rent.
Emily Thornberry
Q 158 I believe that 70% of households in social housing in some London boroughs are affected by the cap. The benefit cap has particular implications for London councils, so it would be interesting to have some additional evidence on that.
Can we also hear from housing associations about the benefit cap’s effect and what the future for housing associations in London is, given the level of the cap? Are we looking at a future where housing associations will only be able to risk renting out to young professionals without children and will not be able to build accommodation appropriate for families?
Mike Donaldson: We are already seeing the impact of the previous benefit cap in terms of the households we can house in larger accommodation, so it is obviously going to get worse as it reduces to £23,000. The other thing we are concerned about is that there is an assumption that rents drop dramatically once you leave the Greater London area, and that is not true. The area around London has equally high rents, because there is a lot of commuting and so on. So there is a real concern that the £20,000 cap also has a detrimental impact on our residents.
Although we do not know for sure, because obviously we have not got all the information from the DWP, we estimate that another 300 of our residents will be affected by the benefit cap when it is introduced. The history so far has been that we have had to engage heavily with those individuals to ensure that they do not face losing their homes. The extra costs that we incur to employ staff, to get people jobs—we employ staff to give financial advice—is money that we have had to find from elsewhere in the past four years. Going forward, of course we will not have so much money, because we will be facing reduced income from rents, so there is a bind. Most of these people have never worked or have not got an engagement with the jobs market—they are starting from scratch. You have to do an awful lot of work with them to get them into paid employment.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Kate Green(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Kate Green
Q 66 The Government had hoped that the number of people on long-term incapacity benefit and employment and support allowance would be reducing. In fact, it has been increasing, and particularly the numbers in the support group have been increasing. What is your analysis of the impact of a very sharp distinction between the level of benefit that you will receive in the support group and the level of benefit that you will receive if you are not in the support group? Is there any incentive, perhaps, to present yourself as more severely unwell or disabled, and therefore having to go into the support group?
Elliot Dunster: We have to look at the confidence in the WCA as well. The speech that the Secretary of State made a few weeks ago, which has been mentioned already, talked a little bit about that. Disabled people are concerned about the WCA and how accurate it is. In Scope’s view, this will mean that people will continue to appeal those decisions because of this slightly more binary distinction.
We agree with the Secretary of State’s assessment that it is not very helpful to think about people being fit for work or not fit for work. That is not a particularly helpful way of looking at things, but of course we have an assessment in which we have to try to draw lines, effectively, about what support people receive. We would like to see the WCA reformed along a number of principles that we have submitted to the Committee, which would make it much more about back-to-work support. However, we think that making a slightly binary distinction between jobseeker’s allowance and ESA will make people more likely to appeal decisions if they think they should have been awarded the support group rather than the work-related activity group, because there is a financial incentive for them to appeal.
Emily Thornberry
Q 67 Eighty-five per cent. Islington Law Centre has an 85% success rate for people who are appealing ESA assessments, when they take them to tribunal. That means that people who are assessed as being fit for work are then being reassessed by the tribunal as not being fit for work, or are put into an employment support group. Would it not be important for the Government to iron out clearly unfair decisions in the work assessment before changing the goalposts?
Elliot Dunster: I have probably covered most of that in my previous answer. We do think that the WCA should be reformed, and it feels like there is starting to be more of a consensus around that. It seemed as though the Secretary of State was talking along those lines as well. Yes; it needs to be reformed, more accurate and more focused on what someone can do. At the moment it is too medical, and that is where it feels like those decisions have not been made in the right way. Whether someone can pick up a pound coin is not necessarily a good indicator of whether they can do a job or not.
Laura Cockram: On the work capability assessment, we would echo the comments from Elliot and Sophie about it not being fit for purpose. The assessment is a snapshot on a particular day. You have mentioned the success rate of appeals. I believe that the figure is that 38% of all fit for work decisions have been appealed across the UK from 2008 to 2013—that is the June 2015 figure from the DWP—and 51% of decisions from January to March last year were overturned. That is a good demonstration that we are putting unwell people through unnecessary assessments and tests. If they are not well enough to work, they should not be forced or, potentially, bullied back into work, which these kinds of assessments are doing.
Gareth Parry: It is hugely difficult to generalise on so many things. We could ask ourselves, “What is work in the 21st century?” Technology has made a difference—people can work from home now, and do flexible working and different hours. There are so many different interpretations of what work constitutes that to have a relatively black-and-white regime around benefits is not flexible enough. If we have a direction of travel, the right way must be to have a direction of travel that is more of an assessment of needs-based support as opposed to labelling people with a particular benefit. The labour market is so versatile and changeable these days that there is no simple threshold at which you say somebody is fit for work or not fit for work. The world does not work like that any more.
Sophie Corlett: Could I just add a really important point? That is absolutely true, but if you are assessed as being fit for work because you could do a very particular type of work in a very particular setting, the person who works with you to find that job needs to be aware of that very particular need of yours. And there is no real link in terms of your assessment and how you are then helped to get a job; you might be expected to get just any job, when you have very specific needs.
Gareth Parry: We completely agree with that; personalised employment support needs to link in to a needs-based assessment. The problem at the moment is that everybody focuses on the benefits infrastructure rather than on the objective of attaining and sustaining employment.
