Welfare Reform Bill

Jenny Willott Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

The point is that it is a zero-cost proposal; I am simply suggesting that the funding would be provided through the mechanism that I have described. It would be tapered away, along with the rest of universal credit, and would sit naturally on top of existing payments, so that there would be just an additional payment in respect of school meals, where appropriate, which would then be tapered away once the disregard had been exhausted. The budgetary cost would be exactly the same.

We have exactly the same issue with free prescriptions. The current system provides them to people on benefits and to some people with low incomes through the HC2 form, but once again, we have heard nothing from the Government about what will happen under universal credit. Our new clause 4 addresses that.

By the way, it is perhaps worth making the point in passing that the number of pupils receiving free school meals is an important indicator for education policy as well. The pupil premium depends on the number of people receiving free school meals. The fact that we have no idea at all who will be entitled to free school meals under the Government’s proposals will create serious problems with that, too.

[Jenny Willott (Cardiff Central) (LD)]

Returning to the right hon. Gentleman’s proposals on prescription charges, is he not concerned about the evidence that we received at the beginning of the Public Bill Committee from a number of witnesses who said that there was a significant difference between school meals and prescription charges? School meals are an ongoing cost every day, whereas prescription charges tend to come in a batch. By tapering the amount of money that somebody received, they still would not be able to afford significant costs—potentially the cost of a number of prescriptions at the same time—because the amount of money concerned would be an ongoing amount, unlike under a system more similar to the current one, where all the prescriptions are paid for when they are needed.

[Stephen Timms]

I agree with the hon. Lady’s point, and to that extent the current system has a lot of attractions. The problem is that we will lose that system with universal credits. The question is: who will be entitled to free prescriptions? I do not imagine that she is arguing—as perhaps the Government will; I do not know—that there should be a cut-off point in income beyond which people suddenly lose all help for prescriptions. If that happens, we will create a serious and damaging cliff edge in the system, which everyone agrees is an undesirable feature. Our new clause 4 therefore proposes to address that problem, although there may be other problems as well. What I would dearly love to extract is a proposal from the Government, so that we can find out exactly what they intend to do, because so far they have been silent on that subject, as on all the others.

We have been told throughout these debates that the main point of the Bill is to ensure that people are always better off in work. Our task in Parliament is to scrutinise whether the Bill lives up to that laudable aim, but without knowing what the Government will do to provide help with child care, school meals or prescription costs, we simply cannot tell.

Frankly, it is an abuse of the parliamentary process not to tell this House what the Government’s policy is before the Bill leaves us. I do not accuse Ministers of withholding information from Parliament; the problem is that they have no more clue about their policy than we do. It is an astonishing and abject failure on their part. They made all these boasts at the beginning—their bragging ran away with them—but now they cannot deliver policies to substantiate those boasts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Buck]

I am not confusing anybody. It is a cut in housing benefit of up to 23% for 670,000 households, of which, according to the Government’s own impact assessment, 400,000 include a disabled person and 108,000 are in adapted properties. Most of those people will have no means of avoiding the cut in their housing benefit, because there is nowhere for them to go. Even if there were, the Government do not want some of them to go there, because then they would not meet their own savings targets.

[Jenny Willott]

The hon. Lady said that she thought that there was no earthly chance of somebody with a similar level of disability needing a property that had become available. I am sure that, like me, she must have an awful lot of people coming to her constituency surgery who have disabilities and have been waiting a very long time for adapted homes. [Interruption.] Disregarding the rest of the debate, and the Labour Members who are hollering at me, the chances are that there will be somebody who wants those properties. That is not a reason to go ahead with moving people, but it is not true to say that there will not be people waiting who need those properties.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Miller]

My hon. Friend is right to be incredulous about the Labour party’s position. She should also express incredulity at the fact that the Labour Members do not seem to have a policy—apart from opposition to the proposals.

I remind hon. Members that the restriction will apply only in areas where local market rent increases at the 30th percentile exceed the annual rate of increase in the CPI. We have said that we are committed to making savings from that measure, but if it becomes apparent that the LHA rates and rents are out of step, that can be reconsidered, as I said in Committee.

Let me briefly consider amendment 72, which raises an important issue for us all. We want to ensure proper and accurate monitoring of the impact of the introduction of our policies. Indeed, we have put that in place for the work capability assessment and our reform of DLA. My hon. Friends the Members for Cardiff Central and for Redcar (Ian Swales) are right to highlight the importance of having an accurate method of assessing the impact of our policies. That is an important and prudent part of Government policy. I hope that my hon. Friends will be reassured that we have already commissioned independent external research to evaluate the impact of the housing benefit reforms that we announced in June 2010 in the Budget and in the spending review. The review will be comprehensive and thorough and presented to both Houses, together with a ministerial statement. We intend to make final findings available in 2013, with initial findings available in 2012.

[Jenny Willott]

There is a huge range of issues that we clearly cannot cover this evening in the time available to us. However, I would be grateful if the Under-Secretary ascertained whether one matter in particular could be included in the review: how foster children are covered. As I understand it, foster children are not counted in the allocation of bedrooms. The way in which the measure is implemented could have a significant impact on local authorities’ ability to recruit foster carers, and on the care that can be provided for foster children. That has not been covered in the debate so far.

[Maria Miller]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, which has been raised with me on a couple of occasions. I remind her that currently there is no additional allocation of housing for families with foster children. There is an accrual within the payments that are made to cover additional housing costs. However, she makes the important point that, whatever our housing policies, we should not disincentivise or put unnecessary barriers in the way of foster carers who do so much to give children who cannot live with their own families the sort of start in life that they need.