Kate Green
Q 68 We have slightly lost sight now of the effect that you think cutting £30 a week will have on people’s propensity to go into work and on the disability employment gap.
Sophie Corlett: I can answer some of that. I think there is a complete misunderstanding of what keeps people with mental health problems out of work. It is not that they find it financially beneficial; it is that if they are in the ESA group—the WRAG or the support group—they have been found not fit for work. They are not well enough for work; the money is neither here nor there. Having less money will merely make you more likely to be debt-ridden, and depressed and stressed and unwell.
Elliot Dunster: I have been quite clear from Scope’s perspective that we think it will be a disincentive, for the reasons that I have already explained. Also, building on what Sophie said, we know that disabled people have less financial resilience than non-disabled people; we know, for example, that disabled people have on average over £100,000 less in savings and assets than non-disabled people. So they are less able to cope with big financial shocks and long periods of time out of work. Because of the lower financial resilience of disabled people, a long period of time on a very low income will have a very serious effect, which we are concerned about.
Kate Green
Q 82 How can the Government support that?
Roy O'Shaughnessy: We have been having some discussions. First, the Government could support it by being unequivocal in our joint commitment to halving the disability unemployment rate. Secondly, they must be realistic about the challenges that many of the individuals face when dealing with their life situations and circumstances while they are moving into that journey of employment. We like this model, because whether you can work three or four hours a week or whether you can only work a day a week, this allows us to structure something that is fair and equitable that would hopefully bridge the gap of the four to five hours’ decrease in the benefits in a way that would work.
This is us just putting our thinking caps on and saying, “Hey, how can we contribute to this debate?” We will have to put some significant funding into it, but we also believe that business and Government will come together to help us get a disability-confident approach. We completely agree that making Disability Confident much more centre to this whole discussion about halving the unemployment rate for disabled individuals is the way to go.
Gareth Parry: Just a brief point. Our experience is like everything that Roy said. Self-employment is a really important tool, particularly for people who have fluctuating or episodic conditions, who may be able to work more on some days, weeks or months than they are on other days, weeks and months. It gives them control over when they are able to work. Self-employment is a really important part of the overall solution.
Elliot Dunster: Self-employment can absolutely be brilliant for some disabled people, particularly those with fluctuating conditions, but it is also worth reflecting on some thoughts about the health benefits of work. We know that good jobs are good for people’s health and that poor jobs are not very good for people’s health, particularly disabled people’s health. We also know that disabled people are more likely to take up lower-paid and more insecure jobs. Let us think about how we can progress disabled people when they are in work, so that they are in good, secure, stable jobs.
I would add one other word of caution, about the danger of isolation. I do not think that we would want to self-employment to mean isolation. One of the great things about going to work, and one of the big health benefits, is the fact that you work alongside colleagues, you are out of the house and you are participating fully. There is a danger that lots of disabled people working at home in isolation would not necessarily be a good outcome for all disabled people.
Emily Thornberry
Q 83 I want to pick up on the point about isolation, but it is also important to bear in mind how completely inappropriate it is for a lot of people with mental health problems to become self-employed. My concern and experience is that I have constituents who have been pushed into self-employment whose mental health is not sufficiently robust to be able to be effectively self-employed, and they get into all sorts of debt as a result. I hate to say this, but I get the impression that the people in the jobcentre are happy that they have been signed off as employed, but it is reckless for these people to be setting up cake-making businesses, or there was another case where someone was supposed to be designing websites. Their mental conditions were such that it was really difficult for them to be able to think through what setting up a business would mean. I suspect that my experience with my constituents is not isolated. I am very concerned about pushing people into self-employment, particularly those with mental health problems. I do not know whether that is right, Sophie.
Sophie Corlett: Yes, I know many people with mental health problems who are self-employed and it is the perfect thing for them, but it depends. I suspect you are talking about people who are perhaps affected by stress or bipolar disorder and so at certain periods do not engage with bills, or who will in certain periods—
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (First sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Kate Green(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Kate Green
Q 25 Can you say something about the way in which the Government should or should not track different kinds of family structure, different kinds of family background, and whether you see this legislation as facilitating that?
Neera Sharma: We believe that the Government should look at the situation of different families. For example, we know that children in certain black and minority ethnic families are much more likely to grow up in poverty. So some of the proposals in the Bill, such as limiting tax credits to two children, will impact harshly on larger families, many of whom are likely to be BME families.
Emily Thornberry
Q 26 I represent a constituency that is part of a London borough which has the sixth highest child poverty figures in the whole country, and we have already been hit very hard by the benefit cap, with many families having to move out of Islington to outer London, so children are having to commute for many hours to go to school. Can you tell us what it means for children to be uprooted from their local communities at an early age, and how their education can be affected, either by changing schools or by having to travel 20 or 30 miles to get to school each morning? How might that impact on child poverty and their life chances?
Neera Sharma: We know that children who grow up in poor families do less well in terms of their education. Uprooting those children from the communities and the support they need, as you have said, has an impact on their life chances. We are concerned that families will have less income as a result of the cap, but we are also very concerned about the mechanisms for reviewing that cap, because the Bill allows the Government to review that cap without having to report to Parliament. It is really important that there is full scrutiny and that the Government do report to Parliament, and that they ask the Social Security Advisory Committee to undertake an annual review of the cap that is reported to Parliament before any decisions are made about increasing, or decreasing—as it probably will be—the cap.